Sure Happy It's Tuesday! Here's what crossed my desk today:

• Paul Krugman shows the receipts that prove OAFPOTUS droogs are using national secrets to get rich on prediction markets.
• Matthew Yglesias answers the question, "why hasn't oil gotten even more expensive?" Hint: Rhymes with taco.
• Jeff Maurer wonders where the people yelling about how "Greenland is strategically vital" have gone.
• James Fallows digs into the collision at LaGuardia Sunday, when a regional jet smashed into a fire truck while landing, killing the pilots and injuring over 40 passengers. The Atlantic's David Graham reacts by bemoaning the state of American aviation in general.
• Bruce Schneier thinks Japan's Team Mirai has a great strategy for leveraging technology in politics.

Finally, a Wrigleyville gem, Uncommon Ground, has put itself on the market so that the owners can retire. The restaurant includes Greenstar Brewing. Anyone looking for a new investment?

• About this Blog (v5.0)  (4 weeks)
• Brews and Choos project  (2 months)
• Chicago sunrises, 2026  (2 months)
• Inner Drive Technology's computer history  (2 years)
• Logical fallacies  (6 years)
• Other people's writing  (5 years)
• Parker Braverman, 2006-2020  (5 years)
• Style sheet  (8 months)
• Where I get my corn-pone  (1 month)

The last two weeks have really taken a toll, so I don't have a lot of creativity to spare today. Between performances, travel, an open house, and everything else, I didn't have a normal day from the 10th until yesterday. And yesterday was only "normal" in that I had no planned or scheduled activities of any kind, which I celebrated by doing fuck all.

Today I have my usual Monday meetings and my usual Monday rehearsal, followed by more of the same all week. I need the routine. Because it looks like I'm going to start packing up my house in two weeks—and I have yet to find a new house. (I'll have more on Chicago's insane real estate market soon.)

Cassie has gotten 2 hours of walks so far today because (a) I had a showing and an open house and (b) it's gorgeous out. I am, however, down about 12 hours of sleep in the last 7 days, and I may have had an extra drink or two in the Hospitality Suite with my colleagues on Wednesday. Plus, of course, 10 hours of traveling yesterday.

Regular posting resumes tomorrow.

Heading back home. I get why people like spending time by California beaches, and yet my main priority right now is getting Cassie back, followed by sleeping in my own bed tonight. I got a little lovin' from a middle-aged German shepherd dog on the beach this morning, which helped.

Last night a friend and I had a filling dinner at Jones. On the way back to the car we discovered a robot nest:

Millions of dollars in research and development went into making them adorable. It works. We found ourselves talking to them: "Almost home, buddy! Sleep well!"

I wonder about the economic prospects of both companies running robots in L.A. and Chicago, especially given how awful Americans can be and the propensity of Chicago to have what we refer to as "weather." We'll see. I don't live inside the delivery zone of either service, but perhaps I'll run an experiment to see if they'll deliver to a park bench or something similar.

Boarding is in 45 minutes, I have had second breakfast (at Chicago lunch time, though), and I am ready to be home. Updates as conditions warrant.

The conference has ended, but I'm staying another day in the Southland. Regular posting resumes tomorrow.

And hey, when in Rome (or Orange County), do as the Romans. I've never had In-N-Out Burger before. It was worth the stop.

As usual, I signed up for the hiking excursion at this year's conference. It did not disappoint (unlike my dying Surface and the hotel's WiFi):

Here's my Garmin track:

Now that I've had a shower, I plan to sit outside and read for an hour. Dinner is at 6:30.

As much as I'm enjoying this conference, including the History of Cyber Warfare talk a colleague just presented, the rest of the world continues to smolder:

• Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won nomination to the US Senate over US Representatives Robin Kelly and Raja Krishnamoorthi in yesterday's Illinois Democratic Primary. Other winners include Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss for the US House (9th district) and Melissa Bean for her old seat in the 8th district.
• James Fallows wraps his head around how badly the OAFPOTUS has screwed up in his completely unnecessary war against Iran.
• Radley Balko has some questions for Homeland Security Secretary nominee Markwayne Mullins in his upcoming Senate hearings.
• Francis Fukuyama outlines "what AI hypists miss."
• Adam Kinzinger provides "a blueprint for staying in the fight."

Finally, citing the insanity of the Persian Gulf situation, the Federal Reserve left rates unchanged this morning. "The decision marks the second meeting in a row in which the central bank has opted against a policy move, instead voting to keep rates unchanged at a range of 3.5 percent to 3.75 percent. Stephen I. Miran, a governor appointed by President Trump last year, issued his fifth straight dissent and voted for a quarter-point cut."

For the third second day of the conference: breakfast at Parlor Donuts, just off the Huntington Beach Pier. No photos of the sugar and fat bomb that I ate an hour ago, and will still be digesting this time next week. But the pier itself looks good just after sunrise:

I've only got a few minutes before the next panel, and I have to sit on my balcony looking at the ocean now. Next post before lunch, as Illinois had an election yesterday that might count for something this fall.

As hoped, I got out of my hotel room and walked up to the Huntington Beach Pier:

Once there, I conducted some pier review:

Once back at the hotel, I bought a pair of shorts, because I was very warm. I remembered to pack shorts, but of course I remembered at O'Hare. Had I known I'd have to stay at O'Hare for 8 hours I probably would have made a different packing choice.

Conference "pub quiz" starts in 45 minutes, and then dinner. Then, I believe, I'll sit outside and read for a bit before collapsing.

Despite all my travel issues, I managed to get to the right hotel and to all the panels I signed up for today. And I have to say, our conference planners did a great job on the location:

Posting will be spotty, but I will try to get more photos of California up while I'm here. Right now, I have to take a nap and then go for a walk, or I'll fall asleep at dinner.

My flight to Boston has left the gate and I'm not on it.

This is OK, because I didn't want to go to Boston at all; I want to get to Huntington Beach, Calif., which is closest to Santa Ana. The astute reader will note that Boston and California are, in fact, in opposite directions from Chicago. This was not lost on me, either, after American cancelled yesterday's flight to Santa Ana and rebooked me on this questionable itinerary, arriving at Los Angeles just before midnight, and getting me to Huntington Beach around 2am.

A creeping delay of the Chicago-Boston flight took me from a 55-minute connection at Logan to 32 minutes, then to 14 minutes, and then they called for more fuel. Refueling would take half an hour. My connection evaporated. So rather than spend the night in Boston, where I have no desire to be this week, I asked if the gate agent could help. She was able to find a seat on tonight's Chicago to Santa Ana flight. It's delayed, of course, but—and this is crucial—it's going to the correct airport.

And while this was going on, they were playing musical chairs on the airplane, because I had a first class seat that was now vacant. Several people got to move to better seats, pushing the open seat into the middle of the plane. The college student desperately trying to get home didn't care, because my exit turned her missed connection into mom picking her up at Logan instead of sleeping at O'Hare tonight.

I also discovered, to my mild disappointment, that the agent who let me into the Flagship Lounge earlier today may have bent a rule, but that is also OK. I'm in the regular lounge. It doesn't have free top-shelf liquor but does have a really tasty mushroom broth, which is a lot healthier for me.

So, it looks like I'll get to the conference hotel around 11:30 PDT tonight (cf. 2am!) and then go right to sleep.

Oh, another thing: for reasons I cannot fathom, the FAA has slapped both AA and UA hard on their oversaturation of O'Hare's airspace. Not that the brittle schedules of both airlines had anything to do with my travel issues this week...

Three related stories grabbed my attention while waiting for a plane to take me to Boston, which turns out to be the opposite direction from California. First, five Chicago-area breweries have closed in the last six weeks as economics asserts itself:

Alarmist Brewing & Taproom in Sauganash permanently closed Feb. 1, and not long after, Berwyn’s Flapjack Brewery and Forest Park’s Casa Humilde turned off their taps. Two more are shutting down: Whiner Beer Co. in Back of the Yards will close March 29, and Illuminated Brew Works in Norwood Park will close June 28.

A steady decline in drinking is partially to blame. The U.S. drinking rate reached historic lows in 2025, according to data from Gallup. But the recent string of local closings was accelerated by rising operational and production costs, including aluminum tariffs, and what many feel is an oversaturated market, owners said.

Besides game and trivia nights, concerts and other concerted efforts to get people in the door, breweries are raising their prices to match inflation and trying to market to younger and more health-conscious consumers with alternative products, such as THC- and CBD-infused beverages.

Not all of the news is horrible. The city's black-owned breweries have embedded themselves in their communities, to some success:

Leaning into cultural celebration is one way Moor’s [Brewing] and Funkytown Brewery — the city’s two Black-owned breweries — set themselves apart in a volatile industry that is seeing increased brewery closings nationwide. In Chicago, at least five have shuttered or announced closures this year amid rising operational and production costs and a decline in the U.S. drinking rate.

By contrast, Moor’s Brewing and Funkytown Brewery have remained resilient due to contract brewing — producing their beers at other breweries instead of opening a brick-and-mortar location right away. They also have built a following by pairing their beer with cultural experiences and events, and targeting a diverse consumer base. The owners say they hope this approach will sustain them when they eventually open their own space.

Funkytown Brewery was founded five years ago by Rich Bloomfield, Greg Williams and Zack Day. It has spent the last five years operating at beverage incubator Pilot Project Brewing in Logan Square. It plans to open its own facility in 2027 on the Near West Side thanks in part to a $3.7 million Community Development Grant from the city.

Cannabis companies have also taken big hits, except for the one I own shares in. So to me, this counts as great news:

Chicago’s Green Thumb Industries reported $114.1 million in net income last year, making it a stark outlier in an Illinois cannabis market where competitors continue to hemorrhage cash.

Five of the so-called multistate operators in Illinois — New York-based Ascend Wellness, Connecticut-based Curaleaf, Massachusetts-based MariMed, and Chicago-based Cresco Labs and Verano Holdings — lost a cumulative $761 million last year, underscoring the strain for an industry facing regulatory uncertainty.

Ascend, Cresco, Curaleaf and Verano each have 10 dispensaries in Illinois, while MariMed has five. Outlier GTI has 12 dispensaries in Illinois and a national footprint in 14 states.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order a week before Christmas last year that instructs the Department of Justice to move marijuana to Schedule III, which would nullify the impact of 280E on marijuana businesses nationwide and save the industry as a whole billions of dollars in tax payments.

But since Trump’s order in December, there has been zero movement by the DOJ to actually reschedule cannabis. It’s not clear when or if the reclassification will be finished, given that the process was first started under President Joe Biden, but stalled out in 2024 amid pushback from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Of course the OAFPOTUS's DoJ has done nothing about this; he's decimated the agency. Yet another reason to do whatever it takes to get him out of office before he does more damage to the country and the world. I'm surprised any intoxicant companies are doing poorly with him in office.

How it started:

How it's going:

I got a good one.

Remember how, earlier today, I posted a smug little note about missing all the horrible weather coming through Chicago tomorrow, because I would be in southern California?

Wouldn't you know, Chicago TRACON cancelled my flight for capacity management. After several attempts to re-route on the American Airlines app, I finally talked to a real person, who got me on the best available alternative. I will now leave tomorrow afternoon for Boston, then fly not to Santa Ana as originally intended, but to LAX, arriving just before midnight.

Oh, it gets better. The conference hotel where I'm staying is 20 km and 28 minutes from SNA, but 61 km and an hour from LAX. Maybe it'll be less than an hour at midnight?

Also keep in mind, midnight in LA is 2am in Chicago. So Tuesday should be a real hoot! At least the time change works in my favor as I can sleep until about 9am Chicago time and still make it to breakfast and the opening session. I will miss a couple of important meetings tomorrow, however.

And there is one real silver lining: tomorrow is Cassie's Gotcha Day. I felt sad about missing it, but it turns out, I'll be home with her for part of it!

Yesterday's performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion was absolutely amazing. I know it's long, and with our 90-minute dinner break it actually lasted over 4½ hours, but I'm sad people left after part 1. I've been posting on social media that they should have stayed to see the twist ending (He escaped!).

Unfortunately, with the 3pm call, travel time, and Beer Choir after the concert, I was out for 10 hours, got home at 11:30, and didn't fall asleep until 1:30. (Cassie had relief well before I got home.) I'm bloody knackered.

Today I have nothing but chores as my house hits the market later this week. Meanwhile, we're looking at this forecast with some trepidation:

Monday: Sunny, with a high near 26. Light southwest wind becoming west 10 to 15 km/h in the morning.
Monday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 14. West wind 10 to 15 km/h becoming light after midnight.
Tuesday: Sunny, with a high near 29. Light and variable wind becoming west 10 to 15 km/h in the morning.
Tuesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 16.
Wednesday: Sunny, with a high near 28.
Wednesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 15.
Thursday: Sunny, with a high near 28.

Sorry, just kidding. That's the forecast for where I'm traveling to this evening. Chicago's forecast looks like this:

Monday: Snow showers likely, mainly before 1pm. Patchy blowing snow. Cloudy, with a temperature falling to around -5 by 5pm. Windy, with a west northwest wind 45 to 50 km/h, with gusts as high as 70 km/h. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New snow accumulation of 2 to 4 centimeters possible.
Monday Night: A 20 percent chance of snow showers before 1am. Cloudy, then gradually becoming partly cloudy, with a low around -9. Wind chill values as low as -17. Blustery, with a west northwest wind 35 to 40 km/h decreasing to 25 to 30 km/h after midnight. Winds could gust as high as 55 km/h.
Tuesday: Mostly sunny, with a high near -2. West northwest wind 15 to 20 km/h, with gusts as high as 30 km/h.
Tuesday Night: Snow showers likely, mainly after 1am. Mostly cloudy, with a low around -5. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
Wednesday: A 20 percent chance of snow showers before 1pm. Partly sunny, with a high near 6.
Wednesday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 2.
Thursday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 10.

Next post probably from O'Hare this evening. Or at least after my nap.

That's the question I asked myself as I headed off to a 3½-hour rehearsal yesterday evening. The answer, of course, is that I voted, walked Cassie for 90 minutes, fielded an emergency at work despite it being a day off, and dealt with half a dozen smaller things around the house.

Today, all I have is a three-hour performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion, plus getting to and from Elmhurst (about an hour each way), plus a freaking nap. At some point I'll post something of substance—if I have time today.

In a post yesterday, I implied that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has admitted having unnatural relations with a piece of furniture. That was incorrect; Vice President JD Vance was the member of the administration alleged to have had the sectional assignation. Hegseth is the one with Nazi tattoos.

The Daily Parker regrets the error.

A colleague at my day job poked around on the Daily Parker, not for the content, but for the software. I now have two more Jira cases.

First, he uncovered a bug in how the app handles the + character in URLs, so that entering a direct link to a tag works fine if you click on the tag, but not if you enter the link itself (https://www.thedailyparker.com/Tags/How+this+works). The problem is in the encoding of spaces; this URL works fine: https://www.thedailyparker.com/Tags/How%20this%20works. This is now Jira case JOUR-444.

He also suggested that he's not really interested in politics, but he does like the technical contents of the blog. This implies a feature where a user can exclude posts that contain a specific tag, rather than find all the posts with that tag. Not sure how to implement it yet, but it's now Jira case JOUR-445.

Also floating around the software discussions at work was a really well-done demo of the most important security bugs in a lot of .NET applications. I'll be sure to check that out when I have free time again in about a week and a half.

A photographer is coming to my house tomorrow so we can list it on Tuesday. To prepare for this, I've removed about 30 boxes of stuff from the house, mostly books and movies, plus some bookcases and other furniture. Just now after lunch, I removed or put away most of the things I use daily in the kitchen and took everything off the fridge. The house looks great for real-estate photos but it doesn't really feel like my house anymore. Even my normally-cluttered office looks spartan.

Meanwhile:

• Defense Secretary Pete "Cushions" Hegseth does not like unflattering photos of himself, though somehow he doesn't mind when reporters publish the actual words he says out loud.
• Speaking of stupidity, the Defense Department continues its war on intelligence, both the human and artificial kinds.
• They also cut the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, an internal DoD office tasked with limiting civilian casualties and avoiding targeting mistakes like the one that killed over 100 schoolgirls on February 28th.
• Matthew Yglesias understands that no one wants a quagmire in Iran, but can't see how the war we started there will go any other way.
• Adam Kinzinger wants to know why the department spent $15.1 million on ribeye steak last September while cutting the $20 million required to keep our RC-26B counter-terrorism aircraft flying.

Sorry, I hadn't planned on highlighting just how idiotic our Defense Department had gotten under Hegseth. Here, let's look at two more stories that have nothing to do with how badly our government is run under this administration:

• Two really good breweries, Half Acre and Maplewood, have announced they are merging to reduce materials costs and "amplify founder-led brands."
• The New York Times Magazine explores the world of "Sync Music," which you hear all the time and have no idea why.

OK, back to the mines. Which are eerily uncluttered and depersonalized this afternoon...