The Daily Parker

Thank you, Tom Lehrer, for encapsulating what this season means to us in the US. In the last 24 hours, we have seen some wonderful Christmas gifts, some of them completely in keeping with Lehrer's sentiment.

Continuing his unprecedented successes making his the most corrupt presidency in the history of the country (and here I include the Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding presidencies), the STBXPOTUS yesterday granted pardons to felons Charles Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone. Of the 65 pardons and commutations he has granted since becoming president, 60 have gone to people he knows personally and who have committed crimes on his behalf. Maggie Haberman and Michael S Schmidt say he's at his most unleashed as he tries to avoid leaving office the loser he is.

In other news:

• The UK and the EU have agreed a trading and security deal with only days to spare.
• Illinois has vaccinated over 100,000 people for SARS-Cov-2 so far, more than any other state.
• Calculated Risk lists the 10 biggest economic questions for 2021.
• Via Bruce Schneier, China has used stolen HR data to detect and neutralize CIA assets in Africa and Europe.
• We had a bit of weather in Chicago overnight. Around 2pm we hit a high temperature of 14.4°C, which dropped slowly to 9°C at 7pm, then promptly fell off a cliff. When I woke up this morning to frigid -10.6°C air, the temperature had dropped 25°C in 16 hours. Welcome to Chicago in winter.

Finally, enjoy this performance of the "Hallelujah" chorus from Händel's Messiah released just a few moments ago by the Apollo Chorus of Chicago:

We're in the home stretch. We have 14 days until 2021 starts, and 32 days until the Biden Administration takes office. As Andrew Sullivan said in his column today, 2021 is going to be epic. Meanwhile:

• After giving away billions in tax revenue to the richest Americans in 2017, the Republican Party suddenly doesn't like budget deficits again, coincidentally with them losing the White House. Fascinating.
• Atlantic City is raising money for charity by auctioning off the right to blow up one of the STBXPOTUS's casinos.
• Today is the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower docking in Plymouth Harbor. (Apparently they didn't like the neighbors in P-Town.)
• Over 1,000 people found themselves stranded in a 15 km traffic jam overnight, some of them for 40 hours.
• Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips lists his top 10 films of 2020.

And watch this blog for information about the Apollo Chorus of Chicago's final performance of 2020.

Winter began in the northern hemisphere this morning, which explains the gray cold enveloping Chicago. Nah, I kid: Chicago usually has a gray, cold envelope around it, just today it's official.

And while I ponder, weak and weary, why the weather is so dreary, I've got these to read:

• Writing in the New York Times, Die Zeit columnist Jochen Bittner explains why Germans worry about the Republican Party's lies about the election. (Hint: Germany remembers 1918 differently than we do.)
• This year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, will take place in an empty chapel for the first time since the BBC first broadcast them in the 1910s.
• Chicago police busted up a party of 300 people in Wicker Park over the weekend, in an effort to explain why we can't have nice things.
• Alex Ross asks, "What does it mean to 'reimagine' an orchestra season?"

Finally, if you haven't already heard our first virtual concert, go listen to it. We worked hard, and we gave an excellent performance.

I was in meetings almost without break from 10am until just a few minutes ago, so a few things have piled up in my inbox:

• Writing in the Washington Post, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule explains why conservative justices vote with liberals more than the reverse (tl;dr: our system of government has a well-known and intentional liberal bias).
• NBC's Jonathan Allen calls the president's re-election campaign "desperate."
• The Mayor's Office in Chicago has put out a 100-page plan for how we can repair the damage Covid-19 has caused.
• The BBC asks, can you get Covid-19 twice? (Tl;dr: we don't know.)
• Matt Ford calls the Electoral College "an American humiliation" and calls for direct popular election of the president. (Good luck getting that past the Wyoming state legislature.)

And no matter where you are in the world, you can attend Apollo After Hours next Friday at 19:00 CDT / midnight UTC. It's going to be a ton of fun.

Welp, it's July now, so we've completed half of 2020. (You can insert your own adverb there; I'll go with "only.")

A couple of things magically changed or got recorded at midnight, though. Among them:

• The Lake Michigan-Huron system finished its 6th consecutive month of record high water levels, with June 2020 levels a full meter over the long-term average.
• Illinois' minimum wage went up to $10 per hour, and Chicago's to $14. Both minima will increase by $1 per year until they reach $15.
• China has asserted total control over Hong Kong on the 23rd anniversary of the UK handing the island back.
• The Daily Parker had a record 576 posts in the 12 months ending yesterday, my third such record this year. June also was the 4th consecutive month where I posted more than 50 times, which is unprecedented.

And finally, I am now officially the President of the Apollo Chorus of Chicago. My first task: ensure that our annual fundraiser, Apollo After Hours, brings in the dough. More on that later.

In November, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago performed in the Chicago Opera Theater production of Everest, a 2015 opera by Joby Talbot. After the second performance, Talbot and a number of the soloists met some of us out for drinks nearby. Andrew Bidlack, who sang the role of Rob Hall, mentioned they were going to London to perform the work at the Barbican. I told him I'd be there.

That performance should have taken place tonight at 7:30 BST. Obviously, it's cancelled, and even if it weren't, Covid-19 precautions mean I can't even get into the UK right now without a 14-day quarantine after arrival.

The middle half of 2020 may turn out to be the most disappointing period in my lifetime. But I'm optimistic about the fourth quarter, and about 2021. We'll get through this.

Happy May Day! Or m'aidez? Hard to know for sure right now. The weather in Chicago is sunny and almost the right temperature, and I have had some remarkable productivity at work this week, so in that respect I'm pretty happy.

But I woke up this morning to the news that Ravinia has cancelled its entire 2020 season, including a performance of Bernstein's White House Cantata that featured my group, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago. This is the first time Ravinia has done so since 1935.

If only that were everything.

First, via Josh Marshall, former Obama Administration disaster-preparedness expert Jeremy Konydndyk lays out the facts about our plateau (60,000 excess weekly deaths) and how the Trump Administration continues to do nothing to help us slow Covid-19 deaths.

Next, all of this:

• The Experimental Aviation Association cancelled AirVenture 2020, the huge annual fly-in that brings thousands of airplanes to Oshkosh, Wis. (Bonus: video of a brand-new Airbus A-380 landing at the small Wisconsin airport in 2009.)
• The New Republic on "the morbid ideology behind the drive to reopen America."
• Republican legislatures and governors made it harder to get unemployment benefits in general, which makes it needlessly difficult to get them in this current crisis.
• Trump whipped out his "very good people" trope to support the armed protesters who stormed the Michigan State Capitol this week.
• Paul Krugman: "Crashing economy, rising stocks: What's going on?"
• Megan Garber: "Groundhog Day was a horror movie all along."
• Bruce Schneier says Covid-19 contact tracing apps "have absolutely no value." Only "ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing" will make a difference.
• Alexandra Petri: "Heroes, we cannot possibly repay you for your sacrifice, so we will make no effort to." ("We will give you everything except PPE, and we will offer you all the thanks in the world but an increase in compensation.")

But some good news:

• Canada will ban assault-style weapons in the wake of the Nova Scotia shooting last week. ("Canadians deserve more than thoughts and prayers," he said.)
• Henry Olsen: "Every single piece of data aligns: Trump is behind and dropping." (David Graham agrees.)
• David Brooks: "Why the Trump ploy stopped working."
• Dr Anthony Fauci showed us how scientists convey calm optimism.
• Tampa Bay Times columnist Leonard Pitts: "I will not die of stupid."
• Chicago won its latest fight in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals against Trump's order to cut off federal funds to sanctuary cities.
• Karen Attiah explains why #Karen jokes aren't racist or sexist.

Finally, while alarming in its own right, the record water levels in Lake Michigan (4 months in a row now) have exposed some historic shipwrecks.

Today's news:

President Trump claims he knew COVID-19 was a pandemic all along, even though he had a strangely ineffective way of showing it.

• COVID-19 has caused a food security crisis as entire industries lay off vulnerable workers.
• The University of Illinois has cancelled graduation, devastating thousands of seniors.
• The World Health Organisation recommends avoiding Ibuprofen to treat COVID-19 symptoms; use paracetamol instead.
• Bob Cesca in Slate asks, "Why do we keep electing Republicans? They're no good at this."
• China has expelled 13 journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, in retaliation for the US expelling Chinese reporters earlier.
• Most of the Spring Gala Season in Chicago has been cancelled. (The Apollo Chorus moved its fundraiser to July 17th, crossing our fingers that the worst will be over by then.)
• Joe Biden won the most delegates in three big states (including Illinois) yesterday, making him all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Finally, and not related even a little to COVID-19, Olga Khazan writes in the Atlantic about "the perks of being a weirdo."

Last night I had the wonderful experience of performing Bach's Johannes-Passion with the Apollo Chorus of Chicago and the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra. I say "performing" because, recognizing that we had already cancelled our performance on Saturday and would probably cancel Sunday's as well, this was our one shot. Three months of preparation, hours of study and practicing German diction, gone. And I'm on my second half-personal-day at home dealing with the cleanup, which has included a few hundred emails, changes to the chorus website and ticketing system, consulting with the rest of the Board...and grocery shopping.

We cancelled Sunday's concert in part because Illinois Governor JB Pritzker ordered all events with 1,000 or more attendees cancelled, and recommended events with more than 250 people also be cancelled. Since we have 100 singers and 75 instrumentalists on stage...well, there you go. No audience allowed. 

This makes me no different than other performers and athletes all over the world right now. In Chicago alone, the list of local cancellations has dozens of items. Just now, the Chicago Teachers Union has demanded that Chicago Public Schools close as well. For parents and children who live with food insecurity, that could hurt a lot.

And yet, the thing that enraged me, and has generated near-universal opprobrium, was the President's speech on Wednesday night. Some reactions:

• "Trump’s 10-minute Oval Office address Wednesday night reflected not only his handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads."—Washington Post
• "This latest Trump speech was uniquely incompetent and inappropriate.... In my view it had three problems: how it was conceived; how it was written; and how it was delivered."—Former presidential speechwriter James Fallows
• "At every turn, President Trump’s policy regarding coronavirus has unfolded as if guided by one rule: How can I make this crisis worse?"—David Frum
• "Rather than focusing on what we need to do here at home, the president focused on trying to ward off the evil that he insisted was coming from abroad."—Chicago Council on Global Affairs president Ivo Daalder
• "Donald Trump is panicky and clueless"—Kevin Drum
• "Trump is singularly incapable of addressing this credibly or effectively, with anything like the right mix of realism and hope the crisis demands."—Andrew Sullivan

We live in really weird times. If only we had a leader to reassure us.

We just sent this out:

Apollo community,

After much deliberation, and in consultation with Music Director Stephen Alltop, the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra, and both of our concert venues, we have decided to cancel our concert at St Luke’s scheduled for this Saturday March 14th.

The ESO has agreed that tickets to Saturday’s performance will be honored on Sunday at 3pm at the Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church performance. If you bought a ticket through our online system for Saturday’s performance and provided an email address, we will also be in contact with you directly.

The health of our members, our audience, and our communities is our first priority. We will continue to monitor this situation, and abide by requests from CDC and other government entities. Tonight and on Sunday, we will have hand sanitizer available throughout ECRC, and church staff and ushers will be wearing gloves on Sunday.

Thank you for your support of the Apollo Chorus of Chicago during this difficult time.

Let me just say that the board meeting we had a couple of hours ago had surprisingly little acrimony.

I wrote three versions of the release, one for our members, one for the community at large, and one for our ticketholders. It's been a busy afternoon. And we're still rehearsing tonight for Sunday's performance, just with more hand sanitizer than usual.