The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Joe's enormous package

President Biden just signed the largest relief bill in history:


Doug Mills/New York Times

President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package into law Thursday, his first legislative achievement since taking office less than two months ago, a measure to infuse billions into the U.S. economy and bolster funding for vaccines, testing and school reopenings.

The package, which was unanimously opposed by Republicans in Congress, will also provide millions of Americans with $1,400 stimulus checks that are set to go out by the end of the month. The White House is planning a victory lap tomark the achievement with the president, First Lady Jill Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris hitting the road next week.

The signing from the Oval Office comes just hours before Biden is set to mark one year of coronavirus pandemic shutdowns with his first prime-time address since taking office. The remarks are expected to both look back at the scale of loss over that time and peer ahead at a post-pandemic future.

The law provides immediate payments of $1,400 per person, including dependents, for individuals making less than $75,000 per year or families making less than $150,000; a $3,000 tax credit for every child under 18 ($3,600 under 6); subsidies for child-car costs; an expansion of the Affordable Care Act; and money for pensions, among many other provisions.

Remember when we thought Biden would be just, you know, OK? Or that the Democratic Party would once again cower in fear of the other guys yelling about bipartisanship and deficits?

Welcome to 2021.

Blue Island Beer Co., Blue Island

Welcome to stop #41 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Blue Island Beer Company, 13357 Old Western Ave., Blue Island
Train line: Rock Island, Blue Island-Vermont (also Metra Electric, Blue Island)
Time from Chicago: 20 minutes (Zone D)
Distance from station: 800 m

This entry might run a bit long, as Blue Island Beer Co.'s owner Alan Cromwell sat down with me for about an hour when I mentioned the Brews and Choos Project to him. And while we were talking, Jim Richert, president of the soon-to-open Banging Gavel Brews in Tinley Park, also sat down with me. I have two pages of notes, most of them actually legible despite this being my third stop of last Saturday and Cromwell's insistence that I try seven beers.

So before I get started, let me give a shout out to Metra for painting some of its modern locomotives in historical livery, like the one pushing the train that got me to Blue Island:

Back to the brewery.

Cromwell, whose family lived in Blue Island from the turn of the 20th century, opened Blue Island Brewing Co. in April 2015. With Enterprise Zone incentives and a good chunk of their own money, the partners got the brewery off the ground quickly. They're a founding member of the Dixie Highway Brewery Trail, sharing brews and marketing with seven other breweries.

And they make really good beer. I started with a simple flight of five:

From left to right, we've got the Lost Weekend rye barleywine (10.1%), the Dank Punk hazy IPA (7%), the Massive Political Corruption pre-prohibition amber (4.6%), the Hard Luck American IPA (6.8%), and finally the English Manor brown ale (5.3%). Unfortunately, over the course of an hour talking with Cromwell and Richert, plus the two additional samples Cromwell gave me (including his delicious imperial milk stout), my notes require some deciphering. Suffice to say I would drink any of them again, though I tend not to go for barley wines or sweet stouts. (That milk stout, though, would make a great dessert.)

I should also note that the Hard Luck IPA comes out of a low-carbon-dioxide pump at near room temperature, making it a superb and flavorful American interpretation of an English real ale.

When the weather warms up, I'll head back, bring a book, and chill outside. And have fewer beers.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Two, avoidable
Serves food? No (BYOF)
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Record temperature yesterday

Chicago got up to 21°C yesterday, tying the record for March 9th set in 1974. It's already 20°C right now, close to the record 22°C set in 1955.

In other news:

And now that I've finally gotten a .NET 5 application to deploy onto a Microsoft Azure Functions App, I will take a well-earned walk.

Ten years ago

This week in 2011 had a lot going on. Illinois governor Pat Quinn (D) signed legislation that abolished the death penalty in the state on March 9th, for starters. But the biggest story of 2011 happened just before midnight Chicago time on March 10th:

On March 11, 2011, Japan experienced the strongest earthquake in its recorded history. The earthquake struck below the North Pacific Ocean, 130 kilometers (81 miles) east of Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region, a northern part of the island of Honshu.

The Tohoku earthquake caused a tsunami. A tsunami—Japanese for “harbor wave”—is a series of powerful waves caused by the displacement of a large body of water. Most tsunamis, like the one that formed off Tohoku, are triggered by underwater tectonic activity, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The Tohoku tsunami produced waves up to 40 meters (132 feet) high,

More than 450,000 people became homeless as a result of the tsunami. More than 15,500 people died.

Of somewhat lesser importance, on this day in 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on The WB.

It does not seem like 10 (or 24) years ago.

Deaths in the news today

Three reports of deaths today, two of them institutional. First, the one with the most relevance to me personally, one of the people most responsible for my sense of humor, died yesterday at 91:

Norton Juster, the celebrated children’s author who has died at 91, stumbled into literature much as his most famous hero, Milo, stumbles into the marvelous world of wordplay and ad­ven­ture in the classic 1961 volume “The Phantom Tollbooth.” They were bored and entirely unsuspecting of the wonders that awaited them.

A budding architect with a self-confessed tendency to procrastinate, Mr. Juster was living in New York City and working — or not working — on a children’s book about cities. A Ford Foundation grant had given the project a degree of urgency. But it was not the book he wanted to write, and soon enough, he recalled years later, he was “waist-deep in stacks of 3-by-5 note cards, exhausted and dispirited.”

To pass the time, Mr. Juster began scribbling the story of Milo, a boy of about 9 or 10 years with no interest in the tedium of school or “learning to solve useless problems, or subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is or how to spell February,” and who was as bewildered by the grown-up world as grown-ups were by him.

Only slightly less relevant to me, writer Jelani Cobb joins the crowd of people observing the death of the Republican Party:

The most widely debated political question of the moment is: What is happening to the Republicans? One answer is that the Party’s predicament might fairly be called the revenge of “the kooks.” In just four years, the G.O.P., a powerful, hundred-and-sixty-seven-year-old institution, has become the party of Donald Trump. He began his 2016 campaign by issuing racist and misogynistic salvos, and during his Presidency he gave cover to white supremacists, reactionary militia groups, and QAnon followers. Trump’s seizure of the Party’s leadership seemed a stunning achievement at first, but with time it seems more reasonable to ponder how he could possibly have failed. There were many preëxisting conditions, and Trump took advantage of them. The combination of a base stoked by a sensationalist right-wing media and the emergence of kook-adjacent figures in the so-called Gingrich Revolution, of 1994, and the Tea Party, have redefined the Party’s temper and its ideological boundaries. It is worth remembering that the first candidate to defeat Trump in a Republican primary in 2016 was Ted Cruz, who, by 2020, had long set aside his reservations about Trump, and was implicated in spurring the mob that attacked the Capitol.

One of the most telling developments of the 2020 contest was rarely discussed: in August, the Republican National Convention convened without presenting a new Party platform. The Convention was centered almost solely on Trump; the events, all of which took place at the White House, validated an increasing suspicion that Trump himself was the Republican platform. Practically speaking, the refusal to articulate concrete positions spared the Party the embarrassment of watching the President contradict them. In 2016, religious conservatives succeeded in getting an anti-pornography plank into the platform, only to be confronted by news of Trump’s extramarital affair with the adult-film performer Stormy Daniels. Now there would be no distinction between the Republican Party and the mendacity, bigotry, belligerence, misogyny, and narcissism of its singular representative.

In addition, the G.O.P.’s steady drift toward the right, from conservative to reactionary politics; its dependence on older, white voters; its reliance on right-wing media; its support for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; and its increasing disdain for democratic institutions and norms all portend increasing division and a diminishing pool of voters.

Large things die slowly, though, and the GOP's rot and sickness will pollute our civil discourse for years to come.

Another large, old thing that may not die for a couple more centuries has also let out a gangrenous burp this past week, when Harry Windsor and his wife Meghan unloaded on "the Firm" they recently quit. Leave it to an Irish writer (in this case Patrick Freyne) to sound exactly the right note:

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

The most recent internecine struggle is between the royal family and a newly disentangled Prince Harry and his wife, the former actor Meghan Markle. Traditionally, us peasants would be nervously picking a side and retrieving our pikes from the thatch. Luckily, these days the pitched battles happen in television interviews.

Over the course of the interview Harry and Meghan, who are charming, clever and good at being celebrities, make the monarchy look like an archaic and endemically racist institution that has no place in the modern world. Well duh. And despite all the outrage you might read in the UK tabloids right now, they also did something else that renders everything else irrelevant: they officially launched themselves in the United States.

Harry and Meghan are ultimately going to win. Despite the tabloid frenzy, this was never the story of an ungrateful pauper being elevated by the monarchy. This was about the potential union of two great houses, the Windsors and Californian Celebrity. Only one of those things has a future, and it’s the one with the Netflix deal.

Well, OK, only one of those things has actually, permanently died. But I expect the other two will die before I do.

Why I hate the suburbs

As I mentioned in my post about Hailstorm Brewing that went out earlier today, you can have an excellent brewery with a TV-free taproom within 1500 meters of a Metra station and still qualify for the Brews and Choos project only on special dispensation. Because wow, getting from the Metra station to Hailstorm (and by extension, when I go later this spring, to Soundgrowler) might kill you.

Here's the path from the Hickory Creek Metra stop to Brothership Brewing:

It's short (just under a kilometer), along nearly-deserted exurban streets, and the streets have sidewalks for most of the way. Sure, you pass this:

But that's a typical landscape in northern Will County.

Now look at how you get to Hailstorm:

Why did I go through an ugly subdivision, several parking lots, and behind large industrial buildings instead of just walking down 80th Avenue? Because 80th Avenue is a six-lane arterial with no sidewalks and not a lot of stoplights. Cars drive down it at 90 km/h with nothing to slow them down except the stoplight at 183rd and the railroad tracks to the north.

And when I say "ugly subdivision," I mean a complete horror show of exurban McMansion architecture:

I really wanted to run over to some people I saw sitting in their garage and ask what series of life choices brought them to the decision to buy such an ugly house?

So, yes, I liked Hailstorm, and I hear good things about the tacos at Soundgrowler. But the entire point of the Brews and Choos Project is to drink beer safely. That means without driving to the breweries. But it also means not getting run over walking there. And the suburban/exurban landscape along the Cook-Will border (183rd St, on the map above) will kill your body if you walk along 80th Avenue or kill your soul if you walk through this development.

</rant>

Hailstorm Brewing, Tinley Park

Welcome to stop #40 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Hailstorm Brewing, 8060 W 186th St., Tinley Park
Train line: Rock Island, Tinley-80th
Time from Chicago: 38 minutes (Zone E)
Distance from station: 1.7 km

The tl;dr on Hailstorm: Great beer, difficult location. I'll start with the beer.

Since Hailstorm doesn't do flights, I only tried two of their 20-or-so selections, the Cumulus Hazy IPA (6.3%), and the Chasin' Waves West Coast IPA (7.5%).

The Cumulus had delightful Citra flavors, with grapefruit most prominent, and a good balance and finish. The Chasin' Waves also had terrific balance between the in-your-face hops and smooth malt. I'd drink either one of them again.

In a separate post I'll explain the problem, which has to do with its location. That said, when I come back to Tinley Park to visit Soundgrowler Brewing, which is just two blocks from Hailstorm, I'll come back here as well, because look:

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? None
Serves food? Yes
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Top of the inbox this morning

The CDC just released guidance on how vaccinated people should behave. It doesn't seem too surprising, but it also doesn't suggest we will all go back to the world of 2019 any time soon.

In other news:

And now, I have to wait for IT to unlock my work account, after fat-fingering my password once too often.

Brothership Brewing, Mokena

Welcome to stop #39 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Brothership Brewing, 18781 S 90th Ave, Mokena
Train line: Rock Island, Hickory Creek
Time from Chicago: 43 minutes (Zone F)
Distance from station: 1.0 km

Brian Willig and partners opened Brothership Brewing on 22 February 2020, which says a lot about their beer. It's that good.

I started with a standard flight, but Emily Willig (Brian's wife) gave me very small samples of their two special brews as well. From left to right: the There Goes Gravity New England IPA (6%) had a bright nose, lovely not-too-bitter hoppyness, and great flavor; the excellent Teleporter (7%) gave me caramel and chocolate notes with a long finish; the Solar Orbiter New England Double IPA (7.6%) had the fruit flavors I'd expect from the Citra hops but balanced those really well with just enough bitterness; and the Cosmic Surfer West Coast IPA (7.4%) had a little more malt than I expected, with bold hop flavors and a lingering finish. I'd drink any of them again, especially the Porter, even though Emily said Brian hadn't initially planned on making one.

She also let me have a couple sips of the Orbit One New England Triple IPA (9%), which had hops on the nose, hops in the (big!) flavor, and hops in the finish; and finally, the Space Debris Vanilla Stout (12%), about which my notes begin with: "oh, baby!" Vanilla, cream, even a maple syrup note, really rich and really sweet. I'd have this for dessert after a steak dinner, and I don't usually go for stouts.

If you live in the southwest suburbs, it's worth the trip. I'll be looking for their beers at my local Binny's.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? 2, avoidable
Serves food? No; BYOF
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

And that's the way it is

It was 40 years ago today that Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time:

Over the previous 19 years, Cronkite had established himself not only as the nation's leading newsman but as "the most trusted man in America," a steady presence during two decades of social and political upheaval.

Cronkite had reported from the European front in World War II and anchored CBS' coverage of the 1952 and 1956 elections, as well as the 1960 Olympics. He took over as the network's premier news anchor in April of 1962, just in time to cover the most dramatic events of the 1960s. The Cuban Missile Crisis came six months into his tenure, and a year later Cronkite would break the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. The footage of Cronkite removing his glasses and composing himself as he read the official AP report of Kennedy's death, which he did 38 minutes after the president was pronounced dead in Dallas, is one of the most enduring images of one of the most traumatic days in American history. Cronkite would cover the other assassinations that rocked the country over the coming years, including those of Martin Luther King, Jr.Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon. He also reported on some of the most uplifting moments of the era, most famously the Moon Landing in 1969.

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Amy Grant's album Heart in Motion, which matters a lot less in the scheme of things but makes me feel a lot older.