The Daily Parker

Both the temperature and dewpoint have dropped, from a high of 27°C/23°C just past midnight yesterday to 22°C/19°C just now. The dewpoint should continue dropping for the next day even as the temperature rises tomorrow afternoon, so we're looking forward to a really lovely weekend and sleeping with the windows open for the first time in almost two weeks.

Now the downside. The same weather system that brought cool and dry north winds also brought yellow and gross Canadian wildfire smoke, giving Chicago the worst air quality (AQI 197 right now) in the country:

Smoke from Canadian wildfires has rolled into the Chicago area, and AccuWeather has rated Chicago’s air quality as the worst in the world on Thursday as a result, according to a news release.

The city put out an air quality alert, noting the air quality “is at an unhealthy level.”

The city’s air quality could “vary by day over the weekend,” according to a health department news release.

I can attest that the air has an unpleasant flavor right now.

I've also been slammed at work from turning on my laptop until a few minutes ago, so I'm finally going to take Cassie on her "lunchtime" walk.

One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded struck off the east coast of Russia last night, registering magnitude 8.8 according to the United States Geological Survey. So far there have been fewer casualty reports than one might expect, owing to the sparse population in the area. Governments around the Pacific basin issued tsunami warnings almost immediately, though they have since downgraded them.

In other stories:

• Jeff Maurer doesn't think the Epstein scandal will end the OAFPOTUS's regime, suggesting that "Trump is being so defensive that it’s tempting to think that there’s something incredibly damning in the files, but I have a simpler, highly plausible explanation: Trump is just a huge fucking idiot."
• Paul Krugman agrees on that last point, explaining in greater detail how the EU just played the OAFPOTUS like a three-dollar kazoo.
• Though I rarely agree with George Will, today in the Post he echoes some of my own annoyances at the laziness of too many writers. Reminder: there are no degrees of "unique."
• Writer and actor Patton Oswalt has a hilarious take on pretty songs that creep him out.

I'll close with a photo that explains why so few people died in such a large earthquake. This is what Kamchatka looks like (but it's actually a bit north of there):

If you've ever played Snakes & Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US) with a small child, or really any game with a small child, you have probably cheated. Of course you have; don't deny it. Everyone knows letting the kid win is often the only way to get out of playing again.

It turns out, Japan last week and the European Union this week both demonstrated mastery of that principle while negotiating "trade deals" with the world's largest toddler:

[I]f the US-EU trade relationship was more or less OK last year, why did Trump impose huge tariffs and leave many of them in place even after the so-called deal? Because he felt like it. You won’t get anywhere in understanding the trade war if you insist on believing that Trump’s tariffs are a response to any legitimate grievances. And he failed to gain any significant concessions, mainly because Europe was already behaving well and had nothing to concede.

So was the US-EU trade deal basically a nothingburger? No, it was a bad thing, but mainly for political reasons.

Two less discouraging aspects of what just happened: First, Trump appears to have backed down on the idea of treating European value-added taxes as an unfair barrier to U.S. exports (which they aren’t, but facts don’t matter here.) So that’s one potentially awful confrontation avoided, at least for now.

Second, if this trade deal was in part an attempt to drive Epstein from the top of the news, my sense of the news flow is that it has been a complete flop.

Still, if I were a European I’d be very angry at anything that even looks like Trump appeasement. The EU is an economic superpower, especially if it allies itself with the UK. It needs to start acting like it.

Oh, it will, I reckon. But for now, all the OAFPOTUS has done is to impose a 15% tariff on the United States in Europe and Japan.

Meanwhile:

• Dan Rather calls out the OAFPOTUS for (once more) enriching himself at taxpayer expense, and not just for spending $63 million on golf trips.
• Explaining to the Republican Party that we'll put down our guns when they put theirs down, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) warns that several large Blue states can also go full-Gerrymander, so maybe Texas should leave well enough alone.
• Crime has fallen dramatically in Chicago and other big cities across the US since 2020, and no one really knows why.
• Pro-Ukrainian hackers crippled Russian civil airline Aeroflot over the past weekend.
• Auto and traffic-safety writer Josh Max suggests that upping training and safety standards could reduce the 38,000 annual US traffic deaths, while ignoring the roles that road and city design play.
• The continued destruction of our environment under Republican administrations has led to the reddest districts in some places playing host to huge, noisy, climate-destroying AI data centers.
• On-premises Microsoft SharePoint Server installations suffered a catastrophic data breach in a zero-day attack starting Friday, which researchers say means any network with an on-site SPS instance exposed to the Internet must consider their user credentials compromised.

Finally, the New York Times has a look at Sesame Street's set design and how it has reflected changes in urban life over the last 56 years. "The show’s designers intentionally made the original set appear grungy, with garbage on the street, the brownstone spotted with soot and the color scheme appearing dull and muted. ... During a major redesign in the ’90s, the set introduced a new hotel and apartment building. The brownstone remained, and one of the show’s designers said it 'was meant to look like a survivor of gentrification.' After the show struck a deal to stream on HBO in 2015, the set appeared even shinier, newer and brighter." There's even a recycling bin next to Oscar's trash can. Sic transit, et cetera.

Chicago Cubs legendary second-baseman Ryne Sandberg has died:

Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg, a Cubs legend and the architect of the famous “Sandberg Game,” passed away Monday at his home after a battle with cancer. He was 65.

Sandberg’s breakout 1984 season couldn’t have come at a better time for the Cubs. The “Sandberg Game,” when that year’s NL MVP went 5-for-6 and hit two game-tying home runs off Cardinals closer Bruce Sutter, served as a turning point in the season. The Cubs would go on to clinch the division, snapping a 39-year playoff drought.

Sandberg announced in January of 2024 that he’d been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. With treatment, he was cancer-free by August, sharing the good news on Instagram: “Rang the Bell this morning! WE did it, WE won!”

Four months later, however, his cancer had returned, and Sandberg resumed intensive treatment.

We've lost a lot of good people this month. It's getting distressing.

Mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer has died at the age of 97:

Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1928, one of two sons of James Lehrer, a successful tie manufacturer, and Alma (Waller) Lehrer. Young Tom was precocious, but his precocity had its limits. He took piano lessons from an early age, but balked at learning classical music and insisted on switching to a teacher who emphasized the Broadway show tunes he loved.

In 1953, encouraged by friends, he produced an album. To his surprise, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” cut and pressed in an initial run of 400 copies, was a hit. Sold through the mail and initially promoted almost entirely by word of mouth, it ultimately sold an estimated half-million copies.

In 1964 and 1965 he wrote several songs for “That Was the Week That Was,” the short-lived satirical NBC television series. He did not appear on the show, but he did return to the road for a while, recording his new songs at the hungry i in San Francisco for the 1965 album “That Was the Year That Was” — not a do-it-yourself effort this time, but released on Reprise, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records.

Lehrer lived so long that the Times had to admit that the obituary's author died two years ago: "Richard Severo, a New York Times reporter from 1968 to 2006, died in 2023. Alex Traub contributed reporting."

Yascha Mounk has a remembrance:

[I]t was on my second visit to the United States...that I first came into contact with a piece of comparatively obscure American culture which would go on to shape my sense of the country that has since become home. In my aunt’s living room in Morningside Heights, she and her friends were reminiscing about the late 1960s when, freshly expelled from Poland, they had first arrived in New York. Somebody put on a CD called “That Was the Year That Was” by Tom Lehrer....

The album also features Tom Lehrer skewering supposedly progressive educational fads which only succeed in making things unnecessarily confusing in “New Math”; him poking fun at America’s over-reliance on military might in “Send the Marines” (For might makes right, / And till they’ve seen the light, / They’ve got to be respected, / Till somebody we like can be elected); and him making light of fears about nuclear proliferation in “Who’s Next?” (Egypt’s gonna get one, too / Just to use on you know who. / So Israel’s getting tense, / Wants one in self-defense. / “The Lord’s our shepherd,” says the psalm, / “But just in case, we better get a bomb!”)

Lehrer was not a builder of legacies. His style of musical comedy has mostly died out. He does not appear to have been interested in family; asked whether he had ever married or had children, he quipped that he was “not guilty on both counts.” Nor did he ever aim to maximize the financial profit he would draw from his fame; a few years ago, he declared that all of his lyrics and melodies would henceforth be in the public domain (which is one reason why I’ve been able to quote so liberally from his songs.)

But, perhaps despite himself, Tom Lehrer did leave a lasting legacy: He deeply shaped the way I—and many others—see the country he skewered so lovingly in his unforgettable songs.

He will be missed.

As promised, I just pushed new bits for Weather Now. Release 5.0.9340 corrects a couple of regression issues I introduced with the previous release, which happens more often than not after an architecture refactoring. End users will probably not notice any differences, except that for the last 10 days no one other than system admins have been able to edit their own home page weather lists. Now they can.

I have one more release of Weather Now planned for this summer, which will allow users to create multiple weather lists (which was the whole point of this round of refactoring) and view the site in French. All of the measurements and weather reports have been available in French and 8 other languages since 2007, but the version 5 release only had US English and Mexican Spanish. I have plans to restore all the other languages, I just don't have a lot of time or a lot of registered users from outside North America.

I've spent a lot of my day cleaning my house and doing some housekeeping on the Daily Parker. In the latter case, I finished adding the ancient Site News entries that ran from July 1997 to March 1998, bringing the total active posts up to 9,984 (though the blog engine thinks there are 9,988). That means that the 10,000th Post will happen in about two weeks at my present rate of posting.

I also uploaded a few more Fitbit tracks into my Garmin account, including a 14.5 kilometer walk with Parker in June 2016 and both halves of my September 2015 walk through England's South Downs from Arundel to Amberley.

Tomorrow morning I'll push some new Weather Now bits to Production, too. So it's a productive day, with more housekeeping (going through ancient boxes) this evening.

Historian Timothy Ryback, writing in The Atlantic, takes us through a short history of a not-so-long-ago German Chancellor's war with his country's apolitical civil service:

A memorandum was circulated to all state civil servants demanding blind loyalty to the Hitler government. Anyone who did not feel they could support Hitler and his policies, [future war criminal Hermann] Göring added, should do the “honorable” thing and resign. The Berliner Morgenpost observed that Hitler was clearly working to “transform the state bureaucracy from the most senior positions down to the administrative levels to align with his political positions.”

Despite Hitler’s heavy-handed assault on the government bureaucracy, he could not touch [central bank president] Hans Luther. According to a 1924 law, the Reichsbank was independent of the elected government; the Reichsbank president served at the discretion of a 14-member board, which included seven international bankers and economists.

[In a meeting with Luther in March 1933,] Hitler acknowledged that, as chancellor, he did not have the legal power to remove Luther as central banker. But, he told Luther bluntly, as the new “boss” of the country, he had access to considerable alternative sources of power that he would not hesitate to employ “ruthlessly” against Luther “if the interest of the state demanded it.” The nature of Hitler’s threats was unmistakable. Luther—who had already been shot once before in protest of his monetary policies—did not need to be warned again.

One hopes the OAFPOTUS and his droogs don't resort to such things. This is the "farce" part of the "first as tragedy" proverb, however, so we might escape going full-on Fascist for the next three years. I hope.

It looks like the temperature peaked at Inner Drive Technology World HQ a few minutes ago, hitting 32.7°C with a heat index of 42.3°C. The 26.4°C dew point is higher than I like the temperature to be. It may cool off later today when the thunderstorms finally start, but as I would like to get home from the office before then, I will have to go back out into this soupy mess soon.

The only story of note this afternoon: Wrigley Field will host the 2027 All-Star Game. That's pretty cool, especially for the Wrigley neighbors who usually get insanely loud concerts over the All-Star Break.

Cassie's stitches came out and her cone came off this afternoon:

Tomorrow she goes back to day camp. This weekend, if the weather allows it, we'll go to the dog beach. We are both so freaking happy not to have the cone anymore.

Also, her left ear doesn't look as out of place as I'd worried. We'll see how it looks when all her fur grows back in a couple of weeks.