The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Twice. I hit Ctrl+W *twice* while writing this post

Ctrl+W closes the active browser window, you see. I meant to type the word "Wade" in italics but somehow hit the Ctrl key instead of the Shift key. There may be some irony there.

Possibly the warmth has addled my brain? It's just gone above freezing for the first time since the wee hours of January 13th. It's also gloomy and gray, but those things go together.

Anyway:

  • Today is the 51st anniversary of the US Supreme Court's decision in Roe v Wade.
  • Michael Tomasky wants to know why the press seem to ignore the XPOTUS's obvious dementia.
  • Something fishy happened with the 2023 Hugo nomination process, but that certainly has nothing to do with the politics of the host country.
  • The City of London has embarked on an ambitious pedestrianization scheme that has, among other things, turned the area around the Bank Tube stop into a pleasant place to sit.

Finally, European researchers have published a report suggesting that domestic dogs wag their tails because humans like the rhythm. I will shortly go test this theory on my resident tail-wagger.

Goose Island Beer Co., Fulton taproom

Welcome to stop #97 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Goose Island Beer Co., 1800 W Fulton St., Chicago
Train line: CTA Green and Pink lines, Ashland
Time from Chicago: 6 minutes
Distance from station: 600 m

Given Chicago's long association with Goose Island Beer, and my own review of their (now closed) flagship brewpub on Clybourn almost exactly a year ago, I haven't got much to add. Since InBev bought the brewery in 2016 and expanded to places like Seoul and Shanghai, it almost doesn't qualify as a local brewery anymore. And hey, I loved Goose Island 20 years ago. But selling to InBev really did make a difference.

But the Brews and Choos Project doesn't discriminate, so we went back to the Fulton Taproom and tried their newest beer, the No Plans Tasty Time pale ale. I wrote: "not too bad, not awesome."

And that's pretty much my review of their only remaining Chicago taproom. They plan to open a new flagship brewpub at the Salt Shed in the spring, and I'll review it in due course.

Bottom line, with a couple of truly wonderful taprooms nearby like Midwest Coast and On Tour, you can skip Goose Island and not miss anything special.

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

Great Central Brewing

Welcome to stop #96 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Great Central Brewing, 221 N. Wood St., Chicago
Train line: CTA Green and Pink lines, Ashland
Time from Chicago: 6 minutes
Distance from station: 500 m

Despite the cold yesterday, a friend and I set off to the West Fulton Corridor industrial area to visit a cluster of three breweries all within a few hundred meters of each other. First on the list: Great Central Brewing.

We liked the place, though it really leans into the "industrial" part of the corridor, with a cavernous interior and washrooms three flights up.

Still, we liked their beers. The dry-hopped Pilsner (5%) was nice: dry, not too malty, good finish. The West Coast IPA (6.5%) had a great hop mix and a long finish, with a hint of banana. We judged it "very good." And the Kick Push Hazy IPA (7.2%), a collaboration with Perch, was dryer than most hazies, with lots of banana, a bit of apple and apricot, and lingering bitterness.

We also liked that, by sharing three 150 mL pours, we barely dented our capacity for trying beers at our next two planned stops.

Beer garden? Rooftop planned, not yet open
Dogs OK? No
Televisions? One, avoidable
Serves food? No; BYOF
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

Busy weekend

I grabbed a friend for a couple of Brews & Choos visits yesterday, and through judicious moderation (8-10 oz of beer per person at each stop), we managed to get the entire West Fulton Corridor cluster done in six hours. So in a few minutes I'll start writing four B&C reviews, which will come out over the next three days.

Before I start, though, I'm going to read all these stories that have piled up since Friday:

Finally, the Roscoe Rat (really a squirrel) Hole got its own NPR story this morning. And in my social media I saw a photo of someone proposing to her boyfriend at the rat hole. Color me bemused.

The life and death of a Chicago squirrel

Wow, is this a Chicago story.

On January 6th, a local comedian posted a photo of what he thought was the impression of a rat in concrete on a Chicago street. (Local residents claim it's actually the death mask of a very unfortunate squirrel that fell from a tree into the wet concrete decades ago.) Quickly dubbed the "Chicago rat hole," it went viral, and so far thousands of people have made pilgrimage to 1918 W. Roscoe St. to see it.

Well, yesterday, some jagoff filled it in with "a plaster-like substance." But fear not! Locals rushed to its rescue in a way one can only hope they rescued the original artist:

NBC5 reported the rat-shaped sidewalk hole near near 1918 W. Roscoe St. was filled in with a “concrete-like material.”

t’s not clear who has a problem with the rat hole and doesn’t want us to have nice things, but Lakeview neighbor Johnathan Howell grabbed his license plate and went to work digging out the hole, NBC Sports’ Alex Shapiro reported. Other neighbors joined in, using other small tools to help.

By early afternoon, the hole looked mostly back to normal, though remnants remained of the filling, melted snow and slush.

The material used to fill in the rat hole appeared to be some type of plaster or modeling clay. Neighbors who had made a pilgrimage to the rat hole during their Friday lunch were relieved the desecration of the landmark was not permanent, they said.

The Lakeview Roscoe Village Chamber of Commerce launched a contest last week to come up with a nickname. The five finalists:

  • Lil’ Stucky
  • Splatatouille
  • Splat
  • Roscoe Road-dent
  • Dibs

You know, as a student of history, I always wondered why people spent most of the 1920s and 1930s chasing silly fads. (Woody Allen nailed this phenomenon in his 1983 film Zelig.)

So here we are: a beloved Chicago fad, defiled by a spoilsport (my money's on Streets and Sanitation), rescued by neighbors. That's us.

How to explain this to future generations?

Twenty years ago today, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) showed enthusiasm for his 3rd-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses in a way he came to regret:

Conventional wisdom says that this scream tanked (see what I did there?*) his campaign, but really, Dean never had the momentum or following needed to win the nomination. Plus, President Bush had taken us to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and with common sense in Iraq, so war hero John Kerry looked like the best person to challenge him.

I can't remember exactly, but I think I voted for Kerry, mainly because the nomination was sewn up by then. More importantly, though, I voted for Illinois State Senator Barack Obama (D-13th) in the primary to fill the US Senate seat of retiring US Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R). My guy won that election (if you recall), and I got to go to the victory party on primary night. Fun!

* See, e.g., this clip from 1988.

You'll get there in a few millennia

An Ottawa judge told the Crown Prosecution Service to return a suspect's mobile phones after prosecutors failed to unlock them after trying 175 million passwords:

The police seized the phones in October 2022 with a warrant obtained based on information about a Google account user uploading images of child pornography. The contents of the three phones were all protected by complex, alpha-numeric passcodes.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Ian Carter heard that police investigators tried about 175 million passcodes in an effort to break into the phones during the past year.

The problem, the judge was told, is that more than 44 nonillion potential passcodes exist for each phone.

To be more precise, the judge said, there are 44,012,666,865,176,569,775,543,212,890,625 potential alpha-numeric passcodes for each phone.

In his ruling, Carter said the court had to balance the property rights of an individual against the state’s legitimate interest in preserving evidence in an investigation. The phones, he said, have no evidentiary value unless the police succeed in finding the right passcodes.

The article helpfully describes how dictionary attacks work, but doesn't attempt to figure out how long it would take to brute-force them. (I'm not going to attempt that, either, but I expect it's a while.)

Cold snapped

Around 7 this morning, the official Chicago temperature at O'Hare went above -15°C for the first time in 81 hours, the longest such cold snap since February 1996:

In the 1996 stretch, O’Hare recorded highs of -20.6°C on Feb. 2 and 3, and of -16.7°C on Feb. 4, according to NWS meteorologist Casey Sullivan.

Sullivan said the longest stretch of temps below -15°C in the area was a period of five days in the 1880s, according to NWS records, which go back to 1871.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to do that, but it’s unusual, not unheard of,” Sullivan said of the cold streak.

There may be some — albeit slight — relief from the extreme cold on the way in the coming days. High temperatures Wednesday should climb to a high of around -8°C, the NWS said.

Thursday’s high temps could end up near -5°C, and Friday’s high is expected to be near -9°C.

As of 1pm we've gotten up to -9°C, but the sun is out, and we have brisk west-southwest winds, both of which should help. As long as it stays above -10°C I can walk Cassie home from day camp. (I had to drive her yesterday and today.)

The National Climate Prediction Center says the Arctic Vortex will get back to where it once belonged next week:

I sure hope so. And if Cassie understood "future" as a concept, so would she.

Still chilly, but not like 1985

My socials today have a lot of chatter about the weather, understandably as we're now in our fourth day below -15°C. And yet I have vivid memories of 20 January 1985 when we hit the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, -32°C. The fact that winters have gotten noticeably milder since the 1970s doesn't really matter during our annual Arctic blast. Sure, we had the coldest winter ever just 10 years ago, but the 3rd and 5th coldest were 1977-78 and 1978-79, respectively. I remember the snow coming up to my chin those years, and the never-ending below-freezing temperatures (like the 43 days from 28 December 1976 to 8 February 1977).

That said, I completely support the Chicago Public Schools closing today and tomorrow. And that they smoothed out all the streets since I was younger, so kids don't have to walk uphill both ways in the snow. But given the wind-chill advisory in effect until tomorrow morning, none of us wanted to go into the office either.

So instead of commuting, I'll have some time to read these as I shiver in my home office:

Finally, should I get an induction burner? I've been using my electric teakettle to pre-boil water for pasta, which saves a ton of time. The Post looked into the benefits of induction vs natural gas, principally around air quality. Looks like it's worth $120 to reduce my gas use. Of course, since I have gas furnaces, it might not do a lot for me this week.