Events

It was a lovely afternoon for a concert. We performed selections from Händel's Messiah, Rachmaninoff's Aleko, and Bach's St John Passion in the gorgeous St Michael Catholic Church in Old Town, Chicago: Inside, just before the concert: Our next performances will be with Chicago Opera Theater on the 14th, 16th, and 17th. Then some of us will be back at St Michael for Messiah on December 6th. It's going to be a hectic couple of months.

On Wednesday night it snowed, and the temperature spent several hours below freezing. That caused this to happen: Those leaves fell en masse from a linden tree in my neighborhood. Which means they won't fall in two weeks when they're bright yellow. Most of the trees in my neighborhood, and the ivy covering my own building, dropped all their leaves the morning after the snowstorm. So we don't really get an autumn this year. And that makes me sad. Nature, sometimes you suck.

It's the first day of November 2019, the month in which the 1982 classic film Blade Runner takes place. Los Angeles has a bit of haze today from wildfires in the area, but I'm glad to report that it isn't the environmental disaster portrayed in the movie. No flying cars, no replicants, and no phone booths either. In other news: Chicago woke up to 75 mm of snow on the ground from the largest Halloween snowfall in the city's history. Despite the white stuff on the ground, a study at CBRE Group and...

This is The Daily Parker's 7,000th post since 13 May 1998 (but only #6,804 since the "modern era" began in November 2005). When I started posting jokes on braverman.org back in 1998, none of the predictions I could make about the world on the verge of the 2020s would have been correct. The Cubs winning the World Series? A powerful computer in every pocket? Donald Trump being anywhere near the nuclear codes? And here we are. A thousand posts since December 2017, two thousand since October 2015...that's a...

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal points out that while PG&E has some responsibility for California's wildfires, the real culprits are the voters and elected officials who have ignored routine maintenance for two generations: A kind of toxic debt is embedded in much of the infrastructure that America built during the 20th century. For decades, corporate executives, as well as city, county, state, and federal officials, not to mention voters, have decided against doing the routine maintenance and deeper...

American late-night host Jimmy Kimmel wondered if there were differences between President Obama's announcement that we had assassinated Osama Bin Laden and President Trump's announcement that we had assassinated Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. He only found a few: To quote The Untouchables, "We laugh because it's true."

The House of Commons have just voted 438-20 on the third reading of the bill to have a general election in December. This overrides the Fixed-Terms Parliament Act of 2011, as Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts pointed out. Because Amendment 2 to the bill, setting the election date of 9th December, failed about half an hour ago, the election will be on Thursday December 12th. Under the rules of Parliament, the last sitting day will be next Wednesday, November 6th, and the campaign will officially begin...

That's American for the English idiom "penny in the air." And what a penny. More like a whole roll of them. Right now, the House of Commons are wrapping up debate on the Government's bill to prorogue Parliament (for real this time) and have elections the second week of December. The second reading of the bill just passed by voice vote (the "noes" being only a few recalcitrant MPs), so the debate continues. The bill is expected to pass—assuming MPs can agree on whether to have the election on the 9th...

Writing in the Guardian, journalist and historian Neal Ascherson says that the long Brexit fight has deepened divisions within the UK that have always been there, but now may have passed the point of no return: It’s commonly said that the Brexit years have made the English more xenophobic, less tolerant, more angrily divided among themselves.  [T]he deepest change since 2016 is the weakening of the United Kingdom’s inner bonds. The “great rest of England” seem to have felt for many years that if the...

Benjamin Wittes, writing for Lawfare, points out that Alexander Hamilton predicted exactly how an impeachment would bring partisan differences into even sharper relief than ordinary politics. So Republicans in Congress have to change the subject: Yes, Trump’s approval numbers show there are cracks in the wall, as every pundit is busily pointing out. But the larger point, it seems to me, is that there is still a wall. And as Hamilton argued, it is the comparative strength of that wall, not any...