Events

The Social Security Administration released its annual report this week, and right on cue prominent Republicans started shaking their heads slowly and lying about needing to cut benefits to "save" it.

Yesterday's gentle rainfall included reported gusts over 120 km/h in some places and extensive damage. In my own neighborhood, Montrose Avenue remains closed until the city can free up a crew to remove this huge locust tree:

This thing just tore through Chicago:

With the unmatched legal minds populating the Republican Party, and this administration in particular, the Broadview Six grand jury transcripts are still astounding. In any other administration, US Attorney Andrew Boutros would have resigned already. Not in this kakistocracy, though. How many US Attorneys have had state bar disciplinary proceedings against them while serving? We might get another one.

The most powerful person in the world fled from an interview last week clutching his tiny little pearls because a reporter asked him for evidence to support his bullshit. Perhaps there was a certain je ne sais quoi about the interviewer that rattled his insecurities? Some theories:

Ah, Mondays. It's always fun doing all the things that you didn't do over the weekend because of the things you did over the weekend. Today involved rewriting some documents and figuring out when to walk Cassie so we didn't get rained on. (Both walks so far were rain-free, but it's not clear if we can three-peat.)

As I had planned, I made three visits to Ribfest this weekend, and as I had hoped, the weather cooperated. I don't have a full After Rib Report yet, but I will say that Hell's BBQ from Oswego had by far the meatiest bones of the 7 samplers I tried:

We definitely have summer weather today, with temperatures passing 31°C and dewpoints already up to 24°C by me and 21°C at O'Hare. That won't stop Cassie and me from going to Ribfest for the second time in about half an hour.

I had a maddening experience last week in this app's dev/test environment: Azure Table Storage stopped working. But it only stopped for table storage, and only in one storage account. I tried everything I could think of to reach it, but it stubbornly refused all read and write requests, even though it allowed me to list the tables. So I could see the tables but not what was in them. This seemed a lot like an authorization problem both to Google's and Anthropic's AIs, and I could find nothing by...