Today is a travel day as we finally fly home. I wonder if that Trump guy is still president? Have the Dodgers won the Stanley Cup yet? Is it still the temperature of molten lava in Southern California? I guess I’ll find out when we land.

To keep you amused, here’s a gallery of photos from the famous Long Room library at Trinity College in Dublin. Despite my mini-rant about museums on Monday, I have to say that the attitude toward photography sure has changed for the better from ten years ago. Not just in museums, either. Basically, you can take pictures almost anywhere these days, and even the places that nominally forbid photography don’t really seem to care much. Maybe the rising army of smartphones finally caused everyone to give up.

Here’s the Long Room itself. I didn’t bother taking a good, basic establishing shot of the room since there are already hundreds of great pictures easily accessible on the web. Here’s one of them, available via Creative Commons from Diliff.

The Bible section. I found it by accident:

The famous busts lining the bookshelves:

Opera! But not the singing kind. According to a reader, “They appear to be volumes containing the collected works (opera in Latin) of St. Robert Bellarmine, a leading figure of the Counter-Reformation.”

The upper tier:

A creepy-loooking set of books. This is not a black-and-white photo. It just looks like one:

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

I’ve seen a bunch of criticism of Sen. Jeff Flake that goes like this: Sure, you talk big about Trump, but when it comes to a vote you’re always on his side. What a hypocrite.

This is also a general criticism of nearly every Republican who criticizes Trump. But what do you expect them to do? They’re conservatives. When conservative bills reach the floor, are they supposed to vote against them just because Trump happens to support them? That doesn’t make any sense.

Short of impeachment, there’s really not much that congressional Republicans can do to rein in Trump.¹ Given that reality, calling him out clearly and distinctly when he acts like a child is exactly what they should do. We need more Jeff Flakes, not fewer, and they deserve support when they speak out, not petty carping.

¹Though I’m open to suggestions.

In the past, trained human beings used to do stuff at airports. In the future, highly efficient AI-driven machines will do stuff at airports.

In the meantime, crappy machines do a lousy job at airports with occasional assistance from bored and harassed humans. I can’t wait until this era in human history ends.

David Levene/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA

This is nuts. Republicans are now planning an investigation into the ridiculous myth that Hillary Clinton turned over America’s precious bodily fluids uranium to the Russians. Also Devin Nunes apparently has more to say about her emails. And I guess the infamous Steele Dossier is also up for grabs. Ed Kilgore describes it as a “bombshell” that it turns out it was financed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Has anyone notified Republicans that Hillary lost and will never be running against them again? Is this just a way to get into Donald’s good graces? A way to keep the press busy, since they can always be suckered into covering nothingburgers about the Clintons? Or perhaps they’re just doing it to distract their base, which is starting to realize that Republicans plan to shower money only on corporations and the rich, just like always.

The dossier thing is just weird. Let me see if I have the story straight: The DNC and the Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to conduct oppo research on Trump. Fusion GPS hired Steele. Steele produced his dossier. It was never used. End of story.

I suppose there’s some way to make a scandal out of that. Congressional Republicans have made hay out of less before. But do they really want to highlight the dossier anyway? And shouldn’t they be focusing their attention on Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders and whoever else is actually politically important these days?

Scandalmongering the Clintons has defined the Republican Party for the past quarter of a century. Maybe going cold turkey was just too much to ask.

Better late than never! A few weeks ago I told you that someday I’d post a photo of the Madonna at Coomakista Pass. Since I’m back in Ireland for a couple of days, why not today?

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Let’s see. Republicans first proposed a complicated border tax scheme as a way of paying for their huge tax cut to the well-heeled. That didn’t fly. Trump then preemptively declared both the mortgage interest deduction and the charitable deduction off limits. Republicans regrouped and laid out a proposal to eliminate the deduction for state and local taxes. That died when a bunch of red-state senators realized it would affect them, not just Democrats in blue states. Child tax credits are also off the table since Trump wants to increase those. Ditto for capital gains rates, which no Republican wants to increase. Finally, in desperation, Republicans recently tossed out the idea of limiting 401(k) contributions, but now Trump has killed that idea too.

So mortgage interest, charitable deductions, retirement income, state and local taxes, and education accounts are all now off limits. That’s basically everything. There is no longer any way, even theoretically, to pay for the Republican tax cut.

And yet wealthy business owners want their tax cut. That’s the only reason they supported an obvious simpleton like Trump in the first place. So Republicans need to deliver.

But how? I predict smoke and mirrors.

Bye, London!

What follows is a fairly petty gripe, and right at the start I want to say that I understand why things are the way they are. If I were in charge of a museum, I’d run things the same way. And yet….

I’ve long had sort of a nagging grumble about the professionalization of everything. Retail. Food. Magazines. Politics. Blogs. Blah blah blah. This is wildly hypocritical of me, since I personally insist on a pretty high degree of professionalism myself, but there you have it.

For some reason, this struck me harder than usual in the museum space on this trip. They are all basically identical. You approach the ticket counter, which seems to be staffed by the exact same cadre of well-scrubbed young people as the last one. You look at the tariff board, smartly printed in Univers or Helvetica for maximum readability. Not that you really need to bother: they’re all the same. It will cost €20 per person, maybe €19 if you’re over 60. You get a little pamphlet. Your ticket is scanned. You walk through the exhibits, guided by a very well-done audio tour. Everything is explained by neatly printed signs. You exit through the inevitable gift shop, all of them basically identical except with different details on their mugs and keychains. And then you leave.

It’s all well crafted and informative. But also somehow lifeless, simply because they all look so similar. The same tickets. The same prices. The same signboards. The same inoffensive, committee-written text.

I don’t know why, but the museum where this hit me the hardest was the Cabinet War Rooms. The rooms were all there, visible though plexiglass. The furniture was neatly arranged. The mannequins were realistic. The audio tour was competently done. The path from start to end was clearly laid out.

But I ended up with no real sense of what the place was like during wartime. Maybe there’s no way to do that. But somehow I felt like a bit of a robot walking obediently from station to station.

Maybe it’s just me. Anyone else feel the same way?

ON THE OTHER HAND: Kudos to the Cabinet War Rooms for entertaining me with my favorite form of communication: charts. Lots and lots of them. That was kind of cool.

A landslide victory! Doesn't he look excited?Yoshio Tsunoda/AFLO via ZUMA

The LA Times explains how Japan’s Shinzo Abe won easily in a landslide election on Sunday:

Despite scant enthusiasm for many of Abe’s policies, particularly his planned reform of the constitution’s pacifist Article 9, his position rarely looked seriously threatened. On top of a weakened opposition, the economy has posted consecutive quarters of solid growth after decades of stagnation, the stock market is at a 20-year high and there are 1.5 vacancies for every job seeker.

Too bad that didn’t work for Hillary Clinton.

Today is a travel day. We’re flying to Dublin for a couple of days, and then back home. So here’s something to entertain you while I’m offline.

Rebecca Louise Law is a London artist who specializes in installations constructed primarily of dried plants and flowers. Her largest piece to date, “Life in Death,” is on display at Kew Gardens, and it’s really quite lovely. It takes up a single large room and consists of hundreds of strands of flora hanging from the ceiling. Visitors can stroll through the room—a limited number at a time—and to my surprise they have no problem with taking as many photographs as you want.

The lighting is fairly harsh, but the dried flowers and the wooden walls soften it into warm tones. Here’s a selection of photos: