The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Too many things to read during lunch

A medium-length list this time:

And this brings me to lunch.

It mights gonna to be a bit vindy

As I mentioned earlier, there's a light breeze:

It's so windy that the Randolph Street Bridge is closed. Cromidas saw this too. Officials told her they were worried debris from a nearby construction site (the same one where a wall collapse a few months ago) would be blown into traffic. Fire officials tweeted that building occupants at 150, 180 and 191 N. Wacker Drive were all evacuated because of debris falling from the construction site at 150 N. Riverside.

It's so windy that a woman almost blew away trying to get into a cab. NBC caught her ordeal on tape.

O'Hare's 4pm reading had winds down to 55 km/h with gusts of only 83 km/h. So conditions are improving a bit... Plus, it's still 11°C outside.

Parker is freaking out because wind makes a lot of scary noise (to a dog, anyway), and he's now stress-farting, so we're going for a walk. I'm a little disappointed that temperatures will return to seasonal chills by Monday, too. So make hay while the wind blows at 52 knots, right?

Good news, bad news kind of weather

The official temperature at O'Hare got up to 15°C this afternoon, which you'd expect in early April and not in mid-February. That's the good news. The bad news is the warm air mass is being driven by converging jet streams more or less directly over Chicago, giving us 67 km/h winds gusting to—I am not making this up—100 km/h. Buildings in the Loop are being evacuated because windows are popping out. Also, people are giving cranes wide berths.

Have I mentioned that anthropogenic climate change will (a) be pretty good for Chicago, for a few decades anyway, and (b) pump more energy into the atmosphere causing these kinds of wind events?

Craft distilleries expanding this year

Crain's lists five Chicago-area distilleries, including Few (my favorite), that have run out of room:

  • The West Loop's CH Distillery plans to build a 20,000-square-foot distillery in Pilsen on the site of the old bottling building of the long-defunct Schoenhofen Brewery. It aims to boost capacity to more than 100,000 9-liter cases per year, up from about 8,000 in its current distillery and tasting room. The two-and-a-half-year-old distillery, whose top products are vodka, rum and two types of gin, produced 5,000 cases last year, up from 2,900 in 2014.
  • Few Spirits in Evanston is seeking its fourth expansion in five years to meet demand for its barrel-aged products. The company doubled the size of its warehouse two years ago and is again running out of space. With production doubling last year, led by sales of gin and whiskey, Few is looking to expand again.

Local booze-makers are riding a boom in sales of craft spirits, which jumped 35 percent in 2015 to about 2.4 million 9-liter cases from 1.7 million in 2014, according to the American Distilling Institute's annual survey. That's after 42 percent sales growth in 2014 and a 50 percent spurt in 2013.

While figures aren't available for Illinois, the breakneck growth of CH Distillery, which distributes only in-state and has no immediate plans to do otherwise, offers a clear indication that the local market is just as robust.

I love Few's barrel-aged gin, which is as much a sipping spirit as a good Scotch or Bourbon. CH doesn't make all of their own stuff yet, so them opening their own distillery is good news.

Bruce Rauner does the impossible

Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg put the Rauner administration in context in a column a couple of weeks ago:

Not only did Rauner fail to make tangible progress, but he didn’t even tread water properly. The normal operation of the state, such as passing an annual budget, failed to occur, sacrificed on the altar of the governor’s hunger for term limits, union enfeeblement and other unrelated pet causes. He’s like an office manager getting himself hired by promising to expand a business who then promptly fails to pay the electric bill, as a point of principle against the electric company monopoly, so they turn the lights off. Now we’re sitting in the dark, listening to him explain.

But give credit where due: Rauner has accomplished something real, something that I would have thought impossible:

He makes Rod Blagojevich look good.

In 2014, Rauner won every county in Illinois except Cook, beating Pat Quinn by about 150,000 votes out of 3.6 million cast. That's not a huge mandate. But it has turned into a huge disaster. ("A yuge disaster?" Hm.)

Lengthening reading list

I have three books in the works and two on deck (imminently, not just in my to-be-read stack) right now. Reading:

On deck:

  • Kevin Hearne, "Iron Druid Chronicles" book 8: Staked.
  • Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy book 2: Green Mars.

Meanwhile, I have these articles and blog posts to read, some for work, some because they're interesting:

Time to read.

Meanwhile, I seem to have a cold. Yuck.

Not what you want to see outside your building

This is what happens when you work across the street from the Chicago Teachers Union:

As part of their negotiations with the Chicago Public Schools and the City of Chicago, the CTU are withdrawing their funds from Bank of America. The Tribune has background:

One day after the Chicago Teachers Union rejected a contract proposal from Chicago Public Schools, district officials said they would slash school budgets and stop paying the bulk of teachers' pension contributions — moves CTU's president quickly blasted as "an act of war."

CPS officials told reporters of their plans while announcing the district would make a fresh attempt Wednesday to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to keep the school system's finances afloat.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is also taking shots at the union:

[B]y intentionally and unilaterally whacking tens of thousands of CTU members right in their wallet—and spreading word that Rauner is trying to sabotage the bond deal—Team Emanuel did something more: make it clear that, the Laquan McDonald controversy or not, they're tired of playing patsy.

CTU doesn't like it, and is planning a big protest rally. It accuses Emanuel of “intimidating” the union. But there's no sign of a strike, and the union will have to convince Chicagoans that its members deserve a defined benefit pension with a 3 percent compounded annual inflation hike for only the 2 percent of salary members still will have to pay.

Of course, the 500,000 children who could be turfed out of school should the union strike, and the parents who will have to stay home from work to care for them, would be the proverbial grass that suffers when elephants wrestle.

I'll have more about the news trucks outside my building later today.

Reading list

Stuff:

Someone call lunch...