The Daily Parker

The Economist reports this week that the Tsujiki fish market will close at the end of November:

Squeezed between the Sumida river and the Ginza shopping district, Tsukiji is creaking at the seams. Some 60,000 people work under its leaky roof, and hundreds of forklifts, carrying everything from sea urchins to whale meat, careen across bumpy floors. The site’s owner, the city government, wants it moved.

The final blow was Tokyo’s successful bid to host the 2020 Olympics. A new traffic artery will cut through Tsukiji, transporting visitors to the games’ venues. Part of the site will become a temporary press centre, says Yutaka Maeyasui, the executive in charge of shifting the market. Our time is up, he says, glancing around his decrepit office. The site has become too small, old and crowded. An earthquake could bring the roof down.

I'm planning to re-visit Tokyo in October, so I might just get in under the wire. When I visited in November 2011, I didn't get up early enough to watch the fish auction (which starts around 4am); this autumn, I may force myself to see one of the last ever.

As the work week slowly grinds down, I've lined these articles up for consumption tomorrow morning:

• Paul Krugman has thoughts about Fitbits.
• Chicago is going ahead with a $1bn plan to finish the O'Hare Modernization Project.
• Elsewhere in our fair city, a Meetup group walks the entire length of a Chicago street once a month. I might join.
• Monkeys can't own copyrights in the U.S., even for their own selfies.

And now it's off to the barber shop. And then the pub.

It's a slow, agonizing death:

A report from the real estate service firm NGKF released late last year provides new numbers on an ongoing phenomenon: the slow, agonizing death of the American office park. The report looks at five far-flung office tenancy submarkets—Santa Clara, in the San Francisco Bay Area; Denver; the O’Hare region in Chicago; Reston/Herndon outside of Washington, D.C.; and Parsippany, New Jersey—and finds a general aura of decline.

Between 14 and 22 percent of the suburban office inventory in these areas is “in some stage of obsolescence,” suggesting that between 600 million and 1 billion square feet of office space are far from ideal for the modern company and worker. That’s about 7.5 percent of the country’s entire office inventory.

I would almost rather go to prison than work in a suburban office park. I mean, take this one outside Cincinnati, for example. I can't believe I had to spend four weeks there:

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. I'm posting it as a regular post in addition to posting it as a permanent page, to maintain deep-linking archiving. The previous post was here.

In just a few hours we'll see the latest sunrise of winter, until the days just before the change back to Standard Time in November. That will bring us something really rare: the latest sunrise in Chicago until November 2027, at 7:29am on November 6th. Thank leap years and orbital eccentricity for that. This statement holds true in all parts of the U.S. and Canada that observe daylight saving time until the first Sunday in November. The worst place to be that morning will be in the U.P. of Michigan, where the sun won't rise until after 8:30am. That's almost British.

You can get sunrise information for your location at wx-now.com.

Here are some numbers illustrating 2015 (cf. 2014 also):

• I took only 14 trips and flew only 25 segments, visiting 7 states and 4 countries*.
• Of those, 11 flight segments took off or landed outside the US, which is the highest proportion of international-to-domestic flights in any single year. Those years in which I've flown more international segments were also heavy-travel years in general. For example, in 2001, my heaviest travel year ever, I flew 15 international segments—my record—out of 63 total—also my record.
• I flew 67,187 km, barely re-qualifying (with bonus points) for American Airlines elite status.
• The Daily Parker had 493 posts, the lowest since 2010. The daily mean dropped to 1.35, continuing a slight downward trend since 2013.
• Chargeable hours no longer made any difference as I no longer work as a consultant. However, I did log 148.82 hours walking Parker, 10 more than in 2014.
• Reading suffered a bit. I started 21 books but only finished 15. On the other hand, I went to more operas in 2015 than any year previously, and also ate at more Michelin-starred restaurants than in the preceding 45 years combined.
• 2015 was the first full year for which I have complete Fitbit statistics. During the year, I walked 4.67 million steps, averaging 12,787 per day; slept 2,287 hours, averaging 6.3 per night; and had a net loss of 1.2 kg. (Though at one point in 2015 I had lost 4.1 kg, and am now hoping that the slight bump in November and December was simply holiday food.)

In 2016, I expect more travel, more Daily Parker posts, about the same number of books, and the same number of live performances.

* Germany, Poland, the UK, and Italy; DC, Virginia, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, California, and Texas.

Sorry, Hawai'i. Your UTC-10 is a full day behind Kiritimati, where it's already coming up on Saturday. But happy new year regardless!

And to the few sailors and submariners hanging out in UTC-11, happy new year to you, too, in an hour or so.

Happy New Year from the Daily Parker. It's just past midnight in Chicago, so it's the "real" new year for me and everyone I'm with.

Here's to 2016 improving on 2015, no matter who you are or how good 2015 turned out.

It's just past midnight UTC, so happy new year to all the world's properly-configured computers, wherever they may be. And to the UK, Portugal, and much of West Africa.

It's already 6:30 am on Kiritimati (Christmas) Island. I was going to have The Daily Parker automatically wish Kiritimatians a happy new year right at midnight, but I didn't think about it early enough, clearly.

So: Happy new year, Kiribati, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, Irkutsk, Singapore, and everywhere else whose time zone is east of UTC+7.

Expect some silliness in today's Daily Parker time stamps, starting with this one (published 31 December 2015 10:32 CST).

It turns out, my Fitbit doesn't make me sad, but the numbers I get when traveling sometimes do. Despite a 3.5 km walk around Springfield yesterday, it was the second day in a row and the 4th in 10 days for which I missed my 10,000-step, 10 km goal.

On the other hand, last night I got almost 9 hours of sleep (according to my Fitbit), through several trains and a thunderstorm.

Yes, there was a thunderstorm in December in central Illinois. That's just weird. And in future, probably a lot more common.