The Daily Parker

Mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer has died at the age of 97:

Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Alma (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved.

In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.

In 1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the short-lived satirical NBC television series. He did not appear on the show, but he did return to the road for a while, recording his new songs at the hungry i in San Francisco for the 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was” — not a do-it-yourself effort this time, but released on Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records.

Lehrer lived so long that the Times had to admit that the obituary's author died two years ago: "Richard Severo, a New York Times reporter from 1968 to 2006, died in 2023. Alex Traub contributed reporting."

Yascha Mounk has a remembrance:

[I]t was on my second visit to the United States...that I first came into contact with a piece of comparatively obscure American culture which would go on to shape my sense of the country that has since become home. In my aunt’s living room in Morningside Heights, she and her friends were reminiscing about the late 1960s when, freshly expelled from Poland, they had first arrived in New York. Somebody put on a CD called “That Was the Year That Was” by Tom Lehrer....

The album also features Tom Lehrer skewering supposedly progressive educational fads which only succeed in making things unnecessarily confusing in “New Math”; him poking fun at America’s over-reliance on military might in “Send the Marines” (For might makes right, / And till they’ve seen the light, / They’ve got to be respected, / Till somebody we like can be elected); and him making light of fears about nuclear proliferation in “Who’s Next?” (Egypt’s gonna get one, too / Just to use on you know who. / So Israel’s getting tense, / Wants one in self-defense. / “The Lord’s our shepherd,” says the psalm, / “But just in case, we better get a bomb!”)

Lehrer was not a builder of legacies. His style of musical comedy has mostly died out. He does not appear to have been interested in family; asked whether he had ever married or had children, he quipped that he was “not guilty on both counts.” Nor did he ever aim to maximize the financial profit he would draw from his fame; a few years ago, he declared that all of his lyrics and melodies would henceforth be in the public domain (which is one reason why I’ve been able to quote so liberally from his songs.)

But, perhaps despite himself, Tom Lehrer did leave a lasting legacy: He deeply shaped the way I—and many others—see the country he skewered so lovingly in his unforgettable songs.

He will be missed.

As promised, I just pushed new bits for Weather Now. Release 5.0.9340 corrects a couple of regression issues I introduced with the previous release, which happens more often than not after an architecture refactoring. End users will probably not notice any differences, except that for the last 10 days no one other than system admins have been able to edit their own home page weather lists. Now they can.

I have one more release of Weather Now planned for this summer, which will allow users to create multiple weather lists (which was the whole point of this round of refactoring) and view the site in French. All of the measurements and weather reports have been available in French and 8 other languages since 2007, but the version 5 release only had US English and Mexican Spanish. I have plans to restore all the other languages, I just don't have a lot of time or a lot of registered users from outside North America.

I've spent a lot of my day cleaning my house and doing some housekeeping on the Daily Parker. In the latter case, I finished adding the ancient Site News entries that ran from July 1997 to March 1998, bringing the total active posts up to 9,984 (though the blog engine thinks there are 9,988). That means that the 10,000th Post will happen in about two weeks at my present rate of posting.

I also uploaded a few more Fitbit tracks into my Garmin account, including a 14.5 kilometer walk with Parker in June 2016 and both halves of my September 2015 walk through England's South Downs from Arundel to Amberley.

Tomorrow morning I'll push some new Weather Now bits to Production, too. So it's a productive day, with more housekeeping (going through ancient boxes) this evening.

Historian Timothy Ryback, writing in The Atlantic, takes us through a short history of a not-so-long-ago German Chancellor's war with his country's apolitical civil service:

A memorandum was circulated to all state civil servants demanding blind loyalty to the Hitler government. Anyone who did not feel they could support Hitler and his policies, [future war criminal Hermann] Göring added, should do the “honorable” thing and resign. The Berliner Morgenpost observed that Hitler was clearly working to “transform the state bureaucracy from the most senior positions down to the administrative levels to align with his political positions.”

Despite Hitler’s heavy-handed assault on the government bureaucracy, he could not touch [central bank president] Hans Luther. According to a 1924 law, the Reichsbank was independent of the elected government; the Reichsbank president served at the discretion of a 14-member board, which included seven international bankers and economists.

[In a meeting with Luther in March 1933,] Hitler acknowledged that, as chancellor, he did not have the legal power to remove Luther as central banker. But, he told Luther bluntly, as the new “boss” of the country, he had access to considerable alternative sources of power that he would not hesitate to employ “ruthlessly” against Luther “if the interest of the state demanded it.” The nature of Hitler’s threats was unmistakable. Luther—who had already been shot once before in protest of his monetary policies—did not need to be warned again.

One hopes the OAFPOTUS and his droogs don't resort to such things. This is the "farce" part of the "first as tragedy" proverb, however, so we might escape going full-on Fascist for the next three years. I hope.

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology World HQ has passed 32°C (with a 42°C heat index!) and it keeps going up. Welcome to the summer heat advisory season, with 30 million hectares of maize corn sweating to our west.

Speaking of an uncomfortable atmosphere, the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have had a bad couple of days, which they responded to by making everyone else's days bad as well.

First, on yesterday the US Court for the District of New Jersey declined to allow acting US Attorney Alina Habba (whom you may recall for her previous ethical difficulties) to take the post as a permanent appointment. Instead, the Court ordered her deputy, Desiree Leigh Grace, to step in as acting USA, as Grace has years of experience as a prosecutor and no obvious disqualifications. In response, US Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Grace:

Desiree Leigh Grace, Habba’s first assistant, was tapped by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey to lead the office upon the expiration of Habba’s 120-day temporary term. But, Tuesday, Grace was “removed” from the post by the Justice Department (DOJ).

Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “politically minded judges refused to allow [Habba] to continue in her position.”

It's not clear how many acting US Attorneys the OAFPOTUS will have to appoint before the Court decides that one of them is competent enough to stick around more than 120 days. Meanwhile, the USA's office in New Jersey is in absolute shambles—which is a side-benefit for the OAFPOTUS and his cronies as many of them have property or offices in the state.

Also yesterday, the OAFPOTUS announced a "deal" with Japan that sets bilateral import taxes at 15%, compared with basically 0% before he started ripping up the global trading system. Paul Krugman patiently explains how this "deal" will make things so much worse than before:

As I and others have repeatedly pointed out, there’s some basic arithmetic linking international investment and the trade balance. A few technical details aside,

U.S. trade deficit = Net foreign investment in the United States

This isn’t a theory, it’s just accounting. So if the deal leads to more investment in the U.S., it must, necessarily, lead to a bigger trade deficit.

So why aren’t we seeing big increases in consumer prices yet? Basically because for the moment U.S. businesses are absorbing much of the cost rather than passing it on to consumers. They’ve been able to do that partly because many companies rushed to bring imports in before the tariffs hit, and are still selling out of that inventory. They’ve been willing to do that because they don’t want to alienate customers and lose market share, and have been hoping that the tariffs will mostly go away.

But if Japan still faces a 15 percent tariff after making a deal, that hope will soon fade. Winter Inflation is coming.

Update: Friends have been pointing out that this deal means that Japanese cars will pay 15 percent tariffs, while US car producers will still be paying 50 percent on imported steel. Not exactly a strategy to boost manufacturing. What were they thinking? They probably weren’t thinking.

Of course, the main point of all these tariffs is to further the massive theft of American wealth that is the point of the entire Republican project these days. As Krugman says, "We’re already well on the way toward an economy in which success in business depends not on how good your product is but on your political influence."

Just don't call them stupid. They wouldn't like it.

Leading off the news this afternoon, Black Sabbath lead singer Ozzy Osbourne died today at age 76. I am surprised he lasted this long, as he didn't exactly take care of himself over the years.

In other news:

• House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has stopped the legislative process of the United States rather than vote on releasing details of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with the OAFPOTUS.
• Adam Kinzinger details the quiet cruelty of the OAFPOTUS's droogs.
• Tom Nichols points out that the OAFPOTUS has no theory of governance beyond "anger, fear, and, most of all, pettiness."
• Maryland police officers got away with at least 36 murders thanks to former Maryland Chief Medical Examiner David Fowler's interference in the death classifications.
• CBS cancelled its top-rated talk show, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in a sop to the OAFPOTUS ahead of a proposed merger involving CBS's parent company, Paramount. (Jeff Maurer has a more nuanced take on this.)
• Paul Krugman bemoans the "enshittification and the bitterness of billionaire bros."
• The Chicago Transit Authority restored the Red and Purple Lines to full capacity and re-opened the four Red Line stations closed in 2021 for the Red-Purple Modernization Project.

Finally, NOAA released its findings on the meteotsunami and seiche that rolled over Lake Superior on 21 June 2025. The storm surge and seiche rebound caused lake levels to change by 2.2 meters over the span of three hours in some places, making it the largest such event in recorded history.

Oh, and Cassie gets her cone off almost exactly 24 hours from now. Photos when it happens.

While walking Cassie this morning I saw an unusual number of free eDivvy bikes in my neighborhood. So I thought, why not take one to work?

Including stopping at a Starbucks downtown, it took about 5 minutes longer than it usually takes on the Metra, probably because I didn't have to walk as far or wait for the train.

I think I last rode a bike to work in 2011. The electric bike was only slightly less effort, and about the same average speed. I may have to do this again when the weather cooperates.

For the past few weeks I've been going through things I've got in storage, some of them my mom's from before I was born. It's a lot of stuff, but has yielded some interesting finds. For example, in 1983 or 1984 I bought What's Where in the Apple, a comprehensive look at the Apple ][ and //e architecture. Stuffed inside it I found notes and some source code I wrote to explore the inner workings of the Apple, and a Beagle Bros. "Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers" poster from 1983.

I also found the Glenbrook Loyalty Song, which I spent 15 minutes transcribing in MuseScore this morning for your enjoyment. So, nu? Enjoy.

This project has also produced 3 full bankers boxes of material to shred, at least one full lawn-and-leaf bag of trash, and minor lower-back pain despite being careful to lift with my legs. And the storage locker still has an overwhelming number of boxes in it, most buried under other boxes.

Anyone want a bread maker? How about a small Ikea-like work desk?

Today is Cassie's 7th birthday, and it breaks my heart that she has to spend it in the Cone of Shame:

(I'll clean this photo up before the end of the day.)

She has adapted to the cone just fine, of course, and it'll come off on Wednesday. I could potentially take it off today, but I think it's important to wait until her stitches come out. I just don't want her to hook a suture and open up the incision.

Also, to further ruin her birthday, I'm at the office downtown until just after noon. We'll have plenty of adventures this afternoon when I get home.

Photo updated from original post.

Weather Now release 5.0.9330 came out this afternoon. The only difference is the way it stores weather lists.

When you go to the site, it shows you the weather in a short list of places from around the world. If you register by logging in with a Microsoft account, you can personalize this list. Previously the app stored this personalized weather list as part of the user's profile and stored the system default list (shown to unregistered users) as a simple configuration setting.

This release moves weather lists to their own data structure, so that (a) administrators can edit the system default list on the fly and, eventually, (b) users can have multiple lists. This also means the app now has a designated weather list editing page.

Next up on the feature roadmap:

• Create and edit multiple weather lists per user
• Choose which weather lists to show on the main page
• Show normal and record temperatures for some US stations
• Show historical climate data for some US stations

That said, I have another major project that will take precedence over these updates, so I don't expect another Weather Now release until late fall or even early winter. And if you want to see a new feature on the app, let me know in the comments.