The Daily Parker

Some of us chorus types went to two outdoor performances this weekend. The first, at Ravinia Park in Highland Park, was a Chicago Symphony Orchestra performance of Mark Knopfler's score for The Princess Bride:

Then last night, many of the same people went to the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park to hear the Grant Park Symphony and a lot of other musicians perform Mahler's 8th Symphony:

The only problem? Rain. At both performances, we got rained on. The rains ended early, fortunately, and at Ravinia we managed to get last-minute pavilion seats. The Pritzker Pavilion doesn't have a roof, though, so we just sat in the rain for a few minutes and covered our glasses.

But hey, how often does one get to hear Mahler's 8th live?

This shit amused me:

• The Chicago White Sox have tied the American League record of 21 consecutive losses, with the MLB all-time record of 23 a distinct and shitty possibility.
• CrowdStrike has taken enough of Delta Airlines' shit, thank you.
• In addition to all the other shit that Hurricane Debby turned up over the weekend, the storm flushed 25 kilos of cocaine onto a Florida beach. Apparently, this happens all the time.

Finally, Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dropping 350 liters of very literal, very stinky shit onto a boatload of sightseers in the Chicago River. "The culprit turned out to be the band’s tour bus driver, then-42-year-old Stefan Wohl, who pleaded guilty to charges of reckless conduct and discharging contaminates to cause water pollution. He got hit with 18 months on probation, 150 hours of community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine to Friends of the Chicago River."

I mean, what the shit?

The US election is 98 days away, and August starts Thursday. Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin'...into the future...

And yet, the ever-present Now keeps us here:

• Both Paul Krugman and Molly White are baffled that the XPOTUS is making cryptocurrency a campaign issue, when almost none of their voters understands the first thing about it. (Hint: their biggest tech-bro donors care about it a lot.)
• James Fallows introduces us to Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D).
• Chuck Marohn shakes his head sadly at the installation of an ice machine on a lot previously occupied by a restaurant in Brainerd, Minn. It's an example of how the suburban car-oriented development pattern has made it impossible for kids to be kids.
• New research finds there are six different kinds of depression rooted in which parts of the brain are disrupted. Great.

Finally, Bruce Schneier warns that automobile companies and their suppliers have many disincentives to providing software updates for the entire lifetime of their products. Microsoft stops supporting Windows versions after just a few years, while cars live for decades.

As I mentioned after lunch, a lot of other things crossed my desk today than just wasted sushi:

• Politico reports the results of its latest poll, which, contra many pundits, shows a marked decline in the convicted felon XPOTUS's popularity following his 34 felony convictions.
• NPR describes what it's like living through a 50°C day in Delhi, India.
• Fully 83% of the union representing WBEZ-FM and Chicago Sun-Times employees voted "no confidence" in Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog.
• New York Magazine explains why New York governor Kathy Hochul (D) slammed the brakes on New York City's congestion-pricing scheme. Elsewhere in this week's edition, Rebecca Traister asks, "How did Republican women end up like this?"
• An archaeological dig in Mount Vernon, Va., uncovered dozens of perfectly-preserved jugs of preserved cherries in what was once George Washington's cellar.

Finally, Taylor Swift fans have roundly rejected Ticketmaster's monopolistic gouging by flying to Europe to catch the Eras Tour, often saving so much money on tickets that it pays for their travel. I personally know one such Swiftie who took her honeymoon in Stockholm, where Swift played earlier this year. It turns out, Europe has stricter rules against the kind of parasitic behavior Ticketmaster perpetrates on Americans.

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole.

Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up:

• The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the top (95.03 points), Buchanan next-to-last (16.71), and the XPOTUS dead last (10.92).
• The Justice Dept has finally filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation Entertainment, owner of Ticketmaster, for running one of the most pernicious monopolies of the 21st century. (I refuse to go to Live Nation events or use Ticketmaster anymore, because who wants to pay a 35% fee to a third party just to buy a ticket?)
• Molly White worries about a Dutch court's rationale for convicting Alexey Pertsev of writing the code for a service used to launder money, pointing out that privacy is a human right, and not all anonymization is criminal.
• Pilot James Fallows explains the Singapore Airlines severe-turbulence encounter and repeats the warning I gave earlier in the week.

Finally, Lagunitas Brewing will move its brewing operations back to Petaluma, Calif., (which is a million times better than Megaluma!) and close its Chicago taproom this summer, so I suppose the Brews & Choos Project should get its ass over there pronto.

On this day 200 years ago, Ludwig van Beethoven conducted the premier of his 9th Symphony at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna. The Apollo Chorus performed it almost exactly a year ago, inspiring one of our members to express in meme form one of the more fun passages of the piece:

And how did one of the 19th century's greatest composers follow this up? He decomposed.

After a week of rehearsals capped by two performances of some really challenging works by French and Swiss composers, I finally got a full 8½ hours of sleep last night. What a difference. Not just the needed rest, but also having a much smaller inbox (just one task for the chorus left until next week) and less to worry about.

Until I open a newspaper, of course:

• The head of the political arm of Hamas, the terrorist group and de jure governing party in Gaza which has called for the annihilation of all Jews, claims to have accepted cease-fire terms that would avoid an Israeli invasion of Rafah, but Israel disputes this.
• Six months out from the election, Walter Shapiro looks at President Biden's approval ratings and concludes they probably don't matter.
• UMass Amherst professor Ethan Zuckerman has sued Facebook over a provision of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (47 USC 230) that could allow people to use third-party tools to block their social media. Zuckerman explains the suit in layman's terms in the Times.

Finally, a new bar claiming to be Chicago's first with an indoor dog park got a special-use permit, enabling them to open sometime this fall. B-A-R (as in, "who wants to go to the B-A-R?") still needs a liquor license, and will charge $25 per day or $50 per month per dog. I just passed by the site on Saturday, so I will note that it's directly across the street from some of Chicago's best thin-crust pizza. But $25 just to visit? Hm. The do know they're only a kilometer from a dog park, right?

Cassie and I got over 2 hours of walks yesterday, and spent most of the day outside. By the time we got to Spiteful, Cassie needed a nap:

Her day ended pretty well, on the couch getting lots of scritches, but between our 10 km of walks, the dog park, and meeting new friends along the way, she got a bath. Instead of struggling and trying to escape, though, she mournfully stepped into the tub and awaited her fate. Such a good girl!

Later today, the Apollo Chorus will conclude its season at St Michael Catholic Church in Old Town, one of our favorite venues:

(That's our music director Stephen Alltop warming us up at our rehearsal Thursday.)

Then, when I get 

Through next weekend I'm going to have a lot to do, so much that I've scheduled "nothing" for the back half of next week going into our annual fundraiser on April 6th. I might even get enough sleep.

I hope I have time to read some of these, too:

• Eileen O'Neill Burke has won the Democratic Party primary for Cook County States Attorney (called a District Attorney just about everywhere else), and is therefore the presumptive successor to outgoing CCSA Kim Foxx.
• Andrew Sullivan sees the XPOTUS hawking $59 Bibles as the apotheosis of Christianism.
• Dana Milbank expresses alarm at the XPOTUS's "glitching."
• Molly White summarizes Sam Bankman-Fried's sentencing hearing earlier this week, with just exactly the right amount of snark. ("I can't believe that post-collapse media tour came back to bite him.")

Finally, submitted without comment: Grazie Sophia Christie, writing in New York Magazine, advises young women to marry older men.

A friend posted on Facebook that Billy Joel's album Glass Houses came out 44 years ago today. That means it's as far behind us as the 1936 Olympics was from Billy Joel at the time. A horrifying pun war followed, but that has nothing to do with the horrifying fact that people have known "You May Be Right" for 44 years.

And speaking of things that happened a long time ago, it turns out the President's memory is just fine, thank you, despite what Republican Special Prosecutor Robert K Hur said in his memorandum last month:

A transcript of a special counsel’s hourslong interview of President Biden over his handling of classified files shows that on several occasions the president fumbled with dates and the sequence of events, while otherwise appearing clearheaded.

In a report released last month, Mr. Hur concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden with a crime after classified documents ended up in an office he used after his vice presidency and in his home in Delaware. But the report also portrayed Mr. Biden, 81, as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” touching off a political furor amid his re-election campaign.

Mr. Biden’s lawyers, who were present for five hours of questioning over two days, have challenged the damaging portrait by Mr. Hur, a former Trump administration official. But the transcript had not been publicly available to evaluate Mr. Hur’s assessment that Mr. Biden’s memory has “significant limitations.”

But Mr. Hur made a particularly striking assertion in stating that Mr. Biden “did not remember when he was vice president.” As evidence, Mr. Hur quoted him as saying, “If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?” According to the report, Mr. Biden displayed similar confusion on the second day of questioning, asking, “In 2009, am I still vice president?”

The transcript provides context for those lines. In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.

I wonder how Hur would have done in a similar situation? And can you imagine how the XPOTUS would handle a deposition like that? Oh, wait—we don't have to imagine it, we have ample evidence of his inability to get through one without falling apart completely.

Before I start ranting more about the way the press treats President Biden's occasional (and rare) senior moments versus the way they treat the XPOTUS being unable to string together a coherent though, I'll go back to the original topic and leave you with Weird Al's eloquent response to Glass Houses: