Flashback 1987: IIT simulator puts budding engineers on right track

     I wrote a reaction to the Heat Index embarrassment for today. But finishing it, I thought, "This should be in the paper." My bosses agreed. So you'll have to wait until tomorrow for that, though it is on the Sun-Times web site now if you want to read it sooner.

    Until then, the column mentions this story, written for the school guide 38 years ago, shortly before I was hired on staff. I think it's still interesting. IIT still trains railroad engineers and operators, but I couldn't find evidence that the simulator is still around.

     Tim Reed, Wes Maness and Tom Joyce took a diesel locomotivfe through the Powder River Basin last month without leaving Chicago. 
     They pulled out of Gillette, Wyoming, and steered five locomotives and 110 railroad cars through the region's coal country. The 15,000-ton load, said Maness, in a deep Texas drawl, was "almost a mile and a quarter of train."
    It wasn't what they were used to in Chicago.
     The cabin rattled and shook. The clackety-clack from the wheels alternated with the shriek of steel against steel as the train rounded a curve. A whistle blast wailed mournfully.
     Reed, Maness and Joyce were taking a trip toward becoming railroad engineers. The locomotive they were driving is the Research and Locomotive Evaluator/Simulator, know as RALES, at the IIT Research Institute on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
     Learning to become an engineer at IIT means more than just riding the RALES. Huge trains need to be handled delicately, "like driving a car without your shoe," said Maness. "One nudge can tear the train in half."
     Reed, sitting at the controls, kept one hand on the throttle, the other on the dynamic brake. He gazed steadily at the view ahead of him, trying to find the right combination of throttle and brake that would keep the train from either stopping cold or gaining so much speed tha tit would go out of control down a steep incline.
     "It's very realistic," said Maness, who has been with the railroad 13 years, five as a brakeman and eight as a conductor. "I wish we had more time with this thing. It's scary."
     The hills of the Powder River Basin are from a film, projected on a white wall in a darkened room. At the center of the room is the upper part of a diesel locomotive, mounted on six large hydraulic pistons that gently shake the cabin back and forth. Out of sight is a brightly lighted control room, loaded with monitors, color data readouts and dials.
     A computer directs the hydraulics, the film and the sound effects to simulate real situations.   
     As Tim Reed moved the throttle, the film sped up. If the locomotive slowed down too suddenly, the computer delivered a persuasive "thud" that lurched the cabin in the same way the trailing cars would bump into a slowing locomotive.
     Reed, Manes and Joyce, all from Wichita Falls, Texas, are in the final stages of their training to become engineers. They were practicing on the RALES for their examination, which will determine whether they will be permitted to make the step from conductor to engineer.
     In the old days, they would have been tested by a human road foreman sitting in the cab next to them. Now aspiring engineers are graded by the unflinching eye of the computer.
     "The machine doesn't care how big you are, how much you talk, or don't talk," said Laurence Rohter, a senior engineers at the institute.
     The engineers are required to perform a variety of maneuvers. They go up and down steep grades, execute unplanned stops and read signal sequences.
     "It's a lot more difficult than I imagined," said Maness. "A lot more than just tooting the whistle. An engineer has to think two miles ahead and a mile and a half behind."
     RALES cost $8 million to build, and went into operation in 1983. When it isn't being rented to railroads (at $250 an hour) to train engineers, it is used to test new equipment and "human stress factors."
     For example, instead of incapacitating a working locomotive to install a new type of control panel, the panel can be tested under laboratory conditions on the RALES. The cabin can also be made to reproduce challenging situations, such as 120 degree temperatures, to see how crews operate.
     "This is as close to real as you can get," said Maness, studying the map of his route's slope. He tapped the top of a hill with his finger.
     "A 15-second wait right there might take me four miles to correct. it's possible at any point to fail this test in 15 to 20 seconds."
     Meanwhile, Tom Joyce studied the same map, giving instruction to Tim Reed, driving the RALES train.
     "The minute you get off this hill, going 21, you set your brakes up," he said.
     A graph on the computer shifted as the air brake clicked in on each car.
     "If you don't set up the brakes right, the cars will bunch into you," said Joyce. "There's 100 feet of slack [in the train]."
     Reed points to the various controls and describes what, in driving a train, he has to be aware of.
     "You're looking at your amp, to see how much power you have, looking at the air flow indicator, to see how much air you have to stop with. This is just like sitting in an engine."

             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 10, 1987

      

NYC statue shows our limitations

"Grounded in the Stars," by Thomas J. Price (Photo courtesy of Times Square Alliance)

     At lunchtime Monday I walked a Rocky Patel cigar from the Iwan Ries cigar shop on Wabash to Gibsons on Rush, pausing to smile at the Irving Kupcinet statue south of Trump Tower.
     I knew Kup. He enjoyed a good cigar, and I considered walking over and blowing a puff in his direction, as a benediction. But time was short, so I kept going, wishing, once again, that his left hand, currently extended in a sort of "I give you the city" wave, could somehow be rearranged into a gesture more fitting to the namesake of the building that replaced his newspaper home.
     The Kup statue did not cause a lot of controversy, which is a shame because the Sun-Times columnist liked nothing more than to stir the pot. He loved to call out racists, and sprang out of the blocks early — in the 1940s he would catalog the snubs suffered by Black soldiers and entertainers, and scolded the Chicago Bar Association for refusing membership to Blacks, claiming to be a social club and not a professional organization. Kup pointed out that social club dues are not tax-deductible. Suddenly the CBA saw the light.
     He'd have a field day with the outcry after "Grounded in the Stars," the realistic statue of a 12-foot tall Black woman unveiled in Times Square April 29. The New York Times called the reaction a "roiling debate," though it's really part of the frenzied purge of Black people from American institutions, government and history. The howl of hurt over the statue, the work of London sculptor Thomas J. Price, is not a discussion, but the typical self-own that racists do when confronted with people unlike themselves doing otherwise ordinary activities — riding a bus, sitting a lunch counter, being represented as a statue — while in the process of being Black.
     “This is what they want us to aspire to be?” the Times quoted Jesse Watters, a Fox News host, gasping. “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” He called it, “a DEI statue."
The overweight crack is unjustified — I'd say she's of standard heft found in most people in this country and looks like she could snap Jesse Watters like a breadstick.
     As for anonymous, honoring symbolic women is something this country excels at, from the 19-foot "Statue of Freedom" atop the Capitol building that Watters' pals recently got off the hook for invading and defiling on Jan. 6, 2021, to a certain large gal in a spiked hat standing at the entrance of New York Harbor, given to the United States by France back in the day when we were smart enough to welcome people who want to be Americans.
     Chicago is peppered with statues of imaginary women, from the golden "Statue of the Republic" in Hyde Park to the way cool art deco Ceres atop the Board of Trade.
     The city has an anonymous woman at its heart — the Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza — a woman's head, rendered in the same COR-TEN steel as the building behind it. Yes, when it was unveiled in 1967, Chicagoans boggled. Confronted with the female face Picasso had been drawing and painting for half a century, they saw everything from a praying mantis to a baboon.
     But that's par for the course. Bigotry makes people see what isn't there. David Marcus, a Fox News digital columnist, looked at the placid visage of "Grounded in the Stars" and saw "an angry Black lady." I'd call her expression somewhere between serene and bored.

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Irv Kupcinet, by Preston Jackson

"Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris"

     The "Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" show at the Art Institute is small. Not Caravaggio small — that 2023 offering had just two of the master's paintings, plus three works influenced by him. 

     The Kahlo show is a handful of her paintings over three rooms, well larded with ephemera — a love letter from Kahlo, in English, not particularly poetic ("I love you my Nick. I am so happy to think I love you, to think you wait for me..."), Kahlo's Parisian address book. Too many examples of books assembled by Reynolds, an American bookbinder who had a salon in Paris, supercharged by her partner, Marcel Duchamp, and his work, along with surrealist pals like Salvador Dali, and various pals such as Alexander Calder and Jean Cocteau, are included.

      The Reynolds collection is owned by the Art Institute, and kudos to them for realizing they could generate far more interest than it ever could garner alone by strapping the trove to the rocket of Kahlo, her houseguest for 32 days in 1939. Without Kahlo, you couldn't prod museum goers into the "Mary Reynolds, Bookbinder" show if you used bayonettes. 
     We took in the show Sunday — the place was packed, Kahlo having exploded over the past few decades into a cultural icon for her general badassery — the unflinching gaze at herself in all her broken strangeness, her unstoppable back story. Salma Hayek's smoking portrayal in a 2002 biop didn't hurt.
    To me, she's folk art — too inexpert to be anything else, but making up in color and panache what she lacks in technical skill. You can't but admire someone willing to paint themselves as an arrow-ridden stag, even if the stag isn't quite standing in the forest so much as floating above it.

     Enough. I'm not going to be the guy dissing Frida Kahlo. She made the most of the talents she had, which is all any of us can do. And I cared enough about her to make a point to go see the show. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the show is expressed in the museum's web page about it, which opens: "Unveiling Frida Kahlo’s work for the first time in the Art Institute galleries, this exhibition..." Really? The first time? Kinda late to the party, are they not? The Art Institute has been taking pains to be more inclusive, to try to proactively avoid the lash of the cultural warriors, and Kahlo checks a lot of boxes: female, Mexican, struggling with disabilities. 

     Not to transgress against art by reducing her to her specific qualities, which is the original sin of identity politics. To be a great artist, you need to combine image and impact, to transcend your materials and your limitations and become something more than what you are. Kahlo clears that bar with room to spare.

      "Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds" runs until July 13.

The straw that broke the nation's back

 

     My wife's birthday was Saturday. So we did whatever she wanted. Starting with breakfast at the Cherry Pit Cafe in Deerfield. She placed her traditional order — oatmeal pancakes with blueberries. And I placed mine — spinach, onion and mozzarella omelet, well-done.
     We chatting amiably while waiting for our meal. Matthew brought two large blue plastic glasses of water and two drinking straws.
     You don't need a straw to drink a glass of water, unless you're in a hospital bed. But straws have been in the news, literally a federal issue. On Feb. 25, President Donald Trump issued an executive order, "Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws," which begins: "An irrational campaign against plastic straws has resulted in major cities, States, and businesses banning the use or automatic inclusion of plastic straws with beverages. Plastic straws are often replaced by paper straws, which are nonfunctional ..."
     You could debate the word "irrational." Plastic straws foul the environment, and even leach microplastics into your body. In 2019, California banned them in full-service restaurants, unless requested by customers, and other states and cities followed suit. Both the European Union and Canada banned plastic straws in 2021. The next year, Chicago passed its own Single-Use Foodware Ordinance, but in classical City Council style, there were so many loopholes and exceptions — O'Hare and Midway eateries are off the hook, for instance — that critics called it "greenwashing," aka, a measure that looks environment-friendly but doesn't do much.
    I idly picked up the straw, ran my finger over the paper sheath and felt a telltale bump. This wasn't just any straw. It was a bendy straw. Flexible straws were cool when I was a child and they're cool now. I tore off the paper, felt that deeply satisfying scrunch of expanding the little accordion section by bending the straw, popped it into my water and took a long pull.
     You could also argue about that "nonfunctional" slur at paper straws. As much as I admire flexible plastic straws, I also have fond memories of paper straws. The kind with red stripes. Yes, they could crush in a lunch bag, or collapse while drinking, and you would have to carefully squeeze them back into shape so your milk could flow. They could get soggy. Sometimes you would try to poke them through the little foil hole into the sealed container of milk — for a while we had these pyramid milk containers you could only drink from with a straw — and the straw would get crushed. But in general, I got through 13 years of public school without feeling lingering ill will toward paper straws.
     Not so the president. Somehow, a technology that any 6-year-old can master eluded our nation's leader, who clearly has had some bad, almost unbelievable, experiences with paper straws.
      "These things don't work," he said, signing the bill. "I've had them many times. On occasions, they break. They explode. If something's hot, they don't last very long."
     They explode? And who but a moron drinks a hot beverage through a straw of any kind?

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'Henry isn't a bad boy at heart'

     

     Friday's column mentioned that the Juvenile Protective Association got its start supplying probation officers for the newly-created Chicago juvenile court, the first in the nation. Which I knew because I featured its debut in my 2022 book, Every Goddamn Day, in this entry:

July 3, 1899

      The official opening is not until Wednesday. But Henry Campbell, 11, is here now. So Judge Richard Tuthill, showing the flexibility essential in juvenile court, convenes the first in the world two days early. 

     Campbell, of 84 Hudson Avenue, is accused of stealing. The complainants are his parents, Frank and Lena Campbell. They are present in court. Along with a crowd of reformers. 

     As with most social change, the Illinois Act to Regulate the Treatment and Control of Dependent Neglected and Delinquent Children did not happen quickly or by accident, but required years of effort. The idea is to keep children under 16 out of Chicago jails and downstate prisons, where they are housed with hardened criminals. 

     Henry's teary mother doesn't want him in an institution. “Judge, Henry isn't a bad boy at heart,” she says. “I know he's been led into trouble by others.” She urges that her son be sent to live with his grandmother in upstate New York to “escape the surroundings that have caused the mischief.” Judge Tuthill agrees. 

     Before hearing the next case — four boys “of tender years” incarcerated at the poorhouse at Dunning — Tuthill, a Civil War vet, reads aloud the last part of the new act. 

     Officers finding a wayward or neglected child, Tuthill says, should not use undue haste in hurrying the little one into court, but should confer with parents or clergy, using every effort to set the child right without resorting to an arrest, save as a final measure. 

      He urges that law, when applied to children, always be “liberally construed.”

     Research-loving reader Jill Anderson did some digging after this was posted, and came up with a bit more information on Henry Campbell. 

     "He was born 9 Oct 1889 and died 4 Feb 1946 in Chicago," she writes. "He married a woman named Evelyn, but died young at 56."

     Although only a little young. The male life expectancy in 1946 was 62. Here's the family appearance in the 1900 census. Thanks Jill.

The vagal response

 

Salvador Dali, "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach" (1938)

    Occasionally a reader will remark that they had to look up the definition of a particular word in a piece of mine. Not so much as a reprimand, but just to let me know. And I don't feel sorry for making them do so, because there are a lot of words, nobody can know them all, and regularly checking definitions is both a hallmark of curiosity and the path to acquiring knowledge.
     I look up words myself, all the time. For instance, I was having my coffee and Cream of Wheat Friday morning, reading the Sun-Times — I always read it first, before the New York Times, out of loyalty.
    My attention focused on David Struett's article on testimony at the Jayden Perkins murder trial. The sort of story a reader naturally is drawn to — a grisly murder, a gripping trial, a fainting juror. Five paragraphs in, the doctor, who Struett said "switched from giving testimony to helping the juror" — smoothly put — said, "I think you probably just had a vagal response."

     "A vagal response?" Does that mean anything to you? It didn't register with me, and I groped at what "vagal" might mean. Based on the first three letters, I immediately thought, "vaginal." But surely that couldn't be it. Perhaps a matter of shared derivation. 
      What does the word "vagina" actually mean? I felt a momentary chill, because I was straying into gender politics territory. Best be on my guard. Center? Cleft? Fundamental? Those didn't sound right. As I often say: no need to guess, we can just find out.
     "Vagal" is the adjectival form of "vagus," and according to Dr. Google AI: "The vagus nerve, also known as cranial nerve X, is a crucial part of the autonomic nervous system, playing a key role in regulating involuntary bodily functions like heart rate, digestion, and breathing." Who knew? Not me. While you can't always trust AI — on Tuesday, when I joyously nosed the car into the drive-thru at the White Castle on 111th Street, AI told me that a cheese slider is 340 calories, when that is actually two — that definition sounded accurate, and I did no more digging. You have to go with your gut on these things, provided you have a good gut.
    So what is the etymology of "vagina"? It traces back to the Latin word vagina, unsurprisingly enough, which in ancient times meant, not a sexual organ, but the scabbard you sheath your sword in.  The word took on its current meaning in the Middle Ages, which seems apt. 
     The unchanging quality of the word reminded me of something I was thinking of about 3 a.m. that morning, when. I was awake and musing over the alphabet, which I sometimes do, trying to sleep (it's soothing; judge me harshly if you must). The opening letters of the English alphabet, A, B, C, D, line up with the opening letters of the Hebrew alphabet, א (aleph), בּ (bet), ג (gimel), ד (dalet). (The "C" and "G" sounds being very close). Which means a kid learning his ABCs down the street is going through the same drill of the same sounds that a Jewish boy in Babylonian captivity learned on letters drawn in the dirt.

    See what I mean? Something comforting about that.

Grandmothers to the rescue, with wisdom, patience and doughnuts

     Social media tears down girls. According to a UNESCO report, there is a direct correlation between how much time a girl spends online and increased emotional damage. A Facebook study found that a third of girls say when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram makes them feel worse. Girls are 50% more likely than boys to report being cyberbullied. Plus — stop the presses! — TikTok is addictive.
     How to combat such a widespread, happiness-destroying influence? In Chicago, one of the most powerful forces for good known to humanity is being sent into battle, a voice of comfort and wisdom going back to the beginnings of time:
     Grandmothers.
     "I come here every Tuesday to sit with the young ladies and do different projects — planting flowers, or making different objects they like," said Delores Durham, 62, waiting in the office at Wendell Smith Elementary School on West 103rd Street in Pullman, bearing donuts. "Just having normal conversation to see where their mind is at. What goals they have in life. I'm just trying to be an encouragement to them. I raised two daughters on the West Side of Chicago myself."
     A volunteer who joined Grandmothers Circle last year, Durham was met by Erinn Boone, a licensed clinical professional counselor and coordinator of the program run by the Juvenile Protective Association, a venerable Chicago social service agency founded by Jane Addams in 1901. Originally the Juvenile Court Committee, its purpose was to provide probation officers to the first juvenile court in the nation, founded here in 1899 to keep children from being sent to adult jails.
     She hands around a piece of paper showing various emojis: happy, angry, bored, surprised.
     "I need you all to tell me how you're feeling," Boone says. "Pass it around."
     The girls warm up. They are happy and tired. Goofy and tired. Quiet and tired. Boone detects a theme.
     "Everybody's tired — is it the weather?" she asks.
     Or maybe something else. Students at Wendell Smith face troubles beyond social media — 94% live in poverty, according to the Illinois State Board of Education, and almost a quarter are homeless. The chronic truancy rate is 32%. And layered upon that, all the usual pressures facing middle-school girls.

     "I was having a conversation with another school and we started talking about friendship, and how you can tell someone is a friend," says Boone. "Then we started talking about rumors, and how rumors get started and drama — but I know that's nothing you all deal with here, right?"
     That challenge — preventing the adult world from getting its hooks into kids — continues.
Durham and Boone go to greet nine sixth grade girls, ages 11 and 12, just finishing lunch on trays — chicken fingers, applesauce, cartons of milk. The girls barely register their arrival.
     "Y'all energy seems real low today," observes Boone. "It's a very Monday kind of Tuesday."

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'People are still funny'

      People think of Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain as wits. And rightly so. But while they said a good many smart things, they didn't say everything attributed them; countless quotes are laid at their doorstep that they never said, sometimes never could have said. I'll see some powerful, contemporary thought tacked under a portrait of Hemingway, think "He never wrote that," and be halfway to fact-checking a meme before I realize that, once I plunge down that rathole there's no escape.
     But Dave Barry really did write, in a column of 25 things he learned at 50: "You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at the moment."
    I've quote that line for years, never realizing it was Dave Barry. Great advice, the general dissemination of which could spare the world countless awkward encounters, painful both for the blunderer and for the woman accused of being with child. 
     I asked Barry about it Tuesday morning, in an interview for Wednesday's column, and he said, yes, he believes he indeed coined that phrase. The conversation went all sorts of places I couldn't fit into the column and still say something about the reason we were talking: his excellent new book, "Class Clown," published Tuesday.
    What I really wanted to talk about with him was Gene Weingarten. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose collection, "Fiddler in the Subway," should be pressed into the hands of every sentient human being. Reading it made me proud to be in the same profession.
     But he also wrote this, in a blog in 2021, destroying his career:

     The Indian subcontinent has vastly enriched the world, giving us chess, buttons, the mathematical concept of zero, shampoo, modern-day nonviolent political resistance, Chutes and Ladders, the Fibonacci sequence, rock candy, cataract surgery, cashmere, USB ports ... and curry.
     Indian foods are the only ethnic cuisine insanely based on one spice. If you like Indian curries, yay, you like one of India’s most popular class of dishes! If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like a lot of Indian food. I don’t get it, as a culinary principle. It is as though the French passed a law requiring a wide swath of their dishes to be slathered in smashed, pureed snails. (I’d personally have no problem with that, but you might, and I would sympathize.)

     "Based on one spice." Is that ignorant? Sure, in the sense that there are all kinds of spices in Indian cuisine. I know that by direct, hand-over-fist experience. He did too. It was what we call in the profession "a joke." Not a particularly good one, true. But was Gene's crack the language of hate? I don't think so. Didn't matter — he was frog-marched out the door at the Washington Post. No party. No big farewell section. Hasta la vista, baby. It seems now a dry run for the kind of professional collapse the newspaper would do at the feet of Donald Trump.
     "That had to be scary  to someone whose written 1000 jokes more offensive than that," I said to Barry, who was edited for years by Weingarten. "It must have been sobering for you when Gene got the heave-ho."
       "Yeah, I kept going back over it," he said. "I've known Gene for 40 years. To see him shoved off a cliff over that. He makes it really clear, 'I'm an idiot but I'm pretending to be a genius.' It couldn't be more obvious. His schtick is, he starts out with this long thing how he respects Indian culture. I don't think if it happened that same thing would happen. That happened at the absolutely the height of 'Let's everybody be so sensitive that we really can't say anything,' mania. That was awful, to have Gene called a racist. Gene's not a racist." 
     I'd planned to highlight some other points we talked about, but honest, I want to shift over to something a reader in Florida, who had worked as a first responder, sent in on Wednesday. He wrote:  

     Our rescue crew were the one’s who responded to Dave’s son after he was involved in a bike vs. car crash. His column about the experience mentions us as ambulance guys. It is one of his very, very few serious ones.
     He rode with us to the hospital, certainly shaken (Who wouldn’t be?) but very humble and cordial.

     I read that column and thought, "Wow, what an excellent, excellent column." It made me regret not paying closer attention to the man's work over the past 40 years — I think it was conceited of me — and glad that I've been able to remedy that, a tiny bit, this past week. Better late than never. He's still humble and cordial.

Is nothing funny anymore? Dave Barry gets serious in a new book

     Humor's been on the ropes, for years.
     Between lingering cancel culture and an opera buffa administration that daily defies parody, you could be forgiven for thinking nothing is funny anymore. The Onion stuck in there for a while, but lately it seems to be crafting press releases for the Department of Government Efficiency.
     Even Dave Barry threw in the towel, retiring from his regular column 20 years ago.

     So the good news is that the wildly popular funnyman — once syndicated in 500 newspapers, with dozens of books under his belt — is back, with "Class Clown — The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up." (Simon & Schuster: $28.99).
     I'll be honest — as heir to the sophisticated urban wit of Robert Benchley, in my own mind if nowhere else, I generally avoided Barry's column and, jeez, 45 previous books, including "Boogers are My Beat," which neatly explains why.
     Plus Barry was syndicated in the Tribune, which for many years I refused to touch, since doing so seemed like laying flowers on the grave of its former publisher, xenophobe and Hitler bootlicker Col. Robert McCormick.
     But a publicist invited me to talk with Barry and I couldn't see why not. We newspaper columnists are a vanishing breed, and I rarely get the chance to talk with one. Heck, I hardly talk to anybody anymore.
     "I never set out to be an artist," Barry told me. "I set out to be a joke guy."
     Mission accomplished. Though "Class Clown" begins seriously, with his parents — alcoholic father, depressive mother — in vignettes that are moving and real. I admired the details. A Swedish friend of his father, also named Dave, pronounces his name "Dafe," which made me think of the tailor in "The Inferno" squinting in the twilight. Making me the first critic to compare Dave Barry to Dante.
     The book surprises, practically poking me in the eye.
     His father, Barry writes, "was a fan of the great humorist Robert Benchley and owned several books of Benchley's collected columns. When I was somewhere around eleven or twelve I read those books and became obsessed with them; they definitely influenced my writing style, and I still read them today."
     Ah. Did not see Benchley coming.
     "I was a huge fan — still am," Barry said. "It's definitely a sobering thing if you are humor columnist, to realize nobody read him anymore."
     I learned some unexpected facts about Barry, such as he attended Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, once bumped into Bobby Kennedy, literally, the revered brother of JFK, not the anti-vax nutjob.
     Being a veteran journalist myself, albeit playing AAA ball compared to Barry's big big leagues, I enjoyed his recounting the profession, from his early days at the West Chester, Pennsylvania Daily Local News to his rise at the Miami Herald and the go-go 1980s. In 1987, he and a photographer spent $8,000 to rent a helicopter to get a photo of a garbage barge, adding that today "you cannot spend $8 without prior written authorization from at least three executives."
     That's not so much satire as dry reportage. Last month, in order to be compensated for a CTA bus ride, I had to secure a note from my editor, vowing that the expense is valid, and I wasn't just trying to steal $2.25 from the paper.

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Pistachio pudding

 

     Were someone to ask me about the surprising aspects of being a diabetic — and no one has, so I'll have to just jump right in — I'd say, "There's more pudding than I expected." The pancreatically-challenged can't always eat what we want, and yet life has to retain its savor, somehow. So I've been making a lot of sugar-free Jell-O brand instant pudding.

     The stuff isn't particularly low in calories, since I use 2 percent milk, for reasons too complicated to explain. But those are fat calories, which are our friends, as opposed to sugar calories — boo, hiss —  so I can use it for midday treats without having to shoot up insulin, which I try to avoid, as doing so tends to crash your blood sugar if you're not careful and, really, how careful can a person be? That's diabetics in a nutshell: being careful. All the time.

     So hurrah for pudding. Having sated myself on the chocolate and chocolate fudge varieties, I grew daring, and experimented with vanilla and banana cream, butterscotch (shunning only the cheesecake variety, out of loyalty to Eli's) and, as pictured above, pistachio. Which is one of those flavors, like almond, that doesn't actually taste like the nut itself, but some kind of confectioner's fantasy of what the nut must taste like in heaven. Though in an unexpected nod to the natural world, which doesn't have a whole lot of influence on a product like sugar free Jell-O brand instant pudding, there are actual bits of pistachio thrown in, for verisimilitude.

     At least I hope they're bits of pistachio. They're bits of something.
     There is also a lemon sugar-free flavor, which I'm keen to try, but haven't found it in the wild yet — not at Jewel, not at Sunset. I might have to break down and order it online, being a particular fan of all things lemon. I tried making the regular, full-sugar lemon Jell-O brand pudding version, cooked on the stovetop, just to see if I could eat it. 

      I really can't. You know you're reach some sub-hell of austerity when you take a cup of Jell-O from the fridge, eat a single teaspoon's worth, and put it back. I'm encouraging my wife to eat the stuff.

     Not to short-change pistachio. The nut itself is backed by no less authority than the Bible, Genesis 43:11, when Jacob tells his sons: "Put some of the best products of the land in your bags and take them down to the man as a gift — a little balm and a little honey, some spices and myrrh, some pistachio nuts and almonds."
     You're probably wondering about the maraschino cherry. I add them as a garnish, for festivity's sake, even though it's a more complicated process than you'd think. You can't just plop them in the setting pudding. They're wet, and the juice pools. So I dry them on paper towels while I'm whisking up today's batch. The things we do for aesthetics.

     Speaking of whisking. The box says to beat the pudding for two minutes, so I take out my phone's stopwatch app and whisk it for precisely two minutes. Not a second more, or a second less. Which my wife finds hysterical.  I suppose the daring man would just wing it. Beat the stuff until it's firm. But I am not that man. Have you ever heard the term "literal idiot"? That's me.

     The only thing left is to play my favorite game, "Name that Etymology." I guessed that "pistachio" had to be Italian, which it is, but that's just the start. The word sails off into the past. It's one of those words that cuts through time almost untouched. In Greek, it's pistakion, in old Persian pistah. There's something comforting to the thought that you could show up in ancient Babylon, ask for some pistachios, and reasonably expect to get what you've asked for. And at this point, I'll take all the comfort I can get.

A new pope? But we already have one!

     "Congratulations!" said my cousin Harry, calling from Boston Thursday afternoon.
     I frowned, wracking my brains. What had I done worthy of congratulation? Had the baby been born? And nobody thought to tell me? Now the happy news was percolating through the extended family, reaching me through this circuitous route. "Did you tell your dad and mom?" "Nah, they'll find out eventually ..."
     "For what?" I asked.
     "The pope," he said.
     Ah yes! Bragging rights to the pope. Or "Da Pope!" in another instantly classic Sun-Times headline (with an assist from WBEZ). Or Pope Bob, as a reader dubbed him, born in Chicago, grew up in Dolton.
     Chicago can use the boost. It's been a while since we've had a one-name celebrity to crow over. Michael and Oprah are specks in the rearview mirror. Obama ... well ... still fond of the man and looking forward to that presidential center. Though right now he's still the guy who walked us to the cliff's edge and coughed into his fist as we toppled into the abyss.

     Still. Isn't using the pope as an occasion for pride somewhat contradictory? With all the whoops and fist bumps, I've yet to hear anybody say, "The pope's from Chicago; we'll have to double our efforts to live justly and love our fellow man." All pomp and no obligation — is there too much of that already?
     Honestly, while there was genuine pride, news of the Chicago pope was often played for laughs. Jokes about deep dish communion wafers and baseball. Pope Leo XIV is a White Sox fan. Well, they need something. Jesus did say, "Whoever humbles himself will be exalted," and 121 losses last season is humbling aplenty.
     Harebrained, a local graphics outfit that can turn out a great logo faster then I can tie my shoe, immediately created one of their spot-on mashups.
     Innocent joy only lasted a few hours. The city's understandable pride was quickly used to revive the old "Windy City" charge of unseemly boosterism.
     "But in a place where civic pride is both a virtue and a way of life, Chicagoans need little help believing their city is among God’s favorites," the Washington Post sniffed, as if they weren't the same publication that refused to publish a cartoon that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize because it suggested their owner fell short of his own lofty self-estimation by genuflecting before the orange enormity.
     I hate to be the bearer of bad news: But you put your lips on that guy's backside once, and it leaves a stain that will never wash off. Neville Chamberlain's entire life was an asterisk after waving that piece of paper and declaring "Peace in our time." Live with it.
     I'm reluctant to suggest it doesn't matter what the pope believes in. But we live in a leaderless moment — even President Donald Trump, who spins in the wind. As much as he pushes tariffs, I don't see the MAGA crowd yelling, "Yay tariffs! Double the cost of everything we buy! Shut down the global economic system!"

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Split the difference

     Kitty and I went for a walk shortly before 3 p.m. Saturday, a fine cloudless day in May. We strolled to the corner of First and Walters. To the left, my neighbor Lee Goodman, in his homemade concentration camp uniform, and a small knot of protesters. To the right, the usual expanse of empty sidewalk. I had just about convinced myself to go rightward, avoid the crowd, but my gaze lingered a fraction too long to the left, and Lee's wife Nancy waved. I might be able to slip away from a protest, but I'm not one to cut my neighbors. I ambled over.
     Lee's new sign struck me as non-controversial in a sane world. "Northbrook stands with migrants." This being a nation of immigrants, all of us or our forebears, at one point or another, I'd say we have to.
     But alas, we do not live in that sane world. Having written on the subject Friday, and gotten an earful from readers who have lapped up the immigrants = criminals cant for years, their brains sodden with the stuff, taut like a water balloon, bulging with fallacy. To see them sneeringly feed it back, the logic being, if only they could deliver the news with sufficient vehemence, why then they would win the day. 

     On some I used my line that the fig leaf of concern for legality does not cover their shameful bigotry as well as they seem to think it does. It would help if they viewed a Venezuelan dishwasher with parking tickets and the multiple felon presidents through the same prism of love for law. But that takes time to express, and what's the point?

     Which is sort of my view toward street corner protests. I'm glad they're there, support them fully, but don't see the effect. I chatted briefly with Lee, who mused how long it would take our neighbors — some of whom are far more devoted to the idea of free speech for themselves than they are to free speech for others — will linger before throwing paint at his sign. I figure, nightfall the second day. 
     Prying myself away, I strolled up First Avenue, back toward home, and paused to press my face into the lovely lilac bush below. At first I thought, "These lilacs will make a fine post for tomorrow," planning to ignore Lee, whom I've featured here in his concentration camp uniform in the not-too-distant past. But then I realized the challenge we face is to balance keeping track of and protesting the Trump enormity, while still enjoying the good things in life that his metastasizing presidency has not yet found a way to ruin. I figure, split the difference: start with blue triangles, end with purple lilacs.

Flashback 2005: High-tech world glued to Vatican smoke signals

 

    Maybe I really am getting old. When my editor called Thursday — a Chicago pope! Opinions to firehose at the flaming masses — I did not respond to the clanging bell by stirring on my straw. Did not stagger to my feet, shamble over to my cart traces, and wait to pull professional journalism to the latest fire. The way I always do. 

     I had gotten up at 4 a.m., written a column whittling a splintery stick and shoving it up Kristi Noem's backside. That column was more topical — i.e., apt to quickly lose whatever value it had. It would be stale in three days. Plus, joining the rush to ululate the new pope seemed off-brand.
    "He'll still be pope on Monday," is what I said, passing. Tom McNamee, an actual Catholic, did a fine job and besides, nothing in the paper could top our headline, "Da Pope." Classic.
     Beginning the musing process for Monday's pope column, I thought about the welcomes given pope in the past. Twenty years ago, I did open the the firehose and rinse the topic down. Reading it today makes me glad I waited. The column filled a page and was 1100 words long, 50 percent longer than today. Bring snacks.

Opening shot

     Being in the communications business, I am constantly amazed at the co-mingling of old and new methods of getting the word out. I'll never forget standing on the bridge of a ship crossing the Atlantic and noticing that not far from the high-tech video screen displaying the multicolored radar readout and global satellite positioning system information was a brass mouthpiece for the speaking tube to the captain's cabin.
     So perhaps I was alone in savoring, amid the mass of analysis and hoopla surrounding the transition between popes, that while the death of John Paul II was communicated to the world via an e-mail from the Vatican, the selection of the new pope was conveyed by a puff of smoke and ringing bells. That strikes me as something of a marvel.

If I stop talking I'll die!

     God, I hate TV. They have such a marvelous opportunity to bring a dramatic moment to the world and they blow it, almost every time. There were a few minutes of indecision Tuesday morning as to whether a pope had been selected, whether the smoke was white. We were glued to the TV, waiting. I was watching CNN. As the bells of Rome began ringing, the talking heads kept bloviating, and I wondered if we would be allowed at some point to just hear the bells, a faint background noise. Finally one commentator said something like, "The bells of Rome are pealing, answering the Great Bell of St. Peter; let's take a moment to listen." I leaned forward, relieved, thinking "it's about time." But they didn't listen. Instead Wolf Blitzer began talking as if his life depended on his never stopping.
     Yet another, more human commentator suggested a pause in the palaver to hear the bells, and again Wolf leapt in, yammering away nonstop.
     So sad. That's the worst thing instantaneous communications does to us; it seems to demand that we instantly communicate. Though the real culprit is the media star system where a Wolf Blitzer could never imagine that the viewers might prefer he zip his big yap for a moment and let us listen to the bells of Rome.

Nor will he take up hang-gliding

     One more bit of TV stupidity and then we'll move on — as soon as the 78-year-old Pope Benedict XVI was named, one of the talking heads speculated that it was unlikely he would match the 26-year-reign of Pope John Paul II.
     Gee, ya think so? Considering that it would make him 114 and the oldest man on Earth, I'd say that's a safe bet.
     Let's take a look at the old resume
     As soon as it was announced that the new pope was the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a German hard-liner, and before the new pontiff had even made his appearance, a sweet, older Jewish lady in my office whom I view as a kind of Greek chorus, wringing her hands and voicing the free-floating Semitic anxiety of the moment, drifted by my office.
     She spoke one sentence — "He was in the Hitler Youth" and then moved away.
     The next Jewish colleague I saw was on the down elevator.
     "Whaddaya think of the new pope?" I called after him.
     "German," he said, as he descended out of sight.
     Those are code words for unease. If anyone held out actual hope that the new pope would be in mesh with the liberal American tradition, the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger put the kibosh on that. As you must know by now, he is on record condemning virtually anybody who isn't middle-of-the-road Catholic — Muslims, other Christian denominations, gays, whom he called "evil." I didn't notice any slams against Jews, but that Hitler Youth item on the resume isn't exactly comforting, though supposedly he was in his early teens and forced to join.
     "That's what they all say," said a third Jewish colleague.
     Myself, I can't get too worked up about it. Everybody has baggage from childhood — heck, I was in the Cub Scouts, but I wouldn't want people to hold it against me. As far as his strict orthodoxy, it isn't as if the Catholic Church is an engine for radical social progress as it is, so a bit — or a whole lot — of traditionalism can be expected.
     I just don't feel any anxiety toward this new pope. My central attitude toward the Catholic Church is surprisingly benign: a hope that they do well, so we don't lose any more Catholic churches or schools in Chicago. I hate to see those go.
     Sure, mainstream America wants the church to be ever more liberal, because that's what we are, and like all people we are most comfortable dealing with those exactly like ourselves.
     That would be in our best interest. But the church is a religious group, obviously, and religions face a puzzle that can be thought of as the "Orthodoxy vs. Inclusion dilemma." If they are too strict, then they alienate people in our modern world and lose membership, but if they are too lax, then membership loses its meaning and the people who do belong fall away through indifference.
     Liberalism might be popular in our modern world, but it is orthodoxy that survives unchanged through the ages. Jews used to be 3 percent of the American population, and now we're 1.8 percent and shrinking, primarily because our leaders told us it was OK to practice as tepid a faith as we liked, so as a result, too many of our children ended up inter-marrying and the faithful basically wandered off. We could have used our own version of a Cardinal Ratzinger to keep us in line.

I haven't offended the elderly yet

     The biggest downside of Cardinal Ratzinger's nomination, in my view, is his age. I know that's why they picked him, so that he would not be expected to match Pope John Paul II's amazing quarter century tenure. But after watching the late pope's agonizing physical decline over recent years, are we ready to see it again in a soon-to-be octogenarian pope?
     Perhaps it's all planned out. A few years chaffing under the lash of a fading Pope Benedict XVI's harsh decrees and the church will be ready for whatever dynamic young South American cardinal they pick next. I hope so, because in my heart I'm rooting for the church to prosper.
     At least they believe in something, and while we can pooh-pooh religion, surrounded by our vast American wealth, there are many places on Earth where faith is all they've got — faith and a goat and a few earthen jars. A lot of people are depending on the church to keep going and work out its problems, and if the cardinals think this Ratzinger fellow is the man for the job, then I hope they're right.

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 20, 2005

Noem's fear roadshow plays a date downstate

    

Barbara Kruger, Art Institute of Chicago

     If you could be exiled from your home forever for a speeding ticket, how fast would you drive? If the slightest brush with the law might result in you being torn from your family and sent to a country you last saw when you were 2, how cautiously would you go about your day?
     I mention this because, in the first draft of this column, I began with the hard statistics demonstrating that immigrants, as a group, are more law-abiding than citizens born in the United States. It just makes sense; they have to be.
     But numbers are cold, while stories sizzle.
     This is not to suggest immigrants never commit crimes. Awful crimes. They do. They are, after all, still human beings — that privilege has not been snatched away from them, yet. Though according to the script we're following, that is coming next.
    But one example — or three — is proof of nothing. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is oblivious to that, and hopes you are too. She brought her Immigrants = Criminals Tour roadshow to Springfield Wednesday to complain about our state's policy of not helping federal immigration officers randomly pluck immigrants off the street and ship them to foreign countries to suffer fates unknown for the crime of not having their paperwork in order. Or having their paperwork in order and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
     “People are dying every day because of these policies. People are evading justice,” Noem told reporters during a news conference near the scene of a murder committed, allegedly, by an immigrant. As if "evading justice" weren't a contender for a chapter heading summarizing our current political nadir in some future history textbook. "Evading Justice — America in the era of blatant official criminality, 2025 — 2029."
     Assuming we have accurate history books, which right now is no sure bet.
     Noem went on to fire off the administration blunderbuss of false invective.
     “Governors like JB Pritzker don’t care if gangbangers, murderers, rapists and pedophiles roam free in his state," she said.
     Initially, I grabbed a handful of statistics to throw back. How immigrants are 60 percent less likely to wind up in jail than citizens born here. But figures are complicated, when you dwell in the world of fact, there are many asterisks — the figure could be 30%. Or 40%.

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Buoyed by birds

      Zoos make me sad.  There's no other way to say it. I'm not coming from a PETA, liberation, pity-the-captive-animals point of view. I'm not unhappy that zoos exist — at this point they have an important role in guaranteeing the future of species that might not always be found in the wild.
     I mean, just the experience of going to a zoo. We had a fun meal at North Pond, then walked south to Lincoln Park Zoo. 

     Boom, a nameless melancholy. So many people, so few animals. And the ones that are there are hiding, often. Best zookeeping practice demands that animals be allowed to escape the pressure of our prying eyes — zoos actually plant hedges and erect barriers — and more often than not the animals prefer privacy. It's like going to visit your neighbors only to have them hide inside their house and not answer the bell.
     Part might be nostalgia. For almost five years we visited the zoo pushing what I called "The bus" — a big double stroller holding the two boys. Every animal was a joyous discovery. So seeing the zoo, boyless, well, it's like going to Chuck E. Cheese with your wife, the two of you, for the pizza. Or so I imagine, having never done such a thing.
     The lions were beautiful. But like so much, they kept reminding us what aren't there — what goes with lions? Right, tigers. Wrong — gone, since 2016. At least there were bears, polar bears. Oh my.
     The rhino was sufficiently prehistoric. Like seeing a dinosaur. But the rhino also lives in what used to be the elephant area. Gone for 20 years now.  I'm sure it leads for happier, more productive lives for some herd of elephants, somewhere, enjoying a better place than the North Side of Chicago. But it blows for visitors. Nothing sets your spirits right like an elephant.
     And the gorillas. It was naptime when we went, and they were sprawled, listless, their eyes dull. The enclosures seem small. Hard not to pity them, while at the same time relating to their predicament. As these days of Trump 2.0 grind on, with no end in sight, it's difficult not to get a little glassy-eyes ourselves. How did we end up here? How could we have been so careless as to let ourselves be lured into that trap? By banana? As helpless now to alter our fate as animals in a zoo.
     "Yeah tell me about it, buddy," I want to say. "Not quite the rich pageant we were promised."
     We were about to drift disheartened out of the place, and begin our miserable crawl back to the suburban hellscape from whence we came, when I had an idea.
    "Let's see the birds," I said. 

Green Broadbill

     We made a beeline over, encountering a massive polar bear, pacing back and forth, along with a sign telling visitors not to be alarmed by the pacing. Perfectly natural. 

     Sure it is.
     The birds were a different story. We saw a bright Green Broadbill and a Tawny Frogmouth that looks like an owl. A pair of Luzon Bleeding Heart doves who immediately started to form what Othello called "the beast with two backs" — though in this case it as more a two-tier dove pile — the moment I looked at them. 
     The main bird exhibit doesn't have bars, and you can watch the birds at close range, including a pair of Inca Terns. I think it helps that the birds are relatively small, compared to apes. They have more room to roam. And there are so many different kinds.
     "I don't know what those birders are making such a big fuss about," I said. "Look at all the species of birds we're spotting, right here in Lincoln Park."

Nicobar pigeon

 

New book illuminates Wrigley Building

 

Photo courtesy of the Chicago History Museum

     Resolved: the Wrigley Building is a beautiful, beloved jewel of Chicago, though not great architecture. Discuss.
     "Beautiful" is a value judgment, one I endorse fully. Glazed terra cotta in six shades of white, shifting toward creamy yellow as it nears the top. Festooned with dragons, griffins, cherubs, rams. That four-faced clock, 20 feet tall.
     "Beloved" is not open to debate — any survey of popular Chicago buildings includes the Wrigley Building.
     "It was made to be liked," said Robert Sharoff, whose new coffee table book, "The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon," (Rizzoli Electa) with photographs by William Zbaren and commentaries by Tim Samuelson, shines a spotlight on a structure that's been well-illuminated for over a century.
     "The more I shot it, the more joyous it became," said Zbaren. "It's so playful."
     The Wrigley Building is just fun. Perched at the confluence of Michigan Avenue and the north bank of the Chicago River, the historic heart of Chicago — the outlines of Fort Dearborn are in brass across the street — the tower has always been a font of fascination, to me anyway,
     Starting with it being in reality two buildings, built at different times, with different addresses, 400 and 410 N. Michigan, connected at the 14th floor by that metal skybridge, a rococo detail that seems pulled from those dreamlike early 1900s fantasies of the urban future, with plump zeppelins and streamlined elevated trains and mustachioed gentlemen in bowler hats pedaling through the air on penny-farthing bicycles with wings.
     "The Wrigley Building" bristles with glorious facts that even I didn't know, starting with the clock initially being hand-wound by someone turning an enormous crank, winching up weights that once drove the mechanism.
     The authors come down firmly in favor of "great architecture," not surprising in a book bankrolled by Wrigley Building owner Joe Mansueto. Though they insist the Morningstar billionaire gave them a free hand, which they use to massage the life of the architect, Charles Beersman, who does not have a deep portfolio — his other building of note is Cleveland's Terminal Tower. Both of his signature structures are riffs on the Giralda Tower in Spain, with notes of New York's Municipal Building stirred into Wrigley.
     To me, he had one idea, and it was someone else's. But in this book, Beersman might as well be Michelangelo — we're given nine of his 11 childhood addresses in San Francisco, in a note.
     What we get far less of are the critics who lined up over the years to give the Wrigley Building the backhand. Lewis Mumford referred to its "safe mediocrity." The Wrigley Building is "just what the name implies," sniffed Frank Lloyd Wright — admittedly not famous for kindness toward other architects — noting it “illustrates the principle that an ugly building by day, if illuminated, will be ugly by night as well.”

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Restaurant field notes: North Pond

     The kids wanted to meet for brunch at North Pond on Sunday.
     Which itself is parking the ball onto Waveland Avenue, parenting-wise. Really, if your grown children, having successfully launched and escaped the paternal clutches, nevertheless regularly circle back and say, "Hey old people — are you free?" that's snagging the brass ring.
     As if we weren't buoyed enough just by the invite, walking into the lovely little Lincoln Park restaurant at 2610 N. Cannon Drive, with its gorgeous Arts and Craft interior, drove us to maximum good spirits. The hosts are excellent at welcoming — a lot of places fall down on this. Smiles, warmth, and took our coats.

     The place is so well-constructed you can be forgiven for assuming you're enjoying quality from an earlier age. Actually, though it was built in 1912 as a shelter for skaters on the pond and was nothing fancy. It went through a variety of incarnations — it was a hot dog stand for most of the time we lived three blocks to the northwest, before North Pond Cafe opened in 1998. It has to be the only restaurant to win a Michelin star that was once a homeless shelter. (The star has since been snatched back; but such glory, once conferred, lingers).
     True, my wife and I bobbled the first  challenge. Our server set down a "Hot Chocolate Menu" which the savvy diner would have taken as a tip from the cosmos to order the hot chocolate. We did discuss it. But I've got that diabetes thing, and my wife has that preserving her girlish figure thing, so we opted for coffee. Though I presciently mentioned during our pre-ordering analysis  that higher end restaurants which nail every other aspect of the dining experience often botch the coffee part for reasons I do not understood. My theory is, in their frantic quest for excellence, fancy eateries forget to clean the coffeemakers regularly. My wife believes they opt for chi-chi coffee that is acidic.
     Anyway, the coffee arrived. I sipped, then silently dosed mine with cream, the international signal that the coffee is no good. My sharp-eyed wife noticed. Meanwhile, my daughter-in-law's hot chocolate arrived and she raved about it. I thought of quietly dipping into hers a spoon to try it, but she's new to the family, and that seemed, oh I don't know, an over-familiarity.
     Then I did an uncharacteristic thing. The next time the waiter swept past, I handed him my nearly full cup, said the coffee wasn't to my liking, and asked for a cup of cocoa. Typically, I wouldn't send a bowl of grease from the drip pan back if a place served it to me. But fortune favors the bold. And that hot chocolate looked so good.

     My wife did the same. It was worth the effort. Not too sweet, with all sorts of intriguing flavor hints including, another server tipped us off to, lime chantily.

The cuts in the corn bread were my doing.

     Brunch is $59, and under any other circumstances than meeting our beloved son and D.I.L., that itself would have been a dealbreaker for my wife and, honestly, it almost was. She was inclined to suggest something more budget friendly. But I disagreed, observing that we had talked about going to New Orleans, but didn't. So this meal was far cheaper than buying a praline at a candy shop in the French quarter, if you figure in the flight and hotel. And mirabile dictu, that argument carried the day. Plus we could consider it an early Mother's Day Brunch, that being a holiday, like Valentine's, when the savvy restaurant goer dines at home.
     North Pond brunch is three courses, and I opted for the Tart Tatin, as appetizer, the "Beef, Pastry" for the main course, and Chocolate Cake for dessert.
     I stepped away to spread the insulin welcome mat for that feast, then had to take a phone call from the paper. During my absence, an unexpected trio of breads arrived — quite quaint and pretty, with jam and a pair of interesting butters.

It's hard to find a good tart, but this was.

     The tart is described as "Honeyed Carrots, Goat Cheese Ricotta, 'Pop Tart' Dough, Arugula Salad, Lardons" — that last ingredient being a term I wasn't familiar with. It means cubes of fatty bacon, and I did enjoy picking those out. The salad was a tad wet, but welcome. I'm a big carrot fan — I don't think I've mentioned it before. Truly, Bugs Bunny level. I order just about anything made of carrots, did so here, and didn't regret it.
     The Beef, Pastry — no, that comma is not a typo — is described as "Turmeric Pastry Wrapped Grilled Striploin, Sweet Potato Purée, Root Vegetable Pavé, Sherry Jus."
     I wish I had thought to complain about that comma between Beef and Pastry; it would have been the height of the meal. "Waiter — there's a comma in my Beef, Pastry." The sort of thing that enters into Steinberg lore, the way I once ordered the Happy Family plate at Szechuan Kingdom, and met the raised eyebrows — I always get beef and broccoli — with, "I've sampled the 'Happy Family' at every Chinese restaurant I've been to. To compare them. And do you know what I've found?" They gazed at me, puzzled. "All happy families are alike..." I said.

Beef, Pastry worked, despite the comma.

     Tumeric is the It Girl spice of the moment — our older son had been singing its praises recently. A relative of ginger, it is a deep golden orange. The accompaniments struck me as a tad greasy, but the meat was dense and satisfying.
     The Chocolate Cake was no wedge of standard birthday, but "Lapsang Souchong, Raspberry Curds, Sunflower Seed Crumble, Madagascar Vanilla Gelato." I looked up that first term (if I'm spending sixty bucks on brunch I want to know what I'm getting and getting into) and took away that it is a kind of tea.
     I like tea. But in this case, the cake was a reminder of the perils of insufficient research, because I didn't focus on the Lapsang Souchong definition long enough to grasp the "it's by far one of the boldest, smokiest teas out there." Truly,

The Laphroaig of cakes.

Lapsang Souchong is the Laphroaig scotch of teas, and while smoky tea chocolate cake might be an acquired taste, it is not a taste acquired on the first attempt, at least not for me, a judgment my wife confirmed. I mean, I ate it. But my wife's carrot cake was superior, a reminder that one should always, always order the carrot dish.
    Brunch was a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The kids adore North Pond — they've eaten there before — and for me, the setting and the service helped pull the food, which honestly I wasn't in love with, over the finish line. I enjoyed the experience sufficiently that I'd go back, if only for the joy of complaining about that comma. Plus the entire staff was truly first rate — the waiter didn't charge us for the misfire coffees, which is only smart service, but not a bar that every restaurant can clear. There was no unsettling 3 percent "because we can" fee. The place was surprisingly uncrowded for 12 noon on a Sunday, another sign recession is sinking in.
     Afterward, we walked to the Lincoln Park Zoo and ... well, we'll visit the zoo here on Thursday.

 

   Reminder: I will be one of the speakers at Chicago Fights Back, "An Evening of Stories, Poetry, History, and Music — focused on Chicago, on change, and on resilience." Wednesday, May 7 at 7 p.m. at the Hideout, 1354 West Wabansia. Raising funds for groups benefiting the homeless and the hungry that are impacted by cuts to the federal government. And yeah, it's a little discordant to mention this after a twee skip through a fancy restaurant. But time is running out — it's tomorrow — and one of my few writing rules is, Be Who You Are, and in addition to being a guy who meets his kid for an expensive brunch, I'm also someone who'll figure out some kind of presentation and drag myself to a gritty bar to help people I've never met. And if you are too, maybe I'll see you there. For more information, click here.