Events

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Fox Tale Fermentation Project, 120 E. Santa Clara St., San Jose, Calif.Train line: Caltrain, San Jose DiridonTime from Chicago: about 4½ hours by airDistance from station: 1.5 km I hadn't intended to visit Fox Tale, because a different brewery was closer to my hotel. But that brewery closed abruptly in November, though no one had updated its Google page. I'm glad I went to Fox Tale instead. Owners Felipe Bravo and Wendy Neff don't just...

The weekend was exceedingly busy, so I haven't had time to post the two Brews & Choos reviews from California as promised. I hope to get to that today. Stay tuned.

I don't like getting up before dawn, even if it's 8am as far as my body cares. Except that getting up at 6am Pacific allowed me to get to SFO and through security in less than an hour. That's including showering, checking out of the hotel, catching the BART, and jumping on the airport tram. Cute hotel, too; I'll stay there again if I ever have to fly out of SFO at the ass crack of dawn. Still an hour to boarding, though. I miss the days when I could get to an airport 45 minutes before departure without...

I just got back from a 35-minute walk around downtown San Jose, Calif., including a 1-km stretch of the Guadalupe River trail. My Garmin track gives you hints about how it went, particularly the 300 meters or so along the river under multiple overpasses including the California 87 freeway. And in fairness, it's sunny and 13°C, which doesn't suck for the first day of winter. That said, this is the place where I joined the trail: And this is the 87 underpass: Not shown above, the homeless man launching...

The universe, following up on the death of one controversial right-wing figure in American politics, continued tidying up with the death of former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor (I/r), the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court: Very little could happen without Justice O’Connor’s support when it came to the polarizing issues on the court’s docket, and the law regarding affirmative action, abortion, voting rights, religion, federalism, sex discrimination and other hot-button subjects was...

I got about a full hour in the lounge on my way to the Bay Area with no stress or bother on the way in. After dropping Cassie off at my friends' house near Wrigley Field, I got to economy parking at O'Hare in less than 40 minutes. Of course getting from the economy lot to the other side of security took another 30 minutes, but as things go, that's pretty speedy. I got a light lunch and some iced tea. My only complaint is the salesy guy in my area of the lounge who has not stopped talking since well...

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died. Of course every news outlet has an obituary, but Spencer Ackerman's in Rolling Stone pretty much nails it—"it" being a nail in Kissinger's coffin: Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. McVeigh, who in...

A while ago, I posted two constitutional amendments I'd like to see, to set term limits for the Supreme Court and for Congress. I also proposed an amendment to make the Justice Department independent of the other three branches of government. Monica Lewinsky proposes six new amendments, including getting rid of the Electoral College and—well, an old amendment: The most fundamental underpinning of a democracy is the fact that those who govern are chosen through free and fair elections. Especially heads...

Tomorrow I have a quick trip to the Bay Area to see family. I expect I will not only continue posting normally, but I will also research at least two Brews & Choos Special Stops while there. Exciting stuff. And because we live in exciting times: The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has charged an Indian national with a murder-for-hire scheme in which our "friend" the Government of India put out a hit on a Sikh activist living in our country. The US Dept of Defense has released its...

I guess not all of the stories I read at lunchtime depressed me, but...well, you decide: Writing in the Atlantic, Rogé Karma weaves together the threads of white backlash to civil rights laws, the Democratic Party's cultural elitism, and a series of global crises, to explain why the US uniquely among its peer nations has made such a hash of the post-1970s economy. Georgetown public policy professor George P. Moynihan, who studies government bureaucracies, lays out how the XPOTUS intends to destroy the...