The Daily Parker

I was pretty busy today, with most of my brain trying to figure out how to re-architect something that I didn't realize needed it until recently. So a few things piled up in my inbox:

• David Corn is reporting that US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has basically halted his party's own progress to, well, progress, threatened to leave the Democratic Party if he didn't get his way.
• Part of the President's agenda includes starting to build a 320 km/h rail line from New York to Boston that includes a tunnel under the Long Island Sound. That would bring the US up to the level of technology enjoyed in Europe 20 years ago.
• Europe may bring back the Trans-Europe Express trains that could almost entirely replace short-haul flights within the continent.
• Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) tried to talk sense into her party about the January insurrection, but as predicted, it had no effect whatsoever.
• What brought about the current labor shortage? Ask a psychologist.
• The US intelligence services have started to get serious about Havana Syndrome.
• Last winter proved we can vanquish influenza, but only if we want to.
• Thieves scammed Amazon out of $1.5 million by stealing rental textbooks.
• Rolls-Royce successfully tested an aircraft engine that runs entirely on biofuel.

And finally, Whisky Advocate has four recipes that balance whisky and Luxardo Maraschino cherries. I plan to try them all, but not in one sitting.

On this day in 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their survey of the disputed Maryland-Pennsylvania border, which became even more contentious in 1780 when Pennsylvania aboolished slavery. A group of surveyors started re-surveying the border in 2019; I can't find out whether they finished.

Meanwhile, 255 years later, politics is still mostly local:

• Our professional women's basketball team, the Chicago Sky, won the WNBA championship yesterday.
• Chicago's recently-retired Inspector General has some harsh words for the city's government structure and the current administration.
• Chicago Alderman Jim Gardner got kicked off all of his county committees for general dickishness.
• Farther from my doorstep, President Biden has not spent a single day with approval ratings below his predecessors', thank you very much.
• Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) not only completely fails to understand how the Web works, but he also can't stand anyone pointing out his administration's incompetence. 
• Novelist Christopher Buckley eulogizes the 500-year history of the "Pope's Airline," Alitalia, which Cranky Flyer has previously called the worst airline ever.
• Barbados will become a true republic next month, at which point Queen Elizabeth II will no longer be head of state for the island nation.

Finally, Chicago has perfectly clear skies for only the third time this month after yesterday and the 4th, getting only 39% of possible sunshine for almost the past three weeks.

Oh boy:

• Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen.
• A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas.
• Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would think.
• The Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak have released plans for new passenger train routes from Chicago to other Midwest cities.
• Meanwhile, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to encourage electric-vehicle production in the state.
• New Republic's David Klion says Denis Villenueuve's upcoming Dune adaptation "is the adaptation Frank Herbert's novel deserves," and I can't wait until it comes out on the 22nd!
• As Chicago has stuck to June-like temperatures for the past two weeks, an active jet stream has given the Rocky Mountain upwards of 750 mm of snow and temperatures as low as -10°C.
• Researchers have demonstrated how to reverse-engineer fake photos generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs), a common type of AI.
• Archaeologists have gotten closer to figuring out who massacred a village off the coast of Sweden around 400 CE, and why.

Cassie has bugged me for the last hour, even though we went out two hours ago. I assume she wants dinner. I will take care of that presently.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, which burned for two days and left 100,000 people homeless. But only for a short time; by 1874, when the city had a second big fire, our population had already grown by about that number.

Flash forward to now:

• Time Out rated Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood second-coolest in the world, after Nørrebro, Copenhagen, and beating out Leith in Edinburgh; Chelsea in New York City; and Dublin 8, just to name three.
• A pre-pandemic article from the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) provides some context about why the Australian Navy decided to sink its deal with France in favor of buying submarines from the US and UK. Hint: Australians do not like people coming 15 minutes late to 30-minute meetings.
• CTA Red Line service paused briefly this week when a huge crane toppled into an alley. One person had minor injuries. No word on whether the mishap will set back the RPM project at all.
• David Brooks warns against the essentialist mindset, but of course someone like him would. (That was a joke, y'all.)
• Andrew Sullivan defends Dave Chappelle.

Finally, last night I attended an actual live theater performance for the first time in 19 months, and it was amazeballs. If you live in Chicago, right now you need to go to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater website and buy tickets to As You Like It, which plays through November 21st.

So many things this morning, including a report not yet up on WBEZ's website about the last Sears store in Chicago. (I'll find it tomorrow.)

• Jennifer Rubin advises XPOTUS "critics and democracy lovers" to leave the Republican Party.
• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) completely caved against a unified Democratic Party and will vote to extend the (probably-unconstitutional) debt limit another three months.
• An abolitionist's house from 1869 may get landmark approval today from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. (It's already in the National Register of Historic Places).
• Could interurban trains come back?
• Arts critic Jo Livingstone has a mixed review of No Time to Die, but I still plan to see it this weekend.
• 18 retired NBA players face wire-fraud and insurance-fraud charges for allegedly scamming the NBA's Health and Welfare Benefit Plan out of $4 million.
• Even though we've had early-September temperatures the past week, we've also had only 19% of possible sunlight, and only 8% in the past six days. We have not seen the sun since Monday, in fact, making the steady 19°C temperature feel really depressing.
• Two new Black-owned breweries will go on the Brews and Choos list soon.
• Condé Nast has named Chicago the best big city in the US for the fifth year running.

Finally, President Biden is in Chicago today, promoting vaccine mandates. But because of the aforementioned clouds, I have no practical way of watching Air Force One flying around the city.

Update, 12:38 CDT: The sun is out!

Update, 12:39 CDT: Well, we had a minute of it, anyway.

The Great Chicago Fire started 150 years ago this coming Thursday. It not only destroyed almost every building in the city, but also it burned up official property records. Even today the consequences linger:

Official property deeds stored in the Cook County Courthouse were destroyed when the building went up in flames in October 1871, as were many private records kept at home.

Stored on microfilm in filing cabinets at the Cook County Court Archives and in boxes at the archives’ warehouse is a set of documents, some dating back nearly 150 years and often handwritten, called the “burnt records.” These are records of some of the attempts to reestablish property ownership after the Great Chicago Fire.

The archives estimate there were at least 1,767 burnt records cases in the decades after the fire. But details about the documents are scarce, and the exact number of cases is unknown. Many may be missing entirely.

Other property owners turned to private records. Decades before the fire, firms had begun keeping their own indexes and abstracts of land transactions. These records were saved from the fire — often dramatically, according to legends passed down through generations of abstract and title companies — and they were given legal status in Illinois courts when state legislators passed the Burnt Records Act.

The story also explains why a single grave sticks out of an industrial site on the south side.

The Union Pacific Railroad, which currently operates about 35% of all Chicago commuter trains, has won a major ruling from a Federal judge that clears the way for it to stop operating those trains:

UP wants out of the commuter business, saying it wants to focus on its its freight service. It has noted that almost all other Metra service now is operated by the commuter rail agency itself, sometimes on tracks it owns itself and at other times on track leased from freight railroads. 

Metra’s position is that in the absence of a discontinuance agreement, UP had to continue to run the trains and ancillary services, such as ticket collection, under “common carrier” provisions that governed railroads nationally for more than a century.

Both sides asked Judge Jorge Alonso for summary judgement. Last week he ruled against Metra.

Effectively, Alonso held, common-carrier rules were substantially eased after the creation of Amtrak, the national passenger carrier, and other deregulation actions by Congress in recent decades. Any remaining common-carrier question that requires federal approval would under the law cover only freight, not passenger, service, he added, but UP is moving to stop only commuter service, not freight.

In a statement, Metra said only that “We are reviewing the ruling and our options.”

UP in its own statement promised not to do anything abrupt that would interfere with service.

Well, that's fun. In 2019, the three Metra lines UP operates had about 27 million of the entire network's 74 million passenger trips, including (I estimate) about 300 of mine, so there is no way the lines will simply shut down. Metra will almost certainly take over operations and pay UP for track and signal use, just like they do on other lines. We'll see how this plays out.

Just a couple today, but they seem interesting:

• Metra may build a combined Milwaukee District / Union Pacific station in the Fulton Market district that could make commuting into the West Loop a lot easier.
• Greg Bensinger reminds us that maps have inherent, and sometimes deliberate, inaccuracies.
• Finding stolen cryptocurrency is easier than most people think.

And wow, did the Chicago Bears have a bad game yesterday.

As a follower of and contributor to the Time Zone mailing list, I have some understanding of how time zones work. I also understand how the official Time Zone Database (TZDB) works, and how changes to the list propagate out to things like, say, your cell phone. Most mobile phone operators need at least a few weeks, preferably a few months, to ensure that changes to the TZDB get tested and pushed out to everyone's phones.

If only the government of Samoa knew anything at all about this process:

The sudden dumping of Daylight Savings Time by the Government last week left much of the nation waking up in confusion on Sunday as their phones and other devices automatically updated to show the wrong time.

At the time of writing mobile phones and other cellular-enabled devices and computers were displaying the time as 10 am when, in fact, under the new policy it was 9 am. 

Many Samoans who rely upon their phones as alarm clocks were awoken or arrived at church early because of the automatic update to their mobile devices.

The decision taken by the Cabinet to not activate daylight savings time this year was apparently made earlier this month. 

The coordinators of the TZDB hold their collective breaths each year while waiting for certain religious authorities to decide when to change the clocks in about a dozen populous countries in the Middle East and Africa. But those countries know about the tight timing and work with IANA and their mobile providers to prevent exactly what happened today in Samoa.

It turns out, no one even bothered to tell us that Samoa had cancelled daylight saving time until yesterday, and no one in Samoa's government ever sent us the official notice from 10 days ago.

Nice work, guys.

Nobody ever listens to poor Zathras.

Welcome to stop #57 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Horse Thief Hollow, 10426 S. Western Ave., Chicago
Train line: Rock Island, 103rd–Beverly Hills
Time from Chicago: 26 minutes (Zone C)
Distance from station: 1.3 km

About 180 years ago, the low, swampy area where 111th Street meets Vincennes Avenue today provided excellent cover for a band of horse thieves who plagued the farmers far to the south of Chicago. In 2013, Neil Byers opened a restaurant and brewery nearby.

Eight years in, they are worth the trip to the hind end of Chicago. They not only have many tasty beers, but also they have a smoker and lots of pork to smoke in it. I tried their flight, which comprises six 100-mL pours:

I started with the Little Wing Pilsner (5.2%), a crisp, malty lager with a clean finish. Next, the Annexation West Coast IPA (7.2%), bursting with Citra fruitiness and almost a little tartness, a good example of the expression—but my socks stayed on my feet. The Kitchen Sink "Old School" APA (5.7%) was very good, more flavorful than the Annexation but not obnoxiously so. I had two Spoonful double dry-hopped hazy IPAs (6.5%), and found them nice and hoppy with good juiciness and a clean finish. Finally, I tried the Mannish Boy American Stout (5.0%), which was dryer than I expected, with great flavor, and a long hoppy finish I liked.

The pulled pork sandwich did, it turns out, knock my socks off. So did the beer garden, which (alas) will revert to being a parking lot when the weather turns colder.

As I mentioned yesterday, I got pinned down for an hour by a fast-moving but strong thunderstorm. Fortunately they serve beer inside as well. After the storm passed I had about 25 minutes to walk to the Metra, so I took my time strolling through Beverly. About three blocks in, I encountered this guy:

He didn't seem particularly interested in me, though he kept his distance. Instead he rid the neighborhood of at least one rat and carried on with his evening. Thanks, friend fox.

Beer garden? Yes (summer only)
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? A few, avoidable
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes