The Daily Parker

Client deliverables and tonight's Cubs game have compressed my day a little. Here's what I haven't had time to read:

• Cranky Flier takes a moment to put some perspective on airline premium classes, and tries to be less jaded about them.
• Gulliver feels less guilty about ordering take-out and depriving hotels of their room service dollars (or, in his specific case, pounds).
• Did you know flooding is up 900% in some U.S. coastal cities? Possibly this has something to do with rising sea levels. (Don't tell the GOP.)
• Speaking of the GOP, Grover Norquist is going to Burning Man this year. I cannot imagine a bigger shark to jump than that.
• Finally, why do dogs sniff each others' butts? Because they can't read business cards?

Now back to the deliverable...

I love these guys. The indie duo Pomplamoose are back on tour after this coming Tuesday's album release.

Jack Conte, one half of the group—he and band-mate Nataly Dawn are also partners in real life—founded Patreon last year. The site brings patrons together with artists. I'm not the only one supporting Pomplamoose. My $5 is one of 1,600 pledges totaling more than $5,600 per video, enabling them to (a) eat and (b) produce really slick videos. Here's their latest, showing that you really don't need autotune if you have a great voice:

Via Sullivan yesterday evening—and for no other reason—I'm passing on an old Baffler article about the morning after:

There’s certainly nothing pious or heroic in a hangover. But, trapped in its clutches, you can begin to see it as a wonderful counterbalance, an essential link in the rhythm of life, a stern ebb to an indecorous flow. The hangover is what prompts you to vow, as you fester with your cellmates in that island sanitarium of the demetabolized, “I will never drink again.” Without its vengeful wrath, only guilt would be left to direct us to moderation. For Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, and countless others whose lives met premature and tragic closures, the end may have come even sooner had they never had to cruise the ghastly straits of detoxification. And what of the proud, local folklore of the hangover remedy, or the pathetic morning embrace of the “hair of the dog?” Would the word that has been used so aptly to describe the aftereffects of sprees like Laffer’s 1980s slowly lose its resonance and vanish?

[Kingsley] Amis, the poet laureate of the hangover, was one of the few to fathom its intricacies and divine its transcendent qualities—to find, if you will, the spiritual in the spirits. The hangover, he wrote once, is no mere physical affliction, but a “unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.” This is usually lost on sufferers of the “physical hangover,” obsessed as they are with feeling fresh again. But as they spend the morning shuffling through the Sunday supplements, unable to finish the simplest articles, drinking tomato juice as the sunlight stalks the living room floor, on come those colossal feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and shame—the metaphysical hangover. The best, and really the only, cure for this condition is to simply acknowledge your physical hangover for what it is, rather than attributing these unsettling thoughts to your job or to your relationship. As Amis puts it, “He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.”

More seriously, it's interesting that medicine still doesn't understand the physiology of hangovers. The best guess is that alcohol (ethanol) metabolizes into acetaldehyde, which affects the way the body uses glucose and water. Drinks also contain varying amounts of methanol, which breaks down into formaldehyde, something you really don't want in your bloodstream.

Preventing hangovers is simple: limit drinking. Water, NSAIDs, and caffeine can reduce hangover symptoms, and there seems to be some truth in the notion that fatty foods can prevent ethanlo absorption in the first place. Otherwise, as ever, moderation works.

Downloading to my Kindle right now:

• The State of the American Dog
• Cost of Living is All About Housing
• This Executive Order Is Totally Gay
• Part-Time Workers Deserve the Shift, Not the Shaft

...and a few articles I found last week that just made it onto my Kindle tonight.

Oh, and I almost forgot: today is the 80th anniversary of John Dillinger's death just six blocks from where I now live.

The Atlantic's CityLab blog, of course:

For all the monorail enthusiasts out there just now learning that New York once had its own single-track wonder, put your excitement on hold. For on this date in 1910, during its inaugural journey, the monorail lurched over, sending scores of people to the hospital.

The painful incident can be traced to the slick salesmanship of one Howard Tunis, who did so well demonstrating his novel design for an electric monorail at a 1907 exposition in Virginia that he gained the attention of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The IRT, the original operator of New York's subway line, asked Tunis if he could assemble a similar prototype for use up north. That the inventor did, and soon enough it was ready on a track stretching from a railroad station on the borough's mainland a short distance down to City Island.

Now, if I only had time to read the article...

For once I'm not ranting about politics. No, check out these spite houses:

About a century ago, a Bay Area man named Charles Froling was just learning that he wouldn't be able to build his dream house. An inheritance had gifted him a sizable chunk of land, but municipal elders in the City of Alameda had decided to appropriate most of it to extend a street. So Froling sadly rolled up his blueprints and murmured, "Ah well, that's life."

No, of course he didn't do that. Having a constitution made from equal parts righteous indignation and pickle juice, the frustrated property owner took what little land he had left and erected a stilted, utterly ridiculous abode. The house measured 54 feet long but only 10 feet wide, as if a tornado had blown away two-thirds of the original structure.

They have art. I can't tell if the houses depicted are cozy or horrifying, though.

Tatiana Maslany, who plays Sarah Manning (and Alison, Cosima, Helena, Rachel, etc.) on BBCA's "Orphan Black," was not nominated for an Emmy award this morning. Before hearing from the critics why this pretty much invalidates the Best Actress category this year, take a look:

The Toronto Sun leads the prosecution:

Emmy Award voters must have broken their clickers.

Had they been able to change the channel every once in a while, they might have run across a Canadian actress named Tatiana Maslany and a show called Orphan Black.

Jokes about broken clickers aside, maybe this actually is a U.S. channel problem.

In Canada, Orphan Black airs on Space, which has a far higher profile in our country, comparatively speaking, than Orphan Black's U.S. network, BBC America, does in the States.

And it also must be noted that Maslany's category – lead actress in a drama – was particularly competitive this year. Keri Russell of The Americans and Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men didn't make the cut, either.

Still, this sucks, Canada.

American critics are disappointed too. Insider daily Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman thinks this shows bigger problems in ATAS:

This is not one of those years when Emmy voters get forgiveness on their oversights simply because they seemed to be progressive in a few categories. That's because the rubber-stamping seemed especially gratuitous and the Big Mistakes seemed more prominent and damning.

Tasked with celebrating and rewarding the achievements from within its own industry, Emmy voters continue to come off as half-involved, behind-the-times clock watchers instead of guardians. It's as if the admittedly daunting task of actively sampling the ever-changing content of their own makes them crumble before even making an effort.

I mean, even by the low bar of Emmy standards, 2014 is a real omnishambles.

If you're paying attention at all, Tatiana Maslany from BBC America's Orphan Black is not a dark horse contender anymore. She should have been a slam dunk, not a snub for the second year running. Overlooking The Americans and The Good Wife as best drama is almost startling. In a world where Downton Abbey is going to get a slot, add Masters Of Sex and The Walking Dead to that list.

Part of the yearly problem with the Emmys is the institutional habit of returning an ungodly percentage of past winners into the nomination ranks despite downturns in series quality or superior acting performances from competitors.

And here are just a few things my friends are saying on Facebook:

• Tatiana Maslany was not nominated for an Emmy. ALL AWARDS ARE NOW INVALID TO THE END OF TIME.
• WHY IS TATIANA MASLANY NOT ON THIS LIST? Stupid ATAS.
• I love tofu, esp tofu tacos!

(That last one may not have been, strictly speaking, on point...)

Of course, the Emmys haven't influenced my TV viewing since...well, ever, so I'm not really sure it matters. But what a stupid omission.

Way back in the Ford and Carter administrations, part of my family lived in Manhattan Beach, Calif., a close-in suburb of L.A. During that period, Steven Spielberg made Jaws.

And then this happened yesterday:

A swimmer was attacked by a shark Saturday morning. The unidentified victim, described as a long-distance swimmer between 35 and 40 years of age, suffered a single bite wound on the right side of his rib cage. He was taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and was described as stable.

Witnesses told authorities that the shark bit the anchovies-and-sardines bait on the hook a fisherman had thrown into the water from the edge of the pier. They said the shark was hooked for about 45 minutes and was thrashing around in the water when he bit the swimmer about 9:30 a.m.

“He was trying to get off the line,” said Capt. Tracy Lizotte, a Los Angeles County lifeguard at the beach. “He was agitated and was probably biting everything in his way and then the swimmer swam right into the shark's line.”

So, sharks rarely attack people, but this one was provoked. OK. But I used to boogie board by that pier.

Nothing of political or social import this morning. Just a photo from yesterday, of my friend's 20-month-old daughter climbing up a slide. I watched this kid go up and down this slide structure like she owned it. I'm no developmental psychologist, but it sure seemed to me she was way ahead of where a 20-month-old would ordinarily be in spatial reasoning and motor control.

Plus she's damn cute:

The Chicago Art Institute has released a video showing how conservator Faye Wrubel restored Caillebotte's masterpiece:

The striking results of the restoration reveals greater saturation of color, sharper edges, and more contrast with an overall effect of more visual depth. Overpainting was removed from the once yellow sky, exposing a bluer surface with gradation indicating light and movement.

“What we have been seeing all these years may have been beautiful, we may have all loved it, but it wasn’t right,” Wrubel said of the findings’ impact.

In addition to visible details that were brought to light, conservators uncovered new information about the masterpiece by comparing the ultraviolet and x-ray images to a preparatory sketch for the painting as well as study residing at Paris’ Musée Marmottan.

Here's the video: