Events

For the first week of 2023, Chicago got just 2% of possible sunlight, with no sun at all since last Monday. Normal for January is 40%. On the other hand, so far it's the 4th-warmest January in history, almost 10°F (6°C) above normal, with the 8-to-14 day forecast predicting much above normal temperatures. Note the top 7 are all in the past 31 years. Unfortunately those two things correlate strongly. So we probably won't get a lot of sun until it either cools down or warms up. Such is winter in Chicago....

After DJI decided it didn't want to abide by Google's privacy and security guidelines, and instead wants users to side-load their software (uh...just no), I haven't flown my drone in a while. Today I finally installed Litchi, started my drone, and...*bam*. You don't want to discover that one of your propeller blades is broken when you start your aircraft. Trust me. After I repaired the gimbal and replaced 5 of the 8 rotor blades (the crash broke a couple that were fine before I started the thing up), I...

In a form of enlightened laziness, I often go into my company's downtown Chicago office on Friday and the following Monday, avoiding the inconvenience of taking my laptop home. It helps also that Fridays and Mondays have become the quietest days of the week, with most return-to-office workers heading in Tuesdays through Thursdays. And after a productive morning, I have a few things to read at lunch: The Economist says a lot of nice things about Chicago, including that we have an almost inexhaustible...

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has lost his seventh bid for Speaker—nope, eighth—while Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has amassed more cumulative votes for the office than anyone except Sam Rayburn. Things in the House have become surreal, even without a bad lip reading for levity. As Tom Nichols puts it, What all of these GOP members do seem to have in common is a shared belief that they should be in Congress in order to make other people miserable. Usually, those “other people” are Democrats and various...

Six times in the last two days, the House has tried to elect a Speaker. In each attempt, no fewer than 19 right-wing crazies refused to vote for Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), meaning that Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has gotten a plurality of the vote every time. Naturally, they'll try again in a few hours. Naturally, they'll fail again soon after. Make no mistake: the right-wing crazies have no problem with the richest country in the history of the world operating without a functioning legislature. In a...

While looking for something else, I stumbled upon a post from 2013 that could use some updating: American children born this month will likely graduate from high school in 2041 and college in 2045. Children born in 2002 can legally drink in the United States. That's as far back in time as the first detainees arriving at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Kelly Clarkson winning the first American Idol competition; and both US Airways and United Airlines declaring bankruptcy. Kids born in 2005 can vote...

The House will probably elect a Speaker before the end of March, so we probably won't set any records for majority-party dickery before the Congress even starts. (We might for what the 118th Congress does, though.) But with three ballots down and the guy who thought he'd get the job unable to get the last 19 votes he needs, it might take a few days. Meanwhile: How does the House elect its Speaker, anyway? Whoever the Republicans elect, they have already made clear their intentions for the 118th to...

The Republicans in the House of Representatives made an own-goal just now as they failed to elect a House Speaker on the first ballot for the first time in over a century: Representative Kevin McCarthy of California lost his first vote for speaker on Tuesday and was in a pitched battle for the top job in the House, amid a rebellion among hard-right lawmakers that left the post up for grabs and prompted a historic struggle on the floor at the dawn of the new Republican majority. The Republican mutiny...

I took my use-it-or-lose-it floating holiday Friday and today was a company holiday. So it feels like today's really Sunday, but so was yesterday, after two Saturdays in a row. I think tomorrow's Tuesday but for me it'll be Monday. I think.

We've now got two full years between us and 2020, and it does look like 2022 got mostly back to normal. The Daily Parker got 487 posts in 2022, 51 fewer than in 2021 and 25 below median. As usual, I posted the most in January (46) and fewest in November (37), creating a very tight statistical distribution with a standard deviation of 3.45. In other words: posting was pretty consistent month to month, but down overall from previous years. I flew 10 segments and 16,138 flight miles in 2022, low for...