The Daily Parker

Ain't she purdy?

I couldn't decide which shot or aspect ratio to use, so you get a bonus photo:

She looks especially fine today after having two baths over the weekend. (I may drink Lake Michigan water, but that doesn't mean I want it tracked all through my house.)

Last year's birthday photo is here.

Cassie got almost 2 hours of walkies before 9am with a return trip to the Montrose  Beach Dog Friendly Area:

She also got a bath, because even though Lake Michigan supplies millions of people with fresh water, we don't drink it right out of the lake for very good reasons.

Also, I did not take 540 photos like last time. Maybe tomorrow...?

And if you're listening to "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" on NPR this morning (and tomorrow morning in some markets), I was there Thursday night:

So I have queued up stuff to read later:

• How can anyone believe the Republican Party's "freedom" rhetoric in light of their current behavior?
• Millions of Canadians have yet to regain Internet and telecoms services after monopsony telecom provider Rogers suffered a catastrophic outage yesterday.
• Speaking of Canada, the Court of Appeal for Ontario heard three weeks of testimony about the struggling Ottawa Light Rail project, one of a slew of Canadian transport projects that hasn't gone as planned.
• National Geographic took a ride on the California Zephyr, a train I last took in 1983. Ah, memories.

About the Rogers outage: the CBC published a chart showing that network usage hit 100% of its capacity immediately before it started to fall steadily before collapsing entirely around 4am ET. I wonder if the sequence will turn out to resemble the 1965 northeast blackout?

In case you needed more things to read today:

• Have we become a nation of hostages?
• Impeach Justice Thomas (R) if you want, but that won't solve the real problem with the Court.
• European leaders will miss President Biden.
• Researchers can now explain how climate change affects your weather.
• Amtrak's plans to expand in the South might derail because of opposition from freight lines.
• British Airways has cancelled 10,000 flights through October because of staff shortages.

There are others, but I've still got a lot to do today.

Many people, particularly in the US, have suffered recently because of their choices to live in places without meaningful alternatives to driving, their neighbors' choices not to fund meaningful alternatives to driving, and a war in Eastern Europe that has directly and indirectly raised worldwide oil prices to real values not seen since 1973.

I feel a bit of smugness coming on. See, my house has a Walk Score of 95 and a transit score of 81. I live within 1500 meters (about a mile*) of two rapid-transit train lines and a heavy-rail line, not to mention nine bus routes, three of which operate 24 hours a day. I live within a short walk of multiple grocery stores, bars, restaurants, my Alderman's office, a Target, and basically everything I need.

Also, when my last car gave up the ghost 3½ years ago, I decided to get a plug-in hybrid. It can go about 40 km (25 miles) on a charge, so I hardly ever have to use its gasoline engine when I run ordinary errands.

So yesterday, when I drove to Bloomington, Ill., and back (round-trip: 466 km, 291 mi), I had to fill up for the first time since March 25th. Over the 100 days I went without buying gasoline, I drove 1,400 km (900 mi) and burned 34 L (9 gal) of gas, for an average economy of 2.4 L/100 km (97.9 MPG). In 3½ years I've driven 20,000 km (12,300 mi) and spent $395 on gasoline.

I know many people can't make the same choices I've made, but as a nation, we could make better transit and regulatory choices so that my experience is much more common.

* I'm going to translate everything into American** measurements for the benefit of readers who need to think about these concepts.

** Sure, they're technically "Imperial" measurements, but as that Empire no longer exists, and its remaining bits use the International System (SI), really the only people who need translations live in the United States.

I'm spending today finishing a couple of books and season 3 of The Umbrella Academy on either side of hauling down to Bloomington, Ill., for a friend's birthday/housewarming. Tomorrow I intend to continue doing nothing creative, though the holiday may give me cause to contemplate the future of our nation.

Regular posting should resume Tuesday.

My flight into Austin on Monday took two extra hours after landing—not counting the 45 minutes returning to the airport to get my bag—thanks in part to piss-poor ground operations. Yesterday, we sat at the gate for nearly an hour waiting for fuel.

Apparently the fuel truck has a minor maintenance thing going on, so we had to wait for someone to fix it so they could finish fueling the plane. But once they finished, just past 2pm, we had to wait another 10 minutes because of the shift change.

Please don't make me go to Texas again.

I mentioned earlier today that my flight to Austin did not go smoothly. The plane actually took off on time and landed a few minutes ahead of schedule, and then...stopped. We wound up sitting on the apron for over two hours because of lightning near the airport. (Apparently the ground crew didn't want to get electrocuted. Seems legit.) Even after we got off the plane, our bags didn't for several hours.

Just look at this fun excerpt from the FlightAware track log:

But, as Cranky Flier reports, flying kind of sucks all over these days:

We are just about a month into the summer, and so it’s time to do a little temperature check. How are things going? The answer is… not well. Yes, there are delays and cancellations during any summer, and there’s plenty of labor vs management mudslinging as well. But the numbers themselves show that things are much worse than even a normally-frustrating summer.

I’ve tried to think of the best way put this into context, so let me put it this way. Across these 9 airlines, 3.1% of flights have been canceled from June 1 – 27. If we look at June 2019, the rate was 2.02%. That doesn’t sound like a lot, so let’s make it more tangible.

These nine airlines canceled 18,508 flights in the first 27 days of June. If they had “only” canceled 2.02% of flights as they did in June 2019, then 13,120 flights would have been canceled. In other words, the airlines have canceled more than 40 percent more flights this June simply because they couldn’t run an operation as well as they did in June 2019. And “well” was already a misnomer back then.

The question is… what the hell is going on to make this such a miserable experience for so many people? And the answer is… it’s all going bad.

Boy, I just can't wait to fly home Thursday...

I forgot that this part of Texas had less topography than Northern Illinois:

Yesterday I had one of the most annoying travel experiences I can remember, which I will relate after lunch. And maybe, just maybe, I'll go outside today.

I've been a little busy this weekend so even though I remembered that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Harry Potter's publication, I forgot that Friday was the 25th anniversary of Weather Now v0. Yes, I've had a weather application on the Internet for 25 years.

The actual, standalone Weather Now application launched on 11 November 1999, which I plan to make a bigger deal of. And that comes after this blog's 25th anniversary (13 May 1998). But it's kind of cool that I have an app running continuously since the early days of Bill Clinton's second term.