The Daily Parker

I've got tickets to see Straight No Chaser with some chorus friends at Ravinia Park tonight—on the lawn. Unfortunately, for the last 8 hours or so, our weather radar has looked like this:

I haven't got nearly as much disappointment as the folks sitting in Grant Park right now waiting for a NASCAR race that will never happen in this epic rainfall. (I think Mother Nature is trying to tell NASCAR something. Or at least trying to tell Chicago NASCAR fans something. Hard to tell.)

While I'm waiting to see if it will actually stop raining before my train leaves at 5:49pm, I have this to read:

• New York Magazine tries to understand why Robert F Kennedy, Jr, thinks he should run for president.
• The New Yorker has a long look at the Titan submersible, "an accident waiting to happen."
• National Geographic reminds you not to drink right before you go to bed.
• The Atlantic's Lora Kelly explains why air travel has gotten a lot worse this year.
• The Guardian reminds everyone what happens to people who humiliate Vladimir Putin.

I am happy the roofers finished my side of my housing development already. The people across the courtyard have discovered the temporary waterproofing was a bit more temporary than the roofers intended.

Welcome to stop #83 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Silver Harbor Brewing, 721 Pleasant St., St Joseph, Mich.
Train line: Amtrak, St Joseph
Time from Chicago: 103 minutes
Distance from station: 500 m

Stopping by the best brewery in St Joseph, Mich., does not mean I'm going to expand the Brews and Choos Project to include every brewery, distillery, cidery, and winery accessible by train from Chicago, no matter how far away, but it's a tempting prospect. No, there's still a 2-hour time limit on the trip. But I am spending more time in Southwest Michigan lately, and probably taking the train up there occasionally, so why not try some beer?

My friends from the area told me that Silver Harbor Brewing was the best brewery in the city, so when I visited them yesterday, we stopped in. I had the brisket flatbread (excellent) and a flight of 5x 120 mL pours.

I started with the Tourist Trap American lager (5.1%, 18 IBU), a great example of the style with some maltiness and a crisp finish. The Hops, Sweat, and Tears AIPA (6.8%, 66 IBU) gave me a well-balanced bitterness, with some pine and a hint of citrus. The Pick Me, I'm Hazy IPA (7%, 55 IBU) burst out with fruit and Citra hops and finished perfectly. The Rye-Donkulus Baltic Porter (9%, 29 IBU) finished out the tasting with my meal; my first note is "oh that's tasty" and "long sweet finish, great complexity." I saved the Golden Ticket Imperial Chocolate Stout (9.5%, 62 IBU) for dessert, and got rewarded with cascading complex dark chocolate, molasses, and vanilla. Then we took the 7-year-old to play Connect-Four (she almost won) and walked around for half an hour so I could metabolize the stout.

And of course, every server passing our patio table stopped to pat Cassie.

Important note, though: while you only have to walk 500 meters from the St Joseph Amtrak station to the brewery, through a cute, summer-resort downtown, Amtrak clearly believes people only take day trips from St Joseph to Chicago. The Pere Marquette departs Chicago daily at 6:30 pm Central, then runs non-stop to St Joseph by 9:13 pm Eastern. The return trip leaves St Joseph at 8:09 am Eastern and arrives in Chicago at 9:08 am Central. Great, it's closer to Chicago than Kenosha or Elburn, but Christ on a cracker, Amtrak, could you run a second train favoring Chicago-to-Michigan day trips?

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

Here is the state of things as we go into the second half of 2023:

• The government-owned but independently-edited newspaper Wiener Zeitung published its last daily paper issue today after being in continuous publication since 8 August 1703. Today's headline: "320 years, 12 presidents, 10 emperors, 2 republics, 1 newspaper."
• Paula Froelich blames Harry Windsor's and Megan Markle's declining popularity on a simple truth: "Not just because they were revealed as lazy, entitled dilettantes, but because they inadvertently showed themselves for who they really are: snobs. And Americans really, really don’t like snobs."
• Starting tomorrow, Amtrak can take you from Chicago to St Louis (480 km) in 4:45, at speeds up to (gasp!) 175 km/h. Still not really a high-speed train but at least it's a 30-minute and 50 km/h improvement since 2010. (A source at Amtrak told me the problem is simple: grade crossings. They can't go 225 km/h over a grade crossing because, in a crash, F=ma, and a would be very high.)
• The Federal Trade Commission will start fining websites up to $10,000 for each fake review it publishes. "No-gos include reviews that misrepresent someone’s experience with a product and that claim to be written by someone who doesn’t exist. Reviews also can’t be written by insiders like company employees without clear disclosures."
• A humorous thought problem involving how many pews an 80-year-old church can have explains the idiocy behind parking minimums.
• Chicago bike share Divvy turned 10 on Wednesday. You can now get one in any of Chicago's 50 wards, plus a few suburbs.
• Actor Alan Arkin, one of my personal favorites for his deadpan hilarity, died yesterday at age 89.

And finally, the Chicago Tribune's food critic Nick Kindelsperger tried 21 Chicago hot dogs so you don't have to to find the best in the city.

My neighborhood, yesterday morning:

Unfortunately, tomorrow's parade might get a bit damp.

I think I finally cracked the nut on a work problem that has consumed our team for almost three years. Unfortunately I can't write about it yet. I can say, though, that the solution became a lot clearer just a couple of weeks after our team got slightly smaller. I will say nothing more. Just remember, there are two types of people: those who can infer things from partial evidence.

Just a few articles left to read before I take Cassie on her pre-dinner ambulation:

• Titanic director James Cameron, who has made 30 dives to the famed wreck, slammed the news media for "a cruel, slow turn of the screw for four days" as he, the US Navy, and probably most of the rescuers already figured out the submarine Titan had imploded on its descent Sunday morning.
• The US Navy in turn reported that its Atlantic sonar net had picked up the implosion when it happened, but didn't explain (see re: inferences, above) that it waited until the accident had been confirmed by other sources because the Navy's sonar capabilities are highly classified military secrets. And since the Titan didn't have any kind of black-box recorder, they would not make any effort to bring it up from the bottom.
• New York Times columnist Jesse Wegman slaps his forehead and asks, "Does Justice Alito (R) hear himself?" (See re: inferences, above.) James Fallows argues that "it is time for outside intervention, and supervision" of the Court. Josh Marshall sees the "fish and flights" as emblematic of deeper corruption: "The guiding jurisprudence might best be described as 'Too bad, suckas' or perhaps 'Sucks to be you.' "
• Biologists Jerry A Coyne (University of Chicago emeritus) and Luana S Maroja  (Williams College) argue that ideology is "poisoning" the study and teaching of biology.
• The 2 quadrillion liters (give or take) of groundwater we humans have pumped out in the last 30 years found its way to the oceans, redistributing the mass of the earth and shifting our planet's axis by about 800 mm—not enough to change the seasons, but enough to subtly interfere with global positioning and astronomy.
• LEDs in street lights and houses have added about 10% more light pollution to our skies each year, according to new research. Of course, LEDs provide more light and save 90% of the energy we used to waste on incandescent and nonmetal-vapor lights, so...

And finally, the Illinois legislature extended by 5 years the Covid-era regulations allowing restaurants to sell go-cups. We're not New Orleans by any stretch, but you can continue to take that margarita home with your leftover burritos.

I will now retire to my lovely patio...

The Writers Guild strike seems remote from people watching streaming shows right now because the big streamers still have a lot of film ready to go. That, and most viewers don't even understand many of the things the writers have demanded. Hollywood Reporter recently got 14 writers from the ABC show Happy Endings to talk about how having all that experience in one room made it a better show—and how the "mini-rooms" and siphoning creative control to line producers who have never written so much as a short story are making most shows unwatchable:

I was talking to a writer on the picket line who is a supervising producer under an overall deal and she had been meeting up until the strike to go run shows — and she has never been on set one time. I said, “Ask yourself: Why do they want you to get this title of showrunner if you don’t have the experience to do the job?” That’s the real question, right? Because they want to create this fake position where the line producer is really in charge and they don’t show the showrunner the budget. They want to change what a “showrunner” is because they know they can’t do the job without everything we laid out of how you become a showrunner. They don’t want showrunners like there used to be. There’s a reason why they’re starting to restrict access of information to showrunners. This feels, sadly, like a bigger plan beyond just the staff size issue where they’ve said, “Oh, it’s a budget thing.” I was not sold on the minimum writer requirement at first.

If they limit your ability to make changes in the budget, they can control exactly what happens. On my most recent show, I had to fight for the writers to go to set for their episodes. And it was one of those issues where if I had not had access to the budget — which some showrunners are reporting that they do not have access to anymore — I wouldn’t be able to say, “Let’s find this money somehow.” Or when they told me that what I wanted to shoot was not shootable, then I wouldn’t be able to say, “No, it is shootable, but we need to shoot a shorter episode.” So unfortunately, it just allows people to control things on a studio and network level where they have people that work for them versus showrunners where sometimes they feel showrunners are off doing their own thing.

How many times have we seen a show that doesn’t totally make sense by the time we get to the end? It’s because you didn’t have a room of people breaking that story together, writing that story together, rewriting it together. You didn’t have ambassadors for each episode following it through to production, remembering those things so that if something’s getting rewritten in episode seven, the person who wrote episode two is like, “No, that’s going to screw up a thing that we started over here.” There isn’t a lot of thought that goes into it because these aren’t little movies. It’s not the same medium. You see a lot of people complaining about television now, that it’s not how it used to be. And everyone’s wondering why that is. And I personally think this is why that is.

On these mini-rooms, all the writers go off to script and aren’t paid for the week that they’re writing. If that were me, I would not be putting in my best effort because I’d be running around trying to find another job while I’m also expected to write the script. You turn it in and you’re like, “Good luck, I hope it works out for you,” because you’re not getting paid to rewrite it. And they’re all being written at the same time, so if your show is serialized, then your showrunner is left with these eight Frankenstein scripts that they have to make sense of as you’re going into production. You’re being set up to fail. If you are a first-time writer, if you’re a writer of color, if you’re a woman, that shit is 10 times harder for you because you’re not allowed to take up space in that way, so you have to eat it and keep going, and eventually you burn out. And those writers didn’t learn anything and the showrunner is put in an unfair position. All of it is bad.

Remember this time. By the '30s, you will hate everything about television if this keeps up.

More photos from three weeks ago. Linzer Gasse, Salzburg:

Along the train line from Freilassing to Berchtesgaden, approximately here:

Berchtesgaden, near the border of Schönau am Königsee:

And just a little ways farther up the Köningsseer Ache:

More photos. The Czech countryside, approximately here:

Hafnersteig, in Vienna's Innere Stadt:

The Schloss Belvedere, with (I am told) an Apollo capsule:

I finally got 15 minutes to start going through some of the 740 or so photos I took in Europe three weeks ago. (It turns out, when you go on an 8-day vacation, stuff piles up while you're gone.) Here are a few from Prague.

Senát Parlamentu České republiky:

Prague, from Pražský hrad:

Národní muzeum:

Staroměstská radnice:

More coming this weekend.

I had a lot going on this morning, so I'm only now snarfing down a Chipotle bowl. Also, I'm going to have to read these things tomorrow:

• Over 100 candidates, including a dog, will stand for election in Toronto's mayoral election on the 26th.
• Writing for Mother Jones, Ali Breland thinks the content-creator rebellion at Reddit won't stop what Corey Doctorow calls "the enshittification" of online platforms.
• Similarly, private-equity debt has killed yet another good company making good products, Insta-Pot.
• After what insiders call a deliberate campaign by New York mayor Eric Adams to strip her of power, New York City's police commissioner Keechant Sewell abruptly resigned Monday.
• Despite yesterday's rain around Chicago, the drought in Illinois has gotten worse.
• Save the firefiles!
• Tinley Park, Ill., has launched a brewery trolley that technically puts 2 new breweries on the Brews & Choos list. (I had plans to return to Banging Gavel later this summer anyway, as they're about to open the Vogt House to the public.)
• The list of people excited about the NASCAR race in downtown Chicago keeps getting shorter.

Finally, today is the 35th anniversary of the best baseball movie of all time, Bull Durham. If I had time I'd watch it tonight.