The Daily Parker

I grabbed a friend for a couple of Brews & Choos visits yesterday, and through judicious moderation (8-10 oz of beer per person at each stop), we managed to get the entire West Fulton Corridor cluster done in six hours. So in a few minutes I'll start writing four B&C reviews, which will come out over the next three days.

Before I start, though, I'm going to read all these stories that have piled up since Friday:

• Sports Illustrated shut down publication and laid off the entire editorial staff after an entity called "Arena Group" cancelled its license to publish, yet another thing we can thank the American fetish for private equity owning things they have no ability to or interest in running for. (Apologies for the preposition salad.)
• David Brooks, like generations of columnists before him, has had enough of bureaucracy, but conflates the private obfuscatory kind (e.g., private health insurers) with the kind that protects everyone's rights by treating everyone the same (e.g., Federal agencies).
• Penn environmental scientist Michael Mann finally got into court to face two defendants in his defamation lawsuit against climate-change deniers.
• Kurt Anderson mocks Bill Ackman (whom I called "yet another infantile billionaire") as a "brilliant fictional character."
• A delightful individual who sued dozens of women for bad-mouthing him on a Facebook dating reviews group got convicted of two counts of filing a false tax return. (His defense? He was too stupid to understand his own tax returns.)

Finally, the Roscoe Rat (really a squirrel) Hole got its own NPR story this morning. And in my social media I saw a photo of someone proposing to her boyfriend at the rat hole. Color me bemused.