To snitch or not to snitch? Is proposed parking scofflaw law a good idea?

Bike park at the central train station in Copenhagen.

     This is a tough one.
     As a rule, I'm not a on-this-hand, on-the-other kind of columnist. That's chicken ... umm ... bleep. My job is to not equivocate but make a stand. If you're going to take Vienna, as Napoleon said, take Vienna. No half measures.
     But regarding the ordinance Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) outlined in Fran Spielman's article Thursday, allowing Chicagoans to take photos and turn in commercial vehicles violating parking ordinances, leaving their big blue electric Prime vans in bike lanes and crosswalks, well, I'm torn here.
     It's good that it's being delayed, so the issues can be weighed.
      On the one hand, as a former avid city cyclist, in my younger days — for years after the Divvy system rolled out, I wrote a periodic "Divvy Diary" recounting the joys of blasting those big blue bombers down Chicago streets —I know you take your life in your hands every time you have to veer around some double-parked doofus.
     Why should innocent cyclists energetically going about their business be forced to risk getting themselves creamed by a bus so that housebound shopping addicts sprawled on their sofas can receive their daily, if not hourly, infusion of superfluous junk?
     On the other: I too order from Amazon. I too marvel when something bought a few hours ago shows up, Johnny-on-the-spot. I don't have a dog in this race, living as I do in the sprawling, low-density leafy suburban paradise that is Northbrook. A half dozen Prime vans could simultaneously pull up in front of our house, day or night, and easily find a place to park. Some days, it seems they do.
      In the city, most blocks are wall-to-wall parked cars. So where else are delivery trucks supposed to stop, if not in bike lanes and crosswalks? They only stop briefly, and if you happen to come hammering along and, checking your heart rate on your Apple watch, rear end one, well, tough luck. Maybe you should concentrate on where you're going, and you won't get doored while fiddling with your bike computer.
      Then there is the risk of dragooning the population into traffic enforcement. Is that respect for law? Or trying create a population of snitches?
      La Spata isn't only doing this out of concern for law, generally, but to scratch his own private itch. He's a cyclist, posting Instagram videos of himself leading critical mass bike rides to meetings of the City Council Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which he chairs.
      All good, right? Onward toward a Scandinavian-style cyclist's paradise? Or another example of leaders putting their own priorities first? Maybe La Spata should sponsor an ordinance encouraging police officers to snitch on each other. Because right now the code of silence requires them to cough into into their fists twice upon detecting thin blue line crime, provided no one is around to hear the coughs.
      There is risk involved. As someone who walks around a lot, and often takes photos of what I see, I'd hate to be minding my own business, trying to capture an evocative arrangement of snow on a bare tree branch, only to have some burly delivery guy run over, knock my phone out of my hands and jump on it because he thinks I'm taking a photo of his license plate.
      OK, Steinberg, choose. Ordinance = bad. Is not a culture of snitching another milestone in the road to totalitarianism? Stukach they called it in Soviet Union. Squealing. We start by encouraging people to report someone parking in a crosswalk, then before we know it, schoolchildren are turning in their parents for working on Trump's birthday.
       We're closer than you think. In case you missed it, the National Park Service just scratched Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth from its free entry holiday list, replacing it with the 47th president's birthday. Thank God we're all so numb, or we'd have to scan the headlines with our phones in one hand and air sickness bags in the other.

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Flashback 1991: Pearl Harbor terror recalled at rites here

The 50th anniversary was front page news

  
     Today is Pearl Harbor Day — a Sunday, as it was in 1941. I will fly the flag. Can't say whether the newspaper will run anything — memories fade, passions cool, and 84 years after the event, only about a dozen survivors of the Japanese attack remain alive. Time was, if the Sun-Times didn't mark the anniversary, prominently, readers would complain bitterly. This isn't a column — I was a general assignment reporter at the time, reporting on the Dec. 7 anniversary commemoration — other stories had run the day before. Starting on the front page.

     How bad was it at Pearl Harbor? Enough for Arlandres Dixon to suddenly feel homesick for the Southern city he joined the Navy to escape
     "It was one of the few times in my life I missed Jackson, Miss.," said Dixon of the moment he stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Dale and watched Japanese bombers rip into the harbor. "I was scared as a fox with a pack of hounds behind him."

     The 72-year-old former gunner was one of hundreds of veterans who gathered at Daley Plaza on Saturday for a solemn ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 

     Maj. Gen. James H. Mukoyama Jr., a third generation Japanese American, said honoring the Pearl Harbor dead should not mean rekindling bigotry against Japanese Americans, many of whom fought bravely in World War II and almost all of whom were loyal citizens despite official government outrages committed against them.

     "During World War II, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were taken from their homes," he said. "In Hawaii, (they) were forced to wear black badges on their clothes, reminiscent of the cloth badges Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. The only crime committed by these American citizens were their parents were born in Japan."

     Despite somber speeches, the moment of silence, and the Marine bugler playing taps, it was still a gathering of veterans, complete with hearty handshakes, slaps on the back, more than one dirty joke, and a lot of reminiscing.

     Dixon, whose destroyer was the first ship to make it out of the harbor, recalled using blowtorches and bolt cutters to break into the ship's magazine to get at shells because the officer with the keys was on shore.

     Another attack survivor who was present was Clyde Leland Ernst, 85, who 50 years ago was chief warrant carpenter on Ford Island. He was warming up the engines of the ferryboat he operated when he saw waves of Japanese torpedo planes — at eye level, it seemed — pass by.

     "I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe it," said Ernst, who would spend the next three days ferrying wounded to the mainland hospital. He said that despite his memories of burned sailors, he holds no animosity toward the Japanese today.

     "I've outgrown that," he said. "Time heals the deepest wounds."

       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 8, 1991

Flashback 1998: Galoshes mark big milestone

     The aging brain retains many odd bits, the mental equivalent of drawers jammed with junk and jars brimming with buttons and pennies. Friday morning, contemplating the weekend, I thought, "Dec. 6 is James Thurber's birthday."  As to which one, I squinted and guessed: "...128." Close: Dec. 8, not 6th. And 131 years ago — 1894 . 

     I haven't read his stuff lately — haven't read much at all, now that I can scroll mindlessly through Instagram and TikTok like everybody else. But at one time was he was a point of ready reference.  

     This is briefer than columns lately, because it ran, at the time, in the Features section on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It evokes a time when most days I dutifully headed downtown to work, wearing a suit and Oxford shoes, ready for whatever came. Typically I don't like to repeat a word too often, but here I use "galoshes" nine times — I obviously shied away from the double entendre "rubbers." I was 38 when I wrote this. Imagine how I feel now.

     One of the advantages of growing up fat and kinda unattractive is that, as you enter middle age, you're prepared for it. You've been there.
     I weighed the same this morning as when I was 16. How many guys can say that? True, I was 198 pounds when I was 16. But hey, the logic still holds. At least I don't weigh 300 pounds. Some guys do.
     That said, there are still surprises, still milestones that catch your attention and cause you to pause, sighing, in the doorway that leads away from youth.
     The milestones I'm thinking about are more subtle than the typical markers of time's passage: the graduations, marriages, births. I'm referring to the buying life insurance milestone, the gray hair milestone, the making-the-same-groaning-noise-your-father-made-when-he-got-out-of-a-chair milestone.
     Or, as I discovered recently, the galoshes milestone.
     It was raining hard. As I plucked the umbrella out of the front closet I glimpsed my galoshes, turned inside out, where I had flung them last spring, the previous occasion, when, at my wife's urging, I wore them out of the house.
     Normally, I never wear them unless forced to. There is something terribly sad about galoshes, something dreary and middle-aged. Put on galoshes and you're halfway to wearing woolen underwear and walking about with a hot water bottle tied around your neck with a string.
     Men are supposed to be stronger than that. We must be nagged to wear our galoshes. In James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," galoshes are one of the mundane items that, along with puppy biscuits, Mitty's overbearing wife nags him to purchase.
     "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair done," she says. He argues, "I don't need overshoes."
     "We've been through that," she snaps, then adding the coup de grace, a blow at the heart: "You're not a young man any longer."
     Heading out the door, seeing the galoshes on the floor of the closet, I actually looked over my shoulder, to see if my wife was around to order me to put them on. She wasn't. I hesitated. It was raining hard. I was wearing my Church's oxfords, lovely hunks of hand-made leather bought at great expense, shoes that I nurse through the years (they've had more new soles than a tent revival). It wouldn't do to wreck them while saluting some faded echo of youthful bravado.
     I put on my galoshes.
     The heavens did not crack. People on the street didn't point and stare. The oxfords were protected.
     But I felt a little more stooped, a little more tired. I got to work, peeled off the galoshes, and flung them on my desk, where they have sat since, turned inside out, awaiting the next downpour to be worn home.
     I don't know where being cautious became associated with age and decline. Teenagers leave their coats to flap open, defiantly, when they are forced to wear coats at all. Older people button up and wear those stupid hats with the flaps sticking out. It's smarter, and safer, but I miss the old way.
     At least I don't use the shoe trees. I have all these wooden shoe trees that I inherited from my father. They're in the bottom of the closet. The idea is that you put the trees in your shoes at night to, I don't know, keep them from collapsing in on themselves.
     I have never used the shoe trees, and my shoes seem fine. But maybe I'm just too immature to understand the benefit of a shoe tree. Maybe, in a few years, I'll come home one fine day and those wooden trees will make perfect sense.
     And kids think aging is without its thrills.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 20, 1998

A few of the comments refer to this photo, which was atop the blog the day this post ran.

Can't sleep? Don't count sheep — use this guided meditation for healthful snoozing

     Hey there, and welcome to the Chicago Sun-Times guided meditation for sleep. I'm your host, Neil Steinberg, and I'd like to invite you to get comfortable in a secure location. If you are driving your car, reading this on your phone at a stoplight, as people actually do, you are invited to ease your car over to the side of the road, angle your seat back, and hold the phone a comfortable four inches from your face.
     Or better yet, set this to MurmurMode, where one of 12 artificial voices will narrate this for you: Unemployed Hunky Actor, Older Lady Librarian, Whispering Mermaid, and such. Then you may place your hand over a flat surface, gently open your fingers, and execute a maneuver known as "setting your phone down." If you are experiencing the residual frozen claw that comes from holding an iPhone for 110 minutes straight, try wiggling your fingers until the numbness and tingling dissipate. Do not be alarmed by your hand being empty — your phone is still nearby and available. Give it a gentle pat to reassure yourself that it's still right there.
     Now sit back and close your eyes. Draw in a deep breath, filling your lungs with air. Hold that, savoring the quality of fullness. Then exhale the air out, preventing yourself from wondering how you've come to such a degraded state that you need to be told to breathe, an activity heretofore done automatically and without guidance, by you and most living creatures. Worms breathe unaided — through their skin, a process called cutaneous respiration.
     Now set an intentionality — what sort of sleep would you like to experience? The serene snuggling sleep of an infant nestled in a completely empty crib, devoid of bumpers, blankets or stuffed animals, because apparently those are considered lethal nowadays? The bivalve bliss of the ocean oyster, resting in the warm sand of an antediluvian sea? The restorative slumber of someone who didn't spend the past 40 years madly dashing like a gerbil on a wheel in a profession that was steadily dying all around him? The choice is yours.
     Identify something that happened today and be grateful about it. Is your skin pale enough that you could go to the Home Depot for a box of nails without worrying that ICE would grab you out of the parking lot and send you to a nameless prison in El Salvador? Do you live in a city where the mayor is not a bumbling buffoon trying to balance the budget on the backs of those businesses that stay despite his constant death-of-a-thousand-cuts harassment? Focus on this good thing while crossing your hands over your chest, executing the butterfly hug while repeating, "I am grateful. I am snug. I am protected."
     While we are utilizing the my-wishes-become-reality linkage between flitting intangible thoughts within and the generally harsh and unresponsive reality without, a charmed notion that Oprah years ago somehow convinced us was real, feel free to add: "I live in a functional democracy, where laws apply equally to smirking billionaires and nugatory losers such as me." Reach for the stars.

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'The Carrot Seed'

 

     The Thanksgiving holiday began early in my household this year, with the arrival of my older son, daughter-in-law and their 5 month old baby brood on the Monday before Turkey Day, and ended with their departure more than a week later. 
     For one week, first thing, I'd do every morning is pad downstairs to visit with my granddaughter, and let me tell you, what a great way to get the day off to the right start. Hard to play the crusty annoyed curmudgeon after that. I wish I could post a picture, but such things are forbidden — social media has not won over the young the way it supposedly has. We're back to photos stealing their souls. Just as well —the blazing cuteness might sear your retinas, like staring into the noonday sun. They've been gone 24 hours, and I'm still fairly dazzled.
     What did we do all day? We sang —I did quite an accurate cover of "The Gummy Bear Song"  — "Oh, I'm a gummy bear/Yes, I'm a gummy bear/Oh, I'm a yummy, tummy, funny, lucky gummy bear...") even getting the slightly electronic warble in my voice (though, I admit, I tossed in a few rhyming adjectives not in the song itself —like "rummy" and "scummy." No reason the adults can't entertain themselves as well.  We danced.

     We read. We were always a book household, and many, many old books were pulled down and read. The one that sticks in my mind is "The Carrot Seed," the 1945 classic written by Ruth Krauss, with pictures by her husband, Crockett Johnson, once famous for the "Barnaby" comic strip and his book, "Harold and the Purple Crayon."
     The plot of "The Carrot Seed" is simplicity itself. On the first page, an unnamed little boy —in the requisite beanie —plants a carrot seed. A parade of onlookers — his mother, father, big brother — tell him it won't come up. Still, he pulls up the weeds around the seed and sprinkles the ground with water.  Nothing happens, except those who told him it wouldn't come up continue to tell him that. This affects his persistent care of the seed not at all. He weeds. He waters and then — spoiler alert — a glorious carrot, bigger than he is, shoots up. "Just as the little boy had known it would."
    That's it. I don't know any young writers —or young people seized with any ambition. But its message  —keep plugging, your carrot is coming, no matter what people say —is an essential one. And not just for young people. Success waxes, and wanes, and you can reach a point where nobody but nobody knows or cares what your projects happen to be. You weed, and water, and persist. Even if the carrot never sprouts. What else can you do? 

       

     

Is this 'rage bait' if I'm not provoking you deliberately?

 

     Unlike you, I actually own a full set of the Oxford English Dictionary. A dozen massive volumes — each a foot tall and weighing about 8 pounds. A linear yard of navy blue spines — "Oxford blue," aptly enough — if you include the four supplements, stretched out across the upper shelf of the rolltop desk behind me. Spin around in my chair and I can yank one down, and sometimes do.
     Why go to the trouble when a few clicks will bring up any meaning without the risk of handling one of these big boys? Really, drop it on your foot, you could break a toe.
     My set was published in 1978, making it nearly a half-century out of date. The meaning of "computer" is given as, "One who computes; a calculator, reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc." That's it. A brief, old definition — the way the word is defined in Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary.
     Plug "computer def" into a search engine and you get: "an electronic device for storing and processing data, typically in binary form, according to instructions given to it in a variable program." Much more current.
     But not in-depth. If you find that explanation, like so much online, thin gruel, navigating a lake a thousand miles wide and an inch deep, you can also subscribe to the OED for $10 a month, $100 a year, then plunge into the etymologies and stay up on the blizzard of changes to a language that is mutable and plastic ("5. Susceptible of being moulded or shaped.") Why be behind the times?
     Well, for starters, have you had a close look at the times we're in? In a lunge for publicity, the folks who publish the OED designate a "word of the year." On Monday they announced 2025's term: "rage bait" defined as, "(n.) Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account."
     Rage bait won out, by public vote, over two shortlist contenders: "aura farming," ("The cultivation of an impressive, attractive, or charismatic persona or public image by behaving or presenting oneself in a way intended subtly to convey an air of confidence, coolness, or mystique") and "biohack" — ("to attempt to improve or optimize one's physical or mental performance, health, longevity or wellbeing by altering one's diet, exercise routine or lifestyle by using other means, such as drugs, supplements or technological devices.")
     I'd never heard of any of them — of course not. I'm marooned on one of the increasingly scattered and windswept islands of professional daily journalism, my signal fire guttering, subsisting on coconut milk and grilled voles, watching the water rise up the beach. Though I'm told that kids in their 20s toss "rage bait" out regularly. Last year's word was certainly on point: "brain rot," which is "low quality, low value content found on social media and the internet" and what lapping that up three hours out of 24 — the average chunk of life blown every day on social media by Gen Z types — does to a person.

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Maybe if we put on a better show they wouldn't hate us so much.

      Lots of feedback to Monday's column about the Chicago Quantum Exchange at the University of Chicago, interviewing its director, David Awschalom. Somehow, this email stood out, from a medical doctor:

     Mr. Steinberg,
     If Dr. Awschalom is of our faith, it would have been an appropriate mention given the context of your article.
     All efforts to remind others of our worth, our contribution to society would be a benefit in this era of overt prejudice and anti-semitism.
     My thoughts are a sad commentary of our times.
     Sincerely,
     Lewis C., MD

    While Dr. C.'s remark appeared in my spam folder — he must have said something annoying in the past, though I can't recall what — it touched on a pet peeve of mine, and I thought it deserved a response:  

   Dear Dr. C:
    I disagree wholeheartedly. I don't have many personal rules of conduct, but one ironclad stricture is: don't write for people who hate you. The Jews constitute 0.2 percent of the world population, yet make huge contributions to most realms of culture and science, far outstripping our numbers. Either someone knows that already or they never will.  
    You are giving antisemites too much credit. There is an assumption in your suggestion that is common, and I would argue against: that people who are prejudiced reach that point by weighing reality, assessing the facts before them before coming to their conclusions. Just the opposite: they blinder themselves with their bigotry, and cherry pick what facts support them, when they're not fabricating calumnies out of whole cloth. 
   I see this attitude sometimes if I write about something that departs from the traditional practices of our faith —eat a pork chop, for instance. I'll hear from Jews frantic to put on a good show for the goyim. I guess we need to be all exemplars of our religion. Guess what? We don't.   
     Given the sort of people who go about unashamed, I don't see why I, or you, or Dr. Awschalom, can't do the same. I didn't mention his faith because it wasn't germane — he's not refugee, yet. Though the way our country is going, I could see that happening — no matter how many Jews are making the world a better place — so perhaps I'll have reason yet to mention his religion, prior to his fleeing to the relative safety and tolerance of a nation such as Germany.
     Thanks for writing.
     Neil Steinberg 

     I assumed it would end there — discussion doesn't seem high on anyone's list anymore. But Dr. C. did reply, in a thoughtful way that deserves sharing.

     I appreciate the eloquence and contents of your comments. However, there is a reversal, a stirring exhibited within the American Jewish communities.
Whereas until recently, we hid our Jewishness on campuses or walking down Michigan Avenue so as not to be the recipient of the wrath from irrational bigots, we now have struck a tone of “ here we are and we’re proud of who we are”.
     I do agree there was no natural transition to add the religion of Dr. Awschalom in a seemless way into your column.
     The newsroom guys, the medical colleagues, the factory workers, the small shop owners, the Amazon Prime drivers, the waitresses, the police, the construction workers, the housewives — it is directed toward them, a silent majority, that the Dr. Awschaloms of the world are the shining light, the vibrancy of our religious culture and invent the insanely brilliant stuff that benefits humanity.
     Thank you for reading this.

     It broke my heart, a little, to read that, the old-style notion of blue collar America nodding in admiration of the Jewish molecular physicist changing the world. Maybe they do — I can't speak for them. But looking at the politics of the moment, it's hard to imagine. 

     In my view, the religion would be buoyed, not by more public scientists, but by emphasizing the Jewish truck drivers, waitresses, police, construction workers, etc. — salt-of-the-earth sorts automatically admired in a way researchers are not. It dislodged an old memory. The Chicago Police Department has a Jewish chaplain, Moshe Wolfe. Intrigued by the idea of Jewish Chicago cops, I got him on the phone, and asked him to be the focal point on a story. He flatly refused — not so much because he's Jewish, I believe, but because he's a cop. The code of silence, remember, isn't just about bad apples. It's about everything. A Chicago Police Officer wouldn't want to be subject of a story about rescuing a kitten from a tree — anyone who stands up is hammered down. Not courage in the way I understand it. The whole thing struck me as very sad. 

     

Chicago's quantum computing center a benefit of tolerance

     Seeing that Chicago is the epicenter of a major effort in the future of technology, at the very moment our government is waging a glittery-eyed war on science, I checked in with the man coordinating it all.
     What's going on?
     "In the last couple of decades, scientists and engineers have been able to engineer the way that matter behaves at the atomic scale," said David Awschalom, a professor of molecular engineering and physics at the University of Chicago. "We can take the rule of nature and develop a new technology, which has unusual properties, while common in the atomic world, we don't see every day, like entangling bits of information, or thinking of a bit as not just a zero or one but an infinite combination of the two."
     While those with knowledge of physics are collecting their jaws off the floor at the suggestion of practical applications of entanglement and departure from the binary 0 or 1 holy writ of the digital age, I'll point out that Awschalom is director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, a massive initiative based in Hyde Park but involving Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and more — over 60 partners.
     "This could really be a new way for universities, national laboratories and companies to all work together at the birth of a new technology to move discoveries rapidly into society," he said.
     One way to conceive of what this is about is to consider the first sustained nuclear reaction — Dec. 2, 1942, also at the University of Chicago. If that was harnessing the energy locked in an atom, this is finding a way to access the information hidden within.
     "It's possible now to take a number of quantum bits, entangle them with one another and share a single bit of information," Awschalom said.
     Today, if you order your dog pajamas for Christmas on Amazon, your credit card number passes through intermediaries, where it can be stolen. But someday it could be sent directly, via entanglement.
     "A special link between two points," Awschalom said. "You could transmit information in a secure way."
     The strings of 0s and 1s are shattering into an infinite set of values, "like a miniature gyroscope you can spin in all three directions." Navigation could no longer need satellites orbiting the globe but use the earth's magnetic field, the way birds do.
     "This is important given the number of spoofing attacks on commercial aircraft," Awschalom said. "If you had a quantum system, it's safe."
     Plus the creation of very small computers would reduce the enormous amount of electricity artificial intelligence currently requires.
    The question that always fascinated me about Fermi splitting the atom in 1942 was: "Why here?" Why perform an experiment that Edward Teller worried might set the atmosphere on fire in the middle of a crowded college campus in the nation's second-largest city?
     The top reasons are gloriously random. For starters, Columbia University tried to split the atom first. But their uranium wasn't sufficiently pure, and the experiment failed. And they were building a lab to do the deed southwest of the city, in the Argonne Woods. But a labor dispute shut down the work and, with a war on, the empty space at Stagg Field was pressed into service.

     So why is quantum computing happening here? Did Caltech and MIT drop the ball?
     "It's not the weather," said Awschalom, who left California to come here. "This part of the country just collaborated beautifully, quickly, with support, from the mayor at the time." Rahm Emanuel, if you've forgotten that a mayor can draw business to the city as well as drive it away. Gov. JB Pritzker was an early advocate.
     Strong community colleges are also key, supplying workers for the hundreds of thousands of "really interesting, high-paid, high-tech jobs" that might come from "scalable atomic-size technologies."

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How to unfreeze a cheesecake

      "Ross is making us cheesecake," my daughter-in-law announced bright and early Saturday, as the snow gently fell. "The breakfast of champions."
     "It sure is in this house," I said, approvingly. 
     My older son is a gourmand — he not only notches Michelin stars on his belt like an astronomer surveying the skies on a clear night, but also cooks and bakes. One visit he whipped up a croquembouche, which I couldn't pronounce, never mind conceive of preparing — though I ate some easily enough.
     Not that he was "making cheesecake" in the sense of combining ingredients in a bowl and baking a cheesecake. That would be crazy, particularly when the superlative cheesecake in the world, Eli's, was waiting in the freezer, ready to be roused from frozen slumber. I noted, with concern, that he chose to breathe life into their pair of slices — one classic, one mixed berry —through the wonder of microwave technology.
     Now microwaving is fine for, say, heating up yesterday's coffee. I did so this morning. But, as a semi-official representative of the Eli's Cheesecake Company — their 13th season of advertising on this blog began last week — I must express disapproval of the idea of thawing a cheesecake by microwave. The box instructs patrons lucky enough to find themselves in possession of an Eli's cheesecake to thaw it by either allowing the cake to sit in the refrigerator overnight, or by placing it at room temperature for three hours.
    Strategies which posed insurmountable problems to a person, such as myself, who, inspired by the notion of cheesecake for breakfast, wanted cool and delicious Eli's cheesecake now. Not in three hours. And especially not tomorrow morning.
     So I decided, against my better judgment, to experiment with the microwave method. My wife suggested the gradual approach. I put it for just 10 seconds. There was still frost on top. Another 10, and it seemed frozen. A third 10 seconds, which had to be sufficient.
     I set it out with a cup of hot coffee. The tip was warm — not the ideal cheesecake experience. But the whole thing was not ruined — most was cold, though parts were still frozen. I still ate the slice in short order.
     I would be ashamed, as a semi-official representative of Eli's, to admit this folly on my part. But I'm sharing it because I believe it speaks to an important truth. Two important truths, in fact. 

     First, most everything good in life requires planning. You, reading this, probably cannot eat some cheesecake right now, no matter how much you want to, because you haven't any in your freezer, despite years of reading this blog and having the centrality of cheesecake to a life well-lived drilled into you. No shame there ... well, not too much shame ... okay, some shame because, really, aren't you paying attention at all? 
    No harm though — your current cheesecakelessness can be easily remedied by clicking on the Eli's web site and ordering one, or several, right now, whisked to your house through the wonder of dry ice technology. There isn't much you can do to fix the world right now. But you can have a slice of cheesecake. It'll help. Trust me on that.
     But even if, like me, your freezer is well-stocked with Eli's, a second factor comes into play: Don't do things half-assed. Be patient. Do it right. A slice of classic Eli's cheesecake is a superlative sensual experience. One doesn't rush it. Screw microwaves. Wait. Be patient. Let it properly thaw, in the refrigerator overnight or, in a hurry, with three hours on the counter. What's your rush, bub? You'll be dead and forgotten soon enough. As will I, as will everybody. 
     But we are alive, right now, given a fleeting opportunity to live our lives to the fullest, and part of that is indulging in cheesecake for breakfast. 
     As part penance, part celebration, I removed a second superlative slice of classic Eli's cheesecake and put it in the refrigerator. There it thawed gradually, as God intended. Sunday morning I first spent a delightful 20 minutes singing and talking to the baby, then patted my column into shape, then rewarded myself by padding down to the kitchen and pulling open the refrigerator. There was the slice of Eli's classic cheesecake, smiling right at me. I grabbed a fork. Mmmm, let's just say, worth the wait.

    

'The worst of the worst'

"Public Notice 3," by Jitish Kallat (Art Institute of Chicago)

      This is the Golden Age of Stupidity. Or is it the Renaissance of Ruthlessness? The Heyday of Hypocrisy? No reason it can't be all three, with an unhinged, jabbering dupe of a president, served by a growing army of craven underlings, hand-picked for their servility. Unfettered by the counterbalances and restraints the Founders intended to keep a president in check. Having himself fomented the worst act of rebellion since the Civil War, he dares fling out the word "treason" like spittle off the lips of someone having a seizure. Just one drop of venality in a continual downpour.
    No matter. It's still good to say it, loudly and clearly, from time to time. Not because doing so represents anything new. Or does any good, except remind ourselves that, no matter how accepted it has become to many, despite the silent chorus of shrugs, this is all still unacceptable. Still very wrong. This is a continuing, grotesque abuse and departure from cherished American norms. Not just another Tuesday.

     Particularly the ICE kidnappings — less prominent in Chicago the past few weeks, true, but still growing, as more masked thugs are hired, more detention camps built. Lives are being upended, parents torn from children, hard-working immigrants exiled even as they try to follow the law. 
     Yes, as the months grind on, it becomes difficult — first because one has to wonder, "What is the point?" — to find new ways to convey the venality, the gaslighting, the cruelty, the hypocrisy, the lies, the incompetence, the self-dealing, the corruption.
     Not that I am alone here. I'm blessed with smart, well-spoken readers, in the main. Yes, there are the denizens of the spam folder, vomiting back whatever Fox News told them last night — they care very much about the letter of the law, when it comes to immigrants, but when you wonder why that love of legality doesn't translate to their beloved leader's constant, blatant criminality, they flutter away. I spend little time reading their outpouring, less reacting to it, though occasionally I'll toss out a canned, "The scorn of traitors is praise to a patriot" or "It might come as a shock, but the low opinion of a dupe in thrall to a traitor doesn't carry the sting you seem to imagine it might."
     But the bulk reflects the unease, pain, despair, insight of intelligent people confronting a nation gone mad. One cogent blog reader left this comment, anonymously, and in case you missed it, I want to highlight it today, because it has truth and brevity:

I don’t really know the ‘crime’ business…but, I’m guessing that anyone who is good at it … you know, the worst of the worst … they’re probably not out mowing lawns or shoveling show. I don’t know…it’s just a guess.

     That's it, right? No more need be said. Today anyway. As for tomorrow...

Flashback 2012: This Christmas, give the gift of jerky

 ;

   My brother and I drove to the Upper Peninsula in early October, as usual. And, per tradition, stopped at Held's in Slinger, Wisconsin to load up on their magnificent jerky. And yes, I noted, with approval, this column, framed, and smiled thinking of the time I drove up with my pal Rory, and he tried to explain to the guy in an apron behind the counter that this jammoke standing next to himwas the self-same author of that very column. Which of course could not be conveyed, no matter how hard he tried, since the media is produced by some malign secret force laboring far, far away, not by anybody who might be standing here, in Slinger's, before the cases stuffed with sausage and bacon and jerky. 

     Friday is the day that our holiday buying frenzy traditionally begins . . . well, it used to be Friday. Now it seems Black Friday has become unhinged from its usual location on the calendar and is wandering back in time, to Thanksgiving and beyond, on its way towards Veterans Day, heading toward some dystopia of continual shopping.
     Horror. If you’re like me, it’s hard enough to shop in an empty store, with a clerk smiling at you expectantly while you browse undisturbed. The prospect of plunging into some sea-of-humanity chaos, fighting to snag $50 off a vacuum cleaner, is unimaginable. But hard times make for hard choices, and I don’t want to pooh-pooh anybody motivated to save money on a big purchase. You do what you must, and if you’re dabbing the scratches on your face with iodine, I don’t want to compound your discomfort by snickering in the background. Nice off-brand home theater sub-woofer system. Use it, as my mother would say, in the best of health.
     For those of us squeaking by, however, holiday shopping is not so much about getting an even bigger flat-screen as finding the obligatory love token to serve up to our significant other to prove that, despite everything, our passion has not eroded over the years but remains as bright and fierce as ever, as proven by this . . . um . . . ah . . . nicely wrapped . . .
     That’s the rub, isn’t it? Each person has his or her own set of expectations and desires, and your job, as a conscientious loved one, is to somehow figure them out, Carnac the Magnificent-like. I’ve written before that gift-giving is really a yearlong job, 12 months of constant attention, of careful observation, waiting for the small pout, that “Oh I really shouldn’t,” sigh as she sets it reluctantly back on the shelf, then noting the exact type/size/brand, rushing back to snap it up and tuck it away.
     Not that it’s always that easy. Last year, my wife admired a certain smart, black, wool, winter jacket at Macy’s. Very French, very ooh-la-la. But the price — whatever it was, a couple hundred dollars — was far too expensive compared to the minimal Kohl’s and T.J. Maxx double digit prices she’d trained herself to spend on just about everything.
     As she stepped away, I grabbed the coat, feverishly studied the label like a secret agent memorizing a code, then tripped off after her.
     It took me a day or two to get back to Macy’s. And in the meantime — and this will sound like comic exaggeration — they got in a massive shipment of smart, black, women’s wool coats. The floor was filled with them, rack after rack. I stood there, mouth agape, at this expanse of coats, then plunged in, like one of those thriller movies when the detective is chasing a porter who disappears into a mob of porters on a train station platform, and the private eye grabs each by the shoulder, spinning him around, gazing at each face while other porters, hunched, push past.
     Eventually — and I think it took the better part of an hour — I found what I thought was the right coat and had it boxed and wrapped and hidden away. Of course it wasn’t the right coat — or my wife just changed her mind, the prerogative of beautiful women, true, but a disappointment nonetheless.
     You want something desired but hard-to-find, needed but not bought already.
     The only gift suggestion I have this year — and I suppose this is more for guys than gals — is beef jerky. Not the standard gift, I grant you. But I keep thinking about this place, Held’s, in Slinger, Wisconsin. For the past few years, driving up 41 to Lake Superior, we’ve stopped by their hard-to-miss store — the company is family owned since 1886 — and bought a big chunk for the weekend. A pound of this stuff looks like something that slipped out of Rooster Cogburn’s saddle bag, deep brown on the outside, reddish brown inside. It comes in regular, spicy, teriyaki, barbecue, black pepper, hot Jamaican; $17.75 a pound.
     “It tastes like a burned-down house,” said a friend, summarizing it perfectly.
     “It tastes like tree bark,” said my son, who at 15 lacks the well-practiced determination needed to chew through the stuff, though if you slice it thin enough, it’s quite good.
     When I was there last, a slip of paper said the jerky is available for mail order, and I thought, “The perfect Christmas gift.” Some tiny part of us all wishes we could take a break from the routine and responsibility of living in the Chicago metroplex, to escape to the comfortable flannel freedom of Wisconsin, to don antlers and caper in forest clearings at midnight, howling at the moon, as Badger staters are known to do. Beef jerky from Held’s seems a way to approximate that.
     Anyway, the website is heldsmarket.com, or call (262) 644-5135. Though do exercise discretion. I thought of buying a hunk of jerky for my wife but realized that would be more unwelcome than nothing, and I’d have trouble returning it. Good luck, and if jerky doesn’t work, my suggestion is: Don’t procrastinate. Figure it out now, because it’ll only get more difficult and expensive, as life tends to do.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 23, 2012

Home

     "Home," Robert Frost once wrote, "is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
     From his heartbreaking "The Death of the Hired Man," a short story, really, a farm couple sitting on the front porch, talking about Silas, the ne'er-do-well who works for them, sometimes. A refutation to all those who dismiss Frost as a greeting card poet of snowy evenings and yellow woods. (Along with "Out, Out—" a poem about a boy who feeds his hand into a buzz saw — though the saw practically grabs it, after the boy is called to supper, "As if to prove saws knew what supper meant/Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—")
     Dire things — and poems I've addressed before — at cross purpose with my holiday mood. There are of course happier interpretations of "home." It is the place where you walk in, drop your bags, and — even after an absence of seven months and the arrival of big changes — still immediately stick your head into the refrigerator to see what there is good to eat. Even with a freshly baked cranberry bread waiting on the counter. A ritual of familiarity, and comfort. Things change. But at home — another definition — the grinding gears of time are thwarted, for now. The familiar brands in the refrigerator. The old crib you slept in, a gorgeous rich blue, bought in the city at Lazar's, now magically returned from its sojourn with other relatives. Set up in your old bedroom, under the chess trophies, fitted with fresh sheets, ready for a new generation, home also being the place where you grow up.

"My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd...."

     Say it along with me:

     "My name is Elmer J. Fudd. I am a millionaire. I own a mansion, and a yacht."

     If you are of a certain age, you easily remember those lines from "Hare Brush," the  Merry Melodies cartoon where our bald-headed, shotgun-wielding nincompoop is morphed into a corporate CEO (not that the two conditions are mutually exclusive; remember Dick Cheney) who thinks he's a rabbit. A psychiatrist becomes involved, and a dazed Bugs Bunny ends up repeating those declarations over and over. It's the rare, perhaps unique Bugs cartoon where Elmer is victorious at the end.

     Words ground into us on countless Saturday mornings, sprawled in feet pajamas before our black and white television sets.

     It's an odd brain worm to have, in these times when inflation has made nearly meaningless the coveted 19th century benchmark of "millionaire" — 8 percent of the country are millionaires — while the truly wealthy continually shame themselves by their grasping for even more power and their displays of oblivious self-regard. But these are odd times.

     "My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd..."

     With that line tickling my ear, I regularly check my 401(k). I used to ignore it for weeks at a time. Now I look every day, sometimes more than once a day, rooting it on toward the empyrean.

      Not without a few speed bumps. A week ago Monday, the words echoing in my head, I logged on, or tried to.

     "My name ... is Elmer J. Fudd ... I am ... a millionaire..."

     Instead of the latest update, I got this message:

   
     What the heck is Cloudflare? No idea? And when had I blocked it? I didn't recall. I asked AI what I should do to unblock Cloudflare, and it told me to start wiping out caches and eliminating cookies. I'd just done that, a few weeks earlier, trying to correct some other unwelcome situation, and it's a pain in the ass. You have to sign into stuff all over again.

     Instead I deployed one of my special magic strategies that often work with computers and everything else. I waited. And was rewarded by catching a news report on the radio that mentioned Cloudflare, some huge server system the specifics of which elude me, was down, sending ripples. It wasn't just me. Which is always a comfort. Indeed, as I went about getting my column ready, fact-checking and such, I got several of these messages:

     Now that, if I may, is a useful graphic, in that it tells me what is working —me —what is not working —them — and what I should do: wait. Which I knew to do anyway. Kudos to whoever came up with that one. A human, certainly. 
     Eventually I got into my 401(k), and had my traditional morning lick-lipping glance at the room of pillows I plan to flop into midway through 2027. Tuesday we crossed the Rubicon.  And Elmer's voice whispered once again, tauntingly, in my ear.

Flashback 2000: Building model ships is a lost art

     The boys will be home, tonight, if the travel gods smile upon them. First time in, well, quite a while. Plus two daughters-in-law and a grandbaby. Quite the full house. Which I take as a compliment —nobody forces them back. They arrive of their own free will. I think having had a pleasant childhood helped, evidence to the contrary, such as this 25-year-old column, notwithstanding. 

     I am building a model ship. This will come as a shock to my friends, who know me as one of those relentless grinds who work and work and work and, as a break, gets together with co-workers to talk about work.
     I don't know where the ship came from. A Lindberg 1/64-scale model of a U.S. Navy Torpedo Patrol Boat, still in its shrink wrap. With the commotion of packing for our move, it must have been dislodged from whatever shelf or box where it has hidden for years. The copyright on the model box is 1976.

     My oldest son noticed the thrilling painting on the box of the PT boat bursting through a wave as its machine gunner trades bursts with a Japanese fighter.
     "What's this?" he said. I told him. "Can we build it?" he asked.
     As a young man I was terrible at models. I haven't the patience. The glue got everywhere. I didn't read the instructions right.
     But the prime directive I try to follow when struggling through dadhood is this: Don't say no unless you have to. As unappealing as the idea of assembling this craft was, as hectic as things are, as certain as I am that the boys will destroy the model the instant it is complete, if not before, the fact is, we could do it. I said yes.
     We spread out newspaper on the dining room table. I opened the wrap on the box. I lifted the lid. I looked inside.
     Ayiiieeee! A million tiny pieces. I considered slamming the top back down, leaping up with a "Whoops boys, no boat inside" and rushing it to the trash. But I saw the expectant look on their faces. I grimly began sifting through tree after tree of plastic parts.
     Instruction one began: "Place motor 55 onto mount 56 then flatten pins with pliers as shown in sketch. Next cement and press pulley halves 12 onto motor shaft and propeller shafts 46 as shown in photo. . ."
     A few years ago, I was at the New York Toy Fair and, filled with nostalgic memories of model planes and boats, I slid over to the Revell-Monogram showroom, where I learned that models such as this one, boxes of parts that have to be meticulously glued together over hours and hours, have gone the way of the realistic toy gun. Kids no longer have the time for them. Revell-Monogram's new line of "Snap-Tite" models could be put together in about 60 seconds, without glue or paint.
     Model-building, as a child's pastime, is a fading art.
     "We get a few kids," said Gus Kaufman, co-owner of the Ship's Chandler, a Mount Prospect store devoted to model ships. "But mostly it's the older generation."
     He said when he started, in the 1970s, models were popular among the young. Then they discovered computers.
     "When it comes to using their hands now it seems they're all thumbs," he said. "Nobody wants to take the time to build something. That takes too much effort. They've got to think."
     Do they ever. Some of these instructions are as cryptic as Mayan hieroglyphics.
     Progress is maddeningly slow. Every blower, every cleat has to be glued onto the deck. The cleats are 1/4-inch long. I try to involve the boys — it's their job to pry the pieces off their trees, to dab the glue on, to hold the piece so it sets, to scramble to the floor to find the tiny hatch cover that daddy drops.
     We've been building it for a week now, and I've spent long, agonizing minutes, squinting at some oddly phrased directive, the boys gazing at me with sagging admiration.
     But they keep gazing. And I do not give up the ship. Each day, it slowly progresses. Which is the entire point of these things. A 1/64 scale model of a PT boat will not help either them or me, in and of itself. The memory of having built one, however, the dogged determination and patience needed to not do a botch job, is priceless.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 11, 2000

Dolton mom forced to give birth at the side of the road, symptom of broken health care system

Alena Ariel Wells

     Both my boys were born in Evanston. Which at the time seemed wrong, since we lived in the city.
     "Why Evanston?" I asked my wife. I worried it would dog them, a nagging footnote. They wouldn't be "born in Chicago" but "born in Evanston." Not quite the same ring to it, right?
     Plus: Evanston Hospital was half an hour away. Northwestern Memorial, less than 10 minutes down DuSable Lake Shore Drive from our place at Pine Grove and Oakdale.
     "My OB/GYN is at Evanston Hospital," she said, with finality.
     End of conversation. Go where the best care is. Evanston gave us the red carpet treatment — when we showed up at the emergency room, nurses came running. Then again, my wife made her entrance in an unusual fashion. Or as I explained afterward: "If you want to get immediate help at an emergency room, crawl in on your hands and knees. It focuses their attention wonderfully."
     Unless it doesn't. Such as with Mercedes Wells, the Dolton woman who was met with "blank stares" and turned away from Franciscan Health Crown Point even though she was in active labor.
     "I felt like they were treating me like an animal," Wells later said.
     She gave birth eight minutes after Franciscan put her on the curb. In the cab of a pickup truck. On the side of the road.
     As awful as that story is, it's only the tip of the iceberg of the racial disparity in health care in this country. It isn't a few bad apples in Crown Point, but, in the words of one study backed by two federal agencies: "Systematic discrimination is not the aberrant behavior of a few but is often supported by institutional policies and unconscious bias based on negative stereotype."
     This translates into years of life lost — WBEZ and the Sun-Times are running a series about it. The girl that Mercedes Wells gave birth to can expect to live, on average, three fewer years than had she been white. If the baby were a boy, the gap would be five years.
     There are numerous economic and social factors at work, but plain racism is a major aspect.
     The bottom-line truth — and this doesn't get said enough, so I'm going to just say it — cuts across medicine, law enforcement, employment, the whole of American society: Too many whites, encountering a Black person, see the "Black" part immediately, but the "person" part, poorly if at all.
     Everyone suffers. The only explanation that makes sense as to why the United States, alone among industrial countries, doesn't have a system of national health care, is because white citizens are in horror at the idea of Black people receiving benefits, even if it means they are also uninsured — a reminder that racism is self-destructive and blows back, the way that Southern towns, ordered to integrate their swimming pools in the 1960s, filled them in with dirt instead, so nobody could swim in the hot summer.
     Good manages to come out of the bad. There is a classic Chicago story also involving a woman being turned away from a hospital, one I hope you'll forgive me for relating.
     The woman was Nettie Dorsey, who had already paid for delivery services at Provident Hospital, the "Black medical mecca" near her home on the South Side. But the day in 1932 she arrived, in labor, there was no room for her. Provident had 75 beds for 200,000 Black Chicagoans. (That number seemed low, until I checked. Today, Provident has 45 staffed in-patient beds.)
     Dorsey went home to deliver her baby. Both died. Her husband, Thomas Dorsey, a noted composer of blues and gospel songs, was devastated and first thought he'd give up music. "God had been unfair; I felt that God had dealt me an injustice," he said. "I didn't want to serve Him anymore or write gospel songs."
     That bleak mood lasted a few days, until Dorsey sat down at a piano, put his hands on the keys and poured out his anguish in a new type of gospel blues song, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." The song was an instant classic —it was Martin Luther King's favorite song. Mahalia Jackson sang it at his funeral. Beyonce recorded it.
     Good has come out of Mercedes Wells' experience, too, and I don't mean the doctor and nurse who turned her away have been fired. Think hard — what is the wonderful thing that came from this whole episode? Many news stories didn't mention it at all. Any idea?
     The arrival of Alena Ariel Wells, weighing exactly 6 pounds, on Nov. 16 at 6:28 a.m., delivered without medical expertise but into the loving hands of her father, Leon. The baby is "doing well" according to her mother. The world she was born into, alas, not doing so good. But maybe Alena Wells will be one of the people who try to fix it.

Leon, Mercedes and Alena Wells.

Flashback 2010: Happiness is . . . an empty voicemailbox

     Nobody calls — well, scams, and automatic pharmacy reminders. That's about it. Rarely a real person. Emails too are mostly pellets from some ineffectual blunderbuss blast of scattershot PR pleas. Still, in the morning, as I scroll down in the vain effort to detect something significant, I define and delete them. Out of habit, I suppose, from the day when computer memory was limited and could fill up. A practice that was already out-of-date when this ran, 15 years ago. Back then, the column filled a page, and I've kept the original headings.

OPENING SHOT 

    With swollen, foaming rivers of information roaring across the Internet, we flatter ourselves that the netting of relevant data is a recent skill — as if the primeval forest didn't also offer an overload of information to every prowling hunter, for whom reading the sky, culling facts from the flutter of leaves, from the sound of snapping twigs, were essential abilities, certainly more significant than our talent at finding good local restaurants online.
     We data dinosaurs remember a time when we periodically drained our lakes of information — we flushed away old files, squeegeed off accumulated e-mails. Now, electronic storage capacity is so cheap that few need bother deleting anything. So it grows.
     A shame, because having to dispose of something prompts you to look at it anew before consigning it to eternal oblivion — or, more accurately, before making it harder to retrieve since nowadays nothing ever really goes away.

BERRY PAINT TO BUNCHED ELECTRONS

     My mother phoned. "Do you know your voicemail at work is full?" she asked. "No ma," I said. I don't often phone myself at work, because when I do, I'm never there.
     So I phoned my office.
     "Welcome to Avaya messaging," began the mechanical lady's voice. "You have . . . two new voice messages . . . one hundred, twenty-three, saved messages. Your mailbox is full. You will be unable to send messages. You may wish to delete unwanted messages. Main menu . . ."
     I "may wish?" I do wish! Let's get at them!
     First the two new messages — the anonymous angry guy who has been phoning at night for years (for a taste, click the video at the end of the column). He marks his messages "urgent" — the only caller to do so. Sometimes I delete his message right away, upon hearing that it is "urgent," pausing to savor the irony. Nothing signals a communication is meaningless as clearly as it being labeled "IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ."

     Sometimes I listen to the first few syllables. "Mister Steinberg, you LIBERALS make me pu . . ."
     Delete. God bless voicemail.
     "Thank you brother Steinberg," a minister begins, citing a few minutes I took to speak to a young man under his care.
     Onward, to the 123 saved messages, wondering what that first message will be. Like an archeologist with a toothbrush, working my way backward in time.
     A retired cop; a Metra engineer; a man abused by a priest. The Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
     Delete delete delete. Most I saved for the phone numbers -- quicker than jotting them down.
     A few dozen messages and we're back to the fall, and the election. A campaign manager. A senator's aide. The National Confectioners Association; the BBC; the Chicago Bears; a newspaper in Norway; the American Embassy in London.
     The need to cull messages is a sign of our phone system's age. The e-mail pit, which once we were periodically hectored to dredge out, has apparently become bottomless, thanks to terabytes of storage. Or are we on to petabytes by now?
     There are 32,765 e-mails lingering in my e-mail queue, and nobody seems to mind.
     Back to voicemail. Some I kept as a record of the caller's remarks.
     "The weapon was not registered, therefore it was illegal."
     One was me, a nasal voice — cripe, I do sound like Woody Allen — caught without a notebook, calling my voicemail to read words from a plaque. A clever trick — if I say so myself — to have in your bag.
     A surgeon. A public defender. Leon Varjian, the man who created the Pail & Shovel Party at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1970s, phoning from New Jersey.
     Once this stuff is kept forever, will anybody bother with it? Scarcity creates value, and electronic communications' overwhelming quantity, coupled with its hasty, artless construction, will probably keep anybody from ever caring. Nobody is going to write a thesis on "Tweets of the Early 21st Century."
     Or will they?
     We haven't even read the stuff we've got. Most Egyptian hieroglyphics unearthed by archeologists still haven't been read yet.
     At least I think that's true. Better check.
     "There are massive amounts of demotic papyri," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. ("Demotic" denotes the common form of ancient Egyptian writing; it relates to the familiar bird-and-eyeball hieroglyphics the same way shorthand relates to block printing).
     "It's the biggest single corpus of written records, because they used this stuff as packing for mummies."
     Stein did not want to guess how much is still untranslated, and passed me to professor Janet Johnson, editor of the massive Demotic Dictionary, which the institute has been assembling for the last 40 years.
     "Twenty years ago, I would have said that only 10 percent of all fragments have been read," she said. "But in the last generation, an inroad is being made on the backlog of unpublished things. Work on demotic is really moving forward."
     While I had her on the phone, I asked: How's the dictionary coming?
     "We're on the last three letters," she said. "We hope to be done in two years."
      We'll check back then. Meanwhile, the first voicemail was no forgotten complaint from Barack Obama, as I had hoped, but a Canadian lawyer offering a speaking engagement. Eventually the voicemail was scrubbed clean, and offered words I took unexpected pleasure in hearing:
     "You have no new messages and no . . . saved messages. Main menu."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

From Alicia Brandt:
     The technological advance I wish I could get is an addition for my answering machine: a Get-to-the-Point button.
      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 2010

A cautionary tale

"Praying hands,"  by  Albrecht Dürer (Albertina Museum, Vienna).

      

     Readers write to me all the time, sometimes sharing various personal developments. Like this on received Friday afternoon:

      Newspaper readers do tend to be an older crowd. I was sympathetic, and immediately replied:

   And this is the part that makes me cringe. Figuring, "No time like the present," I clapped my palms together, turned my eyes upward in the general vicinity of heaven, supposedly, and said, out loud, in the presence of my wife: "Please God, deliver a swift and full recovery to Jim Murray."

     The shame is not from the invocation of a deity I don't believe in, but in something revealed the next email.

     "Do you often shop online?" OMFG. A scam! I had fallen for a fuckin' scam. True, my only loss was dignity. But I had prayed for this piece of shit, in his miserable overseas scamster boiler room. I decided to string him along.

    That brought an instant reply.

     People fall for this shit? I mean, talk about a muddy narrative. I tried to string him along.

     But he must have sensed he was nailed —they do this all day long —and moved on to bigger dupes than me. And while I did not lose anything material, there was still an odd, visceral sort of violation. I'd dropped my guard. I had prayed for this guy.   

     No shame there. Still, we human beings, who take things on face value, or try to, are at a disadvantage in this online world. And it's only going to get worse.

Atop blog: "A Dip in the Lake," by John Cage (Museum of Contemporary Art)