The Daily Parker

Wouldn't that be nice? Alas, people keep making them:

• Harvard University president Claudine Gray finally threw in the towel.
• Researchers at Rutgers University have identified clear patterns in TikTok hashtags that suggest direct Chinese Communist Party interference with the app.
• Though the WMO and NCDC haven't confirmed it officially, 2023 appears to have been the hottest year on record—and 2024 will be warmer.
• Vishaan Chakrabarti, the former director of planning for Manhattan, outlines a plan to make room for a million more New Yorkers, while Charles Mahon likens the current housing shortage to an imaginary world where the government subsidized expensive shoes (it makes sense).
• Because of the runway arrangement and urban density surrounding Chicago's Midway Airport, Southwest Airlines will continue to struggle whenever Chicago has weather.
• Author Samuel W Franklin excoriates the corporate culture of "creativity" that somehow elevates Elon Musk over Mozart and da Vinci.

Speaking of excoriation, David Mamet has a new memoir about his 40 years in the LA film industry, Everywhere an Oink Oink. (Expect to find that on next year's media roundup.) And I still have to read Linda Obst's Hello, He Lied, which I keep forgetting to liberate from my dad's bookshelf.

Last year continued the trend of getting back to normal after 2020, and with one nice exception came a lot closer to long-term bog standard normal than 2022.

• I posted 500 times on The Daily Parker, 13 more than in 2022 and only 6 below the long-term median. January, May, and August had the most posts (45) and February, as usual, the least (37). The mean of 41.67 was actually slightly higher than the long-term mean (41.23), with a standard deviation of 2.54, which may be the lowest (i.e., most consistent posting schedule) since I started the blog in 1998.
  
• Flights went up slightly, to 12 segments and 20,541 flight miles (up from 10 and 16,138), the most of either since 2018:
  
• I visited 5 countries (the UK, Czechia, Austria, Slovakia, and Germany) and 5 US states (California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Indiana, and Michigan). Total time traveling: 156 hours (up from 107).
• Cassie had more fun last year than 2022 as my team went from 2 to 3 days in-office (meaning more time at day camp). She got 372 hours of walks (up from 369) and at least that many hours of couch time.
• Total steps for 2023: 4,619,407 steps and 3,948 km (average: 12,655 per day), up from 4.54m steps and 3,693 km in 2022. I hit my step goal 341 times (327 in 2022), which wasn't bad at all. I also did my longest walk ever on September 1st, 44.45 km.
• Driving? I did several trips to Michigan in the summer, but still only drove 5,009 km (down from 5,925) on 87 L of gasoline (down from 144), averaging 1.7 L/100 km (136 MPG). That's the best fuel economy I've ever gotten with any car for a full year. I last filled up July 30th, and could conceivably go through January on what I've got left in the tank, but it's always best to keep your tank full in super-cold weather.
• Total time at work: 1,905 hours at my real job (up from 1,894) and 73 hours on consulting and side projects, including 640 hours in the office (up from 580), but not including the 91 hours I spent commuting (down from 103). How did I add 60 hours in the office while cutting 12 hours off my commute, I hear you ask? Simple: I live closer to the Metra than I used to, and the 6-10 minutes a day adds up.
• The Apollo Chorus consumed 247 hours in 2023, with 166 hours rehearsing and performing (cf. 220 hours just on the music in 2022). We had fewer performances and an easier fall season, which made a huge difference.
• As for media consumption, I'll leave that to its own post tomorrow.

In all, not a bad year. I hope the trends continue for 2024, though I do expect a few more blog posts this autumn...

Yeah, I know I've posted this nonsense before. Kiritimati atoll (pronounced "Christmas" because the missionary who named the place had a broken typewriter) and Kiribati changed their time zone to UTC+14 in 1994 so that they could be the first place in the world to enter the 21st Century. So while the wall-clock time on Kiritimati is the same as the wall-clock time in Hawai'i, Kiritimati and Kiribati are a full day ahead.

Anyway, it's now 2024 in the Pacific/Kiritimati time zone. Happy new year!

Welcome to stop #92 on the Brews and Choos project.

Distillery: Take Flight Spirits, 8038 Lincoln Ave., Skokie
Train line: CTA Yellow Line, Oakton-Skokie
Time from Chicago: 46 minutes
Distance from station: 700 m

This charming single-pot distillery in the only charming part of Skokie began distilling in March 2020 and opened its tasting room in the summer of 2022. A couple of friends and I were visiting a mutual friend a few blocks away, so we decided to traipse down the bike path that parallels the Yellow Line and visit Take Flight, passing Sketchbook along the way.

We all liked the vibe, and got to meet the distillers, Carrie and Andrew Cole, who gave us a little context. Most importantly, they don't distill grain-neutral spirits (AKA vodka), preferring to make their gin from their rum instead. They also have a really lovely barrel-aged rum, and they make a malt whiskey and a Bourbon. Right now they also have a gin distilled from a batch of Sketchbook Insufficient Clearance that went wrong. (I tasted that batch. It was horrible. The brewery recalled all of it, including the 4-pack I bought from them, and explained they messed up the hop load.)

I got a flight with their basic gin (hits a bit hard; cardamom, lavender, grapefruit, lots of juniper; the rum base gives it a nice depth), the aged rum (nice balance, not too sweet, long finish), and the bourbon (easy nose, almost a lighter taste than expected, very young, might make an OK old fashioned but IMO not ready yet). My friends let me try the malt whiskey (sweet nose, nice smoke, good finish) and their cocktails. The aged rum made a wonderful old fashioned. At $55 a bottle, though, I'd rather sip it than load it up with bitters and syrup.

I'm looking forward to going back, maybe to one of their evening events. As of this post, the Yellow Line still hasn't resumed service after their accident in November, adding maybe 10 minutes to the already-lengthy 46 minute ride from downtown Chicago. But I foresee a day in the spring where a few of us get together for a cocktail at Take Flight followed by a pint at Sketchbook.

Beer garden? No
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? None
Serves food? Snacks only; "BYOF" (bring your own food) policy
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

I don't usually do link round-ups on Saturday mornings, but I got stuff to do today:

• Josh Marshall is enjoying the "comical rake-stomp opera" of Nikki Haley's (R-SC) primary campaign.
• The Economist pokes around the "city" of Rosemont, Ill., a family-owned fiefdom less than 10 km from Inner Drive Technology World HQ.
• The New York Times highlights the most informative charts they published in 2023.
• The Chicago Tribune lists some of the new Illinois laws taking effect on Monday. My favorite: Illinois will no longer bar marriage licenses for out-of-state same-sex couples whose home jurisdiction prohibits same-sex marriages.
• The CTA plans to build out 10 blocks (2 km) of "community space" under the new Red/Purple Line trestle under construction in Uptown and Edgewater.

Finally, two restaurants in Chicago—well, one restaurant and one infamous hot-dog stand—have joined forces to create the Chicago Croissant, which "features a char-dog rolled into a pastry lined with mustard, relish and onions. Definitely no ketchup. It’s topped with poppy seeds and celery salt and garnished with a tomato, pepper and pickle." This, they claim, is a breakfast food.

Due to an odd combination of holidays, a use-it-or-lose-it floating holiday, and travel, I'm just about done with my first of four short work-weeks in a row. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Of course, since I would like to finish the coding problem I've been working on before I leave today, I'll have to read some of these later:

• Josh Marshall thinks it's hilarious and pathetic that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), realizing she can't win against a Democrat in her own district, said she'll run in the next district over.
• Jennifer Rubin points out that while you can blame anyone you want for what's wrong with US politics today, ultimately it's the voters.
• Authors Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith argue for the repeal of the Insurrection Act, not just because of the XPOTUS.
• Climate scientist Brian Brettschneider has charted the perfect year-long road-trip across the US where it's always (normally) 21°C.
• A truck driver found himself trapped in an Indiana creek for six days until some fishermen discovered him. (He's OK.)

Finally, police and firefighters in Lancashire, England, are glancing about sheepishly this evening after reports of a fire at Blackpool Tower turned out to be...orange construction netting. They still managed to arrest one person for "breach of the peace," though for what The Guardian didn't report.

As I wait for my rice to cook and my adobo to finish cooking, I'm plunging through an unusually large number of very small changes to a codebase recommended by one of my tools. And while waiting for the CI to run just now, I lined these up for tomorrow morning:

• Michael Tomasky calls former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has left the House and scampered back to California, "the most incompetent House Speaker of all time." (No argument from me.)
• Former GOP strategist, lawyer, and generally sane person George T Conway III read through the dissenting opinions in Colorado's decision to bar the XPOTUS from the election on 14th-Amendment grounds and came away convinced of the correctness of the verdict.
• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's motorcade drivers have wracked up over $2100 in fines from automated red-light and and speed cameras. (Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel solved a similar problem elegantly: he made his drivers personally responsible for the tickets.)
• Psychologist Pamela Rutledge thinks about why some people pay so much attention to their fitness trackers.
• Matthew Walther believes Händel's Messiah belongs to all of humanity, even the ridiculous mid-20th-century performances with half a million singers.
• James Fallows explains when autopilots are dangerous and when they're not—complete with pilot-view video of an Airbus A320 performing a Category III autoland at Vienna.

Finally, the CBC has an extended 3-episode miniseries version of the movie BlackBerry available online. I may have to watch that this week.

Climate scientist Rollie Williams explains the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's not-so-secret plan to get "every molecule" of hydrocarbons out of the ground:

Seriously. You can almost hear them twiddling their mustaches and tying the maiden to the tracks in this one.

Ordinarily I'd quote Upton Sinclair, but the government of KSA completely understands the thing. Then again, with temperatures on the Arabian peninsula routinely cresting 45°C and sometimes exceeding 50°C, what do they think will happen if their plans to burn all those fossil fuels succeed?

May your solstice be more luminous than these stories would have it:

• Chicago politician Ed Burke, who ruled the city's Finance Committee from his 14th-Ward office for 50 years, got convicted of bribery and corruption this afternoon. This has to do with all the bribes he accepted and the corruption he embodied from 1969 through May of this year.
• New Republic's Tori Otten agrees with me that US Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is the dumbest schmuck in the Senate. (She didn't use the word "schmuck," but it fits.)
• Texas has started flying migrants to Chicago, illegally, in an ongoing effort to troll Democratic jurisdictions over immigration. This came shortly after they passed a manifestly unconstitutional immigration law of their own.
• Millennial journalist Max Read, a kid who took over the Internet that my generation (X) built from the ground up, whinges about "the kids today" who have taken it over from his generation. (He thinks a gopher is just a rodent, I'd bet.)
• Hard to believe, speaking of millennials, that today is the 35th anniversary of Libya blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Finally, a court in California has ordered one "Demeterious Polychron" to destroy all extant copies of what I can imagine to be a horrific example of JRR Tolkien fanfic that the court found infringes on the Tolkien estate's copyrights. Note that Polychron (a) put his self-published fanfic for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, (b) after sending it to them with a letter call it "the obvious pitch-perfect sequel" to The Lord of the Rings, and then (c) suing them when they allowed Amazon to produce its own prequel, Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. Note to budding novelists: if you're writing fanfic, don't sue the underlying material's copyright owner for infringement.

I can't yet tell that sunsets have gotten any later in the past two weeks, though I can tell that sunrises are still getting later. But one day, about three weeks from now, I'll look out my office window at this hour, and notice it hasn't gotten completely dark yet. Alas, that day is not this day.

Elsewhere in the darkening world:

• Mike Godwin, the person who postulated Godwin's Law, believes that invoking it as regards the XPOTUS is not at all losing the argument: "You could say the ‘vermin’ remark or the ‘poisoning the blood’ remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence. But both of them pretty much makes it clear that there’s something thematic going on, and I can’t believe it’s accidental."
• Julia Ioffe watches with growing horror at Ukraine's looming money cliff.
• The rings of a 200-year-old tree in Arizona show just how bad last summer was.
• The Federal Highway Administration has revised the MUCTD after 14 years, this time after actually listening to people who don't drive cars.

Finally, Tyler Austin Harper shakes his head that university administrators and other people of limited horizons completely misunderstand why the humanities are important:

If we have any hope of resuscitating fields like English and history, we must rescue the humanities from the utilitarian appraisals that both their champions and their critics subject them to. We need to recognize that the conservatives are right, albeit not in the way they think: The humanities are useless in many senses of the term. But that doesn’t mean they’re without value.

It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter. ... At the same time, a generation of Ph.D. students is eyeing current hiring practices and concluding that the only research that has a prayer of landing them a tenure-track position relates to questions of identity and justice.

Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy.

The whole essay is worth a read.