The Daily Parker

Barret Hansen, better known as Dr Demento, has announced his retirement:

“It’s been a blast,” he wrote in a message to fans, “but I have come to the decision that I need to hang up my top hat soon.”

Throughout the course of his long career, Demento introduced several fantastically silly songs into the public consciousness, including “Fish Heads” by the comedy duo Barnes and Barns, and “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell.

But his greatest achievement took place in 1976 when he dug out a cassette mailed into him by a 16-year-old high school student named Alfred Yankovic, and played his homemade song “Belvedere Cruisin'” on the national airwaves.

When I was a kid, I spent my summers in L.A. I started listening to the Dr Demento show on KMET (6pm Sunday) where I pissed myself laughing at "Another One Rides the Bus" and Tom "T-Bone" Stankus's "Existential Blues."

I hope he enjoys his retirement as much as we all enjoyed his shows.

The music legend has died at 82. Barenaked Ladies popped into my mind when I read the story.

Meanwhile, I've got a meeting in 10 minutes, so let me also add just small note how the OAFPOTUS has affected Chicago. A friend of mine works for Northwestern University, and she is pissed off:

In a message to the Northwestern community, the school’s leadership said the new measures would include a faculty and staff hiring freeze, reductions in academic budgets, and a “0% merit pool with no bonuses in lieu of merit increases,” among other actions.

“Like a number of our peer universities, we have now reached a moment when the University must take a series of cost-cutting measures designed to ensure our institution’s fiscal stability now and into an uncertain future. These are not decisions we come to lightly. The challenges we face are many, some of which have been building for some time and some of which are new,” the message said.

Other cost-cutting measures include modifications to the health insurance program and additional non-personnel budget reductions. The school said more information on each of the actions would be coming in the days and weeks ahead.

I'd also point out my agreement with Josh Marshall on how states like Illinois and California, by being net contributors to the Federal budget, are essentially funding the war on themselves.

We've got 19 more months of this shit, folks.

Lunch today will be a sampler of ribs from the first vendor at Ribfest that looks appealing. Then Cassie goes to sleep-away camp and I go to a performance call in Glenview at 3pm. So tune in tomorrow morning for the first rib report.

Conductor and composer Matthew Aucoin suggests we call it "written music:"

The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment. Like every other sector of cultural life, classical music has been roiled over the past decade by intense debates about the field’s ongoing lack of diversity, among performing artists, composers, and leaders of musical organizations. The stakes of these discussions—which have involved charges of Eurocentrism, head-in-the-sand elitism, even white supremacy—have at times felt existential, given many institutions’ financial straits. Maintaining a 90-piece orchestra is generally a money-losing proposition in America today, and as a result, classical-music organizations lean heavily on private donations. Why, many onlookers have asked, should an orchestra or opera company gobble up millions of dollars from wealthy sponsors to subsidize the salaries of musicians who mainly perform music by white men from centuries past, music for which (judging by ticket sales) demand is limited? What is classical music, whom is it for, and what about it is worth defending?

Our answers to these questions will depend on what exactly we love about this music, and what we care about preserving, enriching, and expanding. Claiming that classical music deserves a prominent place in American culture merely because we want to safeguard a particular sound, style, or cultural or ethnic lineage—“music that sounds like Brahms,” or “music from one of three Central European countries”—would be a losing cause.

But a better answer is out there. Rather than defend the “classical” in classical music, I want to champion a particular creative process. What links Hildegard von Bingen and Kaija Saariaho, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Benjamin, is not a specific sound or aesthetic but a shared technology of transmission. At its core, classical music isn’t “classical.” It is written music.

His essay from this month's Atlantic is worth a full read.

I had a delightful 2-hour lunch with a friend I've not seen in a while, after a morning of non-stop meetings. I also updated a piece of software that gets deployed tomorrow. I've got about 20 minutes now to jot down all of the things I hope to read later today:

• An Army helicopter on a training flight collided with an American Airlines CRJ on approach to DCA last night, killing 64 people; the OAFPOTUS blamed black folk. (I'm not kidding, he really did.)
• Paul Rosensweig explains how the flurry of orders coming out of the White House targeted the weak spots of the US government, "precisely [those parts] whose oversight might interfere with Trump’s activities, or those of his allies."
• Mark S. Zaid and Andrew P. Bakaj agree.
• David A Graham expands on this thought, looking at the funding-freeze memo and the chaos it caused.
• Matt Ford chuckles over the effort's "crash and burn."
• Paul Krugman points out that the Elon Musk-driven effort to get rid of a sizeable chunk of said bureaucracy is "a scam and a purge." 
• Jamie Bouie just calls the administration "delusional."

Finally, singer Marianne Faithfull has died at 78. She will be missed.

After my general statistics for 2024, here are the books and media I consumed since 2023.

Books

I didn't read as many books in 2024 as in 2023, mainly because they were longer. Any one of the Culture novels is the equivalent of 3 or 4 times The Outsiders, for example. The 30 books I started (and 26 I finished) included:

• Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. An excellent handbook for the kakistocratic country we now live in.
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. I hope this does not become a handbook for the kakistocratic country we now live in. (Still reading this. It's not something one just breezes through.)
• Iain Banks, Raw Spirit, his hilarious travelogue of Scottish distilleries, plus the Culture novels Excession, Inversions, Look to Windward, Matter, Surface Detail, and The Hydrogen Sonata. I also finally read The Crow Road.
• Christopher Buehlman, The Daughters' War. Prequel to his previous novel The Black-Tongued Thief.
• Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, which I first read in 2001 and wanted to read again.
• Cory Doctorow, The Lost Cause. Imagine what the world will look like when today's alt-right go to nursing homes and the yet-to-be-born generation has to take care of them.
• David Farley, Modern Software Engineering. Decent recapitulation of stuff I've known for years, but updated.
• Scott Farris, Almost President, short biographies of the men (it's from 2008) who lost presidential elections and still influenced politics for years after.
• William Gibson, The Peripheral. Quite different than the TV series, but both were great.
• Charles King, Every Valley. The history of Händel's Messiah. (Not finished yet.)
• Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. Absolutely essential reading if you want even to try understanding the horribly damaged generation born after 1995.
• John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation and Agent to the Stars. I absolutely love Scalzi's writing.
• John R. Schmidt, Authentic Chicago, a collection of historical vignettes from an authentic Chicago historian.
• Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies. A quick read that helped me understand how my new boss looks at software team management.
• Andrew Weir, The Martian. Another one that I have meant to read for a while.

Other Media

In 2024, I watched 24 films, a bit more TV than usual, two concerts, and one comedy show:

• Films I would recommend: American Sniper (2014), The Beekeeper (2024), Constantine (2005), Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), Dune Part 2 (2024), Furiosa (2024), The Gentlemen (2019), The Intern (2015), The Martian (2015), The Menu (2022), Sicario (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), and the entire John Wick series (2014 to present).
• Films you can skip: The Good Shepherd (2006) and Maestro (2023).
• TV shows: The 100 (first two episodes, 2014), The Bear season 1 (2022), The Boys season 4 (2024), The Decameron (2024), Designated Survivor (2016, first two episodes), Fallout (2024), Ghosts (first season of the UK version, first two episodes of the inferior US version), House of the Dragon (both seasons, 2023-2024), Justified season 1 (2010), KAOS (2024), Killing Eve season 1 (2018), Once Upon a Time season 1 (2011), The Peripheral (2023), Rome season 1 and some of season 2 (2005), Silo season 2 (2024), Slow Horses season 4 (2024), Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 (2024), Tales from the Apocalypse (2023), Three Body (2024), and The Umbrella Academy season 4 (2024).
• I saw two live performances at Ravinia Festival: a live orchestra version of The Princess Bride (1987) and the CSO doing Holst's The Planets.
• I also saw Liz Miele when she visited Chicago, and Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! in December.

A lot of good things in there, and a couple of dogs. Actually, only one dog, who very much enjoyed all the time I spent on the couch with her.

Despite getting back to a relative normal in 2023, 2024 seemed to revert back to how things went in 2020—just without the pandemic. Statistically, though, things remained steady, for the most part:

• I posted 480 times on The Daily Parker, 20 fewer than in 2023 and 17 below the long-term median. January and July had the most posts (48) and April and December the fewest (34). The mean of 40.0 was slightly lower than the long-term mean (41.34), with a standard deviation of 5.12, reflecting a mixed posting history this year.
  
• Flights went up slightly, to 17 segments and 25,399 flight miles (up from 13 and 20,541), the most of either since 2018:
  
• I visited 3 countries (Germany, the UK, and France) and 5 US states (Washington, North Carolina, Arizona, California, Texas). Total time traveling: 189 hours (up from 156).
• Cassie got 369 hours of walks (down from 372) and at least that many hours of couch time.
• Fitness numbers for 2024: 4,776,451 steps and 4,006 km (average: 13,050 per day), up from 4.62m steps and 3,948 km in 2023. Plus, I hit my step goal 343 times (341 in 2023). I also did my second-longest walk ever on October 19th, 43.23 km.
• Driving went way down. My car logged only 3,812 km (down from 5,009) on 54 L of gasoline (down from 87), averaging 1.4 L/100 km (167 MPG). I last filled up April 8th, and I still have half a tank left. Can I make it a full year without refueling?
• Total time at work: 1,807 hours at my real job (down from 1,905) and 43 hours on consulting and side projects, including 841 hours in the office (up from 640), plus 114 hours commuting (up from 91). For most of the summer we had 3-days-a-week office hours, but starting in November, that went back to 1 day a week.
• The Apollo Chorus consumed 225 hours in 2024, with 138 hours rehearsing and performing (cf. 247 hours in 2023).

In all, fairly consistent with previous years, though I do expect a few minor perturbations in 2025: less time in the office, less time on Apollo, and more time walking Cassie.

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago has performed Händel's Messiah 145 years in a row. Our 146th will happen at 7pm Saturday December 14th at DePaul's Holtschneider Performance Center and at 2pm Sunday December 15th at Millar Chapel, Evanston.

We've gotten really good at this. And Josefien Stoppelenburg is the absolute queen of melismas. Don't miss this!

Welcome to stop #118 on the Brews and Choos project, which announced its bloody closure just three days after I visited.

Brewery: Ravinia Brewing, 2601 W Diversey Ave., Chicago
Train line: CTA Blue Line, Logan Square
Time from Chicago: 16 minutes
Distance from station: 1.4 km

I reviewed the original Ravinia Brewing location in the historic Ravinia neighborhood of Highland Park so early in the Brews & Choos Project that Covid-19 had only just started entering most people's awareness. Almost by accident two of the beers my Brews Buddy and I tried were the same as the first Ravinia beers I tried in February 2020.

The Steep Ravine IPA (7.2%, 22 IBU) and the Baldwin barrel-aged porter (6.5%, 35 IBU) tasted just as good as they did 4½ years ago. We liked the new ones, too, with a big caveat. The Ludwig barrel-aged Oktoberfest (6.9%) "taste[d] like an Oktoberfest, but more so: more intense, syrupy flavor," she said, with which I completely agree. The Diversey Station juicy session pale ale (4.0%) had a good fruit-hop balance and will come up again next time I visit.

We differed a bit on two other tastes. Of the Infusion of the Week (see above, bottom right), she said "It's growing on me. Once I got accustomed to the rosemary, I could adjust my palate, and it just works." I said, "this beer is not for me." And of the Casa de Guava Berliner Weißbier, with its cloying, sweet, overwhelming guava flavor, she said it was "clean and refreshing, tart but not too tart, nice finish." I gagged involuntarily and, after recovering, said "no, oh no, oh no no no." (This is why we make a good team.)

Since we had just completely failed to finish the outsized pretzel at Pilot Project, and despite the 2 km walk between the two, we simply had no appetite for tacos. But the tacos at their Highland Park taproom are excellent, and we've had them several times before Ravinia Festival concerts.

Finally, in a couple of months, Ravinia Brewing will rebrand as Steep Ravine Brewing because of the SLAPP suit brought by Ravinia Festival. No one wanted this, except probably Ravinia Festival's legal department. And if Illinois' anti-SLAPP law had broader protections that included trademark disputes, Ravinia Brewing probably would have won a countersuit. Alas. I'll update the Brews & Choos reviews once the re-brand becomes official.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Many, difficult to avoid
Serves food? Yes
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes

"It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on his not understanding it."—Upton Sinclair.

We lead our news roundup today with the biggest Chicago transit story of the year, with the major players acting just as Sinclair would predict:

• Chicago's three transit-agency chiefs don't see their complete lack of coordination on top of impressive administrative bloat as any reason to consolidate into one metropolitan agency. (So why doesn't Chicago have a Clipper Card yet, then?)
• The Sun-Times, quickly becoming the paper of record (as the Tribune gets hollowed out by the hedge fund that owns it), calls bullshit on them.
• Unsurprisingly, Chicago-area residents overwhelmingly support consolidating transit agencies, because where's my Clipper Card?!
• The CTA train operator injured when he missed a signal and slammed his Yellow Line train into a maintenance train had a blood-alcohol level of 0.06, according to the NTSB.
• Like me, James Carville isn't losing too much sleep over the election, for three reasons he outlines in his New York Times op-ed today.

Finally, Mike Post is sad that most television shows no longer have theme songs. So am I. But now I have the Quincy ME theme song in my head...