Events

Happy fin de Septembre, the last day of the 3rd quarter and possibly the last really summer-like weekend of 2023. At the moment it's a perfectly sunny 21.4°C at Inner Drive WHQ with a perfect forecast of 24°C. The plan today: walk 4 km to a friend's house because her kids want to see Cassie, then walk 3 km to the Horner Park DFA, then another 5 km to Spiteful Brewing's Oktoberfest, then walk the last kilometer home and plotz. I am confident both Cassie and I will succeed in all aspects of this plan....

Somehow, it's already the end of September. I realize this happens with some predictability right around this time of year, but it still seems odd to me. Of course, most of the world seems odd these days: As we careen into the 4th Republican-caused government shutdown in the last 30 years, we might want to reflect on the fact that only 68,000 people elected the 8 clowns most responsible for this year's bullshit. New York Times editorial board member Alex Kingsbury wants people to keep top of mind the...

The senior US Senator from California, a Democratic stalwart, died overnight, according to her family: In recent years, Ms. Feinstein, 90, had suffered from frail health and memory issues that made it difficult for her to function alone and prompted calls for her to step down, which she consistently rejected. Her staff was being informed at 9 a.m. A spokesman for Ms. Feinstein’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CNN had her obituary ready to go: Feinstein broke a series of...

The English actor does not make widgets or suffer fools: At some point a few years back, an unholy union of like-minded tech bros, studio suits, media water-carriers and social media personalities settled on their own “widget,” a catchall phrase that would both encompass and minimize the various forms of entertainment they touch: “content.” And when news broke on Sunday night that the monthslong Writers Guild of America strike was coming to an end, Variety, the industry bible, gave this term its most...

It's only Wednesday? Sheesh... The Writers Guild of America got nearly everything they wanted from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (i.e., the Astroturf organization set up by the big studios and streamers to negotiate with the Guilds), especially for young writers and for hit shows, but consumers should expect more bundling and higher monthly fees for shows in the future. Josh Marshall suspects that the two competing storylines about the XPOTUS (that he's about to return to...

New York Supreme Court (i.e., trial court) judge Arthur Engoron ruled yesterday that the XPOTUS's eponymous family business committed fraud on such a scale that the company is no longer allowed to do business in New York State: The surprising decision...is a major victory for Attorney General Letitia James in her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, effectively deciding that no trial was needed to determine that he had fraudulently secured favorable terms on loans and insurance deals. Ms. James has argued that...

Other than getting a little rained on this morning, I've had a pretty good day. But that didn't leave a lot of time to catch up on any of these before I started a deployment just now: Heather Cox Richardson examines US history through the lens of a never-ending conflict between "two Americas, one based in religious zeal, mythology, and inequality; and one grounded in rule of the people and the pursuit of equality." Josh Marshall ponders the difficulty of covering the XPOTUS's increasingly ghastly...

I was a little busy over the summer, so it took me a couple of months to finish adding Inner Drive Technology World HQ's Netatmo weather station to Weather Now. (Implicitly, the app can now read any Netatmo data to which the owner of the station has granted us access.) Netatmo weather stations upload data every 10 minutes, so that's how often Weather Now downloads it. I had to change a number of assumptions throughout the application, as it has only used NOAA aviation weather since its origins in 1997....

The Writers Guild of America's negotiating committee announced the tentative deal last night: We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional – with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership. What remains now is for our staff to make sure everything we have agreed to is codified in final contract language. And though we are eager to share the details of what has been achieved with you, we cannot do that until the last “i” is dotted. To do so would...

Welcome to stop #87 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Nick & Ivy Brewing, 1026 S. State St., LockportTrain line: Heritage Corridor, LockportTime from Chicago: 47 minutesDistance from station: 400 m Nik & Ivy is directly across the stroad from Lock & Mule, which could not have been more convenient on Saturday. In fact, I took the above photo from just outside Lock & Mule while I contemplated how I was going to frogger over there after brunch. I liked the place, and traffic on Rte 176 was light...