Crumbling US senate echoes Roman collapse

Augustus

     Don’t be glum, chum. It isn’t as if the United States Senate is the first legislative body to dissolve into an impotent puddle at the feet of a domineering leader. History’s full of ’em. The most glaring example, alas, is the senate in the ancient Roman Republic.
     If it’s been a while since you reached for your Edward Gibbon, save yourself the back strain. I’ve spent the weekend thumbing through “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and, buddy, as bad as the news is today, by consulting history we are reminded that it can get worse.
     Much worse.
     Gibbon starts off his epic — some 4,000 pages — of decline with the first emperor; Julius Caesar’s nephew Octavian, who renamed himself “Augustus” and, like a certain president we all know, swept aside governmental norms to gather power to himself.
     “Every barrier of the Roman constitution had been leveled by the vast ambition of the dictator,” Gibbon writes. He had help, particularly in rural areas.
     ”The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants,” Gibbon writes. “The people of Rome, viewing with secret pleasure the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows.”
     Enjoy the Super Bowl Sunday? Good times...
     The thing is, Augustus liked the senate. He himself was a senator, and made a show of consulting his fellow senators, who were always welcome to show their fidelity to him, since “it was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous.”

To continue reading, click here.

Hip-hip hooray! Replacement surgery a smooth ride

  
 
     “Another one of those chopped-up weeks,” said Sam, a friendly Metra conductor on the 6:26, when asked how it’s going.
     ”Exactly!” I enthused, delighted at his unintentional double entendre.
      He meant New Year’s Day coming midweek, like Christmas, breaking up his December schedule. I was thinking of why I was on an early train: to head to Northwestern Memorial Hospital to be cut open, the second time in six months.
     ”Chopped up” is not a polite description of the surgical process, ignoring the years of laborious training doctors go through, the great skill and care they exhibit. I apologize for that. But humor is essential for getting through even a fairly simple operation, like having my arthritic hip replaced with an artificial one. In the weeks up to the event, I developed a patter to explain to friends and, more importantly, try to convince myself just how easy hip surgery is.
      ”The thing is very quick,” I’d say. “You stroll in to the hospital, stop at a mark on the corridor floor. A medical team rushes out, like a pit crew at the Indy 500 changing a tire. One yanks your pants down, another swabs the affected area with Bactine. Meanwhile, the surgeon ambles by, whips out a knife, makes a few Hibachi chef-slicing motions — shwick, shwick, shwick — your old hip is glistening on a metal tray, and the new one is slapped in. Up go the pants, the surgeon puffs on his fingertips and strolls off in one direction while you stride happily away in the other.”
     The reality was a bit more complicated. At Northwestern, we were given a number on a card, which my wife tucked away.
      ”944091!” a compact young woman in green scrubs announced. My wife fumbled in her purse, but the card eluded her fingers for a moment, prompting the woman to call out “Steinberg!”
     We sprang up, babbling apologies. She marched us int o a room, ordered me to undress, followed by more instructions, with the air of a drama student in an acting class challenged to express contempt through a set of ordinary commands: “Take your clothes off.” “Put them in this bag.” “Put this under your tongue” and such. My wife and I exchanged glances. Maybe we’d picked the wrong day to do this.

To continue reading, click here.

Which came first, hobby horses or hobbies?

    The internet is not a font of fascination. It could be: all the information's there. It should be. But the good stuff tends to be obscured by such a thick buzzing fog of endless malice, argument, trivia and nonsense that only occasionally does something interesting—at least interesting to me—bob into view through the murk.
     One example has been sitting in mind, waiting for a dance partner: a post on Facebook, some list of geography tidbits that had rattled around online for years, headlined "Australia is wider than the moon." This snagged my attention like a fishhook, and the old Daily News motto, "interesting if true" flashed in mind. I had never heard that. I knew the moon is 240,000 miles away. But I never paused to reflect upon its diameter.
    Turns out the diameter of the moon, 2,158 miles, and the width of Australia, east to west, 2,500 miles at its extremes. Making Australia wider (and the United States too, for that matter). Like any interesting fact, it rearranged my thinking a little, and I realized the moon is actually pretty close: 10 times the circumference of earth away. No wonder we made it there.
     I held onto that fact, waiting for a mate, which arrived a few days ago on Twitter. Maybe I should just reproduce the tweet:

     Hmmm. That's marvelous, as good as my favorite linguistic factoid that the Canary Islands aren't named for the birds, but for the dogs the Romans left there—canis is dog in Latin. Later a small yellow bird was discovered and named for the islands.
     But could such a broad category as "hobbies"—stamp collecting, knitting, woodworking, etc.—really take its name from such a marginal plaything? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what is more extraordinary than the dozen jumbo blue volumes of the full Oxford English Dictionary, kept on my desk for just such a purpose?
     "Hobby ... 1. A small or middle-sized horse; an ambling or pacing horse; a pony," with usage tracing back to 1375. The second definition is a short form of "hobby horse," quoting Tollett from 1813: "Our Hobby is a spirited horse of pasteboard in which the master dances and displays tricks of legerdemain."
     Eventually, the Oxford works its way to "5. A favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest, that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse; an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance."
     I'm tempted to wonder whether the tone of disapproval isn't something British, or a function of my Oxford being 40 years old. The online Cambridge dictionary is more neutral: "an activity that you do for pleasure when you are not working." But I do think there is a slight air of chastisement to the term we might not even think about when we urge troubled friends to get a hobby.  When I refer to this as my "hobby blog," there is a note of humility in it, a suggestion of triviality. 
    Speaking of humility. At the risk of pointing you toward a blog that is more interesting than mine; Haggard Hawks, run by British author linguist Paul Anthony Jones, is definitely worth looking at. I immediately followed his blog, followed his twitter feed, and went on Amazon and bought his Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: A Yearbook of Forgotten Words.  It looks fascinating, and I figure, somebody should make a little money at this game.

‘Going to end badly’ — a zombie movie for the Trump era

Bill Murray, right, and Adam Driver in "The Dead Don't Die."

     Can a columnist write for years and never reveal anything personal? I suppose it's possible, but that seems awful dry, not to mention suggesting that you're some kind of Delphic Oracle, delivering truths while hidden behind the mists of Mount Parnassus.

     That ain't me, obviously. I believe personal information is the glue that holds a columnist to his or her readership. Without reference to your own life, you're just a brain in a jar, issuing opinions. You need to occasionally reflect that you have a life, a family, a dog, that you got your hip replaced—details in Sunday's paper—and enjoy pistachio pudding.
    Columnists must take care, however, that these shared details are adhesive rather than repellent. A prime cautionary tale is George F. Will, who in 2009 wrote a column damning blue jeans as "the infantile uniform" of a nation lost to TV and video games. It was standard Will stuff, quoting both Edmund Burke and St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. And then, in the last paragraph, he severed his bond with readers, at least this reader. He admitted that while he did own a pair of blue jeans, he had only worn them once, under duress, when forced to in order to attend a country music-themed party.
     My regard for the man drained away. It colored him, forever. The guy who never wore jeans.
     So I’m pausing before this admission. I think I’m on solid ground. Only one way to find out.
     I had never seen a zombie movie. Not before last month. Oh, I’d caught glimpses, in commercials. I know there’s a TV series, “The Walking Dead.” So I can conjure up images. A lot of lopsided shuffling. Much bloody gnawing of flesh. Not my idea of fun.
     But my older boy was home, and he broke down my resistance by pointing out this was a zombie movie with Tom Waits, “The Dead Don’t Die,” directed by Jim Jarmusch. I love Tom Waits.
     So I watched. “The Dead Don’t Die” (2019) starring Bill Murray, who has made a sub-career adding his celebrity sparkle to small films, and Adam Driver, because he’s in every movie lately, as Chief Cliff Robertson and Officer Ronnie Peterson. The pair are the senior peace officers in Centerville, which begins to have problems due to “polar fracking” throwing the Earth off its orbit. Daylight and nighttime are scrambled, the ants are confused and, oh yes, the dead live, popping out of their graves to eat human flesh.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2009: Something about the Super Bowl

    After yesterday's post on Mr. Peanut, cherished reader Chris Wood (he's cherished because he ordered my 2015 poster) remarked on Facebook, "Thanks, I'll have a nice story to tell Super Bowl Sunday morning."  Which was flattering, but the story struck me as thin gruel for a bunch of hardened sports fanatics, which I imagine to be the crowd Chris runs in. (You could be cherished too, if you catch my hint...) "I've got a better one," I said, promising to dig up the nugget below, which originally ran under the a-shade-too-candid subhead, "Something about the Super Bowl." And to show you just how sincere I am in my indifference to these things, I am going to guess which teams are involved in Sunday's game, and leave the guess up, knowing it is probably wrong. The ... New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Raiders.*

     It might come as a surprise to those who have spent time around chickens, but the word "fowl" and the word "foul" do not share a common root. The first comes from an ancient word meaning "to fly," while the second from a word meaning "to stink." That they sound alike and describe something that shares both qualities is coincidence.

     On the other hand, turkey, the bird, and Turkey, the country, do come from the same word because settlers in North America mistakenly believed the birds hailed from that land, probably because turkeys seemed exotic and, at the time, all things Turkish were considered exotic, the way that, later, deep-fried fingers of potato would be dubbed "french fries" because they were considered fancy, and fancy stuff came from France.

TV commercial, 1966

     Which leads us to Sunday's big game. It is called the "Super Bowl," and one might assume that the name came from all the college "bowl" games (which, in turn, owe their names to the stadiums they were played in, the Yale Bowl and the Rose Bowl and such).
     But according to football lore, it was Lamar Hunt who gave the Super Bowl its name after seeing his kids play with a Super Ball, the Wham-O toy that was popular in the summer of 1966, when Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, worked on the committee setting the particulars of the first championship game between the AFL and the NFL.
     "My wife, Norma, had given the kids these Super Balls, and they loved them," Hunt said years later. "If you threw one down hard on the concrete, they would literally bounce over the house. The kids were always playing with them and talking about them, and I guess it was just on my mind."
     Which is why there is a Super Ball on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Enjoy the game.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 1, 2009.

* Close. The San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. Well, I guess not all that close. I got that one team came from California...

Planters’ fake tragedy runs into real thing

     Would any sane person connect the deaths of Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, and seven others in a helicopter crash Sunday — an all-too-real tragedy — with the PR stunt cooked up by Planters Peanuts: the notional death of its fictional mascot, Mr. Peanut, announced last week and set to be solemnized during the Super Bowl?
     Yes, the internet is fueled by outrage. People online are incredibly touchy. But are they that incredibly touchy? The idea seems — pardon the pun — a little nuts.
     But Planters — owned by Kraft Heinz, somehow co-headquartered in Chicago and Pittsburgh — obviously worried the connection would be made. So it suspended the online publicity blitz, while still planning to run a 30-second Super Bowl commercial Sunday featuring Mr. Peanut’s funeral. So toning down the publicity, out of one corner of its mouth, while blasting it to the world out of the other.
     The whole campaign was a mistake. The smart, strategic route would have been to just quietly put Mr. Peanut out to pasture, the way Campbell’s Soup exiled its tomato-cheeked Kids. Ready to return when needed.
     Given the genuine general public grief about this tragedy — Kobe Bryant, not Mr. Peanut — affecting not only basketball fans, but anyone saddened to see a father of four cut down in the act of being a good parent, it seems Planter’s should have shown some spine, trusted consumers, and ignored any online trolls lunging to cast Mr. Peanut’s death as an insult to Bryant’s memory.
     Ironic. Mr. Peanut was designed to address public scorn, not inflate it. Since everything that could be said about Bryant is being said, I wanted to highlight something the media missed in the first days after Mr. Peanut’s demise: how Planters got an anthropomorphic peanut as a mascot in the first place. Top hat, monocle, and white gloves — kind of upscale for a comestible that at the time was considered food for swine and the poor.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2004: Fat and happy Big Boy always stands tall

  

     Grant me this, I am consistent. I was in Nexis, trying to find out what happened to the Campbell's Soup Kids—there's no evidence of them on the Campbell's web site—and I stumbled upon my own story, from 16 years ago, mentioning the chubby siblings. 

     My first thought, reading this below was, "They printed that?" Because it seems so exceedingly trivial, even for me. And those four dashes in the opening sentence; I would never do that today, and it's all I can do not to repair it. But if I start trying to clean up old columns, well, that's all I'd ever do. 

Reader Dave Connell shared this photo taken at the
Classical Gas Museum, Embudo New Mexico.

     If you were to walk into my house—please don't!—but say you did—no, I'm serious, I'll call the police—theoretically walk in, that is, and went to the TV room, which is what we call our repository of toys and junk, there you would find, in addition to two young boys who have been watching Spider-Man cartoons so long their eyeballs are swelling shut, there above the shrinelike TV, another shrine of sorts. A series of five standing figurines, each 10 inches tall, each pot-bellied like a Buddha, each in red- and white-checked coveralls. Two holding hamburgers aloft.
     I refer of course to Big Boy.
     Now I know that the Big Boy restaurant mascot is an object of post-modern irony to many people, who keep a Big Boy or two around as some kind of knowing wink at consumer culture.
     That is not why I have five Big Boys at home. I own them sincerely, because I love Big Boy. I always have. I know this will seem very strange to those who consider Big Boy a mere corporate shill, like Colonel Sanders or Michael Jordan or Mayor McCheese. That's why I'm writing this—not just to reveal yet another embarrassing personal detail. But to try to understand what it is about the homunculus that is so appealing.
     What is it about the Boy?
     This comes in the wake of our story Thursday, about the town fathers of Canton, Mich., attacking a 7-foot Big Boy statue in front of a local restaurant, citing zoning against multiple signs.
     The owner, Tony Matar, defended his Boy—it isn't a sign, he said. "It's an icon."
     He sure is. More than an icon. Big Boy is a god (not the God, capital "G"—put down your pens, please—but a god, sort of a fast-food deity. The Spirit of American Burger Plenty).
     Big Boy is often depicted as running, frozen in mid-stride, lofting his enormous namesake burger high above his head. He is our Hermes, our Mercury, the god of travel and double cheeseburgers.
     There are so many reasons to love Big Boy I don't know where to begin. First, he's so happy—beaming like he's ready to explode with joy, eyes goggling, apple cheeks about to pop. Second, that Reaganesque pompadour. So strange and wonderful. And third, he's fat. How many food brand mascots are fat? Campbell's Soup sent their chunky twins to Jenny Craig years ago, Aunt Jemima lost 40 pounds along with her scarf.
     Fourth, the Boy carries a whiff of 1950s California drive-in culture, with its boomerang architecture and leering mascots, like the Pep Boys, Manny, Moe and Jack. Or Big Boy who, now that I think of it, does have a certain malign look about him, like he should have eight arms: Big Rav Boy, the Destroyer. And that appeals, too.
     The power of Big Boy is such that I am drawn to his chain, despite the fact that I've had some of the worst dining experiences in my life at Big Boy restaurants.
     I should stress that I haven't been to every Big Boy in the country—they are different companies regionally, Bob's Big Boy and Elias' Big Boy and Frisch's Big Boy—and I imagine there must be some that aren't lousy. But I've had not one, but several legendary disasters. Once the food never came at all, and we had to eventually get up and leave, the boys weeping with hunger. Another, with a family we vacation with in Ohio, was such a terrible experience that to this day—years later—all we have to do is raise the question of where to eat lunch, and lips begin to curl into mocking smiles, and eyes dart in my direction as I slump and hide my face with my hands, scoured by the memory that it was I, Big Boy's acolyte, who insisted we go there.
     Strangely, these nightmare visits have not soured me on the Boy himself. Even at that Ohio Big Boy, waiting endlessly for our cold food, I had only good feelings for him.
     "If only Big Boy knew," I said, echoing the kind of faith that abused Russians had in their czar 100 years ago, conjuring the image of Big Boy arriving just in time to save our lunch, rushing into the kitchen, a blur of activity, shouting orders, firing people.
     All hail the true burger king!
     To understand the power of the Boy, look at all those other mid-level restaurant chains— Denny's and Hardee's and such. Sure, their food might be better. But what are they in the hearts of America without a Big Boy? Nothing.
     Ronald McDonald is frightening in that way that only clowns can be. I never see him without expecting him to be holding a bloody ax. Wendy's mascots were worse—first that freckled, pigtailed Wendy creature, who looked like the vile Pippi Longstocking, and then Dave, the CEO, who tried to be lovable but you just knew, when the cameras weren't rolling, was screaming at cringing underlings, white spittle flying off his lips.
     That's it. That's the answer. Big Boy is comfort. He is cheeseburgers and malted milk and smiles and rest and safety. But, like so many minor deities, he is only the promise of these things, the promise of paradise. The graven image of delight without the substance.
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 16, 2004