"But wait, there's more!" Ron Popeil still going strong.

Ron Popeil

    When the pantheon of great Chicago businessmen is reeled off— retailers Montgomery Ward and Marshall Field, restaurateurs Ray Kroc and Richard Melman, manufacturers Cyrus McCormick and George Pullman— somehow they never quite get around to Ron Popeil, master TV pitchman. 
    Which is a shame, because Popeil not only made a fortune for himself out of such humble devices as the Chop-O-Matic and the Pocket Fisherman, but was a pioneer in bringing the smooth-talking Maxwell Street salesman into the electronic age. 
    His Chicago roots are discussed even less here than he is, but I was reminded of them when I bumped into him, quite by accident, Sunday at the end of a long day at the International Home + Housewares Show at McCormick Place. 
    "Chicago, Chicago, my home town, Chicago," he said, shaking hands. He began working here at 13, hauling vegetables to the sprawling outdoor market on Maxwell Street so his father, S.J. Popeil could demonstrate his inventions, such as the Veg-O-Matic. Soon Ron was demonstrating products at the flagship Woolworth's at State and Washington.
     "That's where I got my education," he said.
     His business quickly grew. He wore a Rolex, had offices at the Playboy Building at 919 N. Michigan. The Veg-O-Matic went through vegetables so quickly, salesmen had trouble hauling them around, so he thought to go on TV, producing a string of memorable commercials that brought Popeil, part Midway barker, part street corner salesman, part vaudeville entertainer, to the growing medium. Although he was no mere pitchman. Popeil enthusiastically researched and developed his products. They had to work well.
     He introduced more products—Mr. Microphone, Inside the Shell Egg Scrambler, Showtime Rotisserie, to name a few—and became part of the culture. Steve Goodman wrote a song about Popeil products; Weird Al Yankovic wrote one too. "Help me, Mr. Popeil!" 
     Popeil sold his company in 2005 for $55 million. He lives in Beverly Hills, where he is developing his next breakthrough product, a table-top fryer.   
    "Most of my inventions take two or three years," he said. "This one has taken twelve and a half years." 
    I wondered how he settled on a fryer.
    "Why a fryer? Before I invent a product, I have to completely understand and be satisfied with the marketing. All my inventions, the marketing has to be there before I entertain a particular invention." In other words, there is a need."
     For a 78-year-old, he had a clear-eyed view of the present media moment.
     "The market now is changing," he said. "The TV audience is getting smaller and smaller. It only has eight to ten years left. Social media is the new journey."
       He also has an unusual hobby.  "I happen to be the world's largest collector of olive oil," he said. "I'm in the Guinness Book of World Records."
      Though I kept trying to shift the conversation back to Chicago, kept the focus relentlessly on his new fryer, which he plans to sell lock, stock and barrel to whatever company sage enough to buy it, claiming that improved safety standards will cause all other fryers to be pulled from the market.
     "It is the most dangerous product on the planet," he said, speaking with animation and enthusiasm. I had to ask him—at this point in his life, why continue to work on new products?
    "I love what I do," he said. "Inventing and marketing, creating the market."
     Popeil gets back to Chicago a few times a year—though he no longer owns the company, he was stopping by the Ronco booth to visit. 
     "The people are what I miss about Chicago," he said. "The city has really grown. Great downtown, great people.  The weather is wonderful where I live, but you really can't replace the people."

“High displacement dunk chamber funnels the milk"

   

     I could write a week's worth of columns at the Housewares show—there are just so many hopeful, quirky people, so many good—and bad—ideas. It's just overwhelming. Only after I wrote this did I realize I forgot to mention Bambooee, the reusable paper towel made from bamboo. You can wash the sheets up to 100 times, but the question for me was whether anyone would pay $15.99 for a roll of 20 paper towels that you toss in the laundry. To me, that makes them rags, and why pay for them when there's an endless supply waiting to be cut up in your t-shirt drawer? "Can you put them back on the roll after you wash them?" my wife asked, touching upon the convenience factor in paper towels. The whole point is: you throw them away. So even though I think reusable paper towels is a non-starter, somebody obviously put a lot of money into the idea.  

      Are you vexed by twist ties? Because you can’t find one when you need one, or the ties you do find are all kinked up, or not the right color?

     Milton D. Wheeler has a product for you.

     “The Twist-Tie Pod,” a circular unit that lets you cut your own lengths of twist tie from a 65-foot spool, one of the blizzard of products, old and new, featured at the 2014 International Home + Housewares Show, which opened Saturday at McCormick Place and brings together 2,000 exhibitors and 60,000 foot weary attendees, trudging past an endless vista of plastic tubs, wooden spoons, crystal glasses, dog beds, gourmet knives, and—most interesting—new products whose concepts  are either brilliant or ridiculous, depending on your perspective.

   Satisfied with your current twist tie arrangement? How about your toilet seat—is it drab? Consider Toilet Tattoos, labels that adhere to the top of a toilet seat, transforming it into a zebra skin print or butterfly swarm or death’s head.

    “I wanted a leopard seat,” explained Celeste Massullo, an Ohio woman who started with four designs and now sells 175.

    The show is open to the trade only, and indeed, most booths are interesting only to someone who, for example, might want to order a shipping container full of wine racks. But to the casual observer, the novel new products stick out, each with its own story.

     “My sister asked me, ‘What do I do about bananas constantly being crushed in my backpack?’” said Paul Stremple, who answered by inventing  the Banana Bunker (“Protection with Appeal”)  a plastic case that fits around a banana, protecting it from the vicissitudes of the lunch bag.

     The show sprawls across McCormick Place, featuring manufacturers who come from around the world to do business, to find out what’s new and make contacts and sales. Just walking through the show is an art. To make eye contact is to invite a pitch.

     “I got a product that you just don’t need,” said Andy Morris, pushing Mold Be Gone, an anti-mildew spray. He came up with the approach—he said—the day before, trying to get people to break stride. “Everybody here is trying to sell you something, to convince you it’s something you need,” he said. “So I figure, ‘Here’s something you don’t need.’”

      Some products take a moment to understand. The Iron Shoe is neither iron nor worn on the foot, but a high tech surface attached to  irons to protect clothing. The Grillbot crawls over a grill, scrubbing it with three rotating drums of metal bristles.  

     “Takes a dirty, messy job and now you want to watch it like a race car,” said Ethan Woods, who came up with the product after finding himself using a metal brush attached to a power drill to try to clean his grill.
     Not every new product is trivial. Potsafe is a new system of cookware and metal framework designed to keep children from pulling hot pots off stovetops.
     Gloves seem big this year, particularly specialized disposable cleaning gloves. Duramitt offers a range of mittens with sponges attached to the palm, or scrubbers, or surfaces designed to hold paint.
     "No one wants to get their hands dirty anymore," said Diana Malone, of Kleen Maid, which sells Spic and Span Disposable Dusting Mitts, in packs of five for a dollar. Though gloves "have been around forever," specialized, disposable versions are becoming more popular. "Everyone has become germ-conscious," she said.
     Of course, makers of traditional gloves point out the obvious drawbacks of these all-in-one gloves. "If you only have a sponge on your hand, you can't do anything else with it," said Evan Karls, a division manager at Karmin Group, which licenses Arm & Hammer gloves.
     Managing garbage can liners must be an issue, because several new products address it. "It comes out like a tissue box," said Jack Licata, president of Bag Ups, "The Original Trash Bag Dispensing System," which sits at the bottom of your trash container, ready to offer a fresh bag.

   Some products surprise with their elaborate presentation. Guac-Lock is a container designed to keep guacamole from turning brown, but its airy, white-on-green graphic booth looks like a jewelry store, or something Apple would design.
     Some new products aim for an almost heartbreakingly small niche, yet seem to be thriving. A few years back the show saw the debut of Dipr, "The Ultimate Cookie Spoon," a hook that slips around the center of a sandwich cookie to facilitate it being dipped.
      "Business is good, sales have doubled," inventor Robert Haleluk said. "Now we're on to our second product." That would be the Dunkr, a cup that narrows to a half-cookie shape. "High displacement dunk chamber funnels the milk into a narrow groove at the bottom of the cup," its literature explains, "giving you a perfect dunk, even with very little left." Suggested retail price: $6.99.
     The show runs through Tuesday.

"Chicagoland": One summer does not a swallow make

   

      Sometimes German just sounds better. If you ever saw both the original and the dubbed versions of Wolfgang Petersen's classic 1981 submarine movie, you know that not only is the title more powerful in German than in English, "Das Boot" versus "The Boat" (say them aloud) but the dialogue is a lot more dramatic.  In the original, they're always shouting things like, "Jungs! Lasst uns in die U-Boot jetzt gehen!" Which sounds limp in English: "Hey guy, let's go into the submarine now."
      Wagner, of course, is grand and powerful in German -- "Gotterdammerung" -- but becomes a feeble sigh in English: "Twilight of the gods."
     So watching the second installment of CNN's eight-hour documentary "Chicagoland," it is probably better for me to say the old German adage, "Einmal ist keinmal; und zweimal ist immer," came to mind, than "Once is never and twice is forever."
     The first episode was dramatic and intriguing, focusing primarily on the Chicago's 2012 teachers strike through three major characters: the mayor, police superintendent Garry McCarthy, and Liz Dozier, the principal one particular South Side High School, Fenger. 
     The second installment, well, I felt like I was watching the first over again, except with Billy Dec, the fedora-wearing restaurant and club entrepreneur. I know him, nice guy. But he didn't bring anything to the show. What did he tell us? What did we learn, beyond the fact he owns clubs and wears hats?
    That's isn't the final judgment—there are six more episodes yet. I still think they're done a laudable job trying to capture this dynamic and heartbreaking city. And the shows themselves, technically, are beautifully done, fast-paced, wonderfully-photographed. But after show No. 2, there was a definite air-leaking-out-of-the-balloon quality, and it made me eager to see the third installment, in part, hoping it picks up and is closer to the excellence of the first.
     Commentary on the show from other journalists seems to pingpong from praise -- the city looks great, which is good -- to condemnation -- Mayor Rahm Emanuel looks great, which is bad. 
      As if both couldn't be true. The city does looks great. And the show is heavy on Rahm, who is not exactly the Man of a Thousand Faces. To me, a little Rahm goes a long way.  
     On the other hand, calling it an advertisement is unfair. What's the terrible thing about Rahm that isn't in there? That he closed 50 schools? They certainly convey that in excruciating detail. That he's a rich guy who a lot of people don't like on general principles? They go there too. My theory is that some critics just don't like looking at him so much. 
      The mayor isn't all of "Chicagoland," thank God. It isn't quite "Rahmland." What I found most interesting, again only seeing the first quarter of the eight hours are the scenes of African-American life in Roseland and Englewood. A lot of time in the first two programs is spent listening to African-American students who go to Fenger High School, their parents, teachers, principal Liz Dozier, people on the street, talking about their lives. These aren't voices you hear or faces you see on television all that much, and that aspect alone, to me, that made the programs important and worth watching.  (And another cause for complaint, this time from black Chicagoans who worry that the show suggests many African-Americans live in poor, violence-ridden neighborhoods and face difficult lives. Ahem, I hate to be the one to say it, but if CNN focused on well-off black couples walking their tiny dogs in Lincoln Park, imagine how THAT would be received. Maybe in an 80-hour series).
     Still, I wish the rest of "Chicagoland" found other areas of the city to delve into the way they explore Roseland, but they really don't. Not yet anyway. 
     At this point, I suppose I should toss out a few caveats. I'm in the first episode, briefly, though I'll leave you to decide whether being momentarily caught in the limelight has dazzled me and made me unable to respond other than to blink in blind praise.  I'm also friends with Mark Konkol, who was the producers' point man -- the Chicago Virgil showing them about the city. Konkol's the real thing, he wrote the narration and delivered it in a unique yet classic Chicago voice that I believe we're going to be hearing more of. Though Mark would be the first to tell you that being his friend wouldn't stop me from dispassionately critiquing something he had done—loyalty is not my strong suite—and I am here, I hope. As I said, I think less of "Chicagoland" after the second show than I did the first. The Blackhawks segment seemed a waste — what did it communicate? They won the Stanley Cup and the city was happy. That isn't precisely a revelation. I would have preferred to learn a little something about the team, the victory, the celebration. To me, the sign of a good documentary, of good non-fiction, is not so much its style, as what it tells you that you didn't know before and now want to tell other people. What are the fascinating details they've found and shared? 
     But wait, I guess I'm not done with ticking off my biases.  I don't loathe Rahm Emanuel -- a lot of the criticism of the show is that you see him as an active, important figure in city life, which he kinda is.  Sure, he's pissed off folks whose schools he's closed, whose pensions he's trying to claw back, but those observations only damn him if you stop there and don't peek over the financial cliff Chicago is teetering on, and he is vigorously trying to yank the city back from. The key question, to me, is whether Rahm's trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor—the Occupy/Karen Lewis accusation. They say, "Why not tax LaSalle Street for the money?" and Rahm replies if he did that, he'd drive business away and then we'd really be screwed. Which makes sense. Who's right? That call is above my pay grade, but I don't think knee jerk condemnation of the mayor and automatic sympathy to anyone with a complaint gets us any closer to the truth. Maybe they should have sat down one of Rahm's critics and had him tick off all the things that, three years into his administration, haven't gone right. 
    The show doesn't suffer because it has too much Rahm, rather, that having so much Rahm crowds out other things. My central concern, having seen a quarter of the shows, is that, trying to create some kind of narrative, we're getting too narrow a slice of the city. As interesting as Fenger High School is, and its principal Liz Dozier, I could never see them in the program again -- or Rahm, or Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy for that matter-- and I'd feel like I had seen them plenty. But they're all coming back in the third episode, and we can only hope they're used to widen the scope and go other places. It's a very big city, with all sorts of people in it. Were it my show, I'd have included a regular person character,  a bakery truck driver, a letter carrier, and some of time spent watching Rahm escorting his powerful pals through corridors again and again would be shifted to getting to know that guy. Then again, it's their story, and maybe they never intended to create a postcard of the city. A writer gets to pick his subject.
     I should probably wait until it's over to pass judgment--they're still crafting the final episode -- but then you wouldn't be able to watch it, Thursday nights at 9 p.m. on CNN (of course, it's 2014, so you can watch anything whenever you want; I wonder when the tradition of seeing programs as they air will become a quaint anachronism). It's holding my interest, and this progress report notwithstanding, I'm withholding final judgment. There's six hours to go. It's too early to really tell. Or as they say, better, in German, Eine Schwalbe macht noch keinen Sommer. One swallow does not a summer make. 
     
      

Saturday fun: Where IS this?

      There can be an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to elegance. You see something, presented as rich and marvelous, look at it for an admiring moment, then think, "Wait a second; that's hideous." 
     Much depends, of course, on an individual's particular taste. Me, for instance, as much as I generally admire the sense of casual, if not shabby, East Coast old wealth being purveyed by Ralph Lauren, and though I realize those bright green flannel pants with the ducks on them are supposed to be something your mad Uncle Percival would wear to a croquet match at the Rod & Gimlet Club, sometimes my jaw just drops. Lauren's Olympic uniforms did that for me, or his introduction of enormous logos, which I assumed were for Saudi Arabian sheiks and Mexican drug lords and others with far more money than taste, but are also found in the United States, though I see them in stores far more than I see them worn in the street. Maybe all the people who buy them are over in Kenilworth and Bannockburn and other high hat suburbs, and don't find their way into the lumpen world of Northbrook since they haven't been around long enough to show up at Goodwill stores in volume. Anyway,  I find them crass, but times change, and I'm probably saying more about myself than about the shirts. No doubt the logos will only grow bigger.
      Today's "Where is this" features a carpet. My wife and I were at a birthday dinner party for well-off acquaintance, a large, potlatch celebration, and we wandered off for a while to poke around, and found ourselves in this empty ballroom. 
      "That's the ugliest carpet I've ever seen in my life," I remarked, and snapped a few photos. 
     Why? The bright scarlet and cornflower blue, surrounded by these thick black lines, hurled across a mud beige background. The shapes themselves, in the foreground, clown face features interposed with wing frameworks, a starfish half run over by a truck tire in the background. One worried about its effect on drunk people.
     This probably can only be solved by someone who, like us, wandered by and saw it. It's a place where someone would hold a large birthday supper, with music and dancing and hundreds of guests. (It's the first party I've been to where the hosts hired professional models, apparently, to mingle during cocktails and then scram, because there was a platoon of tall, thin, gorgeous young people who stood around during drinks, who promptly vanished at dinner. Or maybe they were crashing, but they had an air of industry about them). As for a hint, well, I'll say, it's a famous place, whose name most anyone in Chicago would recognize. One that should know better when it comes to carpet. Or am I wrong here? Besides guessing for the contest, if anybody likes this, finds it aesthetically-defensible, my all means, please, let us know why. 
     Otherwise, the contest rules are the same. Post your guess in the comments section.  The winner gets a signed copy of my book, "You Were Never in Chicago." Have fun.

Helping people with brain cancer live longer

Human brains stored at the Illinois Anatomical Gift Association

    I like writing medical stories, or used to. Then the pace of the paper got more frantic and I stopped taking the time. While I've done a number with the University of Chicago Hospitals, Illinois Masonic, Michael Reese, Christ Hospital, and especially Loyola, Northwestern Memorial was in a realm of unapproachability all its own. For reasons I never quite fathomed, they just didn't want to be in the newspaper. So whenever I would meet someone from Northwestern, a trustee, a board member, who would airily inform me they were with the hospital, I would shock them by saying, "Northwestern Memorial? I HATE Northwestern Memorial...." I don't know if that had an effect, though I did it twice in the past year with two highly placed NU bigwigs, or they just brought on a new PR team, but they actually pitched this research at me, and it sounded new and significant enough to write something about. I had wanted to spend time delving deeply into this process, but got sidetracked, and this more superficial look had to do. 

     ‘Here’s the thing with brain cancer,” said Dr. Andrew Parsa, chairman of neurological surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, “it’s relatively rare — 30,000 to 40,000 people get it every year. Yet it’s a very significant health care cost, per patient, because of all the chemo, all the treatments, the MRI scans.”

     An expensive, deadly illness, one that kills patients quickly, usually within a year to 16 months after it’s detected.

     “We have made no progress in this disease in the 20 years I have been in neurology,” Parsa said. “We haven’t moved things forward in terms of therapies. We have made some minor advances, but haven’t found any home run drugs or approaches.”

     Not yet. But that might change soon.

     Parsa is conducting a major study for the National Cancer Institute, treating brain tumors not just with the traditional surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but with a vaccine formed from material taken from the cancerous tumors themselves, which range from the size of a cherry to a grapefruit. The vaccine is designed to keep cancer from recurring and shift it from a terminal to a treatable chronic condition, like diabetes.

“When we talk about vaccines, we think mumps, measles, rubella,” Parsa said. “With this type of vaccine, what we can do is disrupt the tumor from coming back, in a specific, nontoxic way. We [cut out] the tumor, ship it to a laboratory, they make a vaccine that is tumor-specific, patient-specific.”

The vaccine process is not new. Scientists have created anticancer vaccines using a variety of substances — the patient’s blood, for instance, or particular proteins. But this approach creates a wider-ranging vaccine, providing hundreds of antigens to provoke an immune response against this cancer.
     Since 2006, Parsa has been conducting the largest randomized brain tumor study ever funded by the NCI. “It’s a tribute to the validity of the approach,” he said.
     In February, Parsa gave the first injection to Phil Ashbach, 67, a hot dog stand owner — Phil’s Last Stand, 2258 W. Chicago — who last summer noticed something odd.
     “Smells,” Ashbach said, “that weren’t accurate. Smelling things that didn’t exist.”
     Phantom smells can be a form of seizure. After experiencing eight or 10, he phoned his brother, a doctor, who told him to go to the emergency room immediately.
     Ashbach was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a particularly fast-moving, deadly, treatment-resistant brain tumor that usually kills in three to nine months.
     He had two surgeries to remove the cancer, then began the experimental treatment.
     Is facing brain cancer scary?
     “I’m not really scared much,” Ashbach said. “I get melancholy a fair amount. I get sad. I worry about my family. ” He has four sons; his ex-wife died of cancer 18 years ago. “I’ve had a little bit of bad luck lately.”
     It is still early to know whether his luck is about to change. In phase II of the Northwestern clinical study, only 30 percent of the patients receiving the new vaccine lived a year which, considering the lethal form of cancer, Medical News Today considered a “promising” outcome.
     “This is the final step in getting the drug approved by the FDA,” Parsa said. “It’s safe to say that in two years we will have some results. We will have an answer one way or another.”
     The hope is they will have a treatment that works better and isn’t as toxic as chemo or radiation.
     “That’s part of the reason why we’re so excited about it,” Parsa said. “Our hope is that people move forward, that we create long-term quality of life with minimal toxicity. This is a clinical trial, we don’t know yet the result. This particular therapy, this vaccine, it’s like climbing a mountain. As we get higher up, we set up a new base camp, then we regroup and climb even higher. This particular vaccine gets us a base camp high in the mountain.
     “This vaccine has the potential to be part of a treatment that will be a home run,” he continued. “This vaccine can turn a terminal disease into a chronic disease. I don’t say ‘cure,’ but just like diabetes, just like heart disease, something we can live with.”
     I assumed that brain cancer patients, facing swift death, might be eager to take part in his study and thought I should give Parsa a chance to wave them off, because of course he wouldn’t want to be inundated. Wrong.
     “We need more brain cancer patients,” he said. “Tell them to call Dr. Parsa.”
     I warned him that if I wrote this, people would call him for help.
     “They do it every day,” he said.

"Abe Lincoln would not have done it."

     


     The general ignorance of the American people cannot be overstated, and should come as no surprise.
     And yet, sometimes, particular instances do gall.
     For instance, Bill O'Reilly, the TV host and author of best-selling clip job histories, noted on Fox Tuesday that Barack Obama had gone on a humor program with Zach Galifianakis called "Between Two Ferns" on the comedy website Funny or Die. The president was encouraging young people to sign up for health insurance. O'Reilly said he found the appearance "a little bit desperate," perhaps "demeaning" and something that Abraham Lincoln would never do.
     "But the president of the United States?" O'Reilly scoffed. "All I can tell you is Abe Lincoln would not have done it. There comes a point when serious times call for serious action.”
    Despite all the ill-informed bile that has flowed for years like a mighty river from Bill O'Reilly's mouth, we in the fact-based world have to stand back and marvel, if not gape, in shock, almost awe. Really? Lincoln? The 16th president? The man O'Reilly wrote a book about? The president who, if he was known for one thing, was famous as a clown and a story-teller who "in serious times" would tell jokes under almost any circumstance.
     "In the midst of ... death-giving news," observed Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish born writer who lived in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, "Mr. Lincoln has always a story to tell. This is known ... by all who approach him. Months ago I was in Mr. Lincoln's presence when he received a telegram announcing the crossing of the Mississippi by Gen. Pope at New Madrid. Scarcely had Mr. Lincoln finished the reading of the dispatch when he cracked ... two not very washed stories."
     Not just jokes, but "not very washed stories," aka, dirty jokes. 
     Two basic default misperceptions about the past among those with scant knowledge of it are 1) that people were all chaste prudes back then. And 2) that they had no sense of humor, as if the real Lincoln were the stiff portrait on the $5 bill, or the serene face on Mount Rushmore. O'Reilly no doubt invoked Lincoln's name because, to him, Lincoln represents all that is grave, serious and Biblical about America.
     Lincoln loved puns, introducing himself and his stout wife as "the long and the short of it." He might not have really told job seekers that they had as much chance of getting a federal appointment "as you have of sleeping with my wife," but several contemporaries claimed he did. No event was too solemn, such as on April 30, 1863, which Lincoln had officially proclaimed as "a national day of prayer, fasting and humiliation" for the proud but shattered country to humble itself before the offended Almighty God and beg for forgiveness, seeking relief from the divine punishment of the Civil War. 
     "Gentlemen, this is a fast day," he observed to his staff,  "and I am pleased to observe that you are working as fast as you can."
      Just as Obama's humor draws the hoots of his relentless ideological enemies, so Lincoln's jests provoked the scorn of their equivalents at the time. "A low-bred obscene clown," sniffed the Atlanta Intelligencer which, like O'Reilly, spoke to an audience in self-destructive open rebellion.  

Cartoon criticizing Lincoln, who replies to Columbia demanding her sons
slain in the Civil War with "That reminds me of a story." The New York
World had published a false report that he joked surveying the carnage
 on the battlefield at Antietam.

     The tales are endless, and while some are certainly false or exaggerated, enough come from eyewitnesses, diarists, reporters and Lincoln himself that we know that here was a man who liked to jest. O'Reilly saying what he did would be like his saying that Obama's playing basketball is something former Senator Bill Bradley is too dignified to ever do. 
    As with Obama, Lincoln's jests were twofold—he enjoyed telling them, and they served a purpose. This was true throughout Lincoln's life, even as a young man, when he worked as an attorney.
    Once, at the summation of a trial he was arguing, Lincoln referred to the punch line of a popular joke.
     "They have their facts right," he said, "but are drawing the wrong conclusion."1
     The full joke went like this: a farm boy runs to his father and says, "Pa, pa, the hired hand and sis are in the hay loft! She's a liftin' up her dress up and he's a pullin' down his pants and affixin' to  pee all over the hay." 
     The farmer put his hand on the agitated boy's shoulder and replied, "Son, you've got the facts right but you're drawing the wrong conclusion." 
      O'Reilly is worse than the naive farm boy. He both has his facts wrong and is drawing the wrong conclusion. But then, he's built a career out of doing that, spinning folly from error for an audience of  belligerent  yokels who lap it up. Too late for him to change now. 

Postscript

     After I wrote the above, I was still looking through materials I had gathered about Abraham Lincoln and humor, and came upon this, written by Lincoln in a letter to Col. John D. Van Buren, dated June 26, 1863:

I believe I have the popular reputation of being a story teller, but I do not deserve the name in its general sense, for it is not the story itself but its purpose, or effect, that interests me. I often avoid a long and useless discussion by others or a laborious explanation on my own part by a short story that illustrates my point of view. So, too, the sharpness of a refusal or the edge of a rebuke may be blunted by an appropriate story, so as to save the wounded feeling and yet serve the purpose. No, I am not simply a story teller, but story telling as an emollient saves me much friction and distress.

     In other words, Lincoln's humor has a point, which of course Obama's does too—in this case, saving American lives by promoting health insurance. When you realize what he was doing—nudging young people toward health care—the appearance becomes more than not "demeaning," but laudable. 

     And you realize, again, how loathsome the opposition of the O'Reillys of the world truly is. Not just ignorant, but disingenuous. They are against not only his method in this instance but in all instances, and not just the purpose behind it, but against whatever his purpose happens to be.  Against literally anything he does. Someday, when the history of attacking Barack Obama is written—and what an interesting book that will be—future historians will marvel how his kneejerk opponents, who decried everything he said or did, somehow managed to maintain the fiction that each new vibration of their pre-determined condemnation was a fresh reaction based on a fair analysis of the latest evidence, and not just the chiming out of their single, set, tuning fork quiver of continual opposition. 

1. From "Abe Lincoln's Legacy of Laughter," Edited by Paul M. Zall (University of Tennessee Press: 2007)

Could you leave your cell phone at home?

     Dealing with the gun aficionados for the past two days reminded me of the time I printed a riddle about motorcycles and heart transplants. It was benign, and in no way suggested, oh-for-instance, that they should all wear helmets so as not to saddle society with their medical bills. No matter. After dealing with thousands of angry motorcyclists, who weren't responding to anything I had written, but just to the commands of their puppeteers, I was ready to never write about the subject again, which I suppose was the point of their swarm-the-zone response. Anyway, thank God I forgot my cell phone Tuesday, or I probably would have spent the day staring out the window, twitching a muscle in my jaw, and writing nothing. As it is, I managed to squeak out this. 
     Moving on -- some 91 percent of Americans have cell phones — among the younger generations, it's even more, 96, 98 percent. (Among those over 65, it's still only 75 percent). Those stats feel permanent, though It'll be interesting to see if there is any pullback, or if toting around a communications device is now a permanent human condition. My guess it is.

     "I have to leave right now,” I told my wife Tuesday morning, shrugging on my Burberry as she stepped out of the kitchen for her kiss as I flew past.

     The clock in the bedroom had said 7:48 a.m., which almost frightened me, because the bedroom clock never says 7:48 a.m., since I always leave at 7:45 a.m. That way I can stroll the easy block to the train station, buy my coffee and the Chicago Sun-Times, then calmly wait for the 7:54. 

     Fast-stepping down the sidewalk, I did my usual inventory. Wallet, check. Money clip, check. Sunglasses, check. . . . 

     No cellphone.

     My first thought was to stop, pirouette, rush home, retrieve the phone. I could still make the 7:54, maybe, though I’d probably have to forgo the coffee and paper. Or I could plant myself at home and write more restrained replies to honked-off gun owners for 15 minutes and catch the 8:17. Or . . . 

     The possibility bloomed, strange and wonderful. I could go to work without my cellphone. I could consciously and deliberately leave it behind. Just posing the question answered it — it was so novel, so strange, I had to give it a try. The commute suddenly assumed a certain carnival, Feast of Fools, inverted quality. I did not go back.

     At the Northbrook station, a strange scene: Fellow commuters stood in place, each gazing at his palm. They were like fronds swaying at the bottom of a pond. My first thought was to snap a picture. My hand was halfway to my pocket when I realized . . . Oh, right. No phone. The mind is an odd thing.

     I threaded my way through the crowd — it’s easy, if you aren’t distracted. It felt like one of those science fiction stories where a guy can stop time and wanders in and out of frozen, statue-like pedestrians. 

     I got my coffee, my copy of the paper. As I paid, the stern Metra announcement muddily warbled, “Your attention please. The next inbound Metra train is now arriving in your station,” followed by the risible warning that frantic commuter bees should not attempt to crawl onto the train before it stops and the doors open. Is that really necessary? 

     Habit is a taskmaster. To sit down on a train is to take out the phone and check who has emailed me over the past 10 minutes. This is going to take some getting used to.

     I read the paper. I read a book. I wondered who was emailing me. 

     At the office, the white cord hanging off my computer was a rebuke. Normally, I’d be charging my phone, hooking it to its essential transfusion of life-giving power.

     I only truly missed it at lunch. I was hurrying to a restaurant I had never been to — Primebar, at 155 N. Wacker. Not only never been to, but never noticed. I was trucking along, almost late. Suddenly, the addresses were in the 120s and I hadn’t seen it? What if it wasn’t there? What if I had read “Wacker” and it was really “Wabash?” They both begin with “Wa.” I’d be late, my business scuttled. Should I bolt blindly to Wabash? Borrow a cellphone? I was off-grid. Fear rose. I doubled back. There it was.

     I was early. Rocked on my heels watching the young execs who had just left their offices and were now checking their cellphones to see what had happened in the minutes they were walking over. 

     Technology is strange. No sooner did medicine slap cigarettes from our hands than cellphones came along to give us something to fidget with. They couldn’t have planned it better. Is our business really that pressing, or do we just like to think it is? My guess: the latter. The messages are never, “Diphtheria detected. Serum low. Harness the dogs and mush hell-bent to Nome.”  

     Here’s a wild thought: Deliberately leave your phone home one day a week. Or if that’s impossible, do it once. Make the decision, accept the consequences. Find out. Though if you can’t, ask yourself: Is what you’re really worried about that you’ll miss something important? Or that you won’t?

     The devices are supposed to help us; they’re not supposed to own us. We’re not their slaves, the meat pedestals that bear them about in triumph. Not yet anyway.

     If it helps, this problem is nothing new. Exactly 160 years ago, Henry David Thoreau wrote, in Walden: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at . . . we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

     It’s a shame we couldn’t dedicate a fraction of genius that made these phones into crafting what we convey over them.