The Daily Parker

Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Pedal Haus Brewery, 214 E. Roosevelt St., Phoenix
Train line: Valley Metro Rail, Roosevelt/Central
Time from Chicago: 3½ hours by air
Distance from station: 350 m

I discovered last week that Phoenix built a light-rail system between my visits in 2015 and 2023. And it goes past a bunch of breweries. So when I had a few hours between my flight landing and the conference welcome dinner, I went to two of them.

Pedal Haus Brewery has multiple locations, including a production facility in Tempe. The downtown Phoenix location has two levels, most of which are outside. (They don't get a lot of snow or rain in central Arizona.) I found my way to the roof and ordered a flight and took notes on my phone.

I started with the Kölsch (4.7%, 19 IBU): light, crisp, honey, pear, lingering finish. Not too bad. Next, the White Rabbit wheat WCIPA (6.5%, 48.6 IBU): subtle, some fruit, much lighter than expected. On to the Desert Classic APA (5.9%, 36 IBU): malt, apple, light banana notes, very drinkable. Finally, the Haus IPA (6.4%, 58 IBU): hoppy, nice balance, long finish. 

I also had just a taste of the Day Drinker Light lager (3.46%, 11.9 IBU) and wrote: "nose is like a Bud Light or Old Style, as is the taste, but with some complexity and flavor. Not for me, but could be life-changing to a Miller Lite drinker."

In all, not too bad, though the unavoidable TVs put a damper on my enjoyment.

Oh, and they clearly like dogs, even if fully a third of their rules concern pee:

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Yes
Televisions? Yes, ubiquitous
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Maybe

The New York Times today has an interactive feature explaining how converting pre-war offices to apartments is a lot easier than converting modern office buildings. Simply put, before the 1940s, no one had air conditioning, so the buildings had more light and air:

These kinds of buildings, often dating to the early 20th century, make for simpler conversions because the same logic that shaped how they were designed as offices a century ago determines how apartments are planned today. Both share a rule of thumb that no interior space be more than 8 or 9 meters from a window that opens.

Iconic prewar skyscrapers like the Empire State Building were designed to this standard, and with this smallest unit in mind: a single rentable office 3 to 6 meters wide and about 8 meters from the windows to the common corridor. That was just the right amount of space for a receptionist’s anteroom and a windowed office.

Dan Kaplan, a senior partner with the architecture firm FXCollaborative in New York, identifies the private-eye suite in any film noir as a classic example: frosted glass doors, a secretary framed by interior transom windows, and then the detective in his private office flooded with natural light.

But the conversion puzzle gets more complex with offices built after World War II. That’s because the modern office has strayed far — increasingly far — from the window rule.

Two inventions liberated office space from the window: air-conditioning and the fluorescent light bulb. Just as the elevator and steel-cage construction enabled buildings to grow taller in the late 19th century, the architectural historian Carol Willis has written, fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning enabled their floor plates to become much deeper.

Then local rules add still more complexity: Maybe the building has to meet stricter seismic requirements as an apartment than as an office (much of the West Coast), or the whole facade must be replaced to meet current wind-load standards (hurricane-prone places). Or you can only convert 18 of the 32 existing office floors into residential use (in Manhattan, such use caps depend on a building’s age and location). Or units must average at least 500 square feet in size per building (downtown Chicago). Or every legal bedroom must have its own working window (New York requires this but Philadelphia and San Francisco don’t).

Still, the commercial real-estate collapse of the last three years has made conversions imperative in big-city downtowns like the Chicago Loop.

The result, probably in only a few years, will be to transform former dense commercial districts like the Loop into dense mixed-use districts that people want to live in. 

To paraphrase Hemingway, the pandemic began gradually, then suddenly. Three years ago today, we started March 12th with some trepidation and ended it by closing the world.

What a strange three years we've had.

After my work conference this week, and flying home yesterday, I had a rehearsal this morning and I've got a performance tomorrow. I'll try to catch up on some posts tomorrow morning.

Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson got a big nod this week:

Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts senator and former presidential candidate, is backing Brandon Johnson in the Chicago mayor’s race.

“Commissioner Brandon Johnson and I are both former public school teachers, and I can tell you that he understands what it takes to build a stronger Chicago for everyone. From education to public safety to housing, Brandon has a bold, forward-looking, progressive plan to move Chicago forward, and he has the experience to make those plans real,” Warren said in a statement.

I didn't catch Wednesday's debate, but given how close the race is, I expect they'll have more.

We had several options for group activities today. I did not choose the golf or spring training options. I chose this:

I should have photos of this and other bits (including two extra Brews & Choos stops!) over the weekend.

I'm in Phoenix for my company's Tech Forum, where all the technology professionals come together for a few days of panel discussions and heavy drinking networking events. This morning's lineup, including the keynote speaker, emphasized to me the dangers in the United States' declining ability to teach kids English and history.

I will have more details later, but for now I'll mention these three things. First, if you show the ubiquitous graph of the growing gap between productivity and wages that the US and UK have experienced since the mid-1970s and blame technology for this gap, I'm going to point you to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the history of capitalism as possibly contributing factors. I mean, there was a similar wage-productivity gap in the southern US from about 1800 to 1865, which technology certainly made possible, but ultimately public policy had a lot more to do with it.

Second, if you present your company's most exciting new AI technology, and someone in the audience asks you if you can show some non-scripted input, saying "no" calls your entire presentation into question. But that's OK; it was already the most boring presentation on an exciting topic I'd seen in years, so I the guy may have challenged them to go off-script with less-than-honorable intentions.

Finally, to the junior developer presenting for the first time to other professionals: if your slide has content on it obviously copied and pasted from the previous slide, your colleagues will forgive you with a little razzing. If you then cannot for the life of you figure out what the content should be, your colleagues—particularly the more senior ones—will think you've blown off your homework and as a consequence your presentation has wasted their time. Because what am I learning from you anyway, if you have not learned it yourself?

What does this have to do with humanities education? I guarantee all of these presenters were engineers without much history or English study, and their lack of breadth showed.

Next up: the "Sonora Desert Hike" experience, with 45 of my best friends. It's cool and cloudy right now so I anticipate I will enjoy it immensely.

Why set an alarm when your hotel room looks east?

And hey: Arizona has topography! Also not something we really get back home.

I'm in the desert southwest for a company event. They gave me this (East) view:

Since I last visited Phoenix in 2015, they've added a light rail system. It got me from the baggage retrieval carousel at the airport to the hotel (which is by the convention center, pictured above) in 32 minutes, which I appreciate.

The first airplane they had us on to get here broke, so I got to Phoenix two hours later than planned, which I did not appreciate.

I've got nothing scheduled for the next two hours so I'm going to explore. Unlike the 39°C that baked my last visit, right now it's about 22°C and pleasant, and I need 3,000 more steps for today.

The unfunny cartoonist answered a few questions from the Post:

“I shook the box intentionally. I did not realize how hard I shook it,” he told The Washington Post via text.

Adams tells The Post that his remarks that day were intended to be hyperbole, while also contending that he was responding to a larger sociopolitical narrative. He does not apologize for what he said in the episode — viewed more than 360,000 times — though he asserts that he disavows racism. Meanwhile, on a follow-up “Real Coffee” podcast, he called both White people and the press “hate groups.”

“Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for out-of-context news of course),” Adams tweeted Thursday. “Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting me.”

We have yet to see whether Adams' financial acumen has the same results as his cultural sensitivity. He reports his income has collapsed, but he did make a lot of money back when he wrote funny cartoons.

It's sad, really, but I did tell you so.