Still a few bugs in the system

Digital display technology check at Watchfire Signs, Danville, Illinois

     Sometime it takes a while for the media to catch up. I see the Independent suggesting "The AI bubble may be about to burst." 

     God, I hope so. Because right now the hype is tedious and endless. I'm still doing the dishes and the laundry. Let me know when the next Boston Dynamics unit is ready to do either; then I'll share the enthusiasm. But right their robots seem only fit to dance. 

    Okay, and vacuum. I was skeptical about those little round robot vacuums. But we have one; it's great.

     But not intelligent. It does find its way around a room. And back to its little charging port. Which is impressive. But it can't do our taxes. Yet.

     Until then, I'm just waiting. I'm always reluctant to declare The Next Hot Thing to be a dud, ever since, more than 40 years ago, I announced that cell phones were a fad. They weren't.      

     So I acknowledge that artificial intelligence is both important and here to stay. I see that, just as telephone operators and gas station attendants were replaced by chips, so customer service reps and, I suppose, journalists, will give way to algorithms. Someday you won't have to decide what's for lunch; your kitchen will do that for you.  

      But look at me, adding to the annoying, pie-in-the-sky AI hype. Big on ballyhoo, short on helpfulness. Every day I write this little essay on blogger, a useful, intuitive platform that Google offers for free, just 'cause, and every time a little prompt pops up offering to insert a dozen or two links into my copy. My choices are "Dismiss" and "Apply." Not wanting a bunch of random links in my copy, I dismiss it. Every time. If you want to learn more about a noun, you can search it yourself.
     So rather than making my job easier, it's making my job harder. Adding an extra step. Every time I write something.
     Finally I took dynamic action to get rid of it — or tried to. By asking AI, ironically enough. I dove into the settings and flipped a few things. Only I couldn't shut it off. Whatever AI suggested didn't work. It still offers to toss links into this. Maybe that's the true future of AI —a system that spares you from the annoyance it will cause if you don't stop it.

     I'm sure AI is going to get better. Any minute now. Though we may come to miss the days when it didn't work that well. 

Flashback 1987: Stress Test — One man's fitness odyssey

     Whenever I look back on my old Sun-Times stories, I'm amazed at how consistent my voice is. I wrote this almost 40 years ago, when I was 26. It sounds like something I could write today. This wasn't a column, but a feature story. A lot of reporters have trouble placing themselves into a story. That obviously wasn't an issue for me.

     I asked my girlfriend if she thought I was fat.
     "No, I don't think you're fat," she said. "A little extra, but you're not fat. You're not skinny, but I don't like skinny men."
     I asked my mother if she thought I was fat.
     "No, I don't think you look fat," she said. "You are very well shaped."
     I asked Dr. George Lesmes of Northeastern Illinois University's Human Performance Laboratory if he thought I was fat.
     He said nothing, but arranged for me to take a series of fitness evaluation tests that would answer the question, not with opinions, but with cold, unlying numbers.
     "The thing that is important for people who are looking to change their lifestyles is feedback," Lesmes said. "There's no better feedback than numbers. If I can say to you in May your oxygen capacity is 3, and show in July it's up to 3 1/2, that shows progress and is good for motivation."
     The American College of Sports Medicine recommends that individuals over 35 take a fitness evaluation test, not only to gauge any improvement that might come from an exercise and diet regimen, but to make sure they don't have any cardiac problems that might be aggravated by strenuous exercise.
     Before the test, a lab assistant went over a lengthy form that stated, in essence, that I realized I might drop dead at any time during testing and, should that happen, there would be no hard feelings between us. I signed, changed into sweats, and soon found myself sitting on an examination table.
     The first test, a stretching test, was simple. Sitting with my legs on the table, I stretched forward and, arms straining, reached as far as I could past my toes. Piece of cake. I scored a 12 and, not knowing that meant I had the flexibility of uncooked spaghetti, felt quite good about it.
     Next, electrodes — plastic discs with small metal nubs in the middle — were attached to my chest. Hairy men, such as myself, might be a bit surprised to realize that the spots where the electrodes are to be attached must first be shaved. I certainly was surprised, if not horrified. I picked forlornly at the clumps of hair as they fell over the table.
     "Do you want me to save it?" the lab assistant asked. She told me that Evanston firemen, who take the test each year, say it grows back and, at worst, itches for a while. I comforted myself with the thought that if burly firemen allow themselves to go through this, so could I.
     She handed me what looked like a sock made out of netting and told me to slip it on to hold the wires in place. I took the sock and examined it dubiously.
     "This fit people much, much larger than you," she said and, after a bit of struggle, I slipped the netting over my torso.
     Electrodes now held in place by the netting sock, I shuffled over to a treadmill, dragging an electrocardiogram machine behind me.
     Running on the treadmill is the part where, if you're going to have a heart attack, you do. I don't know why, but I had pictured a leisurely jog, trotting along to the bips and bleeps of heart machines.
     What I got was a mad, exhausting dash. Every three minutes they increased the speed and the angle of the treadmill. After seven minutes or so my personality shrank away and I was reduced to an unthinking bundle of flailing muscles and gasping lungs, staggering instinctively forward as the white coat on my right took my pulse, the white coat on my left jacked up the treadmill, the third white coat watched the monitor and the fourth coat, a man — the same man who told me not to lean so heavily on the railings - added insult to injury by jamming a nose clip over my nose and having me breathe through what looked like a hairdryer hose.
     The purpose of the test is to put as much strain as possible on the heart, to see how it reacts. Later, I learned my heart redlined at 188 beats per minute. My first question, after I had given up, been helped off the treadmill and lay in a panting, sweating heap on an examination table, was: If people are in bad shape, why put them through this? Isn't having a heart attack on the treadmill under close scrutiny just as bad as having a heart attack running around a track somewhere?
     "Sure, but running real hard on the treadmill, we'll be able to monitor you with the best equipment possible," Lesmes said. "We'll also be able to identify at what point in your exercise problems occur. Then we can sit down with you and make sure we design an exercise program that will benefit you without putting you at risk, or getting to that point where problems occur."
     Lesmes went on to explain that, for instance, if the EKG showed that my heart started to do the tango at 160 beats per minute, they would design an exercise program where I would be able to approach my limit without overstraining my heart.
     The body fat analysis started simply enough. I sat next to a machine called a spirometer and expelled as much air as I could into a tube. My efforts were displayed by a large, Plexiglas cylinder and recorded on a cylindrical graph. Urged on by the cheerleading of the lab assistant, it was rather fun, like a game one might find at a state fair.
     The purpose of this test was to find out how much air was in my lungs so that in the next test, the hydrostatic weighing, the reading would not be thrown off by excess air.
     Hydrostatic weighing was not so much physically taxing as it is psychologically icky. I had to climb into a square metal tank filled with warm water, and sit on a harnesslike thing attached to a scale. Once on the harness I had to dip my head below the water, blow all the air out of my lungs, and wait until the assistant took a reading.
     While I was showering and getting back into my street clothes, the data was compiled into a small booklet, which we then reviewed. The good news was that my heart was "strong," which meant that it was quick to recover its "resting" rate after exercise and did not change rates in rapid jumps, but gradually.
     The news quickly got worse. My oxygen consumption was average, flexibility fair, lung flexibility good. The real knife-twister was body fat: 23 percent. According to their table titled "Normal Values of Percentage Body Fat for the Average American Population," I had the body fat of a 47-year-old man, which I suppose would be fine if I were 47, and not 26.
     They calculated my ideal weight (170 pounds) and — perhaps on the assumption that I was stupid as well as fat and couldn't do the math myself, perhaps just to grind my face in it — they calculated how many pounds I would need to lose to get to that ideal weight.
     Then we then went over the mysteries of calorie intake, types of exercise and importance of warm-ups.
     "We don't want to just tell you you're fat," said Diane Reynolds, a graduate assistant. "We want to work with you to reach a goal."
     My goal at that point was lunch, and, after going on a tour of the gym that people who pay $65 for the test are free to use, I conducted a test of my own, which involved measuring my response to a big bowl of teriyaki chicken. I passed.

         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 7, 1987

Dousing flag burning is a step toward drowning freedom of speech

     

     Almost exactly 60 years ago, on Aug. 2, 1965, comedian and political activist Dick Gregory led protesters on a five-mile march from Chicago City Hall toward 3536 S. Lowe, the home of mayor Richard J. Daley.
     They chanted "Ben Willis must go, snake Daley also" — Willis was the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, notorious for jamming Black students into "Willis wagons," classrooms held in trailers, a solution to overcrowding not found in white schools.
     They were met by a mob of several hundred Bridgeport residents, who poured out of their homes, shouting racist slurs, hurling rocks and eggs. The police ordered the marchers to disperse and, when they didn't obey, arrested 65 peaceful marchers, charging them with disorderly conduct.
     If I had arrested the crowd, I would have had a riot on my hands," explained Capt. Howard Pierson, commander of the Deering police station.
     The Illinois Supreme Court upheld their disorderly conduct convictions. But the U.S. Supreme Court overturned them, ruling, in Gregory v. City of Chicago, that our constitutional rights cannot be shouted down in what a University of Chicago law professor had called "a heckler's veto."
     If our First Amendment rights were voided whenever someone else violently objected — or could be constrained by the spot decision of a cop on the beat — then none of us would have free speech.
     The heckler's veto is back, as a loophole in an executive order, "Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag," signed Monday by President Donald Trump. It acknowledges that the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning is protected speech, then tries to skip around it this way:
     "Burning this representation of America may incite violence and riot," the order notes. Perhaps that's only acceptable when mobs are being let loose on the Capitol.
     Burning a flag is clearly free speech. Perhaps this is best illustrated by citing another legal passage: the United States Flag Code, adopted by the National Flag Conference in Washington DC in 1923, and amended by Congress.
     Specifically Section 8, "Respect for the Flag." Line K: "The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning."
     Not only is burning the flag permitted, it's preferred, as the most desirable, respectful way to dispose of old flags.
     Underline respectful. It isn't the burning that's the problem. The FBI isn't going to burst into American Legion halls — the group collects old flags for disposal — and arrest vets in their watch caps.

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Pogo no go

      Random thoughts bubble out of nowhere.

      Such as:

     Are pogo-sticks fun?

     Is there anybody out there who has pleasant memories of an hour — or a minute — spent entertaining yourself with a pogo stick? 

     Because I remember encountering them as a child, and giving them a try. Maybe I was too heavy. But they didn't spring up the way they were supposed to. The pogo stick rider tended to fall over. And abandon the effort very quickly, if one were smart. 

     Not sure what prompted the pogo stick thought. Some chaotic firing of neurons. The question certainly would have never seen the light of day. But shortly after I had it, I was walking down the block, and saw this pair of pogo sticks set out for the trash. No, I didn't try them. Or take them. Or knock on the door and pose my question to their former owner. 

      Coincidence, surely. What else could it be? I didn't summon the sticks up. It wasn't foreshadowing. Not augury. The linear universe glancing ahead, warning me through telepathy of the approach of discarded pogo sticks.

     But it seemed one of those odd coincidences that some consider fate. You contemplate pogo sticks. And here they are in the living world. I should ponder a bag of money next.

     Pogo sticks are a reminder that all the hand-wringing over phones and video games and such. Do you remember how kids passed the time? We twiddled our thumbs — boy, I bet more than one minor pundit has stretched that observation into an entire column. We bounced a tennis ball against the garage. We folded newspapers into boats. And I suppose some bounced on pogo sticks, or tried to. 

     The history of the toy is complicated, and while on another day I might dive in with a whoop, I think I'll shield you from the minutia on this one, the competing claims as to who first invented it and where "pogo" comes from. We don't have to plunge down every rathole, right? All you need to know is that it was a craze in the 1920s, with Ziegfeld Follies presenting chorus girls on pogo sticks, and came back in the 21st century as a kind of extreme sport.

     I don't want to let my own experience blind me. But I just can't imagine the things being fun. Correct me if I'm wrong. 

New novel reopens cold case death of Kup's daughter

     Celebrity is the cheapest coin, the shakiest currency. Debased to begin with, it loses value quickly. Today’s Taylor Swift becomes tomorrow’s Taylor Dayne. Sound impossible? It’s not; it’s inevitable.
     The stars themselves are burdened by fame’s presence, then tormented by its absence.
     “You used to be big,” Norma Desmond is told in "Sunset Boulevard." It is not a compliment.
     The rest of us ordinary folk hoard the briefest encounter with celebrity, our personal cache of fool’s gold. I catch myself tossing a few chips on the table, bragging how Barack Obama once called me on the phone to complain about a column, how I chatted on TV with Oprah Winfrey and sat in the Bulls locker room, talking with Michael Jordan. I used to be big.
     But it fools no one, not even myself. "Self-praise is self-debasement,” as Cervantes writes. These flashes mean close to nothing, three pebbles to suck on in the long forced march through the desert of non-entity.
     Now Irv Kupcinet, he was truly big, a star in his own right. The columnist shared tidbits of the famous we all hunger to read, sparkling in their reflected glow. He didn’t vanish, but left behind a quite-good statue on Wacker Drive, a sign on the Wabash Avenue bridge, and fading memories of those like myself who knew him.
     The Kup story I like to tell is that he once parked his Cadillac on Wacker Drive in front of the Lyric Opera before a performance. Lincoln Towing promptly hauled it away. Back at their yard, they ran the plates, realized whose car they had taken, and brought it back before the final curtain. That’s power.
     Just as the past isn’t past, the dead don’t stay dead. There is Kup, his wife, Essee, their daughter, Karyn, the whole Sun-Times circa 1962, the rock upon which Peter Orner builds his new novel, “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter.”
     Orner takes a footnote in Chicago history — on Nov. 30, 1963, a week after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Karyn Kupcinet, who everyone called “Cookie,” was found dead in her West Hollywood apartment. Foul play was suspected but never proved.
     The subplot involves an English professor who may or may not resemble Orner, a native of Highland Park who now chairs the English and creative writing programs at Dartmouth. Orner is an elegant writer who has his character's low-rent milieu down cold:
     “I hunker in my windowless cube at Loyola ... maybe at this point an English department is lucky to be housed at all. Our enrollments are in the toilet. This office has a Soviet Brezhnev-era feel. A solid kind of nowhere. It’s very quiet. Aside from the medievalist across the hall, who turns up every once in a while, nobody comes in to work anymore. Coming into work is a relic, an abandoned social practice.”
     “A Solid Kind of Nowhere” — I might have to swipe that as my autobiography title.

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Holy Earth

    

     Over the past six weeks, I've been to three funerals. My mother; the son of my wife's late parents' last living friend; and Lori Cannon. All at Shalom Memorial Park in Arlington Heights. I'm getting thoroughly sick of the place.

     Which is not a criticism. Shalom Memorial Park is very nice. The funerals are run briskly and efficiently. The place is beautiful. True to its name, quite parklike. There are no headstones — the grave markers are bronze, flush to the ground.
     No headstones, but a few monuments there are — scattered benches, a mausoleum or two — more testaments to the futility of wanting to be remembered than any kind of aggrandizement of the wealthy.

    A sylvan setting. Just not the place I want to keep circling back to. Though I suppose, if I have to contemplate the brevity of human life, it might as well be here.
     To be honest, I didn't have to go to the last two. But my wife was going to the second, and I go where she goes. And Lori's, well, I considered it a sign of respect. She always showed up.
     In each ceremony, after the casket is lowered, there comes a piece of funereal business where a packet of "Holy Earth" from the Mount of Olives is produced by the funeral director or rabbi, and scattered on the coffin lid. It is explained to the gathered mourners that since the Jew can't be buried in Israel — the ideal, apparently, though I don't remember a vote — a bit of Israel is brought to them.
     Despite all the pre-ritual conversation, nobody told me this would be done at my mother's funeral, and while I wasn't about to object, I wasn't entirely comfortable with it either. She would have preferred dirt from Rocky Mountain National Park. 

    What does "Holy" even mean? "Touched by God" by sounds right. Infused with the divine. Using that definition, either every square inch of the planet is holy, along with each and every one of us. Or none of us is. 

    The alternate, selective holiness, well, we see how well that's working out.

     I'm reminded of last time I was in Israel, over 20 years ago. I took a tour of the Temple Mount, led by an Israeli of the type I usually associate with Israelis — brash, irreverent, candid. He told us that the Western Wall — it used to be called "The Wailing Wall" — is not actually part of the destroyed second temple, but a remnant of the retaining wall used to create the mount on which the temple stood. He also reminded us that there is nothing holy about it. "The stones there are as holy as the stones in my backyard," he said. "A stone is a stone is a stone. Jews don't worship stones."
     Or dirt, for that matter. After the second and third funerals, I considered breaking off from the line of cars, finding where my mother is buried and ... I don't know, standing there, feeling sad. But the second time, we were heading to the shiva at the apartment of the father of the deceased, to pay our respects. And the third time, after Lori's funeral, I just wanted to get out of there. My mother could wait.
     "She isn't going anywhere," I told myself. 

'We know what's best for the people'

Danielle Carter-Walters

     The president sat in the Oval Office Friday, praising the National Guard. In mid-August, he deployed the D.C. guard to Washington, where they patrol the National Mall, keeping a careful eye on tourists — what tourists there are, considering the number of visitors to the United States is down by 22%, a loss of $12.5 billion, thanks to America's performative hostility to foreigners.
     Fresh from that triumph, he said Chicago is next.
     Why us? Why are we so fortunate?
     "The people in Chicago ..." the president said, "are screaming for us to come."
     They are? Did I miss that? Who in Chicago, exactly, is screaming?
     The president gave hints. Chicagoans who "are wearing red hats, just like this one."
     He himself was wearing a jumbo baseball cap emblazoned "TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!" Part of his new line of Trump merchandise that includes "Trump 2028' and "4 More Years" hats. There are photographs.
     "They are wearing red hats," the president continued. "African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, 'Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please."
     They are? I was about to laugh this off as mere mendacity. But for all the slander directed at the media, we still do that truthy-facty thing. Before I could ridicule the notion of Black Chicago women begging for troops to frisk them at bus stops, I had to go looking.
     I quickly found Danielle Carter-Walters, a personal fitness trainer. She indeed has been pleading for precisely this.
     "We knew he had been listening to us," said Carter-Walters, a co-founder of Chicago Flips Red, a group of Trump supporters. "When I saw it, I said, 'Oh, wow.' We've been asking for it in our videos. Now, he's doing it."
     So I asked: She sincerely believes Chicago will benefit from the National Guard patrolling its streets?
     "Yes, I do," said Carter-Walters, who lives in Marquette Park. "Our communities are out of control. The destruction. The devastation of what's happening. We are being displaced out of our homes by illegal aliens.
     "I stay on the South Side of Chicago. I'm living the experience. You can't sit in your car without worrying about being robbed, mugged, shot, carjacked. We definitely need something to be done."
     She said her group has only eight members, but more are out there.
     "There's a lot of us, thousands, silently supporting us," she said. "People think that Black women can't be MAGA. People are starting to see there's a lot of us."
     I did not start writing today's column intending to platform a Trump fan. But the story led me there.

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Hug that job!

     

     Hang around long enough, you may even become fashionable.
     I have that thought every time I read something about the new hot trend toward non-alcoholic cocktails.
     "Look at me, I'm a trendsetter," I'll tell Edie. "Beat 'em by about 20 years." (Next month, in fact. How the time does fly).
     I meant to get a six-pack of NA White Claw — aka flavored seltzer — so I could write something using Wood Allen's bit about buying the rights to "My Fair Lady," removing the songs and turning it back into "Pygmalion." 
     But that seemed a lot of effort to recycle a joke

     Saturday I glanced at my email and saw that clinging to your job has finally become fashionable.

     "Job hugging" is the fab new Gen Z term for not hopping from employer to employer.     

     Next they'll be discovering monogamy.

     "The newest career trend," FastCompany reveals, citing a report from "global organization consultancy" Korn Ferry, which seems agitated at the prospect.

     “At an alarming rate, more and more employees are displaying what is colloquially known as ‘job hugging’—which is to say, holding onto their jobs for dear life,” the report reveals.

     Korn Ferry never explains why the pejoratives — "alarming," "dear life." Perhaps we're all supposed to instinctively understand why staying in one position is inherently not a good thing, though they go on to limn those.

     "Experts say that employees putting down roots is not all doom and gloom, and can in fact bring companies some opportunities, beginning with a financial boon: Without pressure to match outside salaries, organizations face less of a need to raise wages. At the same time, with less turnover, recruitment and training costs dwindle."

    You can pay barnacles less, and don't have to constantly explain to newcomers where the bathrooms are.

     Myself, I'm going to miss the job-hopping trend — not that I ever partook. But ... choosing my words carefully ... there was always a certain comfort in knowing that, should you bump up against a bumbling manager — and sometimes there doesn't seem to be any other kind — that if you wait three years, they'll be on the road again, heading for another gig.

     Still. The arrival of "job hugging" does make me feel a little stupid for staying at the same job for ... 38 years and counting. In my defense, I do like my job, most of the time. And did quit, once, though allowed myself to be lured back. And was poised to quit another time, when the New York Daily News started running my column in 2005, which focused the attention of my bosses at the Sun-Times in a good way.

     Plus I took almost two years away from the paper, aggregate, between paternity leaves, time off to write a book, rehab and various surgeries.  Absence makes the heart grow founder, in both directions.

     Still, loving your job (and, if I may, being extraordinarily good at it) does make one vulnerable to experience the pain of job hugging. Sometimes when I really should have at least pretended to be poised to split. But I just couldn't do it.

     I remember some head hunter pairing me with some executives who were — if I recall — breaking away from Sunbeam and forming a carbon monoxide detector company. We had a lovely lunch at RL and afterward they offered me the job as a the communications head of the new enterprise. In on the ground floor, as Sam Wainwright would say.

      I told them I'd need to discuss it with my wife (again, what George Bailey does in "It's a Wonderful Life") and as we were leaving one of them said how impressed they were that I had worked for the Bohle Company in Los Angeles. 

     I froze, like Jimmy Stewart shaking Mr. Potter's hand. I'd hated the Bohle Company.

     I'm sorry, I said. I don't need a day. I don't need to talk with the wife. I can't go work for you. I can't sell carbon monoxide detectors. 

     I walked down Michigan Avenue to the paper, kicking myself, I was a slave. I didn't even try to wrangle a raise out of it. Some of us were designed to stay put. No point in beating myself up over it now.

Flashback 2007: Satisfaction guaranteed

     I was searching the archive and noticed this. Too much fun not to share. The good news is that Archie McPhee is still in business, and still promises to return unsatisfactory or defective items. Alas, the pig catapult must have caused too much trouble, as it is no longer offered among their line of novelty products. No do they notionally employ the fictive Molly Primrose to interact with the public. David Wahl, however, still works at the company. 

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

     My older son's pig catapult broke. Not surprising, considering the workout he gave it, stalking about a family gathering, peppering his aging relatives with small pink plastic pigs.
     Behavior that a judicious parent would quickly halt — or so you might imagine, until you try actually saying the words, "Stop pelting people with pigs!" Easier to just ignore him. Besides, they're very small pigs, less than an inch long. It isn't as if they hurt.

     The device — sort of a blue plastic handgun with a contraption for flinging — broke very quickly anyway.
     Here the tale might have ended.
     But his mother, always ready to rally behind her cubs, noticed the lad still had the cardboard packaging from the catapult — saved because it has a "Pig Bull's Eye" on the back, to aid in honing his pig-pelting skills.
     She went online, to the manufacturer's Web site.
     "My son recently purchased a pig catapult made by your company," her note began. "The toy was quite fun. However, about one week after he purchased it, the portion that holds the pigs snapped off after the catapult was fired. It appears to have snapped off where the tension rod places pressure on the plastic catapult. Can you please replace this faulty pig catapult?"
     Here again the saga might have ended. One reason our world is so vexing is that companies build their bottom lines by shaving away customer service. It's hard enough to find anyone at Apple to care about your busted $400 iPod, never mind receive satisfaction for a broken $4.95 pig catapult made in China.
     Yesterday, a box arrived. It contained not only a new pig catapult, but this letter:

     "Dear Edie:
     "I am so sorry to hear that your Pig Catapult was defective. Here is a new one for you. Also here is a small gift to say we are sorry for any trouble this may have caused you. Thank you for bringing this to our attention so we could fix it for you!"

     Not quite a second sun appearing in the sky, but close.
     The gift, by the way, was a box of bandages designed to look like strips of bacon. My wife loved it.
     Here too, the tale might have ended. But there was one more paragraph.
     "I have enclosed an Archie McPhee Catalog for your enjoyment. Archie McPhee is our retail business."
     The catalog "of surprising novelties, good jokes and useful articles" hit our household like a t-bone steak tossed into a tank of piranhas.
     How to describe the product line? Simple toys and toys with an edge. Plastic ants and "Just Like Dad!" brand bubble gum cigarettes. Rubber ducks and gummy banana slugs.
     Bacon is fun, apparently. In addition to bacon bandages, there is bacon air freshener, a bacon wallet ("Not made from real bacon"), bacon tape, bacon gift wrap and Uncle Oinker's Gummy Bacon.
     Jesus too, must be amusing, in certain circles. There is the classic dashboard Jesus, plus a bobblehead Jesus, Jesus gift wrap and not one but two Jesus Action Figures, one with wheels "for smooth gliding action," another, deluxe set, complete with plastic loaves and fishes and "glow-in-the-dark miracle hands."
     An invigorating blasphemy pervades the enterprise. Beyond the Jesus goods, there are Last Supper After Dinner Mints ("Tasty & Religious"), a boxing rabbi puppet, Buddha pencil toppers and, so nobody feels left out, Nihilist Chewing Gum ("No flavor -- We don't believe in flavor.")
     Here, again, the curtain might fall. But the letter was signed "Molly Primrose." Must be a made-up name, I decided. A blanket identity to personalize customer service off-loaded to India.
     I wanted to take the catalog to work with me, but any possible argument ("Boys, it's my job") seemed feeble in the face of the passion with which they were selecting and discarding various items from their imaginary orders, toting up the balances so as to absorb every last penny in their possession.
     "Dad," said Ross, as I was leaving, "do you think I should get a Monkey Groan Ball? When you squeeze it, it's like a monkey groaning . . ."
     "Sounds great," I said.
     My morning's work became tracking down Molly Primrose. Such a pretty and unusual name — there is only one person named "Primrose" in the Chicago White Pages — it had to be a fiction.
Hadn't it?
     I contacted the company and waited. Carol Marin envisioned Molly as an older woman, walking a bunny on a leash — a lovely image. I thought of her as mid-20s, tattoos on both arms, bravely trying to keep her poetic soul alive while answering letters complaining about pig catapults.
     Finally David Wahl, Archie McPhee spokesman, called. I could tell he didn't want to say it, so I said it for him.
     Molly Primrose isn't real, is she?
     "It's our contact name for customer service,'' he said, reluctantly. "It's a rotating series of people who do it. We take it very seriously for a company that sells such stupid, useless things."
      Of course, one shouldn't pull back the corporate skirts too much. Still, upon reflection, it struck me that the only thing more wonderful than there being an actual Molly Primrose is there being a business in this day and age that feels compelled to make one up.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 24, 2007

An apology to Poland: Smithsonian scrubbing humbles once great nation

 

     Pride goeth before a fall, the Bible says.
     Well, not really. Like many widely-quoted phrases, that's an improvement on the original, polished smooth by longtime use. The actual line in Proverbs 16 in the King James Bible is "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."
     Either way, a reminder to tack toward humility. 
     I try to bear that in mind. But sometimes I get carried away.
     Such as in February, 2021. The future was bright. The Trump era had seemingly ended the month before. If you told me the guy who sicc'd a mob on the U.S. Capitol would sweep back into office in four years, I'd have laughed. America was back, and what better way to celebrate than to brag about our freedom?
     It being Black History Month, I chose our nation's bleakest chapter. My column began: "You know the great thing about centuries of slavery in the United States? The big positive that gets overlooked ... ?"
     A tease — what could be good about slavery? — to draw readers in, leading to the reveal. The good thing about slavery was:
     "That we can talk about it now, honestly, openly, write and discuss, and contemplate our nation’s difficult and tortured past, unafraid. That is an undeniable greatness of America, one to be proud of. Because not every country can manage it."
     To provide an example, I decided to kick Poland, because that winter, two historians, Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski with Warsaw's Polish Center for Holocaust Research, were hit by a lawsuit by the government-funded Polish League against Defamation, which sued the authors, as I put it, "for recounting history that contradicts their sense of unmitigated national glory."
      The column I wrote was peppered with translated quotes from Yiddish letters from my great uncle, Zalman Bramson, about life in Poland in the 1930s. Let's just say Poles didn't need the Germans to teach them to abuse Jews. 
     “The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale,” said Grabowski. “... which seems to be forgotten by the nationalists.”
     Not forgotten. Actively suppressed. Nationalists have a way of pushing the nations into the abyss. History teaches this, so must be prettied up so as not to give away the game.
     Feeling myself on safe ground, I indulged in some analysis.
     "Like our own country for the past half decade, and nations around the world, Poland fell in the grip of resurgent nationalism. A shameful political philosophy that believes a country becomes great, not by actually doing great things, but through talk, threats and pressure. Their greatness is declarative — tell everybody “We are great!” Over and over and over."
      The nation of Poland, through its embassy in Washington, demanded the column be taken down, while finding nits to pick — this supposed "historians" I cite, his degree was in sociology!

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Flashback 2008: Walter Netsch "He broke out of the box"

     

Walter Netsch's University Hall at UIC's Circle Campus is consistently cited among
the ugliest buildings in Chicago. In 2018, TimeOut Chicago called it "a larger-than-life
Triscuit cracker" and a "rogue domino." (Photo courtesy WikiCommons)

     Tonight's Sun-Times Roast of the Chicago Skyline Cruise is not the first time I've turned to architecture critic Lee Bey to provide insight and perspective. I checked on Walter Netsch's obituary because I plan to talk about brutalism, of which he was the master — if that is the right word; "victim" might be more apt — and was surprised to see Lee doing yeoman's work  lending a hand here as well. I'm surprised I've not shared it before, it being perhaps the most negative obituary I've ever written, except of course for Morgan Finley, that "monument to corruption." 

     Walter Netsch, a controversial Chicago architect whose work was both praised and reviled, as well as a former Chicago Park District board president, died at his home Sunday. He was 88.
     Mr. Netsch specialized in academic structures and designed several significant buildings on Chicago area campuses. He created the tri-towered concrete library at Northwestern University and much of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
     An early building that established his national reputation was the soaring U.S. Air Force Academy Chapel at Colorado Springs, which was initially criticized but eventually became an admired tourist attraction.
     His UIC campus, on the other hand, was described as "physically repellent" by university officials who ordered a face-lift when they discovered that prospective students were shunning UIC after visiting the campus because they found its buildings intolerably ugly.
     Prominent Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman once said of Mr. Netsch: ''His buildings create wonderment, in the best and worst sense of the word.''
     In 1986, Mr. Netsch was appointed Park District board president by Mayor Harold Washington. He left the board in 1988 after a stormy tenure, but he is credited with helping to distribute district projects more equitably, focusing attention on poorer areas that had been neglected previously.
     As influential as he was, Mr. Netsch's ideas were often ignored, perhaps justly so. He once suggested closing the two center lanes of Lake Shore Drive and converting them into flower beds.
     Mr. Netsch spent 30 years with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the giant Chicago-based architecture firm. A heart condition in 1979 forced him to retire, and he was plagued by medical problems in his later years.
     He was married for 45 years to former Illinois Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, who ran for governor in 1994. The two met when the then-Dawn Clark asked to borrow Netsch's art-crammed Lake Shore Drive penthouse apartment for a meeting of independent Democrats in the late 1950s.
     They wed in 1963 without telling friends beforehand. Judge Julius J. Hoffman performed the ceremony in his chambers. Mrs. Netsch had been a law clerk for Hoffman, who would later go on to gain national notoriety by presiding over the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial.
     Mr. Netsch was supportive of his wife's political ambitions, kicking in nearly $1 million of his fortune -- including the sale of an original Frank Lloyd Wright window for $265,000 -- to help finance her failed gubernatorial campaign.
     Walter A. Netsch Jr. was born Feb. 23, 1920, on 62nd Street on the city's South Side. His father was a meat-packing executive from New Hampshire. His mother was a blue blood from a Yankee family that had owned the first car in New Hampshire, and throughout his life the tall, thin Mr. Netsch displayed a certain patrician air.
     Growing up on the South Side, Mr. Netsch said he felt like an outsider. He was unathletic, artistic, frail and highly intelligent. He went to the opera and took drawing classes. He made cardboard houses for his sister.
     "I was a little scrawny kid, so you flaunt what you have," he once said. "But to show intellectual ability -- at that age that's usually considered an aggressive act."
     He studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he was stationed on the Aleutian Islands.
     After an apprenticeship with a Kenilworth firm, he went to work for SOM, where he maintained his outsider ways, pursuing his own rigorous esthetic system -- called Field Theory -- a concept of design that employs the repetitive use of geometric shapes according to specific mathematical principles to create complicated crystalline structures. Like Mr. Netsch himself, these buildings were bold, highly abstract and full of contrasts.
     "He saw that UIC could bridge the Eisenhower Expressway, and designed a north side of the campus, [and a] proposed performing art center that was a cluster of hexagram shapes," said Lee Bey, executive director of the Chicago Central Area Committee, and formerly Mayor Daley's deputy chief of staff for architecture and urban design. "[Netsch did] really good architecture that presages the kind of anti-box forms we see today."
     Examples of Mr. Netsch's work include the mazelike Behavioral Science Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the Miami University Art Museum, and the architect's own Chicago home on North Hudson, whose design inspired the home in the film "Torn Between Two Lovers."
     Bey also said that Mr. Netsch had the vision behind the elegant Inland Steel Building at 30 W. Monroe.
     "Bruce Graham gets the credit because he finished it," said Bey. "As contemporary as it looks now, Walter's earlier version was even lighter, even glassier, even finer."
     Not all critics take such a complimentary view. New York architect Robert A. Stern dismissed some of Mr. Netsch's work as "a landscape of the moon" and "twisted and brutal."
     Even his most famous building had its share of controversy. When unveiled in 1962, the U.S. Air Force Chapel was so hated that Congress held hearings on the matter.
     Mr. Netsch's work at UIC was even more harshly condemned. One critic dubbed it "impersonal concrete brutalism," and part of it suffered that worst fate an architect can face: it was torn down in Mr. Netsch's lifetime.
     In Mr. Netsch's defense, money concerns forced the university to scale back on his plans.
     "The one thing to keep in mind with UIC is it really wasn't built exactly to his design," said Bey. "There was a landscape plan and a lighting plan in his original design, designed to humanize the campus, but they were never completed due to budget problems, so it came off being a cheaper, paler version of what he designed."
     Mr. Netsch never took responsibility for the unpopular campus, pointing a finger at poor maintenance and bad publicity.
     "I did not make a mistake," he said of his original plans. "I will not take the blame." When the architect redoing the campus asked Mr. Netsch to consult with him over the redesign, he refused.
     Mr. Netsch viewed opposition to his work as short-sighted philistinism and felt that his buildings would be vindicated by history.
     "I feel I've introduced something that will be more accepted tomorrow than it is today," he once said.
     His widow said Mr. Netsch was "designing conceptually what cities should look like in the year 2020."
     "He broke out of the box," Dawn Clark Netsch said. "He has left a lot of what was inside of him for others to look at and contemplate, and hopefully also to look at new ways of looking at not only the environment but the world."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 17, 2008 

Post-wedding pancakes at iconic Chicago diner

     Nick Snow and Roxane Briones found each other on Hinge, the online dating site. Each liked what they saw, and decided to meet in person at Avec, the Mediterranean mainstay.
     But there are two Avecs. He went to the one in the West Loop. She went to River North.
     "I forgot he is new to the city," said Briones, who suggested the restaurant. "He went to the wrong one. I panicked."
     "I walked into the place, looking to meet, and there's no one there," said Snow.
     A phone call was made, an Uber grabbed, and the couple got together. Magic ensued.
     "We hit it off very quick," said Snow. "We joke, after our first date, we felt like we were dating a month. After a week, we felt it was a couple months. Now it feels like we've been together for years."
     Briones, 31, is a cook at Proxi, the coastal Asian place in the West Loop. Snow, 40, is a filmmaker who spent almost 20 years in Brooklyn before moving here last October.
     "It was time for a change," said Snow, who noted that Brooklyn was getting very expensive. "Try a new city for a little bit.''
     Briones had a bit of a head start, coming here from Michigan.
     "I came to Chicago almost three years ago," she said. "I was drawn to the restaurants, and the people that I admire work here. I just packed my bags and took a train. I didn't know anyone. Had to rent an apartment in Pilsen with two random girls, who turned into my best friends."
     The relationship, begun in misunderstanding, deepened by accident. Literally.
     "In February I was trying to teach her how to snowboard," said Snow. "She had never done that, coming from Nicaragua. I took her to the tiniest little hill in Naperville. I'm thinking, 'She's going to be fine. There's no way she can get hurt here.' She was doing pretty good, she was picking it up, and just fell forward, tried to catch herself and broke her wrist."
     "In two places," Briones added.
     Bad for a cook who spends her days chopping and stirring.
     "Her whole livelihood," said Snow. "She ended up living with me while she was recovering for two months. In a weird way, that really helped us. It launched us into this position where we were together every day and fire-tested the relationship. We hadn't been dating too long. Suddenly we're living together and together all the time. I'm caring for her. It feels so right. It didn't feel like a burden. That was a special sign."

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Rossmönster Baja Deluxe

     Like all small boys, I have an affection for trucks. 

     From when I was very small, and would carry a red rubber fire truck with yellow wheels in my hand at all times, as a general comfort object and ready distraction, something that could be rolled back and forth on any flat surface when an idle moment presented itself.
    To now, when I'll admire a shiny Mac the Bulldog hood ornament on a Mac truck, or the twin chrome exhaust stacks on a Peterbilt, or the man-size tires on an earth mover.
    We were pulling into the Stanley Hotel for lunch after an extraordinarily satisfying morning at Rocky Mountain National Park — Monday's column discussed that. My brother, who always knows what to do next, said that Guy Fieri has a place there, The Post Chicken & Beer, that we must try. I wasn't about to argue.
    That's where I saw it, passing through the parking lot gate ahead of us — you have to pay $10 to park at the Stanley. Their way, I suppose, of trying to both reduce and monetize curious Stephen King fans who want to rubberneck the locale of "The Shining." Taking your $10, they soften the blow by giving you a token good for $5 off your tab at The Post.

     At first I noticed the vehicle itself. How could you not? Just look at the thing. A brawny slab of custom gunmetal gray, with fog lights and rugged bull bars in front. Then I saw the name: "Rossmönster." My older son's name is Ross, and I tucked the term away for future reference, to give as a gift to my daughter-in-law. Not that he is in any way monstrous. Some guys are. Still, the word still might come in handy as a term of chiding affection. "Less Rossmönster, honey, more yes-dear-right-away..."

Chicken, biscuit and waffles.

     Lunch was everything advertised. I'm not really a fried chicken guy. But they did have a pork chop in burnt orange sauce that called my name. I have to admit, I felt a shiver of order-regret when I saw my brother's plate piled with grub. Two waffles and a biscuit. But he generously traded me a leg and a waffle for a hunk of chop, and neither of us left hungry. 

     First-rate food, and the bartender Joel — we ate at the bar — was friendly and efficient. Plus extra points for a new NA beer, Grüvi Golden Era (also with an umlat. What is happening to us? Are we all Scandinavians now? Or is this more of the synchronicity discussed here Tuesday?)
    Back in Boulder, I lost myself in the Rossmönster web site, watching videos about the truck I saw, the Baja Deluxe, a $444,611 custom camper built on a 5500 Ram pickup. 

     Seeing the vehicle, with its solar panels, front winch and Starlink, I initially assumed it was some kind of rolling armageddon bunker. But the marketing seems designed, less toward survivalists, than for those who want to blast across Joshua Tree in the most comfortable tent ever. The company was founded in Boulder in 2010, and the trucks are built there, which is cool. Rossmönster presents dog-friendliness as a core corporate value, including portraits of the shop dogs right after the staff. Hard not to like folks who do that.

     Co-found Ross Williamson includes a deeply sincere video tribute to his own late dog, Bubs, whose full body profile is the company logo. A well-crafted essay in loss that made my wife cry, at first the video struck me as something that one could possibly scoff at — I felt stirrings when I initially watched it — but then realized, when my own beloved Kitty goes, I will be completely devastated and who knows in what fashion I'll respond? Williamson's reaction — handcraft small boxes for Bubs' ashes to distribute to friends — is certainly unconventional, though the third time I watched the video I thought, "You know ... that's a good idea."

    I'm not in the market for a $444,611 mobile home (not as hideously expensive as it first seems, given that a luxury motorbus can set you back $2 million). But I thought I would toss Rossmönster out into the aether, for two reasons. One, as a reminder that people still build stuff in this country. And two, while public displays of emotion are generally frowned upon, particularly for guys, that rule is suspended when it comes to dogs, and for good reason.

     

What if crowds don't have to spoil the view?

 

Emerald Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park.

     Somewhere just past Bear Lake, the realization hit me.
     My brother wanted to go to Boulder, Colorado. To do the hikes we'd done as kids and eat at the restaurants our mother loved, in what I dubbed our "Farewell Ma Tour."
     I let him pick the trails. He chose wisely, starting along the Boulder River behind our parents' old place — where we'd walk to cool off from the inevitable arguments.
     "On your left!" the cyclists cried as they blasted by. They train them well here.
     Next day, Mount Sanitas: think, a mile on a StairMaster. That afternoon, we took an easy five-mile savannah stroll around the Boulder Reservoir — mostly alone.
     Sunday, another five miles across the grasslands around Eldorado Mountain. Sweeping vistas and black cattle — bovine public employees, basically doing weed maintenance for the city of Boulder.
     For our final day, the idea was to go out with a bang at Rocky Mountain National Park.
     Not so easy anymore. Just showing up and going in is very 2010. You can't do it. The park went to a timed entry system in 2020. All the morning slots were gone. But my brother used his apex predator computer skills to find a secondary cache of available slots for Bear Lake Road.
     People must forget beauty. Because even though I'd been to Rocky Mountain National Park many times, the wonder of the place struck me afresh as we slipped in precisely at our 8 a.m. entry time.
     The parking lot was full. We had to take the shuttle bus. Crowds are considered the bane of national parks. Everybody complains about them, constantly. Me too.
     "Hell is other people," I said, quoting Sartre, as we threaded our way along the trail.
     It is a vigorous 256-foot hike from the trailhead to Bear Lake. You can do it in a wheelchair. Parks are designed this way: Put the best views close to the parking lot. The trail was a continuous stream of humanity.
     It began to dawn on me: Whether the others are a blight or a benefit depends not so much on them, as on me.
     Other folks are usually viewed as an intrusion on precious solitude, a disturbance of the beauty of nature that you've come so far to see. It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.
     Or ... you could consider them part of that selfsame nature.
     The moms bearing their children literally on their backs, like possums. The dads giving pep talks to their tired, balky offspring — I tossed them nods of solidarity. The families, sullen teens, their faces set in "I'm not enjoying this, you can't make me" defiance. The world in hiking boots: Indian college students, Mexican families, prim Japanese couples kitted out in their pricey Mont-Bell gear.

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Flashback 2006: Defeat of flag-burning ban a victory for freedom

     We couldn't stop by the Round the Clock Family Restaurant on our quick weekend trip to Ohio — two dogs in the car. But we certainly thought about it, for reasons this column makes clear.

OPENING SHOT

     With the Fourth of July a few days off, American flags have sprouted along parade routes and downtown streets. If the colors seem not quite as bright this year, the reds a little duller, the blues less true, you might be feeling the chill of the close victory that our flag, and the freedom it represents, eked out in the Senate last week, as the bill that would have allowed the banning of flag burning went down 66-34.
     One vote would have swung it the other way.
     Too close for comfort. Though no more frightening than a dozen other ways American ideals have been carelessly compromised in the name of expediency by this administration.
     Why do those who clearly doubt the ability of this country to thrive while adhering to long-established principles always insist they are the most patriotic? Perhaps because they know, deep down, they are committing an act of betrayal. That the flag is most glorious when respected — or not respected — out of free will. That this country is strongest when its laws are respected, even by those in power.

DON'T MAKE ME STOP THIS CAR!

     We left early — 7 a.m. A long weekend road trip to Cleveland. The idea was to slip out of town before rush hour and grab breakfast in the wilds of Indiana.
     About 9 a.m., a sign suggested "McDonald's," and while I normally avoid the place, the boys had been so good, why not give them a treat?
     "Who wants breakfast at McDonald's?" I enthused, bracing for shouts of glee from the back seat.
     "McDonald's makes me nauseous,'' groaned the 9-year-old.
     Not quite the "Oh boy gee whiz thanks!" I had expected.
     "You're right," I said. "McDonald's makes me nauseous, too."
     So we pulled off at LaPorte to explore. There, in the midst of five chain links — McDonald's, KFC, Subway, Taco Bell, A&W Root Beer — was one hand-painted sign: Round The Clock Family Restaurant.
     Rule No. 1 for road trips: Always choose the local place; they survive for a reason.
     We were rewarded with an experience that entered family lore, from the chatty, "Where are you folks from?" waitress to the sizzling hot pork chops (yes, I know).
     The tables sported paper placemats where local businesses advertised — Tom's Landscaping and Hugo A. Bamberth, attorney at law, and the LaPorte County Public Library. The bathrooms could be grafted on to the new El Trendo restaurant in Lincoln Park and not seem out of place: retro tile floors, slate green walls, a stainless steel sink. Immaculate. That really impressed me because most restaurant bathrooms look like the floor of the Cook County medical examiner's autopsy room after a plane crash.
     We liked the restaurant so much we decided, on the return trip home, to delay lunch two hours so we could eat there again. Qualifying us for the Early Bird Special, meaning that my BBQ ribs, mashed potatoes (don't say it — I was on vacation) and Rosa Maria soup cost $5.09.
     "This is the best restaurant!" said the 9-year-old.
     "Maybe this could be a tradition," suggested his brother.
     Maybe.

SAME LOCATION FOR 32 YEARS . . .

     "I'm a family practitioner, like your family doctor," said Hugo A. Bamberth, the lawyer on the restaurant placemat. "I do adoption to zoning — A to Z. There are always things you choose not to do  — drug cases, child molesters, things like that."
     Some lawyers take pride in the gigantic settlements they've won or the appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court they've made. Bamberth is not one of those.
     "I'm unusual in that I have been in the same address and same phone number for 32 years," he said. "I feign a yawn when I talk about my exciting legal career. To some, I suppose it has been boring. For me it has been very steady."
     I've spoken to a lot of lawyers in my day, and they tend to be circumspect — they won't tell you their favorite flavor of ice cream without considering the matter from every angle, and sometimes not even then. Bamberth isn't like that. I asked him if he gets much business from the place mats.
     "I do," he said. "Because we have Hudson Lake, Fish Lake, Pine Lake, Stone Lake, we have a lot of Chicago weekend folks that have cabins or fishing cottages or whatever and come down here regularly on weekends in the nice weather. One weekend, two of your Chicago firemen had a little too much to drink and got arrested — my recollection is they ran off the road. Nobody got hurt, but they really didn't need that. They gave me a call, and I represented them in those matters."
     Bamberth was in no hurry whatsoever, and we spoke at length in pleasant fashion. He said that LaPorte was a wonderful place to raise his two daughters — Kristen Ulery, now an assistant principal at Gemini Middle School in Niles, and Wendy Bamberth, a fifth-grade teacher in Bensenville.
     "It's just a nice small town," he said.

SPEAKING OF SMALL TOWNS

     We went to Cleveland for my parents' 50th anniversary. Hoping to add interest for the boys, I tacked on an Indians game at Jacobs Field and a day at Cedar Point, the amusement park, where I discovered that one of the joys of roller coasters is that it is impossible to be detached while riding one. Nothing eliminates critical distance or banishes cynicism like being fired at 120 m.p.h. into a 400-foot hill, as we were in the Top Thrill Dragster.
     I almost pointed out to the boys that roller coasters are a good metaphor for life in general — long spans of boredom endured for a few moments of pleasure. But I figured, they'll find out soon enough.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Before he rang off to see to a client, Bamberth told this joke:
     During the first Gulf War, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf is walking in the Iraqi desert.
     He kicks something in the sand, bends down, and discovers it is a brass lamp, which of course he rubs. Out pops a genie.
     "I can grant you any wish you like," says the genie.
     Schwarzkopf removes a map of the Middle East from his back pocket.
     "I'd like everlasting peace throughout this region," says the general.
     "You've picked the one thing that even I cannot do," confesses the genie, with a sigh. "Could you pick a second choice?"
     "Well . . . ," says the general. "It would be nice if the Cubs could finally win a World Series."
     The genie looks stricken.
     "On second thought," he says, "let me see that map again."
                             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 2, 2006

Round The Clock Family Restaurant did indeed become a Steinberg family tradition. From 2023.

Flashback 1993: Hair-Raising Feats Give Pilot a Break - Biplane's Antics Far From 727 Grind

   

     The Chicago Air and Water Show is back. Thirty-two years ago I talked with stunt pilot Susan Dacy who, yes, will be barnstorming this weekend in her Super Stearman 'Big Red." 

     So what is the difference between piloting an open biplane that goes 100 miles an hour and can do barrel rolls and outside loops, and a Boeing 727 that goes 500 miles an hour and, ideally, never does any rolls or loops at all?
     First, with a biplane, every day is a bad-hair day.
     "It's a write-off when I wear my helmet," says Susan Dacy, who pilots both a 727, in her day job as a pilot for American Airlines, and a Great Lakes biplane, which she flies acrobatically at air shows such as the one in Chicago this weekend.
     This is Dacy's third year flying at air shows, which she does in the summer as a break from flying the big airliners.
     The two types of planes really couldn't be more different. Dacy's Great Lakes biplane - a replica built in the 1970s and based on classic barnstorming planes — burns 10 gallons of gasoline an hour. The 727 burns 9,000 pounds of gas an hour, or about 1,280 gallons.
     As terse and no-nonsense as airline pilots are supposed to be, Dacy, 35, is not one to ramble on and on about the joys of flying and the lures that drew a girl from Harvard, Ill., to become one of the country's still-rare female pilots.
      "There are getting to be a few more pilots out there, and people are starting to notice," said Dacy, checking out her biplane at Meigs Field before the start of the shows, which end Sunday..
     But then, in her case, the reason for her career choice is obvious: she grew up on an airport — the private airport at Harvard, owned by her parents. If she ever wanted to do anything else but fly, she can't remember it.
     By age 16 she had soloed in a Piper Cub, and by 18 she had rebuilt a Stearman biplane from the ground up.
     She received an aviation degree from Southern Illinois University along with an Airframe & Powerplant Mechanics license. Since then, she has logged nearly 13,000 flight hours — more than 540 solid days in the air — and flown more than 60 different types of airplanes. She says she loves to perform at air shows.
      "The most exciting thing is seeing the crowds, getting a positive response from them," she said. "Dealing with the kids is a lot of fun. Really fun to see the excitement."
     Dacy sees herself as a good role model for children.
     "I want to portray a positive image and basically get across to anyone that no matter what you want to do, if you try hard enough, you can pursue it," she said.
                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 23, 1993

     One odd aspect of this piece is that while reporting it, I flew with Susan Dacy. We did barrel rolls and loop-de-loops over the lake. Yet I wasn't a columnist, and none of that entered into my story about her, which was either supreme self-control on my part, or lamentable negligence.

Flashback 2008: Russia too big to ignore — Best beware as world's largest nation turns away from democracy

     Vladimir Putin, the Butcher of Moscow, popped across the Bering Strait to ruff the hair of his lapdog, Donald Trump, who talked big, as always, prior to the meeting, but can be relied upon to give up the ranch when actually in the presence of his master.
    Wondering what I've written about Putin over the past, I noticed this warning to readers against ignoring Russia just because they've descended into chaos. But ignore them we did, and now they own us. Or, more precisely, our president. This is back when the column filled a page, and I've kept in the original subheads.

OPENING SHOT ...

     Quick geography quiz: What is the largest country on earth? In land area, I mean. Think hard. Imagine the "Jeopardy!" music playing. . . .
     Give up? Of course you do. Nobody knows these things anymore. It's Russia -- even after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the loss of various republics, it's still enormous, the largest nation on earth, almost as big as the United States and China combined.
     So why is it that Americans are utterly indifferent to Russia -- except, I suppose, for the growing number who actually hail from there? We don't care that Russia, having briefly flirted with democracy, is steadily sliding back toward Stalinesque dictatorship, first under former KGB man Vladimir Putin and now with his cipher puppet replacement, president Dmitry Medvedev.
     Maybe we're indifferent because we spent such a long time terrified of Soviet nukes and felt such relief now that the threat is gone (at least the direct threat. The real possibility of those weapons being passed on to third parties remains, too dire to contemplate, apparently).
     Maybe we don't care because Russia is so economically crippled (Have you ever purchased a product made in Russia? A product more complex than vodka, I mean). We don't feel threatened the way we do by China or India. We're glad the place has become one knot of organized crime funneling the nation's wealth to kleptocrats.
     That's too bad. Because -- as the Islamic world has shown us -- it's the places that we allow to fall off our radar that come back when we least expect them to bite us in the ass.

A HOMEMADE SPOON IN HIS BOOT

     Alexander Solzhenitsyn died last Sunday, and his passing made me want to re-read his work, which I hadn't looked at since I was in high school. But I was busy, and Solzhenitsyn is not a ball of fun, so I let a few days slip by before heading over to the Northbrook Public Library.
     At that point I almost didn't bother, because I figured my fellow citizens, moved by the same impulse and not dallying, would have by then stripped the shelves clean of the great Nobel Prize winner's work.
     Naive. One copy of The Gulag Archipelago was checked out, but Cancer Ward, August 1914 and a dozen others were on the shelves. I grabbed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an early, accessible work, and loped on home to read it.
     It was as I remembered, a bleak, heartbreaking tale of life in the Russian labor camps, where Solzhenitsyn, then a soldier, was sent in 1945 for making a joke about Stalin in a letter home. It tells the story of an average day, after eight years in captivity, of Shuhkov, the nickname for Ivan Denisovich (like any Russian novel, each character has several names, just to make it more confusing). It is 16 below zero, and most of the day is spent bricklaying.
     The book is a quick read that any literate person can polish off in four hours and should, as a reminder of the 2 million -- or 5 million, or 15 million, nobody really knows -- Soviets who died during the 75 years of Communist misrule.
     Thinking about the regime's institutionalized crimes — and those of Communist China, Nazi Germany and all the other oppressive systems — clicked a tumbler into place and helped me understand why I bristle, slightly, whenever somebody gripes about America's crimes, from Guantanamo Bay to the World War II internment of Japanese American citizens to the Palmer Raids. It isn't that these things aren't stains on our history. But compared with the horrors inflicted on millions elsewhere, they're causes of pride in their isolated quality and limited scope.

ON SECOND THOUGHT . . .

     Or am I giving the United States too much of a break? After I wrote the above, I noticed I had omitted slavery and the extermination of the Indians, which though lodged in the remote of the 19th century, were also large-scale horrors. Is this evidence of the screening quality people use to ignore facts that undermine their permanent opinions? It's easy to see in others; not so easy to see in yourself.

SAUNA! FREEZER! SAUNA! FREEZER!

     Is the Thompson Center too hot or too cold? I raised the issue Friday, figuring I would hear from occupants. I did, and the answer is, "Yes."
     "I work there," wrote a friend. "It's a friggin' meatlocker."
     "It's kinda toasty," said a 20-year state employee, who naturally didn't want his name used. "In the summer it's like a greenhouse."
     "I spent two years in the office of communication," writes a reader, whose name I shall shield. "Perhaps it was the chill of thought control from the propagandists in the Gov's office on the 16th floor, but many of our offices were freezing several stories below. I wore heavy warm sweaters during the summer months. But other offices were sweltering, particularly where the sun shone."
     The rumor is that it was inferior glass that caused the initial problems.
     "The design was right, but when the Thompson Center was first built, we had such massive cost overruns, they changed the glass specs," said the long-time employee. "It was supposed to be heavy duty glass to account for the greenhouse effect, but it was over so much, they didn't use it. They'll never fix it."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE ...

     Generally I avoid sexist jokes — I found myself agreeing with a bumper sticker that read, "I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy." But this one works too well to ignore, and I think we can get away with it.
     In the Garden of Eden, in that brief, happy period before the Fall, the first man and the God who created him would sometimes converse.
     "Why did you make Woman so beautiful?" Adam asked.
     "So you would love her," God answered.
     He thought about that a while.
     "Then why did you have to make her so dumb?" Adam wondered.
     "So she would love you."
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2008