I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)
Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:
- Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
- Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
- Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
- James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
- Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
- Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
- Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
- American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
- SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.
Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.
Just a few more notes about last Saturday's 43-kilometer walk to Lake Bluff. First, some photos, including the obligatory BaháΚΌí Temple photo from about 14 km in:
And the Green Bay Trail in Glencoe, Ill., around 27 km:
The walk felt much easier than previous years, so I ran the numbers to find out why. For starters, this year I took longer (6:32:38) to get to 42.2 km than in 2020 (6:20:32) or 2021 (6:17:41)—but last year I took even longer (6:41:36), so that's only part of it. This year was the coolest, peaking at 22.8°C compared with last year's and 2020's 26.1°C and 2021's 24.4°C, which also helped.
But the most interesting data point turned out to be my heart rate. Here's the comparison of the four completions (remember, I didn't finish in 2022):
Zone |
2020 |
2021 |
2023 |
2024 |
Zone 2: warm-up |
8:44 |
0:00 |
8:29 |
1:33:15 |
Zone 3: aerobic |
4:00:41 |
1:40:19 |
4:09:15 |
3:40:19 |
Zone 4: threshold |
2:00:05 |
3:22:43 |
2:43:06 |
1:28:33 |
Huh. This year I spent the least time in the threshold zone, and over 20% of the time warming up, while in previous years I pushed myself a lot harder. I did that on purpose; I really didn't want to exhaust myself as I had in every previous year. I just wanted to enjoy the walk with my Brews & Choos buddy. Data: in all previous years I completely bottomed out my Garmin Body Battery score; this year I had 20 points left.
So, a couple of takeaways. First, most importantly, do the walk in October and not September. My birthday weekend almost always feels like summer even though it's officially autumn; mid-October, we've got cool weather. Second, if I manage my sleep, diet, and energy levels well enough, I can start next year's walk feeling great, and (third) if I manage my heart rate, I can end it feeling great, too.
But maybe it's OK to push a little harder. Could I have cut 15 minutes off my 42.2-km time by moving in the threshold zone earlier? Probably. Should I have left 20 points on the field? Probably not.
Before then, however, we're planning a Brews & Choos-ish like we did last November. Look for that in the coming weeks.
The most interesting news I have today comes from the Chicago City Council's Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which voted 8-5 yesterday to lower the city's default speed limit from 30 mph (48 km/h) to 25 mph (40 km/h). Advocates have wanted this change for years. One influential group, People For Bikes, ranks Chicago 2,279th out of 2,579 cities in the US for bike friendliness almost entirely because of our speed limit. The change would instantly catapult Chicago to the top quintile of their rankings. Oh, and it would save a few dozen pedestrian lives each year.
Next up: an analysis by the New York Times showing that parking minimums dating back to the 1960s require that a new apartment building going up a block from a subway station in downtown Brooklyn has to have exactly 193 parking spaces, even though most of those spaces will likely never have cars in them. New York City has a mix of support and opposition to removing parking minimums, correlating almost exactly with the MTA subway map. This particular "transit-oriented" apartment block will have almost 200 unneeded parking spaces, though, because traffic engineering in the US hasn't progressed since 1961.
Finally, the Washington Post yesterday praised the simple townhouse, such as currently occupied by Inner Drive Technology's World Headquarters:
The new American Dream should be a townhouse — a two- or three-story home that shares walls with a neighbor. Townhouses are the Goldilocks option between single-family homes in the suburbs and high-rise condos in cities.
n the United States, [medium-density housing options] are scarce — they’ve been dubbed “the missing middle” because we need more homes of this size and spacing. And it’s here that we find townhouses.
The United States needs more homes — 3 million to 7 million, depending which expert you ask. In many parts of the world, the obvious solution would be to construct high-rises; however, financing and liability challenges for U.S. developers have meant almost no new condo construction since 2009.
I approve. Except for the four days of pounding, sanding, sawing, and yelling in Polish that I've experienced as my townhouse complex refinishes the stairs to the houses surrounding our courtyard, it's the perfect size and configuration for us. Yay townhouses!
Moving this annual 42 km walk to October really helped:
I'll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow. Right now...I'm a bit sore, but a lot less sore than I was last time.
A contractor punctured the iron casing around the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in New York City, but fortunately thousands of motorists escaped a horrible death:
Workers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the tunnel, first noticed the curious downpour in the eastbound tube around 10 a.m. Leaks are not unheard of, and at first it appeared routine. An initial report indicated that officials suspected that the water was coming from a broken main on the Queens end of the tunnel.
But there was no evidence to support that guess. So, as the water continued to pour in, a tunnel worker performed a simple test using the most sensitive of instruments: his tongue.
The water, the worker discovered, was salty.
Immediately, it was clear that this was no burst pipe. City mains carry fresh water; salt water could only be rushing in from the river above.
[T]he cause of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel’s sudden failure was ... clear. Floating on the river, high above the tunnel, was a barge working on an entirely different infrastructure project, probing deep into the water with a large, red drilling rig.
When contractors punctured Chicago's Loop tunnel network in 1992, we got flooded basements. A QMT failure could have drowned thousands of people.
The History Channel sends me a newsletter every morning listing a bunch of things that happened "this day in history." Today we had a bunch of anniversaries:
And finally, today is the 958th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which is the reason this blog is written in a Celtic-Norse-Germanic-French creole, not just a Celtic-Norse-Germanic creole.
I had a busy Friday and a busier Saturday, so I just got to these this morning:
Finally, US Senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance (R-OH) has a lot to say about families, but when you actually look at how he lives his own life, it makes you wonder about his sincerity. Actually, that's not entirely true: everything the man says makes you wonder about his sincerity, but in the case of family policies he's even more obtusely hypocritical than usual.
I decamped to Marseille on my last full day in France last week, since I had a flight before 11 am and didn't want to add another hour coming from Aix. I will have to visit the city again, hopefully before I'm too old to negotiate the steps to the train station:
I walked around a bit, up through the Panier district, where I caught this view of the Vieux Port:
But this is probably a better view:
I finished the evening at this little corner bar near my hotel. If it were in Chicago, it would just have an Old Style sign out front:
And that's it for Europe, for now. I'll aim to get back to Provence in 2 years or so, and I'll bring my real camera.
A week ago Sunday, my friends picked me up in Aix-en-Provence and took me to their house in St-Martin-de-la-Brasque, about 30 km north, just south of the Luberon massif. I can see the appeal:
We then drove about 10 km to the Commune of Lourmarin, which may be even prettier than Aix:
Yes, Provence really does look like that. I really need to go back.
President Jimmy Carter turned 100 today, making him the first former president to do so. James Fallows has a bit of hagiography on his blog today, and the State of Georgia has declared today "Jimmy Carter Day." I hope I make it to 100, too, but I don't expect the State of Illinois to declare that day a public holiday.
In other news:
Finally, yesterday the UK turned off its last operating coal-fired power plant, ending a 142-year run of burning coal to generate power. XKCD points out that in those 142 years, the UK burned the equivalent of about 3 inches of its land surface generating electricity.
And of course, I'll watch the Vice-Presidential Debate tonight at 9pm Eastern, but I don't plan to live-blog. Reactions tomorrow, though.