Sure Happy It's Tuesday!
Today's interesting and notable news stories:This week marks the 25th anniversary of Chicago's deadly heat wave in July 1995, during which 700 people died and we hit a record 41°C with a 52°C heat...
View ArticleA bit of news overload today
Happy tax day! And now, we're off to the races:Jeff Sessions lost the Republican US Senate primary in Alabama.What the hell was the president talking about yesterday?George Will explains the...
View ArticleIllinois vs Florida
Writing in the Independent UK, Chicago-based Noah Berlatsky argues that state leadership has made Illinois a lot better off than, say, Florida:Illinois' achievement is both a model and an accusation....
View ArticleHappy birthday, Fat Man
The most destructive man-made force in the history of the planet exploded for the first time 75 years ago today:On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the...
View ArticleIt can't happen here, until it can
Oregon Public Broadcasting is reporting this morning that last night, two Federal agencies using unmarked cars have started pulling people off the streets:Federal law enforcement officers have been...
View ArticleFull frontal assault on reason
The new political theory of "executive underreach," defined as "a national executive branch’s willful failure to address a significant public problem that the executive is legally and functionally...
View ArticleJohn Lewis dead at 80
The civil rights activist and long-time Member of Congress died yesterday of complications from pancreatic cancer:On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body...
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A tale of two fitness trackers
I have argued with Fitbit customer service for about as long as I've had a GPS-enabled device, to no avail. Their GPS chips die slowly until they die abruptly. And every time I've complained, they've...
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Garmin Venu vs Fitbit Ionic short walk head-to-head
Yeah, the Garmin wins, hands down.After realizing that my first head-to-head test pitted an Ionic whose GPS was failing against a treadmill exercise, I went out for a quick loop around the block with...
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Garmin v Fitbit: sleep metrics
Despite the Garmin Venu handing the Fitbit Ionic its ass in my first test of exercise tracing, the Fitbit didn't fail completely in sleep tracking.Based on my self-perception of how well I slept,...
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Some observations about my walk just now
Before I get to the technical bits comparing the Garmin Venu (now on my left wrist) to the Fitbit Ionic, let me just list some "learnings" today:Both trackers are waterproof as advertised, as is my...
View ArticleMid-morning news round-up
I'll get to the final head-to-head comparison between my Garmin Venu and Fitbit Ionic later today. Meanwhile:The Dept of Homeland Security plans to deploy 150 agents to Chicago, and no one will say...
View ArticleBigly missing the point
Philip Bump puts in black-and-white terms why the president should perhaps shut up about his cognitive test results:“And they were very surprised,” Trump said of the doctors. “They said that’s an...
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Garmin v Fitbit: Full day comparison
I wore both my old Fitbit Ionic and new Garmin Venu for about 42 hours straight. Yesterday they overlapped for the entire day. And they came in with similar, but not quite the same, numbers.I thought...
View ArticleBusy morning
Just a few things have cropped up in the news since yesterday:President Trump has threatened to send federal agents to "assist" with Chicago's efforts to curb gun violence, which no one except the...
View ArticleMaking reservations for beer gardens
A friend and I plan to go to a local beer garden this weekend—one on the Brews and Choos list, in fact—so we had to make a reservation that included a $7.50-per-person deposit. Things are weird, man....
View ArticleBaseball starts tomorrow
Major League Baseball will start a short (60-game) season tomorrow, with weird rules (including universal DH and starting extra innings with a runner on second). The games will have piped-in audience...
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Garmin offline
Four days after I switched from Fitbit to Garmin, all of Garmin's online services have gone offline:The problems with those services also mean that a range of features can't be used on Garmin's own...
View ArticleWith apologies to Ron Shelton
– He lollygags around the Rose Garden. He lollygags on his way to the Hill. He lollygags in and out of the Oval. Do you know what that makes him? Larry?– A lollygagger!– A lollygagger. What's his...
View ArticleWorking later than usual
I kind of got into the flow today, so things to read later just piled up:Illinois found 1,532 new known Covid-19 cases as of today, with four downstate, bright-red counties now getting warned that...
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