The Daily Parker

Via Deeply Trivial:

I was waiting with bated breath to see how Scott Adams would spin last night's Watergate moment into yet another example of the masterful persuasion techniques of President Trump. Like Baghdad Bob standing on the hotel roof, he did not disappoint:

Democrats and the Opposition Media reflexively oppose almost everything President Trump does. This time he gave them something they wanted, badly, but not for the reason they wanted. That’s a trigger. It forces anti-Trumpers to act angry in public that he did the thing they wanted him to do. And they are.

Trump cleverly addressed the FBI’s Russian collusion investigation by putting the following line in the Comey firing letter: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

That one odd sentence caused every media outlet to display the quote and talk about it, over and over. And when you focus on something, no matter the reason, it rises in importance in your mind. President Trump, the Master Persuader, made all of us think about the “not under investigation” part over, and over, and over.

Except, Democrats didn't want Comey fired. We were pissed off at him, sure, and had a lot of criticism for him, sure. But all of that was subordinate to the institutional integrity of the FBI.

Later Adams invents "the media" "turning on" Comey after the firing. I don't know what media he's seeing, but in the MSM (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) I'm seeing the opposite.

Adams' credibility on Trump suffers every time he spins his "master persuader" crap, but I still read his blog for entertainment value. I am curious, however, when Adams will stop pointing out cognitive dissonance in everyone else and recognize it in himself. Even if Trump has unusually powerful persuasion skills, he can still be incompetent and unfit for office. And Occam's Razor suggests, given the evidence so far, that Comey's firing was less about persuasion and more about Trump being an amateur.

We'll see. Adams did predict Trump's win, after all. Let's see what he thinks after more of Trump's corruption, incompetence, and destruction of American institutions comes to light.

If you're in the Chicago area, today is your last chance to see the Apollo Chorus "American Masters" concert.

We're performing Jeff Beal's "Salvage Men," with Beal himself in attendance (and playing flugelhorn on his "Poor in Sprit" later in the concert). Tickets are still available, $35 at the door ($15 for students), this afternoon at 3pm at Alice Millar Chapel in Evanston.

...this will do splendidly:

A new long-distance train, the East Japan Railway Company’s Shiki-Shima, launched this week, and it’s already earning praise as perhaps the most luxurious train in the world. Its 10 cars hold 17 spacious suites, some kitted out with cypress bathtubs and lofts. And that’s not the only thing that makes it feel like a five-star hotel: This train also sports a piano bar, two glass-walled observatory cars, and even a Michelin-accredited restaurant.

It holds up to 34 passengers, who are squired around eastern Japan for two to four days, paying anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000 for a round-trip ticket.

CGTN has a video review:

Oh, I hope this art installation flies:

In a planned one-day protest, four golden pig balloons will take anchor in the Chicago River, lined up to cover President Donald Trump's last name on his building's southeast facade.  

The giant swine come by way of Chicago-based design company New World Design Ltd., and will arrive by barge. New World is still negotiating how and when the pigs will arrive, but architect and firm principal Jeffrey Roberts says he is confident the project will come to fruition.  With the city's approval, which is still pending, the massive pigs will pop up for a day in late August or early September.

I'm looking forward to the day when the letters adorning that garish skyscraper come off permanently.

For reasons that shall not be explained here, I have, for the last two weeks, binged on Lena Dunham's "Girls." For context, I'm in the middle of season 2 while simultaneously just done with season 6, episode 9.

It's fookin' brilliant.

More context: I went to school in New York. I lived through the late '90s in New York. I was, back then, in my 20s. I watched "Sex and the City" and wondered who those people were, even as I went to the same clubs and bars. I made horrible mistakes. No one guided me. Just like every other 20-something in history.

Basically, in my 20s, people like Shoshanna, Elijah, and Hannah were my friends. As I watch "Girls" I see them clearly. It's almost as if the same problems come around to every generation, and every generation feels like they're the first to feel this way. (</sarcasm>)

But I keep watching, for a simple reason: Dunham can tell a story. I have no idea how closely her feelings align with her character Hanna Horvath's, but Dunham sells it regardless. And I hope I'm not projecting when I say it seems like Dunham has enough perspective on "Girls" to know how to present modern urban adolescence best.

Being 20-something in the '90s sucked. Apparently it does in the 2010s as well. I hope to find out for whom the 20s didn't suck, and why.

This weekend, a "luxury" festival on a remote island in the Bahamas failed to live up to expectations, in the same way bricks fail to hover:

The organizers of the Fyre Festival promised “two transformative weekends” on a “remote and private” island in the Bahamas that was “once owned by Pablo Escobar.” Kendall Jenner promoted it on Instagram. Ja Rule was one of the organizers. Festival-goers paid thousands of dollars for what they believed was going to be a luxury experience. Anyone who could afford the ticket would arrive in paradise on a private jet with their friends, for a taste of the lifestyle that only seems to exist on the Instagram feeds of models.

None of that happened.

The first wave of paying guests arrived on Thursday, only to find themselves staring at a chaotic festival site that appeared to be weeks away from being able to host anyone. Blink-182, one of the bands headlining the festival, had canceled at the last minute. The tents that were set up for guests to sleep in looked like “FEMA tents,” one person said. Not exactly the luxury accommodations they’d paid for. Meanwhile some tents were still in their boxes.

The disorder at Fyre Festival appears to have caught a lot of the attendees off guard. But there were signs that all was not what it seemed. In early April, the Wall Street Journal reported that festival organizers had missed a series of deadlines, including those for paying artists.

Whew, the next time I have the opportunity to pay $250,000 for a trip to a desert island, I'll jump on it.

The festival organizers have posted an explanation.

Things to read today:

• Chicago Magazine bemoans the loss of two-flat apartment buildings in the city, citing increasing average rents.
• Josh Marshall catalogs all the times President Trump was surprised by knowledge that was only new to him.
• VIA Rail in Canada is offering a 10-day, Montreal to Vancouver rail journey to celebrate the country's sesquicentennial.
• Marin County, Calif., has an app that lets you try to mitigate climate-change induced flooding. Good luck.

And finally, the Chicago Tribune has an article on our concert this weekend, and composer Jeff Beal performing in it:

"I suppose it might have been DNA asserting itself," said Beal, who will be in Chicago May 5 and Evanston May 7 when the celebrated Apollo Chorus includes his "The Salvage Men" and "Poor in Spirit" as part of their 145th-season-ending spring concert, "American Masters," in Chicago and Evanston. "It's true that [my grandmother] passed on her love of improvisation, but there's also something almost eerily similar about what she did, watching a screen and creating her own musical accompaniment, and what I do in my day job."

[H]e had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. Though he took seven years to process the news before beginning to write "The Salvage Men" in 2014.

Serendipitously, that was about the time that Apollo Chorus music director Stephen Alltop, who studied with Beal at Eastman, got back in touch to praise Beal's work on" House of Cards" and suggest the possibility of doing a concert together. Which explains why Beal and his new choral works are appearing in Chicago directly after their debuts in London and Los Angeles. Beal also will perform solo trumpet over the comparatively simple text of his "Poor in Spirit," — it consists entirely of one repeated phrase from the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit" — much as he often plays trumpet over the score of "House of Cards."

Tickets are available through the Apollo Chorus website. It's going to be an amazing concert.

TimeOut has their list for 2017. Definitely some on it I want to see, and some I have been to. Next, I think, will be The Ladies' Room and 1952½.

Also, tomorrow I won't be coding all day and forget to write a blog post until 8:30. But at least I got all 12 hours of steps—it's been a frustrating week on that front.

Some articles:

• Jeet Heer writes about President Trump's catastrophic first 100 days.
• Josh Marshall says that Trump's "religion of 'winning'" is the problem.
• Crain's Joe Cahill thinks that the best thing to come out of the United Airlines passenger-removal fiasco is that Oscar Munoz won't become chairman.
• John Oliver on Sunday warned the world about the deficiencies and scary realities of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
• Harvard professor David Searls, in a post from September 2015, calls ad blocking "the biggest boycott in human history."
• Microsoft has announced Azure Media Player v2.0. If you don't know or don't care what this is, don't worry about it. Similarly, you might not care about Lift & Shift vs. App Services in Microsoft Azure, but it's a useful bit of knowledge if you do.
• Starbucks is building a five-story roastery in the space currently occupied by Crate & Barrel's flagship store on Michigan Avenue.
• Sarah Zhang, writing in The Atlantic, reviews Peter Ungar's book on the evolution of teeth.
• Mother Jones' Josh Harkinson explains why American milk tastes weird to everyone else in the world.
• Deeply Trivial continues her A-to-Z explanation of statistics with "V is for Venn Diagram," which includes jokes that some people will find funny and some will not.

And now, Parker needs a walk.