The Daily Parker

This morning's stand-up meeting begins in a moment, at the only time of day that works for my Seattle-Chicago-UK team (8am/10am/4pm respectively). After, I have these queued up:

• EJ Dionne lists some bright spots for progressives in the late election, and points out that we have won the issues that the Right no longer talks about. But actor Joel Gray warns us that Cabaret isn't as far from where we are as we'd like.
• Robert Wright says Pete Hesgeth has an Islam problem that disqualifies him for taking over the Dept of Defense.
• Charles Marohn has moved off Xitter*, "but not for the reasons you might think."
• The Chicago Transit Authority is heading for billion-dollar losses by 2031 if it can't secure new funding sources—or cut costs.

Finally, a new paper found something I've long suspected: small amounts of alcohol actually do help you speak a foreign language better. (Large amounts do not.)

* The X in "Xitter" is pronounced "sh," as in Xi Jinping.

Welcome to stop #118 on the Brews and Choos project, which announced its bloody closure just three days after I visited.

Brewery: Ravinia Brewing, 2601 W Diversey Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Blue Line, Logan Square
Time from Chicago: 16 minutes
Distance from station: 1.4 km

I reviewed the original Ravinia Brewing location in the historic Ravinia neighborhood of Highland Park so early in the Brews & Choos Project that Covid-19 had only just started entering most people's awareness. Almost by accident two of the beers my Brews Buddy and I tried were the same as the first Ravinia beers I tried in February 2020.

The Steep Ravine IPA (7.2%, 22 IBU) and the Baldwin barrel-aged porter (6.5%, 35 IBU) tasted just as good as they did 4½ years ago. We liked the new ones, too, with a big caveat. The Ludwig barrel-aged Oktoberfest (6.9%) "taste[d] like an Oktoberfest, but more so: more intense, syrupy flavor," she said, with which I completely agree. The Diversey Station juicy session pale ale (4.0%) had a good fruit-hop balance and will come up again next time I visit.

We differed a bit on two other tastes. Of the Infusion of the Week (see above, bottom right), she said "It's growing on me. Once I got accustomed to the rosemary, I could adjust my palate, and it just works." I said, "this beer is not for me." And of the Casa de Guava Berliner Weißbier, with its cloying, sweet, overwhelming guava flavor, she said it was "clean and refreshing, tart but not too tart, nice finish." I gagged involuntarily and, after recovering, said "no, oh no, oh no no no." (This is why we make a good team.)

Since we had just completely failed to finish the outsized pretzel at Pilot Project, and despite the 2 km walk between the two, we simply had no appetite for tacos. But the tacos at their Highland Park taproom are excellent, and we've had them several times before Ravinia Festival concerts.

Finally, in a couple of months, Ravinia Brewing will rebrand as Steep Ravine Brewing because of the SLAPP suit brought by Ravinia Festival. No one wanted this, except probably Ravinia Festival's legal department. And if Illinois' anti-SLAPP law had broader protections that included trademark disputes, Ravinia Brewing probably would have won a countersuit. Alas. I'll update the Brews & Choos reviews once the re-brand becomes official.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Many, difficult to avoid
Serves food? Yes
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

My Brews & Choos buddy and I trudged 15 kilometers yesterday to visit two previously-unreviewed breweries and two old favorites. Correction: I visited two old favorites and two new ones, she visited one old favorite and three she hadn't visited before.

My Garmin device doesn't have a resume-later feature, but hers does, so she captured the entire route (in miles):

We had bog-normal November weather for Chicago: cloudy and 5°C. We also had a slice of Jimmy's Pizza and a modest amount of good beer. Altogether, a good day.

Brews & Choos Reviews will post this afternoon and tomorrow.

The weather doesn't seem that great for a planned 15-kilometer walk through Logan Square and Avondale to visit a couple of stragglers on the Brews & Choos Project. We've got 4°C under a low overcast, but only light winds and no precipitation forecast until Monday night. My Brews & Choos buddy drew up a route starting from the east end of the 606 Trail and winding up (possibly) at Jimmy's Pizza Cafe.

Also, I've joined BlueSky, because it's like Xitter without the xit. The Times explains how you, too, can join. (Cassie also has an account, of course.)

My 4-minute train to Clybourn leaves in 45 minutes, so I want to save a few things for later reading:

• Josh Marshall says: "There’s plenty of time for theorizing and message testing. But the first thing to do is to oppose. Less arguing, more doing."
• After Pro Publica reported on the deaths of two women due to Georgia's religiously-motivated anti-abortion laws, Georgia disbanded its Maternal Mortality Committee, embarrassing not only the Republican-led government in the state but also every ostrich at the Atlanta Zoo.
• Blue Man Group has announced it will close its Chicago run on January 5th after 30 years at the Briar Street Theater.
• The Chicago Tribune, once more reminding me why I need to just give up my subscription, raised a hue and cry that "Lake Michigan water levels drop to lowest in years" without providing the context that the lake level is just 40 millimeters below its long-term average. Oh the humanity!
• Molly White spends 30 minutes explaining how crypto charlatans spent unbelievable sums to get their favored stooges elected, and largely succeeded.

Finally, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day this morning has a diptych of the Earth, one side from Saturn and the other side from Mercury. What makes it even more interesting is that both photos were taken 19 July 2013, making it the first time the Earth was photographed simultaneously from two other worlds in the solar system.

I mentioned yesterday that the gingko and maple trees in my neighborhood have held onto their leaves for much longer than usual. Yesterday's snowfall melted overnight, as predicted, but we did get below freezing for about 4 hours yesterday. And yet these two genii of trees just won't let go:

The City of Chicago has had to extend the street sweeping schedule to ensure that they'll have sweepers on task when all those leaves finally do fall off. I will, of course, keep everyone updated on this tense stand-off between Gaia and the Dept of Streets & Sanitation.

We're having gray, rainy weather for our few hours of daylight today. We haven't yet had a freeze this fall, and none is forecast before winter officially begins in two weeks, so all the moisture in the air just hangs around and makes more fog and rain. And yet, tomorrow we might get a high of 15°C—about 8°C above normal—before flurries and "wintry mix" Wednesday night.

Yeah, it's the end of November in Chicago.

Otherwise, I'm still mulling our electoral loss from two weeks ago, even as it looks less like a disaster and more like just three million Democrats staying home. In fact, it looks like neither candidate got a majority of the popular vote, with the OAFPOTUS increasing his total popular vote count by a little over 2½ million while our side lost about 7½ million compared with 2020.

Oh, and it's the 141st anniversary of time zones, which had a far more lasting effect than the election will have.

Happy Monday.

Thomas E Kurtz, co-creator of the BASIC programming language, died November 12th at 96:

Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would come to depend on computers and benefit from understanding how to use them.

“We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social sciences and humanities students — should learn how to use the computer,” Dr. Kurtz said in an interview for Dartmouth in 2014. “Completely nutty idea.”

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command — “RUN” — into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.

I don't have the earliest programs I wrote because nothing survives from the TRS-80 era, when we saved everything to cassette tape (!), nor from the Apple ][+ era because I never converted those files to PC format. But here is a little thing I wrote in October 1987 in the BASICA (Advanced BASIC) language that shipped with MS DOS 3:

5 DEFDBL A-Z
6 PRINT
7 PRINT
10 INPUT "Number to test = ",N#
15 U$="##########"
16 IF N#<10000000# THEN U$="#######"
17 IF N#<1000000! THEN U$="######"
18 IF N#<100000! THEN U$="#####"
19 IF N#<10000 THEN U$="####"
20 N#=INT(N#)
30 TEST#=1
33 WHILE TEST#<=SQR(N#)
36 TEST#=TEST#+1
40 IF N#/TEST# = INT (N#/TEST#) THEN GOSUB 100
50 WEND
55 PRINT
60 PRINT "I found";FACTORS;"factor(s)."
70 IF FACTORS=0 THEN PRINT "The number"N"is prime."
80 PRINT
81 INPUT "Test another (y/n)";A$
82 IF INSTR(A$,"Y") OR INSTR(A$,"y") THEN RUN
90 END
100 FACTORS=FACTORS+1
120 PRINT USING U$;TEST#;
130 PRINT " * ";
140 PRINT USING U$;N#/TEST#
150 RETURN

If you can find a DOS emulator with BASICA, knock yourself out.

Winnemac Park, 3:39 pm:

Spiteful Brewing Tap Room, 7:08 pm:

I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these:

• Michelle Goldberg sticks her tongue firmly in her cheek, declaring Matt Gaetz (R-FL) "the perfect man for the job" of running the Justice Dept.
• Annie Lowry explains the economics behind keeping minimum wages so low no one can possibly live on them.
• The Sun-Times published two stories today about how ComEd, the Illinois power utility, is one of the shittiest companies in the state.
• Andrew Price explains how places and non-places shape our cities.
• Via Schneier, computer scientist Stuart Schechter traces how the conceptual mistake made by two men (including a Turing Prize winner) 45 years ago gave us decades of crappy password policies.

Finally, everyone take six minutes and listen Robert Wright as he reminds us not to get distracted by the OAFPOTUS's trolling:

Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media:

The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.

The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.

While the alliance between Everytown and The Onion may seem like an odd fit, the two organizations share an interest in curbing gun violence, said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. Mr. Feinblatt said that mission was underscored with depressing regularity in the aftermath of mass shootings, when The Onion goes viral with its oft-shared headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

The Onion, of course, spun the purchase in its own way:

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

Alex Jones, according to my social media feed, vowed to keep broadcasting until a court ordered him to stop.

Well played, Onion. Well played.