This Barbie is thankful for community // What's Good: Jul. 21, 2023
Lakes, beer, and Italian* food.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. I am just now home from the first Deep Woods release of the season at Revolution Brewing. I had a lovely time. I would like to give a special shout-out to Barry Sweets, a local small business making absolutely delicious baked goods (at reasonable prices!) using spent grain from breweries. Tonight’s treats used grains and other components (like the fruit puree from Life Jacket) and they were SO FUCKING GOOD. The blueberry pie bars were a highlight, but the (baked!) donut holes were also tremendous. Just really fantastic stuff. Madeline and Hannah crushed.
I need to get tickets to Barbie. I’m very excited about it.
Dive on in
Making it to the lake ahead of work is sort of a big ask for me, but I do want to try this:
UPTOWN — Andrew Glatt and Nicole Novotny invited a few friends to jump into Lake Michigan on an early Friday morning two years ago.
The crew was only eight people, starting their weekend off with casual conversation while bobbing and treading in the water. Glatt and Novotny decided to make it a tradition, returning to Montrose Harbor every Friday. The weekly plunge among friends gradually spread — friends would invite friends who would invite more friends the following week. Within months, those eight friends grew to hundreds of swimmers.
Reliable sources
You will not believe this, but conservatives made another bad bet:
Megyn Kelly introduced a guest on a February episode of her podcast with an unusual caveat: “People have been coming for” Yeonmi Park, she said, by accusing the North Korean defector turned American conservative activist of telling false stories about her home country.
The host acknowledged some shifting aspects of Park’s accounts — but “whatever!” she concluded. Kelly assured listeners that she had fact-checked Park’s story, and “as incredible as they were, her descriptions of North Korea checked out.” Later, she urged Park to run for office.
Brace for impact
I don’t think this story is quite as simple as they make it out to be:
Hours before heavy rains swamped Chicago and Cook County suburbs on July 2, the region’s $3.8 billion flood-control project appeared ready as can be to bottle up storm runoff.
The Deep Tunnel’s massive sewers, capable of holding 2.3 billion gallons, were almost empty, according to Metropolitan Water Reclamation District records.
At the end of tunnels hundreds of feet below the Chicago River, Des Plaines River and North Shore Channel, the McCook Reservoir — more than 20 times larger than Soldier Field — was just 17% full of raw sewage and runoff being stored until it could be safely treated.
I’m absolutely sympathetic to the people whose homes and belongings were damaged by the flooding, but it’s not as easy as flipping a switch. This is climate change! If you don’t like it, well… vote for folks a few decades ago who would have taken it seriously! Obviously it is too late to do that, and we can only do the next right thing. Still, I think that complaints without context are fundamentally useless. This should be a reckoning.
More about the Supreme Court
Sorry, sorry, I know, it just continues to be extremely bad:
For months, Harlan Crow and members of Congress have been engaged in a fight over whether the billionaire needs to divulge details about his gifts to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, including globe-trotting trips aboard his 162-foot yacht, the Michaela Rose.
Crow’s lawyer argues that Congress has no authority to probe the GOP donor’s generosity and that doing so violates a constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the Supreme Court.
Raise a glass
Brewery hype is shifting:
The craft brewing industry is souring on beer festivals — and it's leading to an existential crisis.
State of play: Once ubiquitous and popular, major festivals in Colorado and nationwide are vanishing from the calendar this year amid tightening economic conditions and fatigue among fans, more than a half dozen breweries and industry pros tell Axios Denver.
Others that remain are not selling out in minutes and drawing dozens of breweries and thousands of fans, as they did in the industry's pre-pandemic heydays.
I think this is sort of good for the industry, actually. Brewing purpose-built beers for contests is boring and unenjoyable. Many of my favorite beers will never win a medal because they are not contest-friendly. I like a beer festival, but the medal-chasing is too much. I hope this is an opportunity for growth.
La dolce vita
What if everything you knew about Italian food was a lie:
Parma is quiet at night. The man sitting opposite me is paranoid someone will overhear our conversation. “They hate me here,” he explains in a hushed voice. He checks behind him, but the only other person in the osteria is a waitress who has had nothing to do since serving us our osso buco bottoncini. The aroma of roasted bone marrow wafts up from the table. Amy Winehouse’s cover of “Valerie” plays on a faraway radio. “Can I badmouth them?” he asks. I tell him he can. After all, he hasn’t been invited here to expose corporate fraud. He has come to tell me the truth about parmesan cheese.
We’re in Parma, in the heart of Emilia-Romagna, where everything Italian originated: prosciutto, Parmesan, aceto balsamico – products that, like many others, are typical of the cuisine. But now, all of a sudden, that’s allegedly no longer true. At least not in the way that Italians, and with them all lovers of Italian culture and cuisine, have imagined it to be.
Parmesan, for instance, virtually an Italian cultural asset, is protected and coddled by association officials who lobby hard in Rome and Brussels to prevent it from being counterfeited, copied and produced anywhere but the area around Parma and Reggio Emilia. But truly genuine Parmesan is supposedly manufactured in Wisconsin in the U.S. – according to someone who is a scientific expert on the issue: Alberto Grandi, professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Parma and specialist in business and food history.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1682602707058671617
https://twitter.com/HourlyLizards/status/1682597949962952704
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1682578723852152834
https://twitter.com/tiktokanimaIs/status/1682548574142230530
https://twitter.com/insaneposes/status/1682527745505472512
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1682507112394416128
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1682488799916425216
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1682479090211733505
https://twitter.com/weirdlilguys/status/1682464822988795908
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
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