Saturday, May 7, 2016

Is your sign straight?



     The sign didn't skew a lot, but it skewed enough—maybe half a brick dip to the left or, if you prefer, half a brick rise to the right. 
      It was crooked. 
      Plus, of course, the old brackets that held the "My Pi" sign from the restaurant before, the pizzeria that came and went, and quickly too. That's what happens. You get one chance.
      Nobody took those brackets down. A man on a ladder could have removed them with a screwdriver in 10 minutes. 
      But no one did.
      Last year, months before the restaurant opened, I was walking down Shermer in the old leafy suburban paradise and saw that sign announcing the new place, "Agave Anejo Mexican Grill," and immediately had this thought:
      They'll never make it.
      Because to survive, a business needs to pay attention to detail. Especially a restaurant. Because you can eat at home. You need to master the details, to not scrimp  and cut corners and do a slapdash job. To thrive, a restaurant has to sweat the small stuff. That's what customers expect, and are paying for.
      This vaguely Star Trek "A" was obviously designed on the cheap, the name itself hard to read, and skewed to boot. Amateur hour. The restaurant was doomed.
      I thought of writing that, a year ago, when I saw the sign. But why torment a small business owner, right out of the gate, some poor guy pursuing his dream? A Mexican restaurant of his own.
     Maybe the food would be great. A culinary genius, oblivious to such non-food matters as signs and skewing.
     Better to err on the side of kindness, if staying quiet was kindness.
     Maybe I should have written my thoughts. Maybe it would have helped him. Maybe not doing so wasn't doing him any favors.
     Nah, he wouldn't have taken the criticism and learned. People so seldom do.
     So the restaurant opened, last August. The grand opening banner stayed up for a month after the grand opening. That, too, was a bad sign, literally. It advertised the grand opening that had come and gone, and didn't come down until one corner fell down, and even then it flapped around in front of the door. For a day or two.
      Of course we ate there, my wife and younger son, we tried the food. And it wasn't bad. A little expensive. Basic Mexican food. I remember a serviceable ceviche. We almost went back for a second try—support the local business, a block from our house.
     But inside, there was no art on the wall. Who starts a Mexican restaurant and has no art on the walls? Not a colorful paper-mache lizard. Not a sombrero. Not a metal cactus. Nothing.
      So we didn't go back. The lack of art gave me almost a contempt. Really? And we were supposed to eat there why? The place never seemed that crowded. A few people in the bar. And then not even that. A week or so ago the restaurant went dark and the "FOR LEASE" sign went up. Too little capital, I would guess, and too little effort. A small dream poorly executed.
      Still, someone's dream, not deferred, but vanished, so nothing to laugh about. Instead, a grim nod, a recognition of the risk that all who strive face, and should be aware of. That tilted sign was the tip-off, before the the first basket of tortilla chips hit the table. Don't be half-assed. If you're going to do something, do it well. Make sure your sign is straight.


     

Friday, May 6, 2016

Let's go back to the coroner

"Still" by Damien Hirst, Art Institute of Chicago



     Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Cina announced his retirement Wednesday, claiming a desire to seek a "more peaceful lifestyle."
     Which immediately raises the question: What about his four-year tenure wasn't peaceful?
     Perhaps he was referring to the dramatic press conference where he revealed that teenager Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times, 14 while lying in the street, dying.
     Oh right. There was no such press conference. Cina's term was distinguished by a big hike in funding, allowing him to hire more staff and modernize the medical examiner's office, and though we played connect-the-dots last week, I would be so bold to suggest that those two elements — his keeping mum and his being served a big heaping slice of county pie — are not unrelated. Just a theory.
      I'd love to ask him about it, but no interviews, at least not with me. Then again, I'm the one who pointed out when he showed up that he planned to keep his $5,000-a-day forensic consultancy sideline. That kind of thing tends to sour relations.
     Not so for his predecessor, Dr. Nancy Jones, who had a habit of articulating medical findings, even ones that her bosses found unwelcome. Such as in 2009 when she said that Chicago Board of Education President Michael Scott committed suicide, even though Scott's pal, Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Scott's family preferred to dwell in an alternate universe of flimsy conjecture. Daley threw Jones under the bus, and her staff passed around photographs of the messes they were supposed to be cleaning up.....


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Thursday, May 5, 2016

"It's hard to take the fingerprints of the dead"

Anti-NATO protest, Chicago, 2012. 

      The Cook County Medical Examiner, Dr. Stephen Cina, quit on Wednesday, saying he wanted "a more peaceful lifestyle"—whatever that means, perhaps a reference to his $5,000 a day forensic consultancy sideline. 
     One that got away. I heaved a weary sigh—having known every Cook County Medical Examiner since the first, Dr. Robert Stein, and watching most of them work, I know that the morgue produces interesting stories. Not Dr. Cina, too modest, or too circumspect, to allow that. 
     But his predecessor, Dr. Nancy Jones did, after sufficient pleading directed at her boss, Todd Stroger, a process that ended up in my book, "You Were Never in Chicago." I am proud of this story on a number of points,  particularly noticing the tools she was using. Anyway, I thought it worth reposting.

     'It is difficult to take fingerprints of the dead," says Dr. Nancy Jones, the Cook County medical examiner. "They really are not that cooperative."
     She immediately reconsiders this.
     "These are the best patients in the world," she corrects herself, as if reluctant to criticize broadly people she sees by the thousands, though they don't see her. "If you come to me as a clinician, and I tell you to quit smoking, you don't. I tell you to take your medicine, you don't. It's the living patients who don't do what you tell them to."
Dr. Nancy Jones
    Here, in an autopsy room at the county morgue, however, the patients stay put, quietly waiting their turn on rolling steel tables, their lightless eyes half open. Technician Tiffany Gregoire helps arrange the body of a large, muscular young man, then gently washes him with a sponge. He was found face-down in a roadway, a bullet hole in his back, the latest victim this year of heightened violence, one of a dozen corpses to arrive in the previous 24 hours.
     "A little lighter load," says Dr. Jones. The average is about 16 cases a day. She reads off today's list: "A drug death, a gunshot, an unknown bone that may or may not be human, a couple of elderly people without families, a pedestrian . . . Actually, it's not a bad day."

UNCONVENTIONAL TOOLS

     Dr. Jones examines a 24-year-old who hanged himself with a shoelace—one of two suicides on today's schedule. Suicides are up. "We always know when the economy goes sour," says Dr. Jones, who suspects hard times might also explain the spike in child murders they saw in April and May.
     At the next table, Dr. Larry Cogan examines the gunshot victim. With a potential murder trial in mind, he inserts a steel rod into the wound and Sherry Davis photographs it, so a jury can see the bullet's trajectory.
     After the victim is rolled over, Gregoire takes a scalpel and cuts across the big man's chest, just below his collarbone, and down his sternum, making a rough "T." Below the brown skin is a beige layer of fat, then deep red tissue that looks disconcertingly like steak. In short order, his heart is on an electronic scale. It weighs 374 grams.
     Dr. Jones has short, coiffed red hair and frameless glasses. She was born in Aliquippa, Pa., a small steel town; her father worked in the mill there for 40 years. Though she has lived in Chicago since 1970, she is, she admits, a small-town girl at heart, and she brings a certain practicality to her job. Her medical kit includes carpet needles and a regular pair of pliers instead of a medical dura stripper costing four times as much. The cutting instrument she uses for autopsies is not a scalpel, but a fancy kitchen knife—a Henkels with a 10-inch blade, the kind found in upscale kitchens.
     "The reason I have this is because they hold their edge, and they're a lot less expensive," she says.
     Gregoire struggles to reach up into the murdered man's throat and pull out his tongue. It is hard, physical work, and while she utters an occasional expletive, her face is placid, expressionless. This is routine. When is it difficult?
     "I would have to say when the bodies come in with roaches," she says. "I don't like that. I'd rather see maggots than roaches."
     After weighing the man's heart, liver, lungs and other organs, then dumping them into a red plastic biohazard bag that will later be inserted into his chest, Gregoire turns her attention to opening his skull. Pulling away the dura inside the skullcap sounds like fabric ripping.
     "This is the part of work that gets a little tiresome," Gregoire says.
     The weight of each organ is recorded on a chalkboard. The photographs are shot on film, leading to "racks and racks and racks" of slides.
     Dr. Jones uses carbon paper to fill out multiple death certificates. The modernization that led hospitals to bar-code every last pair of Tylenol hasn't reached here yet. Dr. Jones -- who joined in 1986 but only became medical examiner last year—is planning to bring the office into the modern age as fast as possible, assuming the money can be found.

'IT'S A LOT OF STRESS'

     She also hopes—someday—to have enough staff to give them breaks from the routine, because "it gets to everybody." Some time away from the autopsy room, maybe an occasional month doing paperwork, filing slides, perhaps educating hospitals and funeral homes, which sometimes forget that certain deaths—suicides, infants, industrial accidents, murders—are required by law to be sent to the medical examiner.
     "It will make a huge improvement, to have relief, and not do the same thing day after day after day, month after month after month," she says. "It's a lot of stress."
     Despite the county budget crisis, she is hopeful.
     "I've been getting a lot of help from downtown," she says. "They really do understand my issues here."
     Beneath Dr. Jones' no-nonsense demeanor beats a warm heart. She likes riding horses, owns two, and adopts rabbits from a rescue group. When a friend, a police officer, died, the officer's wife asked Dr. Jones to perform his autopsy. She did so with her usual professionalism, crying only later, as she dictated her notes. Dr. Jones is 55 and proud of it.
     "Getting old is a privilege that many people don't have," she says. "Every time you get up in the morning and feel those aches and pains, you should thank the Lord."
     Her job has strengthened her faith.
     "I believe in God, very, very much," she says. "Doing autopsies on human beings, you see how intricate we are. The wonder of the human body. How well it meshes together, and how little it takes to stop a person's existence. One little thing."

     A few feet away, Dr. Cogan has removed the bullet that killed the man. A mangled lump of whitish metal, no bigger than a fingertip.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 2, 2008


Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Hey George, don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.



     Chicago! Yo! Over here! I have a question.
     So the 2016 Summer Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 5 — three months from Thursday — assuming the city doesn't first dissolve into unrest or the region become overwhelmed by Zika-carrying mosquitoes or Brazil collapse into political anarchy.
     That said, how many of you have had this thought: "Darn, if only we had gotten the 2016 Olympics. I sure wish it were taking place right here instead."
     A show of hands. Anybody?
     Thought so. While I'm sure there must be someone who wishes that, among Chicago's complex raft of woes, the city were also throwing a weird mega block party for shot-putters and pole-vaulters and all those other sports we studiously ignore the 47 consecutive months between Olympics. But I'm not expecting many.
     The general reaction has to be a collective, Whew!
     Dodged that bullet.
     One disaster that Richard M. Daley didn't foist upon Chicago despite trying with all his might....


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Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Chicago's own circus, City Council, once put on an elephant show



     Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had their last show using elephants in Rhode Island on Sunday. I can't claim to be particularly saddened to see the 120-year tradition end. Society changes. I used to enjoy taking the boys to the circus, and the shows were dramatic, especially the elephants forming a massive living tableau of animal bulk. But I understand that elephants are sensitive beings, and abusing them into public performance is not a particularly laudable human achievement. I'm sure feeding slaves to the lions in the Colosseum was a thrilling spectacle too, but that isn't a convincing argument against doing away with it.
    This view represents—I won't say "progress"—how about "evolution" on my part, to borrow Barack Obama's term. Ten years ago, in the wake of three elephants dying at the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Chicago City Council was holding hearings whether to effectively ban elephants in the city. I swallowed hard and attended a meeting. 
    It's a shame the aldermen couldn't have applied this zeal to shortfalls in pension funding; could have saved everybody a lot of grief. Elephants aren't the only ones who suffer. 

     Old people shouldn't live in nursing homes, where they are crammed in small, overlit rooms, often with cantankerous roommates. A few are neglected, suffering terrible bedsores, or abuse at the hands of churlish, undertrained "attendants."
     Instead, they should live out their days with their families, relaxing in wicker rockers, sipping lemonade on the wide front porches of splendid Victorian homes, their grandchildren capering around their knees.
     To help facilitate this, the City of Chicago should ban nursing homes within its borders.
     This, as best I can figure, is the kind of logic underlying arguments against allowing elephants -- either at the Lincoln Park Zoo or in passing circuses -- to reside in Chicago. Since elephants sometimes in some places are treated poorly, they shouldn't be kept in captivity at all.
     This was laid out in the City Council chambers Thursday, during a Rules Committee hearing for Ald. Mary Ann Smith's (48th) proposed ordinance to require so much free space for elephants that it would effectively ban them.
     We saw slides of elephants with abscesses on their feet. A brief, soundless, green-tinged video of a man with a hooked staff, instructing another man how to use it to discipline elephants.
     "Hurt 'em, make 'em scream," read the closed captioning, helpfully provided by PETA.
     Somehow, these incidents were supposed to jell into a general indictment. Testimony in support of the bill began -- for some inexplicable reason -- with a 16-year-old Lincoln Park High School sophomore named Francie Flannigan.
     "The elephants didn't ask to be here,'' she said. (They didn't ask to be in Africa, either, but no matter). "They are our guests. We should treat them like guests and not prisoners."
     The theater major ended by reciting from that elephant classic, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hatches the Egg.
     " 'I said what I meant and I meant what I said, an elephant is faithful, 100 percent.' "
     Ald. William Beavers (7th) responded to this curious display with a pertinent question:
     "Have you ever seen an elephant?"
     "Yes,'' said the girl. "At the Lincoln Park Zoo."
     "Anywhere else?
     "Also at the circus."
     Some three dozen other youngsters, all in identical neon green T-shirts memorializing the last three elephant inmates of the Lincoln Park Zoo, were in the public gallery, which is probably 1 percent of the kids who go through the zoo on a rainy afternoon.
     In general, Beavers provided a steady, thoughtful counterpoint, as we sailed to the realm of the absurd, acting as the Council's voice of reason (as opposed to Ald. Arenda Troutman [20th], whose rambling, incoherent speech left people scratching their heads).
     After the video, Beavers summarized the situation:
     "It's a video of one idiot, and you want to punish the whole city because you saw one person doing something."
     Patti Miles, a former employee of the Detroit Zoo, described how that zoo's elephants were shipped to a sanctuary in California -- she didn't explain why, if the elephants were so terribly abused, they nevertheless lived into their 50s, nor did she point out that the Detroit Zoo managed to make the decision without the intercession of government.
     She seemed to be speaking, not only against zoos, but against human experience of the living world in general.
     "Why is it so important to see something with your own eyes?" she asked.
     The assumption of all the pro-ban people was that there was some idealized state of nature, over in Africa, where all these elephants would be joyfully roaming if they weren't kidnapped and taken here, some Eden with no poachers, no droughts, no hyenas, no illness.
     There are 2 million Americans in prison in this country, some kept in horrendous, overcrowded conditions -- such as at the Cook County Jail. There are 600 elephants in the United States. I just don't think our priorities are straight.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 24, 2006


     Postscript: Stung by ridicule over its banning foie gras in 2005, the City Council ended up not banning elephants. In 2008, the City Council did pass a weak tea anti-elephant abuse ordinance, making it illegal "to use on an elephant any device or instrument with the intent to cause pain and injury" without mustering the courage to specifically mention "bull hooks" etc. and thus missing the heart of the matter.  The Lincoln Park Zoo got rid of its elephants, no law necessary, in 2012. 

Monday, May 2, 2016

U.S. Supreme Court leans toward legalizing corruption

Bob and Maureen McDonnell

     Things are a mess.
     They sure feel like a mess, don’t they?
     Chicago teeters on insolvency. Illinois hurtles toward its first anniversary of utter fiscal gridlock.
     Nationally, the view is even more surreal, like some semi-obscene Dali painting come to life. This crude New York punchline has shanghaied the Republican Party. While the Democrats who aren’t still skipping happily toward Shangri-La behind Pied Piper Bernie Sanders, banging tambourines wrapped in ribbons, grimly assemble around scarred old campaigner Hillary Clinton, like yeomen clutching pointed staffs in a muddy field around Henry V, psyching themselves up to fight off the legions of bowl-haircut Middle American sexist idiocy for the next six solid months.
     So I hate to point out another looming problem, one not on your radar yet. It won’t show up until June, maybe. But it bobbed to the surface of our national discourse last week before being flushed away by the next jaw-dropping set of bad news. Since you may have missed it, I feel compelled to pluck it out and hold it up, gingerly, between thumb and forefinger.
     Bob McDonnell.
     Name mean anything? Of course not. Don’t feel bad, it drew a blank with me too....


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Postscript: Wondering what happened? Read it and weep. 

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Chris Christie in rags



    The presidential election is Tuesday, Nov. 8.
    One hundred and ninety days from now.
    A tad more than half a year.
    Quite a lot, really.
    And given that, right now, it looks as if those days—4392 hours — will be taken up listening to, looking at, and thinking about Donald J. Trump, some words of comfort are in order.
    I'd like to direct your attention to Chris Christie in the photo above.
    Now the governor of New Jersey was never going to be president. That dream vanished when his top aides shut down a few lanes of the George Washington Bridge leading to Ft. Lee in 2013, as some kind of crazy political payback by creating huge traffic jams. Meaning either Christie knew about it and lied about that knowledge. Or ran an administration where henchmen ran riot while he sat in the dark.
    And really, which was worse?
    The man was a political corpse and didn't know it.
    Still, Christie showed up at the Republican debates, delivered his prepackaged zingers and hit his cues. And when it was over he was among the first former opponents to embrace Donald Trump.
    As a reward, Trump lets him join the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band album cover melange of models and GOP mercenaries who have drifted over to his banner and are allowed to stand behind him at speeches.
     Christie, though, is noteworthy for that expression, that stunned, miserable stare that often comes over his face. I think of that woman trapped in the hive in "Aliens," who croaks "Kill me."
    Or—and this is a vague memory—there was some Babylonian king, who kept his enemy, blinded, in a small cage at court. It was something I glanced on a TV historical drama years ago, so might not even be true. I can't dig up any facts on the matter, so maybe you can help out.* But the sight of once egomaniac Christie, deprived of the spotlight, showing his throat to Trump, who dressed him in rags and chained him to a post in the corner, where he crouches, miserable, waiting hungrily for scraps of attention.
    That's a beautiful thing. It makes me happy every time I see it, because the obloquy is so well-deserved. The quisling, his head shaved, in a tumbrel, dripping in spit. And perhaps there's a bit of foreshadowing there. It is too much, at this point, to hope that Trump will end up the same way, toothless, ignored and flailing, a male Sarah Palin, spouting gibberish as people avert their faces. He's too rich for that. But it could happen. Some version of that could yet occur. Look at Christie. Really look at him. Whenever Trump is on stage, scan the ensemble of bootlickers and coat-holders and toadies. Find him and be reassured. The wheel turns, and sometimes rough justice does occur. Trump is riding high now, at this moment. But a moment does not last forever. Or so one may passionately hope.


* A Bible-savvy reader, John Anton Weber, offers up the unfortunate I was thinking of, Zedekiah, citing chapter and verse:

"At the end of his eleven year reign, Nebuchadnezzar succeeded in capturing Jerusalem. Zedekiah and his followers attempted to escape, making their way out of the city, but were captured on the plains of Jericho, and were taken to Riblah.There, after seeing his sons put to death, his own eyes were put out, and, being loaded with chains, he was carried captive to Babylon, where he remained a prisoner until he died."  
                                                — Kings 25:1-7; 2 Chronicles 36:12   
Thank you John!