Events

The Tribune waxes rhapsodic about the season that was: Let's take stock of all that before we start with the wait-till-next-year business. Let's celebrate this year. It was awesome. It was unexpected. It was thrilling. It was a gift to the city of Chicago from a team of overachievers, including four standout rookie starters. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Cubs all-time postseason home run leader Kyle Schwarber, age 22. Rookie of the year candidate Kris Bryant, 23. Cardinal-killer Jorge Soler, 23. And...

It's a little like hearing from an abusive partner a year after breaking up. Glad you're doing better, glad you're getting on your feet, but you're still doing the really bad things that led to me leaving, so no, don't call again. I've been a Cubs fan for most of my life, as were my parents before me, and some of my ancestors before them. My mother lived and died without seeing them in the World Series, as have about two billion other people who were born after October 1945. It's possible I may never...

When the weather is like this (22°C and sunny) in the middle of October, I happily walk the kilometer and a half to the nearest Whole Foods to grab a salad. (When the weather isn't as good, I still walk, just not as happily.) Today I had a slight delay: The city raises the bridges most often in October and April to let sailboats through. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, and on a day like today, I'm happy to watch.

 Read or look at these: Colorized photos from the Civil War The Economist has a list of the best airports to sleep in Crain's has a list of Chicago's coolest offices Want your kid to be a virtuoso violinist? I hope not Today is Back to the Future II day. Here's what they got right Don Friesen forgets his password a lot Oh, and the Cubs lost, which feels somehow familiar.  

Last night, Canada tossed out its anti-climate, pro-business-owner Conservative party and elected the Liberals in a landslide. The Liberal party won an outright majority of 184 seats to the Conservatives' 99 (out of 338). Stephen Harper is stepping down, which Canada's system requires in order for Justin Trudeau to be elected Prime Minister by the next Parliament, which should resume November 9th. The left-leaning Toronto Star is overjoyed: Cheers broke out across the land as Canadian voters chased...

Tonight's pub quiz got cancelled because of some sports game. Long-time Daily Parker readers may remember I used to go to lots of Cubs games. Then I got season tickets, after which they lost 185 games in the following two seasons. So we didn't re-up, and this year, the cubs won 97 and tonight will play game 3 of the NLCS. This year I've been pretty annoyed with myself, and with the team, so I'm just not into the playoffs. Not to mention, this season feels a lot like 2008 or even 2003, both of which...

You may not have known that the "Contact Us" page failed in almost all cases to send messages, but it's fixed now. Please don't make me enable Captchas.

Yes, even with a new blog engine, sometimes link happens: A new opera about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is in the works You want this T-shirt Chicago Tribune transportation writer John Hilkevitch has 5 ways to improve O'Hare Do you like Corgis? Of course you do Pentatonix recently performed on the Tonight Show Malcom Gladwell is wrong, this time about school shooters The new blog engine does have one key advantage: putting that list together took about 1/3 the time it used to take.

We have a crystal-clear, crisp October morning, perfect for spending three hours in a rehearsal for the Apollo Chorus...sigh. It's also a good morning to test the new blog engine and posting from my friend's car.

The Daily Parker v3.1 is here. We have officially launched on BlogEngine.NET. And this is the 5,000th post since May 1998 (but only the 4,804th since November 2005, when the blog launched independently of braverman.org.) I've maintained a pretty consistent posting rate since finishing my MBA in December 2010. Posting nearly every day is how you get to 5,000 entries: There are still a number of bugs, but nothing really horrible except for the Production instance not being able to properly respond to old...