Events

The Daily Parker began as a joke-of-the-day engine at the newly-established braverman.org on 13 May 1998. This will be my 8,907th post since 1998 and my 8,710th since 13 November 2005. And according to a quick SQL Server query I just ran, The Daily Parker contains 15,043,497 bytes of text and HTML. A large portion of posts just curate the news and opinions that I've read during the day. But sometimes I actually employ thought and creativity, as in these favorites from the past 25 years: Old Man...

If you haven't got plans tonight, or you do but you're free Sunday afternoon, come to our Spring Concert: You can read these during the intermission: The National Association of Government Employees has sued President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen—both of whom they support politically—to force the Administration to ignore the debt ceiling. Sci-fi author Ted Chiang, in a brutal essay, suggests a metaphor for AI: think of it "as a management consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey &...

I did not watch the CNN town hall with the XPOTUS on Wednesday night. I do feel bad for the journalists who had to, starting with the Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler: For more than an hour, former president Donald Trump sent forth a torrent of false and misleading claims during a CNN town hall. Here’s a roundup of some of the more notable ones, arranged by subject matter. “I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes from China.” Through the end of his presidency, Trump-imposed tariffs garnered...

We finally have a real May-appropriate day in Chicago, with a breezy 26°C under clear skies (but 23°C closer to the Lake, where I live). Over to my right, my work computer—a 2017-era Lenovo laptop I desperately want to fling onto the railroad tracks—has had some struggles with the UI redesign I just completed, giving me a dose of frustration but also time to line up some lunchtime reading: Both Matt Ford and David Firestone goggle at how stupidly US Rep. George Santos (R-NY) ran his alleged grift...

US Representative George Santos (R-NY) surrendered to Federal authorities this morning, charged with 13 counts of fraud and related offenses: Prosecutors said the charges resulted from “fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations” designed to mislead donors, enrich Mr. Santos and win a seat in Congress as a Republican from Queens. The bulk of the charges relate to what prosecutors said was a 2022 scheme in which Mr. Santos solicited at least $50,000 in donations from political donors for a fake...

Let me repeat that: Former President Donald Trump sexually abused at least one person, not "allegedly," but "really." A jury has said so: A verdict has been reached in the E Jean Carroll v Trump trial, according to a court spokesman. It [was] delivered at 3 p.m. today in the courtroom. The jury began deliberating today shortly before noon. The jury has found that Carroll did not prove Trump raped her, but they did determine that he had sexually abused her. The jurors also found that Trump had defamed...

Ah, Spring in Chicago, when the wind shifts ever so slightly to make you wish you'd layered better: WGN's Tom Skilling explains what happened: Temps down more than 16°C from Sunday’s levels Monday, largely the product of winds off the 9°C lake waters—warming returns over coming week with temps surging from 21°C Tuesday to 25°C Wednesday, 27°C Thursday and 26°C Friday but expect easterly lake breezes to cool immediate lakeshore areas each day this week. Weather dries and mixed sun appears Tuesday with...

Michael Tomasky has no patience for the "leave it to God" crap the Republican Party spewed after our 199th mass shooting of the year: We’re on pace for close to 600 shootings, and perhaps 60,000 willful, malicious, or accidental deaths (there’ve been 20,200 so far this year, according to the GVA, in the first four months and one week of 2023). That 60,000 is roughly equal to the number of Americans who died in Vietnam in nearly a decade. We’ll witness the same amount of carnage in one year. Shopping...

Today got away from me. I performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony last night and caught up on Cassie time today. We had beautiful, warm weather until about 8pm, too, so I didn't do any work at all. Tomorrow we have crappy weather, so I'll post as usual.

If you look at the history of Weather Now, you can see that development tends to happen in bursts. Apparently I'm in one now. Yesterday I fixed a nagging irritation with the UI layout, and today I'm working on connecting to a new data source I've been meaning to add for years. Stay tuned.