Having the morning free, and having a lot of cool air and sun, I took a quick stroll around Nashville. I'll have more later, but for now, here's the Tennessee State Capitol, apparently under construction:
Of course, since the Tennessee General Assembly has a well-Gerrymandered 75-24 Republican majority, I would expect they're actually deconstructing the Capitol. But whatever.
I also passed by Riverfront Station, the downtown terminus of Nashville's adorable little 6-times-a-day toy commuter train:
It may be a really sad attempt to have real public transportation, but it's also a train station, meaning there are Brews & Choos-qualified breweries right by my hotel. I'm planning to visit one today. You'll have to wait until at least Friday for the reviews, though. And also for better photo editing.
Kudos to our conference team and the hotel for getting me exactly the room I hoped for, a high floor with an east view:
I've got some free time this morning, so after I finish reading the news (argh!) I'm going to take a walk. Updates as conditions warrant.
Leading the hit parade of horrors this morning, London's Heathrow Airport completely shut down after an electric transformer caught fire yesterday, leading to over 1,100 flight cancellations so far. Flight operations have resumed, sort of, but Europe's busiest airport going offline will cause rippling failures throughout world aviation for a few more days at least.
Speaking of massive transport failures, we have yet more evidence that the Clown Prince of X knows dick about cars (or rockets or software or anything, really) as Tesla recalled nearly all of its Cybertrucks after people discovered the door panels can fall off. That's if they don't rust, or crumple, or warp, or cut your fingers off.
I Googled "how bad is the Tesla Cybertruck" and got so many responses I had to whittle the search down to just the last month, and it still took a couple of pages to find a source that most people trust: Consumers Union. And they don't like it at all. (I love this bit, too: "Unfortunately, we can’t ask Tesla any follow-up questions about the vehicle—even clarifying ones that could help us better understand it—because Tesla dissolved its media relations department in 2020, and the company did not respond when contacted through its press email." This is the guy now destroying the US government. You were warned, and you voted for the OAFPOTUS anyway.)
Time to walk the dog again, now that it's up to 9°C.
As predicted, none of yesterday's snow stuck around. Here's (a new edit of) yesterday's photo:
And the same spot just over 24 hours later:
In fact, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ has remained above freezing since just before 9am Monday, though it did scrape along at 0.1°C for a couple of hours last night.
Today's forecast predicts a high of 14°C, and this weekend's Garmin challenge predicts Cassie will get a 5 kilometer walk this afternoon.
Before getting to the weather, I don't anticipate any quiet news days for the next couple of years, do you?
- Someone who owns at least 16 rooms and condos in the OAFPOTUS's Wabash Ave. building in downtown Chicago has sued, alleging that—wait for it—the organization running the building is bilking investors. I mean, how preposterous!
- Speaking of corruption flowing from the OAFPOTUS like toxic waste from a Union Carbide plant, Molly White mourns the end of SEC oversight of the crypto industry.
- Former US Representative Adam Kitzinger (R-IL), the last sane Republican, calls the "desperate, weak, and ultimately meaningless bluff" that the OAFPOTUS won't honor President Biden's pardons.
- James Fallows steps through the "correlation of forces" that defines the struggle between the OAFPOTUS and the Constitution.
- Jennifer Rubin interviews Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), "a man refreshingly candid about his disgust with the current administration's policies and its lack of humane leadership."
- Yascha Mounk thinks "the World Happiness Report is a scam," just a pile of elite misinformation.
- A sophisticated supply-chain attack may have put 20,000 GitHub projects at risk of subtle but far-reaching security problems.
Finally, the snow that covered Chicago and parts north and west has indeed melted in the past few hours, even though we've barely gotten above 2°C:
The sun passed directly overhead the equator just past 4am Chicago time, marking what many people call the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. And because it's March in Chicago, this is what Cassie and I squished through on her way to dog school this morning:
And this was the view from my train into the Loop half an hour later:
Of course, this being March, I can see from my office window that the sun is about to come out and melt every last snowflake from the ground before I pick Cassie up from dog school:
Let me zoom in and enhance, because it may not be clear what's going on here:
The area east (to the right) of the blue line is cloudy; to the west it's completely clear. The white stuff you see between the black lines is snow, which will almost entirely melt because of the clear skies and warming temperatures. It should get up to 4°C today and 13°C tomorrow--more than enough heat to let us forget this unfortunate precipitation ever happened. In fact, the temperature didn't even fall below freezing at Inner Drive Technology WHQ overnight, halting its descent at 0.1°C and holding steady under the clouds.
Ah, spring!
It wouldn't be a day ending in "y" without people looking at some stupid thing the OAFPOTUS said and asking "why?" Or, you know, lots of people:
Finally, not that I complain about the weather enough already, but just look at the cold front that came through yesterday around 7:30pm:
I got caught outside wearing just a sweater and was quite unhappy. As in every March, we just want warmer weather already. Like, you know, yesterday afternoon.
Who doesn't like the fun and adventure of spring weather in Chicago? I mean, you don't see temperature graphs like this coming from Los Angeles:
At 5:07 pm on Friday—only about 40 hours ago—it was 23.3°C, I had all my windows open, and I had a polo shirt on when I walked Cassie a few minutes later. Now it's 1.2°C, the temperature has dropped steadily since 3pm yesterday, and I'm about to put on a winter coat because it's bloody snowing.
This week we'll continue to whipsaw around the freezing mark, with forecast high temperatures of 11°C tomorrow and 18°C on Tuesday, followed by forecast lows of -1°C Wednesday night and 0°C on Thursday night.
Eventually we'll have consistently warm temperatures, and in fairness the snow isn't sticking. But March really knows how to torture us.
As forecast, O'Hare had an official high temperature of 26°C yesterday, the warmest temperature recorded there since 4pm on October 30th and the normal high temperature for June 10th. Inner Drive Technology WHQ got all the way up to 23.3°C just after 5pm, so we had all the windows open until the squall line blasted through after midnight.
Today we have a lot of wind and a lot of dust blown up from storms in Texas and Oklahoma. Without the dust, we'd have clear blue skies right now:
Remember what I wrote Thursday about how the air usually looked this time of year back in the 1980s? Today is just a little hazier. Well, OK, quite a bit hazier:
Even Cassie is wondering what that scent is:
That's the scent of climate change, baby. Same as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Fitting that we've got the resurrected zombie corpse of Herbert Hoover in the White House today.
It's 21°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and 22°C at O'Hare right now. In addition to being the normal high temperature for May 20th, that reading at O'Hare is the warmest since 11pm on October 30th. The forecast for O'Hare predicts a high near 26°C, which is normal for June 10th.
Which is all a long way of saying: I'm about to change into a polo shirt, take Cassie for a walk, and open every window in my house—not necessarily in that order.
By the way, the eclipse last night was really cool. I only wish I could have fallen back asleep more quickly after getting up to view it.