Events

On my way downtown to hear Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem with some friends, I saw this notice, hung with a tragicomic level of incompetence, at the Ravenswood Metra station's 12-year-old "temporary" inbound platform: What? We get our "new" platform that has been almost completed for the past 24 months on August 1st? There’s only one brief note on the station info page, but otherwise…nothing. No ribbon cutting, no acknowledgement that the platform is opening 6 years late, no recognition that former...

An entertainer, a criminal, and an architect died this week, and we should remember them all. The most notable person to die was singer Tony Bennet, 96: His peer Frank Sinatra called him the greatest popular singer in the world. His recordings – most of them made for Columbia Records, which signed him in 1950 – were characterized by ebullience, immense warmth, vocal clarity and emotional openness. A gifted and technically accomplished interpreter of the Great American Songbook, he may be best known for...

Cassie experienced a traumatic noontime event: a warm bath. One minute she had pats and scritches on the couch, the next minute her human herded her into the guest bathroom and hoisted her into the tub. Then she had utter confusion and her human rubbed her vigorously all over (which felt nice) while dumping pitchers of warm water on her (scary!). She survived, of course, and promptly got a 30-minute walk to shake it off. She smells so much nicer, and her coat no longer has the greasy feel it had taken...

I forgot at the time that my post yesterday afternoon was the 9,000th since The Daily Parker began in May 1998. I generally care more about the "modern era" since I began posting in a true blog format in November 2005. This is the 8,806th post since then. At the current rate, you should see the 10,000th post in early August 2025 (all-time) or at the end of December 2025 (modern era), depending on how you count.

I had one of those "why am I working inside today?" moments when I got my lunch a few minutes ago. The obvious answer—Cassie needs dog food—doesn't always work when it's 27°C and sunny. It did get me to re-evaluate my dinner plans, however. Cooking pasta just doesn't appeal when my favorite sushi place has an outdoor patio that allows dogs. Meanwhile, I'm adding a feature that might take the remainder of this sprint as it completely changes how we store and present 3rd-party calculation results to the...

It's Tuesday afternoon, and I think I'm caught up with everything in the way of me ploughing through some coding at work the remainder of the week. At some point, I might even read all of these through: January 6th Committee Special Counsel Jack Smith has informed the XPOTUS that he is the subject of a federal investigation, a clear indication that an indictment could soon follow. Abi Breland reports that far-right trolls haven't figured out how to cause misery on Meta's Threads app yet, but don't...

She's not quite middle-aged, but she does look like a confident, mature dog:

Just a few items for my reading list: The Supreme Court's Republican majority have invented a new doctrine that they claim gives them override any action by a Democratic administration or Congress. John Ganz thinks all Americans are insane, at least when it comes to conspiracy theories. Chicago's Deep Tunnel may have spared us from total disaster with last week's rains, but even it can't cope with more than about 65 mm of rain in an hour. Oregon's Rose Quarter extension of Interstate 5 will cost an...

On Friday I posted about Amtrak's $75 billion windfall from the Biden Infrastructure Bill, and I wondered whether the new Siemens Venture rolling stock would make it to Chicago. Well, I took the Wolverine to and from New Buffalo, Mich., over the weekend, and rode in them. My contact at Amtrak said the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan own them. Photos and more details tomorrow.

When I moved to my current house, I planned to hook up my ancient cassette player to a stereo system in my library. So I got my ancient cassettes out of storage and brought them to the new place. It took a couple of stages (ordering bookshelves, getting the bookshelves, waiting for them to fix the adjustable shelf in the center bookshelf) over a few months. In that last phase it looked like this: You're reading that right. I packed that box of cassettes on 3 January 2005, and put a sticker on it when I...