I just walked a complete half-marathon in 3 hours, 27 seconds, which was 28 seconds longer than I had hoped. I had a slower pace than last weekend's AIDS 10k, primarily because it was more than twice as far. That said, my 10k split today was only 1:40 slower than the AIDS 10k, and my pace was pretty consistent the whole walk today. (Of course, my last 5 were slightly faster than my first 5, which is something.)

It looks like we might try to do the 42.2 in two weeks, but schedules and weather being what they are, we can't be sure. I will, of course, crow about it when it happens.

• About this Blog (v5.0)  2 months
• Brews and Choos project  2 days Updated
• Chicago sunrises, 2026  9 months
• Inner Drive Technology's computer history  2 years
• Logical fallacies  7 years
• Other people's writing  6 years
• Parker Braverman, 2006-2020  5 years
• Style sheet  1 year
• The 30-Park Geas  2 months
• Where I get my corn-pone  7 months

The sun has come out, with cool temperatures perfectly suited for taking a walk. I had planned to do my annual marathon walk today, but for a couple of reasons I have to postpone it. Instead, I've planned a half-marathon walk that should take me about three hours. Cassie, meanwhile, is about to get some overdue play time with her day camp pack.

Updates as conditions warrant.

The remnants of Hurricane Polo made it to Chicago yesterday, so we've had nearly non-stop rain for 30 hours or so. I did manage to give Cassie a couple of modest walks this morning, but then I got sucked into a project that I am just coming out of.

Cassie is now nudging me pretty firmly, so I should probably take her out regardless of the rain. Radar looks like this at the moment:

We're right by the edge of the nasty yellow blob that's about to soak us. But she has to pee, so out we go. This will be the second day in a row that I failed to get 10,000 steps. (I should fix that tomorrow, however.)

We have 34 days until the 2026 midterm elections in the US, and whoo boy is it shaping up to be historic.

• Ross Rosenfeld draws a straight line between the OAFPOTUS and Italian historian Carlo Cipolla's "basic laws of human stupidity."
• James Fallows' 35-day midterms time capsule is a must-read.
• Brian Beutler keeps hammering away on the point that "Democrats need to be the uncompromising ones now" lest we lose all the momentum we're building this year.
• US Senator Eric "Dirtbag" Schmitt (R-Mo.) tried a "gotcha" yesterday against former special counsel Jack Smith that blew up in his face in a hysterical self-pwn. (I can't wait to go to my next Atlanta Hawkeyes game...)
• Amanda Nelson has an uncompromising view of Rahm Emanuel, blaming him for losing the South in 2010.
• Washington Post Finance columnist Michelle Singletary suggests ways to stop companies from gouging us through algorithmic pricing.
• The City of Chicago has approved a $2.5 bn sale of our parking meters that finally gives the city a cut of the profits. Unfortunately Mayor Brandon Johnson decided not to buy them back when he had the chance, so the worst municipal deal in history will only get slightly better.
• One of the first Brews & Choos Project stops, Lake Bluff Brewing, has closed after losing its lease. I hope they'll reopen soon.

Finally, this morning I pushed out the fifth Daily Parker (Inner Drive Journal) release this month, with a couple of enhancements and a fairly important bug fix. Again, I'm dogfooding, so when I discover a bug that actually caused data loss, I fix it right away. So annoying. But I think I've got everything looking and running right for the time being, so I'm pretty sure this is the last update for a few weeks. We'll see.

The weather forecast predicts I won't see a sunrise like this until next weekend, so I enjoyed it this morning:

I also like having this one around, though for a few reasons I'm also happy to give her back to her own family this evening:

And, sadly, I have also gotten used to crap like this:

• Brian Beutler looks at the pattern of the OAFPOTUS's declining polling numbers and sees a ray of hope for Democrats eager to fix the damage when we regain power: voters aren't bothered by audacity, they're bothered by the stupid shit. "Power can be wielded aggressively, but it only makes sense to steamroll obstacles when circumstances demand it—when, in sound judgment, something has to happen, and has to happen quickly."
• The OAFPOTUS spent half a million taxpayer dollars on re-running one of his 2024 campaign ads as "public service," to which Paul Krugman says, "bring it on."
• US Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) is having a bit of trouble in his re-election campaign because it turns out, as a practicing OB/GYN, he had pregnant women arrested for not paying $50 in overdue bills. Oh, and he sued a bunch of others, in some cases for amounts under $100.
• The Chicago Dept of Transportation is rebuilding one of the most dangerous intersections in the city and adding a pedestrian-centric signal system that many other cities have used successfully.
• Why do LLMs lie, cheat, and break containment? Yoshua Benigo explains.
• Here's a cool interactive Bayeux tapestry for you.
• D'ailleurs, pourquoi la Vache qui Rit ne rit-elle pas en ce moment? On espère qu'elle n'ait pas d'opinions de Gaza, putain de merde.

Finally, as I and others warned, the good people of Alberta are having tons of calendar problems because of their asinine time zone change. I love Canada, and I love how Canadians are standing up to the OAFPOTUS, but on some policies, they're actually worse than we are (I'm looking at you, GTA). At least they have an easier time correcting some of their mistakes.

I had a lot going on this weekend and didn't have time to offload my phone's photos until this morning. Here are three.

On Saturday I walked the AIDS 10k in nearly-perfect weather. The course went from Soldier Field to 41st Street and back, affording great views of the Chicago skyline:

I then took Cassie to Spiteful for brats and beer, where we met this little guy, who was completely uninterested in both Cassie and the peanut-butter treat I offered him:

And now that sunrise is late enough, I'm seeing one almost every day. Like this morning, for instance:

But now it's Monday morning and I have actual work to do. Puppy needs two new pairs of shoes, after all.

As of last night, both Chicago teams have made it to the post-season as wild cards. The Cubs and Sox both got to 2nd place in their divisions with just enough of a lead over the 3rd place teams to sneak into the wild card race. So while the White Sox and Cubs were fighting for second place, the entire AL West are below .500, meaning we will have a division winner this year with a losing record.

On Friday I went to the Rockies-White Sox game, which the Sox won by a comfortable margin, handing the Rockies their 102nd loss of the season. Unless the Angels lose tonight, the Rockies will be the only team to reach 100 losses this season. And unless the Dodgers win today, only the Milwaukee Brewers will have 100 wins this season.

I also want to complain one more time about the orientation of Rate Field. Why on earth would you point the stadium towards the southeast when this is what you see if you look to the north?

If it gets built, the new ballpark will be (a) right by the Loop and (b) pointing towards the skyline. Fingers crossed.

This morning, I woke up to this:

It's also 14°C with no wind, which is perfect for this morning's activity: the AIDS Foundation Chicago 10k.

It's also Spiteoberfest today, which Cassie and I will walk to after I get back from the 10k. So we'll see how I feel after walking, uh, 20+ kilometers today. (It's 4.3 km by the shortest route to Spiteful.) At least there will be lots of food at both events.

I released a version of the Inner Drive Journal (the software running The Daily Parker) on Wednesday evening and immediately found some usability issues that I spent yesterday fixing. As I'm not in the habit of releasing software right before going to bed, for the same reason I try not to release software at 5pm on a Friday before leaving the country, I pushed the bits this morning.

The most obvious change is in the Calendar, where I've added code to reorder the events shown. Events are grouped into projects, which in this instance include the blog (by far the largest), media consumption, my travel log, and a couple of others used for maintenance and testing. Well, now I can choose one project to highlight at the top of the calendar, and I can choose whether or not to order the other projects or just lump them together. The current order is: travel log highlighted, blog posts on top, then everything else. I can further choose whether to put today's events on top of each group (the default) or put them under ongoing events.

The other cool thing is that I added maps to travel logs. That actually turned out to be kind of complex and is one of the biggest single Git commits of this release. The problem is that Earth is a spheroid. OpenStreetMap, being a street map, uses the Mercator projection because at higher zoom factors it orients streets correctly as people on the ground would perceive them. It was designed for navigation, after all. But it's crap at showing long distances, so for anything over 2,500 km The Daily Parker now uses equirectangular or Aitoff projections, depending on the distance.

But the coolest thing about this release is how long it took to code: just over 7 hours. A year ago, I couldn't even have coded the calendar changes in that amount of time, let alone finished the other 9 Jira cases, including a mechanical reordering of files in one of the projects that Claude did in four minutes.

I think this will be the last update for a few weeks as I have a ton of billable work coming up. So enjoy it, and keep commenting. Also: I'm open to enquiries about commercialization of this thing now that it's mature enough to leave the nest.

Yesterday's Daily Parker release (really the Inner Drive Journal) of course had a couple of bugs, which I am now fixing. Since I 100% dogfood this application, it really doesn't take long to find usability issues. Last night I found six, one of which took under a minute to fix (two lines of code had to move). I also decided to add a couple of small features, not because of usability bugs per se, but because they're not hard to add and they would really enhance the app. So look for a new release tomorrow morning, or even later today if things move quickly.

The real headache is that the new place search logic required re-indexing all 15 million documents in the Inner Drive Gazetteer. After 17 hours, 4.9 million index records are done. I can't wait to see my Cosmos DB bill this month...

Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world:

• An OAFPOTUS-appointed Federal judge ordered the reinstatement of press credentials to three news outlets the OAFPOTUS kicked out of the White House.
• The news outlets are back in cour this morning after the White House continued to block them. Sadly, because it's this bunch of clowns, it's hard to say whether this is incompetence or malice, but then again, we passed through Hanlon's Razor 18 months ago.
• Brian Beutler says "the [plutocratic] revolution has been televised, and it's about to fail," which is what happens when you choose a stupid and corrupt failed real estate developer who's also a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist as your figurehead.
• Speaking of people really bad at their jobs: former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who served as a US military officer, agrees with just about everyone on my side of the aisle that Defense Secretary "Pete Hegseth deserves to be impeached."
• MS Now reports that the OAFPOTUS wants to rename Ford's Theater after himself, which defies parody. We are living in the dumbest timeline.
• Paul Krugman compares the OAFPOTUS's speech yesterday to the UN General Assembly with the Woody Allen film Bananas, and I can't say he's wrong.
• Jeff Maurer argues (and I agree) that the real center of the Democratic Party is...the real center, and therefore our 2028 nominee is most likely to be pretty boring.
• Francis Fukuyama has changed his mind about AI, becoming neither an accelerationist nor a doomer, but edging closer to the latter.
• OpenAI's GPT-6 model spontaneously decrypted an Enigma message from 1941 that had defied human attempts to solve it. By "sponaneously" I mean the model just decided on that specific message after getting a general instruction to analyze a cache of still-undecrypted German WWII codes.
• A research team at Stanford Medicine has determined that our brain is really two distinct organs, which may open up completely new avenues of research into diseases like ALS.

Finally, a short strip of Bryn Mawr Avenue about 2 kilometers from me got a historic landmark dsignation yesterday, which will protect several threatened buildings for now. The area was already on the National Register of Historic Places, though that designation doesn't confer any protections against overeager developers the way the Chicago designation does. It's a pretty segment, made more attractive by the brand new El station that opened a year ago.

The Daily Parker's underlying software, the Inner Drive Journal, just got a new release that adds two entire epics to the application. First, I've integrated the Journal with the Weather Now gazetteer and Azure Maps to speed up geolocating the various event types in the system. That was also the prerequisite to adding a travel log feature, to keep track of, well, travel.

For example: on the 13th I flew from London to Chicago. The travel logs show up in the Calendar as well. And, with a subtype called "location," I can record where I actually was for periods of time. If you go to today's calendar, for example, you can see that I'm in Chicago.

There were also a bunch of tweaks to the Calendar feature itself, and the new Journey class prompted some refactoring to make all the display functionality a bit more agnostic about what it was displaying.

I also tried expanding Claude's remit to build these features, having Claude Opus 5 write the first drafts of all the stories in each epic, then having Claude Sonnet write the first drafts of the code. I did a bit more hand-editing than I expected, but that's mainly because I was fiddling with the look-and-feel of the app, which takes a lot longer to explain to Claude than just to do it myself.

On the other hand, telling Claude to refactor the View page to handle different types of data objects more abstractly worked a charm.

This might be the biggest update of the app for a while. I have a pretty extensive travel log to import, but automating that will be a challenge. Less challenging will be making a couple more tweaks to the Calendar for clarity. This latest update puts the day's events above ongoing events, but I realize that some events are more important than others and need priority in the list. I'll think about that for a while before specking it out. (I also have some paid work that takes precedence.)

Let me know what you think. Also let me know if you think this software could be useful in other ways. Personally, I think it's really cool.

I've finally finished tagging all 888 photos from my trip two weeks ago. Whew. Here are the last three I'll post for now, starting with my hike through Monken Hadley Common:

In Barnet, I passed by the next-door neighbor of famed lawyer Ivan Presume:

Just out of the photo is the sign "Dr Livingstone, I. Presume," which is how I know who lived there.

I wound up the day at the Southampton Arms, where I naturally had a pork bap. This little guy also wanted a pork bap, and since mine was closest, I had a friend for life:

OK, now that's done, I have a few other photos lingering in my phone that need importing, including a Brews & Choos Project visit from this past weekend.

Last few photos from France. In one of my most nerve-wracking moments while planning the trip I called a Michelin-recognized restaurant in Caen. I was pleased that they answered me in French, even though they recognized I was American. I was less pleased that they were closed during the week I was in Normandy. Ah, putain. I did, however, find a substitute that they also recommended: AUGIA, a modern-French place where I had this thing called an œuf parfait that I will dream about for many years.

The next morning I had a few hours to explore, so I took a walk around Caen:

Then it was back to the UK via Paris and Gare du Nord:

I have to say, Gare du Nord is really not set up well to handle UK immigration and customs. The French don't queue very well, for starters, and the mass of people pushing through oddly-configured security and immigration barriers made it a frustrating experience, especially compared with the Eurostar departures from Brussels and St Pancras. Ah, that French efficiency!

One last thing. I first visited France in June 1992, and despite shooting only Kodachrome (slow, fiddly, and $2.40 per frame in today's dollars), I did manage to get this snap in Gare de Lyon:

French trains have gotten a lot better since then. Sadly, American trains have not. Ah, putain!

I got through some more photos from my trip. On the 9th I made it to Caen, the capital of the Calvados department. With only 109,000 people, it's not a big city, but it's Europe so of course it has a cathedral:

The next morning I hopped the train for Bayeux, where the famous tapestry usually resides. In no small irony, the very same day I visited Bayeux, the British Museum opened the tapestry to the public.

Bayeux (population 12,659) also has a cathedral, of course, and it had the benefit of being largely ignored by Germany during WWII, so it didn't suffer much damage in the D-Day invasion:

I mean, just look at this:

I would have spent more time in Bayeux, but the bus to Omaha Beach only runs a few times a day. (It also only costs 6 € round-trip!) So after grabbing a latte by the cathedral, I caught the bus to the American Cemetery and Omaha Beach:

And then I hiked back to the bus stop through the outskirts of Colleville-sur-Mer:

Seeing Omaha Beach was wild. Even with erosion of the bluffs overlooking the landing zone, being up on the ridge gives you a complete view of the beach for 5 kilometers in each direction. Had the Allies not completely fooled Hitler about the location of the invasion, and had his army properly reinforced Normandy's beaches, Allied losses on D-Day would have been catastrophic.

I will have to go back to Normandy. Next time, I'll rent a car, because there was just too much to see.

Cassie and I managed a 30-minute walk this morning between passing bands of rain, and it looks like we'll have a window around 4:30 to go for an even longer walk, possibly with her friend Kelsey. Meanwhile, I'm banging away on two epics that together comprise a feature set for the Journal application (the software that runs this blog) that I've wanted to write for many years. Claude Opus and Sonnet are both helping.

While Claude does its thing, I'm reading these:

• Julia Ioffe wonders, who exactly is the Russian "friend" who bankrolled Don Junior's wedding? And does the DSM-V have enough pages to explain why anyone would marry that guy in the first place?
• Adam Kinzinger points to the US Dept of Agriculture's success eradicating rabies in Appalachian raccoon populations as proof of how well government can work when we want it to.
• Paul Krugman digs into the conundrum of rising prices and interest rates not causing a recession.
• The New York Times examines how the online gambling site DraftKings uses AI to target losers in what I see as yet another reason to regulate these companies until they behave like human beings.

Finally, Block Club Chicago explores Devon Avenue, where a thriving (and delicious) South Asian cultural amalgam has displaced the Jewish communities that lived there when I was growing up. Sari, not sorry, they might say. (Apologies for that one.)

The OAFPOTUS has claimed credit for a "new" "deal" with Greenland (really Denmark, remember) that essentially leaves the existing Defense of Greenland Agreement that we signed in April 1951 unchanged. This is the playground-bully personality of the administration in action: threaten to break something and then claim credit for not actually breaking it.

Anne Applebaum rolls her eyes:

The US-Danish Greenland treaty itself was public, and it enjoyed widespread approval. Indeed, it was a source of pride in Denmark, which has been a loyal American ally ever since.

Starting even before the inauguration, Trump (and Stephen Miller) spent months threatening Greenland, posting memes and making aggressive statements. Finally, in January 2026, after the Danish army brought blood banks to the island and prepared to blow up airport runways to thwart a possible U.S. invasion, he backed off, giving a long, rambling speech in which he confused Greenland and Iceland several times (creating a crisis in Reykjavik too) but seemed to say he would not invade.

A series of negotiations followed. These were accompanied by a semi-covert influence campaign, conducted mostly by private companies, that I described in Empire of Grift, the Atlantic cover story published this week.

After all that, new “deal” is a damp squib. As of this writing, no text of the agreement has been released, but background briefings have been provided to media. The BBC reports that the agreement states that hostile powers, meaning Russia and China, cannot build bases on Greenland, which the Danes would never have allowed anyway. It rules out major investments from those countries too, which weren’t a serious prospect either. The government of Greenland is explicitly included, which is also new. But, at least in the reporting so far, nothing else really changes.

We're 45 days from an election that won't stop this bullshit from happening, but will likely make it much, much more difficult to conceal. It's overdue.

Yesterday I called out Manitoba's recent decision not to change back to standard time 44 days from now, following British Columbia and Alberta making the same poor decision earlier this summer. IANA's Tim Parenti called the Manitoba government, who "could not see any record of the proclamation bringing the Act into force having yet been made." This means not only was it a dumb decision, but it's being implemented in a way guaranteed to cause chaos in November.

The CBC had an explainer yesterday that included maps of how confusing the Canadian time zone regime will be this winter:

Had Manitoba opted for standard time year-round, it would have synced up with the other Prairie provinces. [Manitoba Premier Wab] Kinew previously pitched a "Prairie time zone" in April, saying permanent standard time could benefit interprovincial trade.

In May, Manitoba launched a survey to ask the public to weigh in the issue. For those who did want to see the twice-annual changes halted, the survey asked if they preferred to stay on standard or daylight time.

On Thursday, the province said nearly 72,000 votes were submitted in its survey, with 92 per cent of respondents saying they wanted to see an end to seasonal time changes. Among respondents, 58 per cent preferred permanent daylight time and 34 per cent sided with standard time.

Inna Rabinovich-Nikitin, an assistant professor with the University of Manitoba's department of physiology and pathophysiology, says moving to permanent daylight is not the right decision for people's health.

"Our body has an internal circadian clock … and when we're moving to daylight savings time, it doesn't align with the light and dark cycles outside, and that basically makes us feel like we're always jet-lagged," she said.

Look, I love Canada, and I am impressed by how they've handled all the nonsense coming across their southern border. (Seriously, Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech to the European Parliament yesterday was a barnburner.) But when they get things wrong, they really get things wrong. For any jurisdiction above 40 degrees north latitude to permanently set their clocks a full hour ahead of their natural meridian is almost as bad as Toronto unifying, the main difference being that it's a lot easier to undo the clock absurdity than to restore viable public transit options to Etobicoke.

But hey, experience is a wonderful instructor, and I think come January, a lot of Canadians will be rethinking their time zone choices.