The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

The news doesn't pause

Speaking of loathsome, misogynist creeps, former Bishop of Rome Joseph Ratzinger died this morning, as groundbreaking journalist Barbara Walters did yesterday.

In other news showing that 2022 refuses to go quietly:

And just a couple of blocks from me, Uncharted Books will reopen next week after the state closed it down for failing to file a required sales-tax form. For months. They might want to fire their accountants for this, as the state requires every business that has taxable sales to file the "quarterly sales tax report" every 3 months. I hope their soon-to-be-former accountants also filed their income taxes...

Stupid is as stupid does

One of the most loathsome, talentless personalities on the Internet self-pwnd yesterday after going 0-for-2 against 19-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, and it was beautiful. Actor George Takei sums it up:

Oh my, you have that right, George. MSNBC has the details on the accusations against Tate:

On Thursday, [Romanian] prosecutors said that they found evidence that six women had been sexually exploited “using physical violence and mental constraint” by members of the group.

The women had been forced into making pornographic content for distribution on social media for financial gain to the group, they said.

And the New York Post enlightens us about how Tate got caught:

Tate and his brother Tristan were detained on kidnapping and rape charges Thursday after the controversial social media star tweeted a video response to one of Thunberg’s tweets.

In it, Tate asks someone off-camera to bring him pizza and “make sure that these boxes are not recycled” as he’s handed two pies from Jerry’s Pizza — a local chain in Romania.

The video was all authorities needed to pinpoint the former kickboxer’s location and make the arrest.

The back-and-forth between Tate and Grunberg just adds to the Schadenfreude one feels at his arrest. Tate on Wednesday:

Thunberg replied:

And then yesterday evening, after Tate's arrest:

Chef's kiss, Ms Thunberg.

Oh, by the way, you can't recycle pizza boxes—at least not in Chicago, unless you do it very carefully. The oils from the pizza ruin the cardboard.

A glimmer of hope on a muddy Thursday

I broke away from my last day of work in 2022 around 2:15 to take Cassie on a 3½-kilometer walk. It's 14°C (!!!) right now so almost every snowflake has melted into a thin layer of mud over the entire city. No problems, so far; I keep old towels by the front door and Cassie expects me to wipe her paws when we come in.

Today I learned that I need to close the gate at the top of my stairs whenever we go outside on a day like this. I learned this while chasing Cassie up the stairs and through the living room while shouting "NO!", which, of course, made her run faster to her happy place; i.e., the living room sofa. Fortunately I keep the sofa covered in a $7 Target blanket because of her. Unfortunately, I had just washed it.

Cassie and I have forgiven each other but not before I carried her downstairs and put her in the bathtub. The floors only took about 15 minutes to clean up and the blanket went back into the washing machine whence it came this morning.

Dogs.

I did catch this in Mother Jones, though, and it took the edge off wiping muddy pawprints from several floors and a staircase. It seems that finally, finally!, more cities understand that parking minimums waste land, gas, and money:

California will become the first state to enact a ban on parking minimums [in January], halting their use in areas with public transport in a move that Gov. Gavin Newsom called a “win-win” for reducing planet-heating emissions from cars, as well as helping alleviate the lack of affordable housing in a state that has lagged in building new dwellings.

Several cities across the country are now rushing doing the same, with Anchorage, Alaska, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Nashville, Tennessee, all recently loosening or scrapping requirements for developers to build new parking lots. “These parking minimums have helped kill cities,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School who accused political leaders of making downtowns “look like bombs hit them” by filling them with parking lots.

Climate campaigners and public transport advocates have seized upon the previously esoteric issue of parking minimums, posting aerial pictures on social media demonstrating the vast swathes of prime urban land given over to parking lots and pushing city councils to foster denser communities with more opportunities to walk, cycle or catch buses and trains rather than simply drive.

Cities such as Buffalo, New York, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, scaled back parking minimums a few years ago and have reported a surge in activity to transform previously derelict buildings into shops, apartments and restaurant. Developers previously saw as such work as unviable due to the requirement to build plots of car parking, in many cases several times larger than the building itself.

Just look at this aerial view of downtown Kansas City, Mo., after MODOT destroyed it with one road. Or these photos of empty mall parking lots on Black Friday, the day traffic engineers use to set parking minimums.

I hope that I live long enough to see North America correct the planning mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s, and get at least to the point Europe achieved ten years ago.

Stupid time zone tricks

This moment in the January 6th committee proceedings was total Daily Parker bait (h/t George Conway). It came as the committee interviewed Max Miller, former senior adviser to the XPOTUS and as of next Tuesday the US Representative for Ohio's 7th district. He wanted to establish that no one called his White House office for hours after the insurrection began, pointing to the phone logs as evidence.

I'll let the J6 lawyer explain it:

MILLER (p 120 line 15): I want you to pull up the time from when I left the White House, there's a period of time, there was about 4 or 5 hours, of no phone calls.

J6 LAWYER: And I think what you're referring to is, if we look here...you have a call from Mr. Caporale at 10:40 am.

A: Uh huh.

Q: And the next call that's reflected on your records is 6:40 p.m. on January 6th, so, as you said.

A: So I wanted you to to bring that up is to show you, look, no one called me, right, when things were going wrong....

Q (p 121 line 8): No, I appreciate your perspective, and actually my colleague just corrected me. I need to point something out about how the phone records is—

A: —it's 5 minutes, isn't it?

Q: No, no, no, no. So what that is, is a sign of Greenwich Mean Time. I don't know if in the military you know what that is. So each line reflects whether the time is either Greenwich Mean Time or off of Greenwich Mean Time by some amount. And, at that time of year, the East Coast is 5 hours off Greenwich Mean Time. So, when you see the 6:40 calls on January 6th, the one after Mr. Caporale, you have to take 5 hours off. So that would be...1:40 pm.

A: ...Time is not important...

Congratulations to the anonymous committee lawyer understanding that "18:40Z" is actually 13:40 -0500. Although, now that you mention it, maybe the phone log actually said "18:40 -0500" which would be the time Miller said it was? Too bad we can't see the exhibit.

Last full day of work, 2022

I have to work tomorrow, but come on, it's the Thursday before a mandatory 4-day weekend, so Cassie might just get extra walks. So it turns out I've already mostly caught up on my reading for the day. Still, a trio of car-related articles got my attention.

First, Jersey City, N.J., the next town over from where I lived right before I started this blog, had zero traffic fatalities so far this year:

That Vision Zero milestone comes with a caveat — it only reflects the roads that the city maintains. Several major corridors that cut through its downtown belong to Hudson County or the state, and have continued to rack up crash victims. Still, Jersey City is about to end its safest year on record, bucking a deadly national trend. And local leaders are intent on pushing forward with more improvements that will eventually encompass more of the city and region.

Jersey City is the rare municipality that has embraced the spirit of tactical urbanism — a practice where quick DIY fixes are deployed to nudge officials to make more permanent changes. That approach is what attracted Street Plans, a design and planning firm that helped the city write its ambitious bike master plan, which followed a similar approach.

Meanwhile, 5,000 kilometers to the northeast, a bridge in Stonea, England, puts the 11-foot-8 bridge in Durham, N.C., to shame:

Located in Stonea, about 30 miles from Cambridge, the bridge was struck 33 times in one recent 12-month span by drivers misjudging its height. That makes it the most bashed rail bridge in Britain, according to official statistics, and many local residents say those numbers actually understate the frequency of the crashes.

Among the vehicles that have struck the bridge are an army truck that became wedged underneath; a delivery van that crumpled, spilling eggs and potatoes across the roadway; a horse trailer; agricultural machinery; numerous campers; and many cars that drove under the bridge with bicycles strapped to the roofs, only to emerge on the other side without them.

Shattered glass, pieces of plastic and other debris line the roadside. A gray and yellow hazard sign along the bridge’s low ceiling — only 6 feet 6 inches from the ground — is battered and torn, and the metal behind it is buckled and twisted.

Finally, a 19-year-old dipshit in Santa Cruz, Calif., had the clever idea of issuing fake parking tickets with a "convenient" QR code for easy payment. The SCPD arrested him Thursday.

Sand in the gears

Southwest Airlines, generally known for operational excellence, had a bad weekend from which they still have not recovered:

Tens of thousands of flights have been canceled across the country due to the winter storm and other issues, spoiling holiday plans for many — and Midway has been hit particularly hard by the Christmas chaos. As of Tuesday morning, at least 245 flights there had been canceled in the past 24 hours, according to the Department of Aviation.

Many cancellations are coming from budget staple Southwest Airlines, which is flying “roughly one-third of our schedule for the next several days,” a spokesperson said. Other reports say the airline is telling many travelers the earliest they can be rebooked is Dec. 31.

The U.S. Department of Transportation now says it will “examine” Southwest’s “unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays.”

What in the name of Daedalus happened? Details emerge:

In a statement on its website, Southwest called its own performance "unacceptable."

It said that while it was fully staffed for the holiday travel period, the brutal weather forced daily changes to its flight schedule "at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity."

Unlike many other U.S. air carriers, Southwest operates on what is known as a point-to-point flight route system, meaning a plane will fly consecutive routes, picking up different crews along the way.

In normal times, this can allow Southwest to operate more flights over a given 24-hour period than other carriers, said Scott Meyerowitz, executive editor of The Points Guy travel site.

But if an airport goes offline because of weather, and a flight cannot reach its destination, the point-to-point system has a cascading cancellation effect, he said.

The weather included a deadly snowstorm in Western New York that so far has left more than 30 people dead.

The worst of it is over

The temperature here at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters peaked at -5°C, the warmest we've had since 2:30pm on Thursday. Next Thursday it'll hit 10°C, which is 32°C (57°F) warmer than Saturday's overnight low. Welcome to Chicago in the era of rapid climate change.

I hope we don't get any more really horrific cold snaps this winter, but I expect we will. For now, though, I'm going to take Cassie on the longest walk she's had in almost a week.

(Semi?-)Annual sunrise chart

I forgot to do this in July, so the previous Chicago sunrise chart stayed up all year. As always, you can get sunrise times for your own location at https://www.wx-now.com/SunriseChart.

Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight
2023
3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 29th 07:19 16:32 9:13
27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:09 17:00 9:51
5 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:11 10:11
20 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:40 17:30 10:50
27 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:30 17:39 11:09
11 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr 16th
Earliest sunset until Oct 27th
06:10 17:53 11:43
12 Mar Daylight saving time begins
Latest sunrise until Oct 20th
Earliest sunset until Sep 19th
07:08 18:54 11:45
17 Mar 7am sunrise, 7pm sunset
12-hour day
07:00 19:00 12:00
20 Mar Equinox 16:24 CDT 06:55 19:03 12:08
4 Apr 6:30am sunrise (again) 06:29 19:20 12:51
13 Apr 7:30pm sunset 06:14 19:30 13:15
22 Apr 6am sunrise 06:00 19:40 13:39
10 May 8pm sunset 05:36 20:00 14:23
16 May 5:30am sunrise 05:30 20:06 14:35
14 Jun Earliest sunrise of the year 05:15 20:28 15:13
20 Jun 8:30pm sunset 05:16 20:30 15:14
21 Jun Solstice 09:58 CDT 05:16 20:30 15:14
27 Jun Latest sunset of the year 05:18 20:31 15:13
4 Jul 8:30pm sunset 05:21 20:30 15:09
16 Jul 5:30am sunrise 05:30 20:25 14:54
9 Aug 8pm sunset 05:53 20:00 14:07
16 Aug 6am sunrise 06:00 19:50 13:50
29 Aug 7:30pm sunset 06:13 19:30 13:16
14 Sep 6:30am sunrise 06:30 19:03 12:32
16 Sep 7pm sunset 06:32 18:59 12:27
23 Sep Equinox, 01:50 CDT 06:39 18:47 12:07
26 Sep 12-hour day 06:43 18:42 11:59
3 Oct 6:30pm sunset 06:50 18:30 11:39
12 Oct 7am sunrise 07:00 18:15 11:14
22 Oct 6pm sunset 07:11 19:59 10:47
4 Nov Latest sunrise until 6 Nov 2027
Latest sunset until March 1st
07:27 17:42 10:14
5 Nov Standard time returns
Earliest sunrise until Feb 28th
Latest sunset until Jan 12th
06:28 16:40 10:12
16 Nov 4:30pm sunset 06:42 16:30 9:47
2 Dec 7am sunrise 07:00 16:21 9:20
8 Dec Earliest sunset of the year 07:06 16:20 9:13
21 Dec Solstice, 03:21 CST 07:16 16:23 9:07
31 Dec 4:30pm sunset 07:19 16:30 9:10

(Permalink)

Actually, I did remember what this feels like

The Arctic air mass has arrived:

We didn't actually get that much snow, though:

On her evening walk last night, Cassie wanted to run around in the snow in circles for a bit, so I let her. But even with her double coat, after 4 minutes she was shivering, so we had to go in. She will not enjoy today at all.

One other thing of note. I got myself one of the coolest and geekiest toys I could ever have imagined:

That shows the location of every CTA train running right now. I might have to get one for London, too. And in a couple of days, it might become a practical toy, when the weather gets warm enough to go outside and ride the CTA again.

Outside the vortex

The world continues to turn outside the Chicago icebox:

Finally, dog biologist (?) Alexandra Horowitz explains how dogs tell time with their noses.