The Daily Parker

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Pedal Haus Brewery, 214 E. Roosevelt St., Phoenix
Train line: Valley Metro Rail, Roosevelt/Central
Time from Chicago: 3½ hours by air
Distance from station: 350 m

I discovered last week that Phoenix built a light-rail system between my visits in 2015 and 2023. And it goes past a bunch of breweries. So when I had a few hours between my flight landing and the conference welcome dinner, I went to two of them.

Pedal Haus Brewery has multiple locations, including a production facility in Tempe. The downtown Phoenix location has two levels, most of which are outside. (They don't get a lot of snow or rain in central Arizona.) I found my way to the roof and ordered a flight and took notes on my phone.

I started with the Kölsch (4.7%, 19 IBU): light, crisp, honey, pear, lingering finish. Not too bad. Next, the White Rabbit wheat WCIPA (6.5%, 48.6 IBU): subtle, some fruit, much lighter than expected. On to the Desert Classic APA (5.9%, 36 IBU): malt, apple, light banana notes, very drinkable. Finally, the Haus IPA (6.4%, 58 IBU): hoppy, nice balance, long finish. 

I also had just a taste of the Day Drinker Light lager (3.46%, 11.9 IBU) and wrote: "nose is like a Bud Light or Old Style, as is the taste, but with some complexity and flavor. Not for me, but could be life-changing to a Miller Lite drinker."

In all, not too bad, though the unavoidable TVs put a damper on my enjoyment.

Oh, and they clearly like dogs, even if fully a third of their rules concern pee:

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Yes
Televisions? Yes, ubiquitous
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Maybe

The New York Times today has an interactive feature explaining how converting pre-war offices to apartments is a lot easier than converting modern office buildings. Simply put, before the 1940s, no one had air conditioning, so the buildings had more light and air:

These kinds of buildings, often dating to the early 20th century, make for simpler conversions because the same logic that shaped how they were designed as offices a century ago determines how apartments are planned today. Both share a rule of thumb that no interior space be more than 8 or 9 meters from a window that opens.

Iconic prewar skyscrapers like the Empire State Building were designed to this standard, and with this smallest unit in mind: a single rentable office 3 to 6 meters wide and about 8 meters from the windows to the common corridor. That was just the right amount of space for a receptionist’s anteroom and a windowed office.

Dan Kaplan, a senior partner with the architecture firm FXCollaborative in New York, identifies the private-eye suite in any film noir as a classic example: frosted glass doors, a secretary framed by interior transom windows, and then the detective in his private office flooded with natural light.

But the conversion puzzle gets more complex with offices built after World War II. That’s because the modern office has strayed far — increasingly far — from the window rule.

Two inventions liberated office space from the window: air-conditioning and the fluorescent light bulb. Just as the elevator and steel-cage construction enabled buildings to grow taller in the late 19th century, the architectural historian Carol Willis has written, fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning enabled their floor plates to become much deeper.

Then local rules add still more complexity: Maybe the building has to meet stricter seismic requirements as an apartment than as an office (much of the West Coast), or the whole facade must be replaced to meet current wind-load standards (hurricane-prone places). Or you can only convert 18 of the 32 existing office floors into residential use (in Manhattan, such use caps depend on a building’s age and location). Or units must average at least 500 square feet in size per building (downtown Chicago). Or every legal bedroom must have its own working window (New York requires this but Philadelphia and San Francisco don’t).

Still, the commercial real-estate collapse of the last three years has made conversions imperative in big-city downtowns like the Chicago Loop.

The result, probably in only a few years, will be to transform former dense commercial districts like the Loop into dense mixed-use districts that people want to live in. 

We had several options for group activities today. I did not choose the golf or spring training options. I chose this:

I should have photos of this and other bits (including two extra Brews & Choos stops!) over the weekend.

Why set an alarm when your hotel room looks east?

And hey: Arizona has topography! Also not something we really get back home.

I'm in the desert southwest for a company event. They gave me this (East) view:

Since I last visited Phoenix in 2015, they've added a light rail system. It got me from the baggage retrieval carousel at the airport to the hotel (which is by the convention center, pictured above) in 32 minutes, which I appreciate.

The first airplane they had us on to get here broke, so I got to Phoenix two hours later than planned, which I did not appreciate.

I've got nothing scheduled for the next two hours so I'm going to explore. Unlike the 39°C that baked my last visit, right now it's about 22°C and pleasant, and I need 3,000 more steps for today.

The storm predicted to drop 100 mm of snow on Chicago yesterday missed us completely. That made my Brews & Choos research a lot more pleasant, though I did tromp all over the place in heavy boots that I apparently didn't need. Of course, had I not worn them, I would now be writing about my cold, wet socks.

So while I'm getting two reviews together for later this week, go ahead and read this:

• Illinois had the 18th warmest and 17th wettest winter on record, including the state's 6th warmest January, with temperatures well over 3°C above normal.
• The warm winter has kept ice formation in the Great Lakes at record-low levels, increasing the chances of a warm summer.
• Madison Savedra digs into how US Rep. Jesús Garcia (D-Ill.) dropped from first to fourth place in Tuesday's election between early polling and the vote.
• An agreement between the Chicago and Illinois Departments of Transportation will let Chicago add pedestrian and cyclist safety features on state roads that the car-loving state engineers would otherwise not allow—the first set in my own ward.
• Xochitl Gonzalez fears that the proposed New York City Rat Czar has already lost the war—even before being hired. But as David A. Graham points out in the same magazine, big cities are ungovernable.
• Molly White posted 24-minute video presentation debunking the central claims of cryptocurrency advocates.
• Aging barrels of Jack Daniel's whiskey are feeding a dark fungal growth throughout Lincoln County, Tenn.

Finally, author John Scalzi celebrates the 25th anniversary of his domain name scalzi.com, exactly one month before I registered my own. But as I will point out again in a couple of posts later this spring, The Daily Parker started (as braverman.org) well before his blog. Still, 25 years is a long time for a domain to have a single owner.

At my day job, we just ended our 80th sprint on the project, with a lot of small but useful features that will make our side of the app easier to maintain. I like productive days like this. I even voted! And now I will rest on my laurels for a bit and read these stories:

• If you don't worry that the entire US Supreme Court has the technical expertise of your 99-year-old great uncle, perhaps you should?
• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explains how giving economic aid to Ukraine benefits the West.
• In part because Republicans in Congress have no interest in actually legislating, some 700,000 Illinois residents will lose their Medicaid coverage soon.
• Giving loyalty to an unhinged, narcissistic man-child does not get you loyalty in return. And no, this isn't about the XPOTUS.
• O'Hare Terminal 3—the one I use most often—will soon get $50 million in FAA funds for upgrades.
• State schools, which exist so that everyone in the state has a shot at a solid education, have seen the steepest declines in liberal-arts degrees in the past 10 years.
• Jill Bearup updated her earlier video about the Netflix corset mini-scandal, finding her initial surmise was correct.
• Not-racist cartoonists want to know why it took so long for Scott Adams to get his comeuppance.
• WHY IS IT SNOWING IN MALLORCA? I'm vaguely alarmed here...

Finally, the European Space Agency wants to establish a standard time zone for the moon. Since one day on the moon is 29.4 days here, I don't quite know what that will look like.

The rain has stopped, and might even abate long enough for me to collect Cassie from day camp without getting soaked on my way home. I've completed a couple of cool sub-features for our sprint review tomorrow, so I have a few minutes to read the day's stories:

• Matt Ford doesn't think US Representative Marjorie Taylor (R-GA) wants secession so much as uncontested Republican rule, which, you know, is on brand for her and her party.
• San Francisco native Michael Moritz worries that one-party rule by the Democrats is hurting the city—and the Party. (Seeing a pattern here?)
• Stars & Stripes highlights a vignette from 1952, when then-Lt. Jimmy Carter helped Canada dismantle a failed nuclear reactor.
• Financial advisor Caz Craffy dissipated hundreds of thousands of dollars from Army life-insurance payouts in a case that highlights the Department of Defense's difficulties screening civilian advisors for soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
• Chester, Pa., a suburb just south of Philadelphia, drove itself into bankruptcy in part because of a useless $77m highway project.
• The Guardian outlines how Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific have spent millions on lobbying and propaganda to advance the kinds of business practices that led to the East Palestine disaster this month.

Finally, Friends of the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse hope to tap into National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act funds to turn their organization's namesake into a museum. That would be cool.

Newspapers around the country finally chucked "Dilbert" into the bin after the cartoon's creator, Scott Adams, gave them the excuse:

Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams’s long-running “Dilbert” comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them.

The Washington Post, the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times and other publications announced they would stop publishing “Dilbert” after Adams’s racist rant on YouTube on Wednesday. Asked on Saturday how many newspapers still carried the strip — a workplace satire he created in 1989 — Adams told The Post: “By Monday, around zero.”

Adams, 65, also blamed Black people for not “focusing on education” during the show and said, “I’m also really sick of seeing video after video of Black Americans beating up non-Black citizens.”

I say "excuse" because (a) Adams has said a lot worse, and (b) "Dilbert" hasn't been funny for at least ten years. I stopped reading the strip about five years ago after (a) Adams said a lot worse and (b) it stopped being funny. Why his comments last week tipped the scales, I have no idea. But you only have to go back to the 2016 Presidential Campaign, with Adams calling the XPOTUS a "genius hypnotist" and praising his persuasive abilities the way Father Coughlin praised Goebbels.

So, for whatever reason, American newspapers have finally got shot of this boring, unfunny asshole. Only the timing was unpredictable.

The other "makes sense if you think about it" story concerns the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. I've visited the place; it's really creepy. But aside from the Treaty Village at Panmunjom, it's a five-kilometer strip of land with exactly zero humans in it. Yet NBC News seemed surprised that it has become a de facto wildlife refuge:

Golden eagles, goats and wild cats are among the 6,168 wildlife species were found in new street view images released by Google this week which offer a rare glimpses into life behind the civilian control line.

Away from landmines buried beneath the border zone’s soil, otters and endangered Manchurian trout swim freely in the Imjin river which flows from North to South Korea.

And animals such as long-tailed mountain goats, classified as endangered by South Korea’s environment ministry, can be spotted in the rocky terrain of the Taebaek mountains.

So, that's cool. A lot cooler than a washed-up, right-wing cartoonist losing his syndication deal.

As a bonus, here's Panmunjom, from about 10 meters from the North Korean border:

I spent way more time than I should have this morning trying to set up an API key for the Associated Press data tools. Their online form to sign up created a general customer-service ticket, which promptly got closed with an instruction to...go to the online sign-up form. They also had a phone number, which turned out to have nothing to do with sales. And I've now sent two emails a week apart to their "digital sales" office, with crickets in response.

The New York Times had an online setup that took about five minutes, and I'm already getting stuff using Postman. Nice.

Meanwhile:

• David French revisits President Carter's "malaise" speech, which he characterizes as the former president's most prophetic.
• Molly White asks, why isn't Sam Bankman-Fried in jail? (Most likely answer: because the US Attorney's Office are enjoying him making all those incriminating statements online.)
• The mountains outside Los Angeles have gotten heavy blizzard conditions in the past day in a once-in-a-generation storm.
• A few thousand kilometers to the east, Venice has had near-record low tides that have left its canals mostly empty for hours twice a day.
• The electrical engineer heading up Virginia's Marymount University has proposed cutting everything she doesn't understand from the curriculum, ironically demonstrating why the humanities are critical for good leadership skills.
• Long-time Winnepeg, Man., resident Michel Durand-Wood sees the disappearance of a neighborhood park's gardener as an excellent symbol of the "growth Ponzi scheme" perpetrated by highway departments across North America.
• On the other hand, bureaucracy and poor planning have helped make Manhattan's 2nd Avenue Subway the most expensive transit project in the world.

Finally, I've got a note on my calendar to check out the Karen's Diner pop-up in Wrigleyville next month. Because who doesn't want to be abused by servers?