Events

Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media: The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems. The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation...

I had a completely different post in my head this afternoon, but the OAFPOTUS just nominated Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to run the Justice Department and I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes. I expect he'll nominate high-school dropout Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to run the Education Department next. These kinds of moves explain why I haven't worried so much about fascism as a government that couldn't find sand at a beach. As the OAFPOTUS has no competence himself, it follows that he would neither recognize...

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write. Meanwhile: The OAFPOTUS has picked South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R) as his Homeland Security secretary and Mike Huckabee to represent the US in Israel, which have me straining not to tell the left wing of my party...

The domain name wx-now.com went live on 11 November 1999, 25 years ago today. The earliest known Wayback Machine capture of the old Active Server Pages site was in September 2000; this screen shot from January 2001 looks a bit closer to what it looked like when it went live: In 2008, Katie Zoellner gave it a facelift that lasted pretty much until March 2022, when I completely overhauled the app, writing an entirely new UI and refactoring about 50% of the internal code. I still have all the old source...

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Off the Rails Brewing, 111 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale, Calif.Train line: Caltrain, Sunnyvale Time from SF Terminal: 62 minutesTime from Chicago: about 4½ hours by airDistance from station: 300 m Sunnyvale, Calif., has blocked off the north end of Murphy Ave. to traffic, turning the entire block into a pedestrian zone lined with restaurants and a good-enough-for-the-suburbs brewery where you can have good-enough beers. Despite the amazing...

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Southern Pacific Brewing, 620 Treat Ave., San FranciscoTrain line: BART, 16th St/MissionTime from Embarcadero: 7 minutesTime from Chicago: about 4½ hours by airDistance from station: 1 km This small brewery with a huge taproom is hidden in an industrial section of the Mission District. It's a quick walk from the BART through the Pilsen of San Francisco down a side street and an alley. Talking with some of the people there, it gets busy...

This morning, Winnemac Park, Chicago: I'm still getting through everything I ignored for the past three days. Stay tuned for a couple of Brews & Choos reviews from San Francisco, and on Tuesday, some thoughts on the election.

Hotel to terminal, 7 minutes (Lyft); through security, 10 minutes. Boarding in an hour. Now I just need the coffee to work its magic... I'm also tickled that the ex-POTUS will now be called the Once And Future POTUS. At least for a couple of months. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world: Andrew Sullivan doesn't like the outcome of the election any more than I do, but he nonetheless praises "the energizing clarity of democracy." Robert Wright lays out of plan for "fighting [the OAFPOTUS] mindfully." Molly...

I'm visiting family in the Bay Area today, staying in California for about 38 hours. I leave tomorrow morning early, so I'm back at the charming Dylan Hotel in Millbrae, right by the BART and CalTrain. If you held a gun to my head (or put $10 million in my bank account) and forced me to move to Silicon Valley, I might choose here. It's 40 minutes to my family in San Jose and 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco, for starters. And the Brews & Choos Project works just as well around the Bay as it does in...

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens suggests that a holier-than-thou attitude from Democrats contributed to Tuesday's electoral disaster: The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback. [Democrats'] mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if...