Events

Crain's Chicago Business reported this morning on the precipitous decline in performing-arts audiences (sub.req.) since March 2020: Chicago arts and cultural organizations emerged from COVID-19 lockdowns, virtual performances and fully masked audiences to slow-to-return patrons, reduced ticket sales and scaled-backed productions. A decline in subscription rates, shockingly higher costs, and donations that haven't kept pace with inflation have thrown some arts organizations off balance and spiraled...

Welcome to stop #90 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Solemn Oath Brewery, 2919 W. Armitage Ave., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Blue Line, CaliforniaTime from Chicago: 14 minutesDistance from station: 700 m When I visited Bungalow by Middle Brow last winter, I had intended to visit Solemn Oath as well, but my friend and I had a longer catch-up over food than we intended. After visiting Off Color on Saturday, I decided to correct the oversight, so I hopped on an electric Divvy (pictured above, lower...

Welcome to stop #89 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Off Color Brewing, 1460 N. Kingsbury St., ChicagoTrain line: CTA Red Line, North/ClybournTime from Chicago: 10 minutesDistance from station: 600 m I've actually wanted to stop by The Mousetrap (as Off Color calls their Kingsbury brewery and taproom) for a long time. It opened directly across the street from the Whole Foods Market that Parker and I used to walk to back when we used to walk there. I should have visited years ago instead of...

Butters goes home tomorrow. If she understood the concept of "future," she might look forward to seeing her family again. This morning, however, she did not like getting snowed upon, will not like getting snowed upon after lunch, and will quite happily bogart Cassie's blanket until then, thank you very much: Yesterday I stopped by two breweries for the Brews & Choos Project; reviews coming later today and early tomorrow.

Yesterday's full day with our houseguest went fine. As one might predict, the dogs have discovered each other's toys, and have stolen them. Cassie started it: Butters definitely has an "oh, yeah?" look on her face while guarding Cassie's Kong: She's settled right in, though. They both snuggled with me while I caught up on Loki and digested leftovers last night:

Nothing major in Wx-Now 5.0.8730: annual .NET version update (to .NET 8), minor bug fixes, and some internal changes to how the app logs information from the AspNetCore subsystem. It seems to be a little faster now, probably because it's ignoring 99% of the log messages that it used to write to .NET tables.

Some friends have gone out of town, and I'm traveling in a week, so we arranged a dog swap. This is one of Cassie's friends, Butters Poochface: Butters is quite a solid beagle. Cassie met Butters shortly after I adopted her, and they go to school together, so Butters knows my house and Cassie pretty well. She still goggled for a good five minutes when she saw my back patio this morning: Between Cassie's energy and Butters' stubbornness, walking the two has a few challenges. But they get along just fine....

Enjoy the holiday.

In a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council 29 years ago today, then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned of the coming inequality: We knew the world was changing, and we knew how. But the band played on.

Anyone who has read The Daily Parker knows I desperately hope the US and Canada get over their suburban growth pattern psychopathy sometime before I die. Any actuarial table you consult will suggest the declining likelihood of that happening. Still, a guy can dream. (Or move to Continental Europe, I suppose.) Thus my interest in these two stories today. First, from the New York Times, a report about the repeated failures of self-driving cars to operate safely in urban environments: In San Francisco...