Events

Today's Daily Parker flash of inspiration will memorialize my update to an obsolete proverb. Instead of "a stopped watch is right twice a day," substitute "a dead mobile gets no bad texts." On second thought, they're not orthogonal. But in my defense, I was thinking of the president at the time.

Just a few things in the news: The Illinois legislature has approved an amendment to the state constitution that, if approved by voters in November 2020, will allow the state to set up a graduated income tax. The current proposal would slightly lower taxes for most people but dramatically increase taxes for people making over $500,000 per year. James Fallows has a look at the real complexities of the urban-rural divide in the US. James Comey has an Op-Ed in the Post about the dumb lies the President...

Yesterday Chicago set a few weather records: wettest Memorial Day ever recorded, tied for most days in May with measurable prediction (18), tied for most days in May that have had more than 7.6 mm of precipitation (10), and up to the 3rd wettest month of May (186 mm). And we have more rain predicted tonight. Warmer air holds more moisture. The atmosphere worldwide is warmer. QED.

People who thought moving to far suburbs made economic sense in the 1990s and 2000s can't seem to sell their ugly, too-large houses: "For most of the 1990s, if you looked at the geographic center of jobs in the Chicago area, it was moving steadily northwest, out from the city toward Schaumburg," homebuilding consultant Tracy Cross says. Like the corporate campuses that popped up in that era, the houses were often built big. A generation later, tastes for both have faded: Corporations have shifted their...

Burger King has decided to embrace the suck: Sir, this was a Burger King commercial. Part of a partnership with the nonprofit Mental Health America — as well as an unsubtle dig at the McDonald’s Happy Meal — the nearly two-minute “short film” promotes a limited-time, select-city product called “Real Meals,” which correspond to a customer’s “real” mood: Blue, Salty, Pissed, DGAF and YAAAS. In place of information about where to seek help if you’re experiencing feelings of depression, which would usually...

Burger King's brand implosion aside, other, more important news came out in the last couple of days: This morning, UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced she would step down on June 7th, having lost the confidence of the right-wing crazies holding her majority together. The likely outcome of this will be Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is actually less popular than May, forcing a general election through incompetence by the August bank holiday. The heads of NOAA and NASA have raised the alarm that...

In a move that surprised no one but disappointed millions anyway, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told Congress yesterday that the Treasury has put on hold plans to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 note until President Trump leaves office: Plans to unveil the Tubman bill in 2020, an Obama administration initiative, would be postponed until at least 2026, Mr. Mnuchin said, and the bill itself would not likely be in circulation until 2028. Until then, bills with former President...

The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, just 50 km from downtown Chicago, became Indiana Dunes National Park in February: Supporters of the switch, who have watched the proposal ebb and flow like Lake Michigan along the shoreline over the past few years, said they are excited by the change and hope the already popular attraction draws even more people, particularly those who make it a point to visit designated national parks. Operations at the park, other than a change in signs, won’t be any different...

Due to climate change and gentrification, rat sightings in North America have gone up: New York has always been forced to coexist with the four-legged vermin, but the infestation has expanded exponentially in recent years, spreading to just about every corner of the city. Rat sightings reported to the city’s 311 hotline have soared nearly 38 percent, to 17,353 last year from 12,617 in 2014, according to an analysis of city data by OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit watchdog group, and The New York Times. In...

Meteorologist Brian Brettschneider has figured out a road trip route that keeps you at a (normal) temperature of 21°C for a whole year: For his data, Brettschneider pulled daily “normal” high temperatures from the National Centers for Environmental Information and Environment Canada. “Normals are a smoothed average of all days between 1981 and 2010,” he explains. He took temperatures from every weather station in the U.S. and Canada and “just connected the dots,” he says. “There were some decisions I...