Events

The OAFPOTUS has nominated TV personality and shameless quack Dr Oz to head up Medicare, which is of a piece with the rest of his cabinet nominations so far. I think the OAFPOTUS has some other grievance than against the government, law enforcement, international norms, rational thought, and everything else he's railed against since 2015. Clearly, the OAFPOTUS wants to drive The Onion out of business.

We're having a bit of odd weather in Chicago today. The temperature rose overnight, fell after sunrise, and has gone back up almost to where it was right before sunrise. The dewpoint, however, has stayed the same. That, plus the breezy winds out of the southwest, has pushed the clouds out over the lake: This won't last. A bomb cyclone over the Pacific Northwest will push some nasty "wintry mix" towards us by Thursday. Our sunny 15°C weather will give way to this: Wednesday NightA chance of rain before...

We're having gray, rainy weather for our few hours of daylight today. We haven't yet had a freeze this fall, and none is forecast before winter officially begins in two weeks, so all the moisture in the air just hangs around and makes more fog and rain. And yet, tomorrow we might get a high of 15°C—about 8°C above normal—before flurries and "wintry mix" Wednesday night. Yeah, it's the end of November in Chicago. Otherwise, I'm still mulling our electoral loss from two weeks ago, even as it looks less...

Thomas E Kurtz, co-creator of the BASIC programming language, died November 12th at 96: Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would come to depend on computers and benefit from understanding how to use them. “We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social sciences and humanities students — should learn how to use the computer,” Dr. Kurtz said in an...

Winnemac Park, 3:39 pm: Spiteful Brewing Tap Room, 7:08 pm:

Yesterday I posted a short video from Robert Wright reminding everyone that the OAFPOTUS and his hangers-on thrive on negative energy. The moral: don't waste your own energy on his bullshit. For example, I haven't agonized at all about his kakistocratic nominations for top cabinet posts, for the simple reason that I think they're distractions from the Republican Party's principal goals of increasing the wealth of billionaires and stealing as much as they can rake in from the American People. I mean, the...

I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these: Michelle Goldberg sticks her tongue firmly in her cheek, declaring Matt Gaetz (R-FL) "the perfect man for the job" of running the Justice Dept. Annie Lowry explains the economics behind keeping minimum wages so low no one can possibly live on them. The Sun-Times published two stories today about how ComEd, the Illinois power...

The Brews & Choos Project had a net shift of zero in the last two weeks. I am pretty bummed about the loss, but intrigued by the gain. The loss: Long-time Evanston microbrewery Temperance closed up shop on October 27th. I am sad: Evanston didn’t have a brewery before Temperance Beer Co. arrived at the end of 2013. The suburb’s first brewery was a historic moment, and the taproom quickly became one of the city’s finest with hits like Might Meets Right and Gatecrasher IPA. Temperance represented the...

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...