Events

The Irish Times reported this morning that the controversial singer and author of a hunk of my university-days soundtrack died unexpectedly yesterday: In a statement, the singer’s family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.” Ms O’Connor is survived by her three children. Her son, Shane, died last year aged 17. Ms O’Connor converted to Islam in 2018 and changed her...

Back in 1990, journalist James Burke produced a documentary for PBS called "After the Warming," which looked back from an imagined 2050 to explain how and why palm trees came to grow in Boston. The framing device he used was to set the documentary as an explainer for an important report on the Atlantic thermohaline circulation study due to be released during the broadcast. I won't spoil it for you except to say as pessimistic as Burke was in 1990, he may have been, in fact, overly optimistic: The...

This Twitter is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. John Scalzi has my favorite take so far: Twitter was its own specific thing, whereas as “X” is meant to be a number of different things, of which microblogging will be only one part, and, one suspects, the part Musk will care the least about. He’s really about finding ways to have people give him their money, either through subscriptions or taking a cut of transactions. It’s a...

I'm having a few people over for a BBQ this evening, several of them under 10 years old, and several of them dogs. I've got about 45 minutes before I have to start cutting vegetables. Tomorrow will be a quiet day, so I'll just queue these stories up for then: Not a group to pass up risible hypocrisy, Alabama Republicans have defied the US Supreme Court's order that they create a second majority-Black district in the state, preferring just to shuffle the state's African Americans into a new minority...

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...