Gotcha

       
     So I bought a new phone a week ago Monday. I almost wrote "cell phone" but realized I come off as old enough without rubbing anybody's face in it. I had to buy it — the old phone, an Apple iPhone 12, wouldn't load software updates, no matter how many large attachments and apps I tossed over the side, like a balloonist flinging away ballast. 

     An iPhone 17, if you must know, through a process of extraordinary length and tedium. Not the 6.8 inch pro, but the smaller, 6.3 inch version. That was my central priority — I wanted the same size. Consistency is a big value to me at this point. I might not be able to keep the country from sliding into autocracy. But I can keep my phone from morphing into something huge and heavy. Same size, more or less, same color, black. I worried over the .2 inch increase, but decided it was acceptable. 

    This is a wild abbreviation of hours of study and consideration, over months. How much capacity? I opted for the 512 GB. Do I need the service plan? Generally no. But my wife says ... I started to summarize and quickly realized I was boring myself.

     Credit to Apple — buying it was easy and intuitive, leaving aside the stress and indecision I brought to the process myself. The thing arrived the next day via Fedex. I placed my phones together, migrated my data — easy as pie —  and then had to prepare my old phone to trade in. It was complicated — I had to watch a video or two — but eventually returned wiped it clean, both of information and fingerprints — wiping the screen, using Windex, actually thinking, "Clean the old gal up to meet her parents back at Apple." I thanked the black oblong for its service, packed it up in the little cardboard folder they'd sent and shipped it off, itself a complicated, three part process that involved a) going to the Fedex store or, rather, where the Fedex store had been last time I needed it. Being redirected by a sign at the shuttered store to the new location, b) being told, there, that the label on the parcel in my hand was intended by folks more observant than myself for UPS, not FedEx, and, c) finally, heading to the UPS store (you see why I'm trying to abbreviate this process? Every step has four substeps and three corrections).
     A few days after that Apple wrote me a stern note under the heading, "Action needed to continue your trade in." Despite my best efforts, I had not, apparently, turned off Find My Phone, a system to locating stray devices. Before I got my $120 trade in, I must do that, another dive into a rabbit hole that involved, I kid you not, a 24 hour security waiting period, as if it were some dramatic step, a gun purchase or a divorce.
     I finally did it, or at least thought I did it. No big "Success!" screen comes up. The thing to do once that was accomplished was to wait — waiting, like shutting up, an art form I struggle to master — until Apple realized the Find My ... feature had been shut off and alerted me that my 120 bucks was en route. But patience is the first victim of technology. And I wanted it done. So I jumped into the Apple chat support and, after a 20 minute conversation that I should have preserved. for donation to some future museum of head-on-a-board frustration, I was reassured by some AI chatbot that the check was indeed in the mail, so to speak, and I'd be notified in three to five business days.     

     Satisfied, I went about my business, or tried to. Then this appeared.

     There was something in that tone. The "need" part of the message, like bad news from your spouse. "Honey, we need to talk..." I almost overlooked that nothing was being delivered, or nothing I knew of. I phoned, as instructed, went through a variety of shells and messages without actually getting anywhere, realized I was wasting yet more time, and gave up and went about my business, or tried to. 
    The next day, I got this.

    Oh, for Pete's sake, I thought. What now? Had I inadvertently changed my birth date trying to shut off the Find My feature? I clicked on the Apple Support link. Ba-boom:

    It was a trap, set by my own office, that I had blundered into, softened up by the gantlet Apple had already put me through, buying a new phone and trading in an old one. You know, they used to give us phones. Call us to a room and hand out a box, like Christmas. I didn't care anything about the phones, then. They were free, to me anyway, a benediction that forgave all sins. Now, not only am I required to buy my own phone but if, loggy from the ordeal, I can find it's not a link, but the office in disguise, ready to bite my straying finger.

       I was immediately enrolled in one of those generic security seminars that pelt us like rain and I would avoid if I only could. Hoisted with my own petard. Perhaps also as a result, perhaps coincidentally — who can tell anymore? — perhaps because now my tech judgment was suspect, I was also logged out of the paper's email system, and could not log in, because my new phone isn't set up with its One Login Connect security feature. I felt like I was being made to sit on the red stool, for being careless, and ended up calling our tech support, which allowed me to at least talk to an actual person, and apologize for clicking on the poisoned link. He didn't seem to take it personally. My OneLogin bona fides were quickly established.
     I planned to illustrate this item with a photo of a bird, taken with what I assume is the vastly-improved Zoom feature on my new iPhone17. Only I haven't been outside enough to see a bird. Because I've been inside. Futzing around with this tech shit. I decided to describe the tiresome process yesterday, without realizing just how tiresome it would be to relate. But it's 4:46 a.m. Saturday — I didn't get this written yesterday because we had a big pizza party so family could ogle the new granddaughter, radiating cuteness like a new sun. So some life is still happening, around the tech hassles.  We did go for a long walk out in the beautiful weather yesterday afternoon. Sad that I would choose to describe this phony inside process instead of that lovely outdoor stroll . Another wrong decision. Carpe diem. 

The president, the lies and the cannulated cow

 

     The beauty of getting out into the world, meeting new people and seeing new stuff, is two-fold. First, you learn new information, from the new people you talk to and the new stuff you see. Learning new things is fun.
     And second, you then can apply this new knowledge, making all sorts of interesting connections.
     For instance, struggling to articulate the general numbness of watching President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday, I remembered a cannulated cow seen at Chicago's High School for Agriculture Sciences in Mount Greenwood (What? You didn't know about either cannulated cows or the ag high school? Well, I'm happy to be the one to tell you.)
     MAGA types, who don't seem at all keen on either new people or new ideas, imagine liberals in some kind of pearl-clutching agony, or door-jamb-gnawing fury. But truly, nearly two hours of the State of the Union speech left me mostly bored. We've heard all this before, many times, from the moment candidate Trump descended that escalator in his monstrous brass and orange stone lobby.
     "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," he said. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
     Tuesday was more of the same. When he wasn't lying about the economy or gaslighting — for example, the shameless fraud declaring war on fraud — Trump was grinding over the threat of immigrants. Both criminals and bad drivers. That's where I thought of the cannulated cow. How cows digest their food is important to the dairy industry, and one way to keep tabs is to surgically implant a round window into the side of a cow. Students and scientists look through the window, into the cow's stomach, and watch the half-digested mash sloshing around.
     That was the State of the Union speech. The same well-chewed slop of fear, hatred, lies, prejudice, nationalism and enormous self-regard that Trump has been spewing for years.
      One of the many dangers of this moment is exhaustion. The liars lie nonstop, while those familiar with the truth get tired of repeating ourselves, bloodying our fingers scratching at that brick wall.
     Yet scratch we must. So forgive me for belaboring the obvious for the benefit of — well, I'm not sure who at this point. Either you understood long ago or you never will. Yet truth will out.
     The current war on immigrants is not only morally and economically wrong, but entirely based on lies — haters are cowards, and rather than just admit they're surrendering to fear (of new people and new things) they slur the object of their fixation. They don't hate immigrants because immigrants are criminals; they tar them as criminals because they hate them.

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Out on the stoop

 

     Words are funny things. As you well know. I began re-reading Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" Wednesday and was struck by the magnificent economy of a certain phrase. The hero, Neil Klugman, is driving from his home in Newark, New Jersey to visit a young woman living in its leafy suburbs, noting as he did the "houses where no one sat on stoops." A lot of social history packed into seven words.
     He doesn't say whether that is good or bad. I suppose the answer depends where you happen to be living. Suburbanites might envy the cohesion of those nosy neighbors, gossiping on the steps, while city dwellers were keen to escape the crowded city, with its prying stoop perchers monitoring your movements, another hassle to be escaped, along with smells in the hallways and crashing garbage cans. 
     In the chapter on noise in my "Alphabet of Modern Annoyances," I studied New York's 1929 survey of city noise complaints, finding much to be nostalgic about:

     Despite the familiarity of most noise annoyances listed in the survey ("roistering whoopee parties" was my favorite) other irritants have ceased to be considered problems, from "the noises from milk wagons and pie trucks to "newsboys' cries" to "youths and maidens group on front stoops sing[ing] in close harmony at unreasonable hours of the night," an image that makes one positively pine for the past.

     A "stoop," of course, is the stairs leading from a front door to the street. I wondered about its etymology — the word sounds Dutch, though that might be because of eating too many stroopwafels on airplanes. I imagine some core meaning about downward motion, as the verbal form, such as "She Stoops to Conquer." 

     But which sense came first? The stairs or the descent?

     The Oxford English Dictionary gives "Stoop" a full page, plus, starting by tying the word to Late Middle English and batting away my cookie-stoked theory. "It is doubtful whether the word has any connection with MLG. and early mod. Du. stolpe." "MLG" being middle low German, and you can figure out the rest.

     The bending usage is the oldest, back to 1571, while the architectural meaning shows up two centuries later, to describe "An uncovered platform before the entrance of a house, raised, and approached by means of steps. Sometimes incorrectly used for porch or veranda." The OED considers the word an American and Canadian coinage.

     The OED bringing up such synonyms as porch and veranda sent me scurrying to one of my least-used dictionaries, Webster's 1942 Dictionary of Synonyms, which goes into the weeds regarding the fine distinctions between similar words. It disputes the OED's doubts about the word origin, suggesting it comes, not from Holland, but from Dutch New Amsterdam: "Stoop, which is of Dutch origin, was originally used in and around New York City and is now used elsewhere to designate a small porch, flanked by seats of benches at the entrance to a house; it is now also applied to any platform at the entrance to a house, which one ascends by a step or two."

     While writing the above, a line from Shakespeare floated into mind. "Fetch me a stoup of wine," Sir Tony Belch commands in "Twelfth Night." (Actually, he says, "Marian, I say! A stoup of wine!" I had it mixed up with Richard III's "Give me a bowl of wine. I have not that alacrity of spirit Nor cheer of mind that I was wont to have." Who does nowadays?)

     Where does "stoup," with a U, fit in? Back to the OED...

     Ah, here is the Dutch — specifically, Middle Dutch — I detected, older than them all, back to the 14th century to describe "a pail or bucket" now limited to the Scots and, of course, Shakespeare, quoting that and John Galt's 1822 satiric novel, "The Provost" — "Even lasses were fleeing to and fro, like water nymphs with urns, having stoups and pails in their hands."

    That seemed a lovely image to leave you with — it makes sense that a guy like Sir Belch would ask for a pail of wine — but thoroughness demanded I press on, finding a second OED definition, narrowing our pail into "a drinking-vessel, of varying dimensions; a cup, flagon, tankard."

     That's what Belch wanted: a cup of wine. No wonder people spurn the fact-based world. It does have a way of spilling the wind from the billowing sails of our fancy.

Pet surrenders surge in hard times — the right way and the wrong way

Kaye Larsen Olloway at Fat Cat Rescue, 2023.

 

     The black Kia rolled up shortly before midnight to Fat Cat Rescue, a 7-acre haven for feral cats in Wadsworth that readers might remember me visiting in the summer of 2023.
     It certainly was not summer now, but late January and bitterly cold.
     A couple got out of the car. You see them on security camera footage, jiggling locked door handles. They notice the doggie door, remove a cat from the car, push it through the door, then speed off.
     Being a cat, however, the animal didn't stay where it was put. She ran back outside, into the freezing weather, joined by two more cats dropped off by the same couple.
     The volunteers who keep Fat Cat humming eventually corralled the three cats, one badly hurt by frostbite. Then they appealed to me.
     "We need your help please," Michelle Andrich, a volunteer, wrote. "Two-part help."
     The first part was to share photos of the couple dropping off the cats and their car in the hope that "someone will recognize them and turn them in. ... There should be consequences for their actions."
     Pass. In the annals of unpunished crime, dropping off cats at a shelter doesn't cry out for justice. The couple didn't know any better, which leads to Fat Cat's second request.
     "There are proper ways for a pet owner to surrender their pets," Andrich said. Would I help "educate or enlighten people on proper ways to surrender your pet"?
     Well, I can try. Whether they actually get enlightened is on them.
     People give up their animals for a variety of reasons — they move, lose jobs, can no longer afford their upkeep. Pets get sick, or their owners do.
     What should you do if you can no longer care for an animal?
     Start by planning ahead, if possible.
     "Don't wait until the last minute," said Kaye Larsen Olloway, who runs Fat Cat and suggests allowing at least a month to find your pet a home. "If you know you're moving out, don't wait until the night before to make arrangements for the pet. Give us a chance to make arrangements. We have a list of 20 other rescues we can contact."
     Or reach out to Chicago Animal Care and Control.
     "Our staff will help you," said Armando Tejeda, public information officer at the city department. "You don't have to do this alone. Resources exist."

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Restaurant notes: S.K.Y.

S.K.Y.

      My sons are foodies, and I am always glad when they pick the restaurant, as I know I'm going to dip my toe into something new and noteworthy.

     Saturday it was brunch at S.K.Y. at 2300 N. Lincoln Park West, in the elegant Belden-Stratford apartment building, whose stunning lobby entrance S.K.Y. shares with the venerable Mon Ami Gabi.
     The room is large and lovely — elegant in an austere, mottled concrete fashion — if fairly empty at 12 noon on a Saturday, not a good sign for them. Things were certainly hopping next door at Mon Ami Gabi. I cast a covetous glance in its direction as we swept past.

     Service at S.K.Y. was impeccable. We were six adults and a baby, and we were sat front and center and never rushed. The cuisine is ... what? Asian fusion? The brunch menu offered bibimbop, pork belly noodles and poke, so that sounds right. The Michelin Guide called it "globally minded." The restaurant's unfortunate name stands for the initials of the chef's wife, Seon Kyung Yuk. Myself, I wouldn't monogram a towel, never mind a restaurant. S.K.Y. used to be in Pilsen, which seems an odd fit, like opening a rib joint on Devon Avenue. It relocated to Lincoln Park last July.
     The appetizers were a hit, the black truffle coquettes, filled with aged white cheddar, light and piping hot, the Maine lobster dumplings stuffed with generous helpings of buttery lobster.
     I had trouble finding a main course item that suited my fancy (with days to consider, now that checking out the menu, ahead of time online, is something of a dining tradition). Sizzling Sisig and Short Rib Shakshuka didn't strike me as brunch fare. Maybe I'm losing my exploratory spark. I settled on what I thought was a safe bet, a French Onion Cheeseburger au Jus. Dipping burgers into beef stock is not my idea of a good time, and the crispy gruyere round standing in for the burger's slice of cheese didn't float my boat either. For a $21.95 burger, it was just okay. My wife had Hot Smoked Salmon Tartine on toast, and that seemed a smarter order. She gave me several generous bites.

     The brunch pastry tier for dessert allowed us to sample the place's baked goods — my wife and I were big fans of the petite cornmeal madeleines, while the rest were sweet and ordinary. Still, dividing them in six pieces and passing them around was a fun process.
     The most intriguing item was a slice of "local toast" on the menu for $8.88, which I was tempted to try, in tribute to the $24 bread basket at Balthazar in New York City — the .88 in all the prices being some kind of numerological luck thing. But we already had carbs aplenty, and I decided to leave the toast a mystery.
     My younger son and his wife have been to S.K.Y. before and love the place, so I can assume that my tepid reaction says more about my blunted, aging sensibilities and less about the restaurant's quality, or lack of same. My wife and I decided that we'd go back, if pressed, but would vastly prefer to return to the nearby North Pond, in a similar price range and just better in the grub department. Still, the company was excellent, and a good time was had by all.

'The ghost in the machine is just us' — AI pinch hits. But there's a problem...

 

I also asked Gemini 3.0 to create a new columnist's bug for me — I'm overdue. Notice anything wrong with it? That's right, they place the Aon Center on the river. And I'm left-handed.

     Two years ago, with artificial intelligence the hot new thing, I enlivened a slow February morning by feeding Gemini AI this prompt: "Write a column defending the use of artificial intelligence in the style of Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times."
     Gemini spat out a snappy patter that began, "Hey, Windy City. Steinberg here, with a word about our new neighbors: the robots. Yeah, I'm talking AI. Artificial intelligence. All the sci-fi buzzwords that used to belong to Isaac Asimov and now clog your Twitter feed."
     "Does that sound like my voice?" I asked readers, sincerely aghast. "Kill me now."
     Last February, I checked up on how AI had advanced by putting the same request to Gemini 2.0. The result was smoother, better, and — what really scared me — it provided a spot-on critique of what my writing is like, unbidden, noting my "casual and conversational tone" and "cynical and skeptical outlook" seasoned with "A touch of self-deprecation."
     Who needs self-deprecation anymore? Not when reality deprecates us so regularly, with technology and the entire culture joining forces in a feverish drive to utterly moot what real people, such as myself, do for a living.
     Now February has come again and is fast waning. So if I want to keep the tradition alive — the way things are going, there might not be another February — time to gird my loins and approach AI, bigger than ever, filling actual, real-world jobs, so — cue the self-deprecation: I thought I'd lob Gemini 3.0 the same slow pitch and see what happens.
     Four seconds after I clicked the button, it offered a solid headline: "The Ghost in the Machine is Just Us" and a column beginning:
     "I stepped onto the Red Line this morning and watched a young man staring into his phone, his thumb flicking upward with the rhythmic precision of a piston. He wasn’t looking at the scenery — which, let’s be honest, is mostly the backside of crumbling brick three-flats anyway — he was arguing with a computer. Or rather, he was asking a computer to write a poem for his girlfriend because he, like most of us when faced with a blank page and the weight of human expectation, had found himself utterly empty."
     Sigh.
     OK folks, using only that big, slow, imperfect lump of pink wetware between your ears, can anyone please tell me the problem with that paragraph? Not a subtle drawback either. I hope. Honestly, the flaw should reach out of the page and slap you hard across the face. Because — not to pressure you — if it doesn't, it truly might be time for me to go out to Lake Michigan, settle myself on an ice floe and wait for spring, to be carried out to that Great Newsroom in the Sky, to share a lager with H.L. Mencken and Sydney J. Harris ...
     Anybody?    
     It's not true. I didn't step out onto the Red Line — indeed, would never use that phrase if I did, but name the specific station — there was no young man, no phone, no nascent poem.
     Honestly, Gemini could have responded the same if I asked it to pinpoint the biggest problem with AI: firehosing a constant stream of fictitious slop.
     This year's Fauxberg column continues:
     "The scolds will tell you this is the end. They’ll say that Artificial Intelligence is the final nail in the coffin of the human spirit, a cold, silicon reaper coming for our jobs, our art, and our very ability to think.... We are a species that delights in fearing our own shadows, especially when those shadows are cast by a new kind of light."

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Flashback 1987: Buying a tie - How to select one that suits you

     Lawyers are circumspect. While paid to speak, in court, they are also paid not to speak, at least not publicly, in almost every other situation.
     This would make me almost an anti-lawyer, in that I am paid to communicate constantly, and also do so on a pro bono basis, such as here. For fun.
     The general reticence of lawyers came up recently at home, when I showed a unpublished blog post to a certain young attorney mentioned in it, hoping he'd say, "Sure, go for it. Excellent work!" What he actually said was, "I'd rather you didn't." Or words to that effect. The moment evoked the memory of a long afternoon spent trying to find a lawyer who would provide the first quote in the story below. I had to knock on many doors, despite it being what I thought was a completely uncontroversial topic. Saying nothing is always safer.
    I was newly hired, writing for "The Adviser," a weekly section giving people tips on living their lives, necessary in that pre-Internet age. Now ties are hardly worn at all. Or if they are worn, are too often red, and you can wear one tied so long that it covers your fly and still be president. Bigsby & Kruthers went out of business in 2000.

 

 

     "Before the world sees your home, your automobile or your wife's jewelry, it sees your necktie."
                                                    — Montague

     Behold the common necktie. A simple strip of cloth, 56 inches long and — this year — about 3 1/4 inches wide. It serves no practical purpose, beyond covering the buttons at the front of the shirt.
     But a lot of symbolic weight is packed into those few square inches of fabric. When a man puts on a tie, he is donning his armor for the workplace.
     In comparison to the tie, the suit jacket is a mere accessory. Any CEO can doff his jacket, roll up his sleeves and run a meeting. But take off the tie, and he might as well grow three days' worth of beard and carry a pair of maracas.
     For example, no lawyer worth his writ would be caught, in or out of a courtroom, without a tie.
     "Law firms provide fairly expensive services to their clients," said David Crumbaugh, a partner in the law firm of Winston & Strawn. "They are selling those services, and at same time they are selling a certain image, of which a tie is a required part."
     Gene Silverberg, president and co-owner of Bigsby & Kruthers men's stores, feels so strongly about the importance of ties that he covered an entire wall of his new La Salle and Madison store with them, and says it is more important to buy a few suits with many ties, than many suits with few ties.
     "When you're looking at Michael," said Silverberg, using his hands to frame the area between senior vice president of merchandising Michael Karpik's chin and mid-chest, "you're looking right here. You concentrate on the shirt and tie. That's the focal point, the power zone."
     Power is an important word when it comes to neckties. Just take a glance at the televised Iran/Contra hearings and you'll see a parade of power ties, their colors and patterns carefully selected to give an impression of professionalism — and honesty.
     "Teal is a powerful color," said Karpik, the tie-buyer for the Bigsby & Kruthers stores. "Pinks are still hot, or yellows. People want the power look."
     Not only do men wear ties for power, they wear them to be distinctive, to stand out from the crowd.
     "Men are getting a little more daring for business wear," said Bill Gardner, owner of Besley Tie Shops. "Reds and yellows are still very popular, but we're seeing a lot more pastels."
     Be forewarned. It is easy to get in trouble with a tie. If you tie it too short, or too long, the most expensive tie will seem ridiculous (ideally, the tip of your tie should just crest over your belt buckle). A little extra haste in the morning, and you'll leave your clients asking themselves, "How is this guy going to manage my assets if he can't tuck his tie under his collar in the back?"
     Ties come in thousands of patterns and varieties. When choosing one, you need to keep two things in mind: what the tie will be used for, and whether the tie is right for you.
     "There are ties for getting a raise and ties for getting a date," said Silverberg, holding up a red silk tie with small emblems. "Now, some people would wear this on a date, even though it isn't a tie for a date. It's a tie for the office."
     Silverberg then pointed to a rich, glittering tie with inlaid patterns of silver and purple. "Now this tie says: `Friday night, work's over. . . .' "
     If you have a difficult time matching the various elements of your wardrobe, selecting ties with a variety of colors in them can make the task easier.
     "For instance, this tie will pick up a gray suit, a blue suit, a yellow shirt, yellow socks," Karpik said, holding up a pink tie with medallions of pink, blue, burgundy, gray, teal and yellow.
     Silverberg said to be creative when selecting ties by giving classic styles a slight twist. Set yourself apart from the crowd and still appear well-dressed by wearing a tie with large single paisleys or oversized medallions.
     "The whole dress-for-success thing turned out to be bad," said Silverberg. "All these rules for business dressing were created and the result was complete anonymity.
     "We always encourage a little flair. You don't make waves, but you can make ripples."
     There are several tests of quality when buying a tie. Hold the tie in the middle and let the wide end hang. If the tie does not hang straight, but twists, that's a sign the inner lining is too tight, or not sewn properly. The tie won't hang right on your neck, either.
     Another test is take the tie, seam side up, and hold it in the middle with both hands, between the thumb and curled fingers. With a light grip, slowly run the tie through your fingers. The lining in a quality tie will not bunch up.
     Judging the quality of a tie by how many gold stripes are on the white lining sounds like one of those urban myths, but it is a valid test. The best, heaviest lining has six gold stripes. Lesser qualities have fewer stripes. Turn the tie over and gently fold back the ends to expose the lining and the stripes.
     Ties can be made of numerous materials: silk, wool, polyester, cotton. Which material makes the best tie is a personal decision and the subject of some debate.
     "I've been making ties since 1940, and peddling ties before, so I should know something about ties," said Irving Wolfmark, 79, founder of the Wolfmark Neckwear Co., holding up his own maroon polyester tie. "When a person buys a polyester tie or polyester silk tie, they find satisfaction. The tie holds its shape, comes up like new after you clean it.
     "People go for silk because it is more expensive," Wolfmark continued, "but if a silk tie gets a spot, you have to throw it away. The most practical tie for someone who wears a tie everyday is a polyester tie."
     Bigsby & Kruthers, on the other hand, doesn't stock polyester.
     "There's no virtue in having a polyester tie," said Silverberg.
     "My customers don't put their ties in washing machines. I don't want to be a snob, but there is a certain resilience to silk. It's natural. The best manufacturers in the world, the ones with the most interesting patterns and designs, don't use polyester. A polyester tie is very utilitarian and a silk tie is very artful."
     One kind of tie you should never buy, unless you are a policeman or a lathe operator, is a clip-on tie. Clip-ons are fashion death, and unless required by your job, they should be disposed of after adolescence.
     "Throw them away," said Karpik. "They're good for 9-year-olds at Sunday school. That's it. After grammar school, it's time to get a real tie."
           — Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 31, 1987

Meet strongylodon macrobotrys

     Under ordinary conditions, we would not have rushed back to the Orchid show 11 days after attending the opening of the 1960s-themed "Feelin' Groovy."
     But we have houseguests, and "Take 'em to the Botanic Garden" is our go-to host move.
     Not that we didn't enjoy our second visit. We did. Particularly this distinctly blue-green pod of flowers found hanging off a vine in the Tropical Greenhouse. Not part of the show — not an orchid, obviously, but strongylodon macrobotrys, also known as a jade vine, a woody creeper endemic to the Philippines. It's not new — the woody vine grows all the way across a wide doorway. I just don't recall ever seeing it in bloom. One of the many appeals of the Garden: no matter how many times you go, and we go a lot, you always see something you didn't notice before.

     Its name, strongylodon macrobotrys, begs for dissection. Strongylos is Greek for round, also describing certain worms and parasites (as well as a village in Cyprus) and odous is tooth, giving us the dread "orthodontist" and showing up in Hebrew, such as in the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" passage in Matthew. Macro is "large," of course, but also "long," and botrys," is a very old word, found in ancient Greek and Babylonian Aramaic, to describe a bunch of grapes, or unripe dates.

    So "round-toothed long cluster," which certainly describes the flowery calyx (a pod of flowers; good Scrabble word).

     The plant itself is related to — and the Trump administration wouldn't want me to tell you this, which is reason aplenty to dive into the story in detail — a notorious moment in the intersection between botany and colonialism.
     In 1836, Congress authorized the U.S. Exploring Expedition, "for the purpose of exploring and surveying the Southern Ocean, ... as well to determine the existence of all doubtful islands and shoals, as to discover, and accurately fix, the position of those..."
     The six-ship flotilla, with 500 officers and men, as well as nine civilian scientists, left Chesapeake Bay on Aug. 18, 1838 and was gone for four years, logging 87,000 miles and hitting the Philippines in 1840, where strongylodon macrobotrys was first collected. It was the last U.S. nautical mission to circumnavigate the globe completely under sail. led by a New York naval officer, Charles Wilkes, experienced with charts and instruments (he studied under Nathaniel Bowditch, whose "American Practical Navigator" is used to this day), but not actual seafaring or relations with native populations. When two sailors were killed in Fiji, bartering for food, Wilkes seized 80 Fijians and killed them.

     The U.S. Naval Institute described Wilkes (no relation to John Wilkes Booth; I checked) who was considered by some a model for both Ahab and Capt. Queeg, this way:

     "Wilkes never doubted his ability to complete with total success any task he undertook. With this self-assurance, however, came a huge ego, and this ego was in turn covered by a paper-thin skin. Wilkes was quick to detect a slight or insult, real or imagined, and was unforgiving of the perpetrator(s). He was extremely excitable and suspicious by nature, constantly suspecting officers of forming cabals to plot against his authority."

     Nevertheless, the mission was considered a success. Naturalist Titian Peale declared it had elevated “our country in the rank of Civilized nations.”

     A reminder that it is the engaging in science, not the dismantling of it, that brings respect. Or did. 

     When he returned, Wilkes was court-martialed for excessive cruelty to his men but retained his position — it isn't just the CPD that lets its bad apples stick around and fester — and during the Civil War, Wilkes seized a British Mail ship, almost drawing Britain into the war against the Union, for which he was court-martialed again. He retired a rear admiral.

     Well, I'd say we got enough for today from some interestingly-colored flowers.

Trump administration slashes away at science, but scientists are pushing back

 

National Center on Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado

   My father had one good idea.
     OK, that is unfair. He had many good ideas. Marrying my mom, for starters. He also held patents in the design of compact nuclear reactors.
     In fact, those two good ideas might be related — there was a shakedown cruise of an atomic-powered submarine that my father, a naval reservist, was keen to avoid. Married men were exempt. Perhaps it's cynical of me to connect them.
     But he also had one really good idea that resonated around the world and has an impact today.
     My father's really good idea occurred to him in the early 1970s. The 747 Jumbo Jet had been introduced, to endless publicity — the spiral staircase leading to the lounge in the bulging upper deck hump, the enormous capacity, 400 passengers, making long haul air travel economical for millions. And — what my father noticed — radar systems and other instruments that monitored atmospheric conditions around the plane. A constant stream of data.
     You know ... Robert Steinberg thought ...what if that weather data wasn't just used to fly the plane? What if it was sent to a central location? And then used ... to predict the weather?
     It would be a big improvement over weather stations — scattered mountaintop outposts, with thermometers and spinning anemometers and such. Plus weather balloons, instrument packages floated high into the upper atmosphere for expensive keyhole glimpses.
     He wrote an article titled, "Role of Commercial Aircraft in Global Monitoring Systems," that ran in the April 27, 1973, issue of Science.
     "The new family of wide-bodied jets such as the 747, DC-10, and L-1011 aircraft can be used to supply important global atmospheric and tropical meteorological data for which there is a pressing need," my father wrote. "In the final analysis, commercial aircraft may offer the most inexpensive way to monitor our atmosphere in the near future."
     By summer, NASA loaned him out to NCAR — the National Center for Atmospheric Research — in Boulder, Colorado. NCAR was in a stunning, I.M. Pei-designed building of reddish concrete. Boulder was nice. Mountains. He traveled the world, signing up airlines. The idea took hold.
     "Aircraft-based observations play a big role in the accuracy of weather forecasts — reducing forecast errors in numerical weather prediction systems by up to 10%" according to the World Meterological Association.
     This is a long way of saying that, in an era of constant shocks to American science — 25,000 federal researchers and support staff left the government this past year, thousands of grants slashed, agencies shuttered, scientific data yanked off line, the U.S. scientific establishment being "systematically destroyed" in the words of the Union of Concerned Scientists, NCAR being scuttled stood out as personal.
     And political. NCAR is being closed down by the Trump administration for the sin of "climate alarmism." Because atmospheric research points to uncomfortable facts that business and its handmaiden, government, don't want to think about anymore.
     We should be clear why all of this is happening. Business makes money, but if it has to, oh, consider pollution, or worry about the purity of food or the efficacy of drugs, it makes less money. So watchdog agencies, and research facilities and university centers that would counterbalance the whims of business are being scrapped.
     Scientists are not going quietly.

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Artisanal bread

 

     Well ... it's been an interesting couple days, since Monday night when, tired from a long day and with a full house of kids and a granddaughter, I wrote this and went to bed, only to wake up Tuesday and find out Jesse Jackson had died, shortly after midnight.
     So I clawed this post back, and put up Jackson's obituary in its place. It seemed the right news judgment call ("Hmmm, country bread or the death of a major national figure? Let's go ... with the ... bread.") 

     Then Wednesday I ran the column the paper asked me to write about Jackson's passing. Now things have quieted down, for the moment, so it's back to artisanal bread. Apologies to the 49 readers who read this before 5 a.m. Tuesday, when I took it down. And if there are any new readers from the ... 2 million hits the Jackson obituary received (thank you Apple News!) the way the blog works is, we usually have subjects of some kind of topical interest but, given the blog's quotidian nature (every ... goddamn ... day) sometimes we plumb the depths of the truly trivial. Which is also what happens to take up the bulk of all our lives, so it does remind us: the small stuff is important too.

     Often I snap photographs for the purpose of sharing them with you, here. But that is not why I took the above. Central Street in front of Hewn Bakery was jammed with cars one recent Sunday, and rather than park a block or two away, I pulled into an illegal space, left my wife guarding the car, and ran in to check out the situation, breadwise. 

     We had never been to Hewn, but my wife had heard good things about it and suggested a visit, post brunch with the kids at Blind Faith. I took the photo, then hurried back outside to show her the bread selection. We discussed our options, and settled on an rye with oats, which did indeed prove to be quite good.

     You would think that, being raised on Wonder bread and, later, Buttercrust, which was basically Wonder dyed yellow with some corn meal sprinkled on the top, that I would retain some residual nostalgia for garbage white bread. But I really don't. Except under very unusual circumstances — say being served a metal plate of barbecue at a joint in Memphis, or a Kentucky Hot Brown, I never want to see another slice of white bread for the rest of my life. Someday I'm going to write something about the food I was served as a child. But I'm not ready yet. I think I'm going to wait a few years, to make sure my mother is good and dead, and won't claw out of the grave and get me for my indiscretion. 
     Returning to Hewn, which also has an outlet in Wilmette (and a third in Libertyville, thank you, Charles Troy). My wife is addicted to pecan rolls, so I grabbed one of those for her as well.

     Any thoughts on the name "Hewn"? I get that it is supposed to evoke the hardy artisan, powerful forearms coated with flour, drawing rough loafs from the primordial essence of natural grains and yeast and such, plunging them on wooden boards into wood-fired ovens. A name redolent of adzes and wide plank floors. But it still, to me, would be better attached to a line of ranch oak furniture, chairs with the bark still on the legs, and such. "Do you want some of this bread? It was hewn by me..." is not a question one leaps to answer with an emphatic "yes!"
     Moving on. If this seems a bit light, well, my oldest, his wife and the granddaughter, now 8 months, showed up Monday afternoon. I wish I could share her photo with you, but the chance that the cuteness might burn your retinas is too great, and I can't risk the liability. As it is, her mesmeric presence caused me to forget all responsibility, organized thought, or concern for anything that wasn't being bounced on my knee. I spent the day making sputtering noises, widening my eyes, breaking into insane grins, singing from my vast array of 1920s pop hits learned from my mother, who could sing far better than she could cook. Tunes such as "April Showers" and "Toot-Toot-Tootsie Goodbye" and not thinking for a single moment what I might post here. The results speak for themselves. The good news is that I will have to, somehow, ignore all that in the morning  and turn out a newspaper column of some sort. But you'll have to wait for that until Wednesday. Assuming I can draw myself away from the Concentrated Essence of all Sweetness and Adorableness in the Known Universe long enough to do it.

Rev. Jesse Jackson charmed the great and the infamous, trying to make a difference

Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1982 (Chicago Sun-Times file photo)

     The Century Shopping Centre at 2828 N. Clark Street was built inside the old Diversey Theatre, a defunct 1925 vaudeville house. It has an interior atrium, sort of Water Tower Place Lite, and a winding ramp, past seven stories of shops.
     My then wife-to-be and I were wandering there, years ago, heading up the ramp, when we encountered a mass of people coming the other way. Rev. Jesse Jackson, with a knot of shoppers, photographers and media. Campaigning for Eugene Sawyer, if I recall correctly.
     "I'd like to meet him!" my future spouse said.
     I brought her up to Rev. Jackson and made the introduction.
     "May I kiss you?" he asked, to my surprise, and hers. But she agreed. The kiss occurred.
     We parted ways, the famous civil rights leaders and his entourage heading one way, my significant other and I heading another. Someone needed to say something. A thought came to me.
     "Congratulations," I said. "You just kissed Yasser Arafat by proxy."
     That neatly summarizes the dilemma of Rev. Jackson, who died Tuesday. He met the Dalai Lama and the bloodstained leader of the P.L.O. He hung out with Martin Luther King and Robert Mugabe, responsible for the deaths of 20,000 Zimbabweans. A moral man, generally, who met highly immoral people and sometimes held their hands and prayed. He visited Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad and Fidel Castro.
      "Jackson has made a career of giving dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic a chance to show their gentler side by releasing captives at his request," a Time magazine columnist noted in 1999. "It’s not mere ego tripping, as some cynics charge, or an expression of Jackson’s deeply held belief in nonviolence. It’s almost Faustian. I think he needs the rush that only bargaining with evil can provide."
     Another dilemma for Rev. Jackson. To draw media attention to particular problems, prisoners, picket lines, he needed to draw attention to himself. It wasn't supposed to be about him. Yet it was.
     Rev. Jackson was master of firing torpedoes that circled back and impacted into his own vessel. He mounted the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate in 1984, then hired Louis Farrakhan to do his campaign security and called New York "Hymietown" in the presence of a newspaper reporter, who Farrakhan later threatened to kill for spilling the beans.
     The "man of contrasts" summation might be a cliche. But with Rev. Jackson, it was true. He could whipsaw you with it. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, Jackson made the rounds of editorial offices, humbly pointing out that it was pioneers such as, ahem, himself, who made Obama's triumph possible.

     Then Jackson immediately said, into an open Fox News microphone, that he'd like to castrate Obama. Which puffed away the cloud of revered pioneer respect he was trying to fog around himself

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Rev. Jesse Jackson, civil rights leader and Chicago icon, dead at 84

 

Rev. Jesse Jackson (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin)

    “I may be poor ...” began the call-and-response Rev. Jesse Jackson led in various forms before rapt audiences for more than half a century. “But I am ... somebody! I may be on welfare. But I am ... somebody! I may be in jail. But I am ... somebody! I may be uneducated, But I am ... somebody. I am Black. Beautiful. Proud. I must be respected. I must be protected. I am ... somebody!”
     That, in essence, is the message Rev. Jackson devoted his life to championing — for Black people in general and himself in particular. From leading Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s open housing campaign in Chicago in 1964, through his close association with the great civil rights leader during the last three years of King’s life, to the tumultuous 1970s, when Jackson started what became the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, to the 1980s, when he ran the first viable presidential campaign by a Black candidate in the United States, to the 1990s, when he traveled the globe, to free hostages, advise leaders, join picket lines and lend his internationally famous name to often desperate causes. To his later years, when he settled into the role as a revered elder statesman of Black Chicago and an unceasing voice for social justice.
     Rev. Jackson died at age 84 on Tuesday, the family said in a statement. He had been in declining health for a decade; in 2017 he announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease two years earlier, but last April revealed that it was actually misdiagnosed progressive supranuclear palsy, a condition also affecting bodily movements. He stepped down as president of PUSH in July 2023, citing health concerns. Rev. Jackson appeared onstage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 2024, when he was presented to the crowd after a video celebrating his life, but did not speak.  

This ran Feb. 18, 2026

     If the legend of his mentor, Martin Luther King was simplified, almost beatified, by early death — a martyr at 39, an icon who had a dream — then the legacy of his eager protege was complicated by long life. Rev. Jesse Jackson was in the public eye for six decades, a tireless wielder of social pressure. He was respected and dismissed, inspiring adoration and disdain, a Chicago institution who left footprints on the world stage, an ardent advocate for civil rights whose attempts to wield political power himself were thwarted, and channeled into the power of protest, persuasion and complaint.
     ”Yet, there are doubts and criticisms raised about this complex man, a man characterized by ambiguity and contradiction,” the New York Times magazine wrote about him in 1972. “He is a brilliant speaker, a skilled mobilizer. He is also vain and self-seeking, a star, a man of great ambition, a man who, at times, uses the tricks of a demagogue.”
     Which is another way to describe a powerful orator who inspired and uplifted millions of people, whether one-on-one or through the media he played skillfully around the world. In everything he did, Jackson was always pushing to be counted and make a difference. To be somebody.
     He was born under highly unpromising circumstances, on Oct. 8, 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, in a three-room, tin-roofed house without running water. His mother was an unwed 16-year-old high school student named Helen Burns. His father, Noah Robinson, was a married neighbor more than twice her age — 33 — with three stepchildren.
     When Jesse was a toddler, his mother married Charles Jackson, who adopted Jesse when he was about 12. Charles Jackson worked as a janitor, and sometimes young Jesse would help him clean buildings.
     It was a deeply segregated time and place. When baseball star Jackie Robinson came to Greenville for the NAACP, he wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom at the airport. Young Jesse was taunted for his stammer, which would return in moments of excitement later in life. His mother was his first adoring audience. She always told him, Rev. Jackson later recalled: “You’re going to be somebody. Just hold on.”
     His calling came early.
     “Jesse was an unusual kind of fella, even when he was just learning to talk,’’ Robinson remembered. ‘’He would say he’s going to be a preacher. He would say, ‘I’m going to lead people through the rivers of water.’‘’

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'Boss Lincoln' reminds us that Honest Abe didn't float into the presidency but clawed his way there

Daniel Chester French’s statue of Abraham Lincoln in his memorial in Washington, D.C. I love how his right foot is slightly raised, as if he were about to leap up and kick some laggard American ass, like the tireless political operative that Matthew Pinsker details in his excellent new biography, “Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln.”

     You can believe something all your life and then, confronted with new evidence, suddenly realize how ridiculous your thinking was.
     Well, I can anyway. Many people cling to error as if their lives depend on it. Maybe they do. To me, the ability to admit being wrong is not a flaw but a superpower.
     Had you previously asked me to describe the rise of Abraham Lincoln, I'd have said something about young Abe writing letters with coal on the back of a shovel in a log cabin, growing into a lanky, wisecracking Illinois railroad lawyer who shambled into the presidency in 1860 because he was so homespun and wise.
     Dumb.
     Then I cracked open "Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Matthew Pinsker, published last week.
     Lincoln was a driven, scheming political animal, "barking out orders, providing advice," scrawling "BURN THIS" at the bottom of letters, abusing the congressional franking privilege to deluge constituents with his speeches, glad-handing every farmer he met.
     Then as now, truth was the first victim of the partisan battle royale.

     "I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth and aristocratic family distinction," Lincoln gripes, of slurs after his marriage to well-off Mary Todd, noting that 12 years earlier he'd been a "friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat."
     Any biography rests on the fascinating facts it shares, and Pinsker drives home what a mover and shaker Lincoln was, years before the presidency, with this:
     "He was a man of consequence, important enough even to have a town named after him," Pinsker writes. "... the town of Lincoln, Illinois, was born in August, 1853" in honor of the skilled lobbyist who had pushed rail lines through Northern Illinois.
     We're reminded the past isn't a playpen: They weren't handing out presidencies to whatever Bible-quoting yahoo showed up and asked. At one point, Lincoln himself pauses to mock that thinking:
     "Do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice, if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men?"
     Not anymore I don't.
     As we are still arguing who can be sheared of human dignity and under what circumstances (color of skin, then; condition of immigration papers, now) the book is terrifyingly relevant — and offers the comfort of reminding us that our extraordinary times might not be quite so extraordinary.
     In 1858, the worry is about immigrants voting illegally. Spying "fifteen Celtic gentlemen with black carpet-sacks" at a railroad junction, Lincoln follows them, spying while the Irish workers hang around a saloon.

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Chicago resistance to ICE echoes opposition to Fugitive Slave Act 175 years ago

“A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves” by Eastman Johnson. “The absence of white figures in this liberation subject makes it virtually unique in art of the period — these African Americans are independent agents of their own freedom,” writes the Brooklyn Museum.

     Jim Gray arrived in chains.
     At the railroad station in Ottawa, Illinois, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago.
     Gray wore leg irons, his arms bound to his sides, and was led by a rope.
     It was Oct. 19, 1859.
     The month before he had escaped from slavery in New Madrid, Missouri. Caught by an Illinois sheriff "in sympathy with the slave owners," Gray was being returned to bondage. A crowd awaited him, including a local merchant named John Hossack, an immigrant from Scotland.
     "What crime has he committed?" Hossack shouted. "Has he done anything but want to be free?"
     A question that echoes through the years and across the country today. With federal immigration agents this past year prowling Democratic cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis — kidnapping Latino individuals and dragging them off to exile, and billions being pumped into immigration enforcement, gearing up to grab more people and confine them to enormous facilities now being constructed nationwide, it's impossible not to think of the Fugitive Slave Act, the 1850 law that also created a federal force tasked with snaring people for the crime of wanting to live in freedom.
     There was already a law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, empowering owners to retrieve their chattel from the North. But Southerners were upset that California was being admitted to the union as a free state. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a sop to them, meting out punishment to anyone helping Blacks escape slavery, and creating monetary incentives for agents bringing escapees back. The law gave bite to the slave drivers' bark.

John Hossack (Ottawa Museum)

     Then as now, local communities fiercely resisted this federal intrusion into their constitutional rights. Then as now, street clashes erupted as national law and human decency faced off against each other. This being February — Black History Month — and with the Trump administration waging war on Black History, scrubbing it from the Smithsonian, from college campuses and federal websites in an attempt to declare the civil rights struggle an unmentionable blot upon enforced patriotic zeal, it seemed important to explore the subject in depth, while we still enjoy the right to do so.
     "All historical analogies are the same," said Matthew Pinsker, a history professor and director of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College. "There's always some similarities and plenty of differences. This is a battle between the national administration and blue state governments. In the Fugitive Slave days, it was a battle between Washington and Northern states, which passed laws called 'personal liberty laws' that were like the sanctuary city laws that Trump is trying to overturn."
     Hundreds of Ottawa residents showed up for Gray's hearing the next day in the courtroom of Justice Dean Caton, who ruled that while Gray had broken no Illinois law, the Fugitive Slave Act demanded he go to Springfield to face charges.
     Gray never got there.
     As a marshal began to lead Gray from the courthouse, local men sprang into action. The officer was restrained, while Hossack grabbed Gray by the elbow.
     "If you want liberty, run!" Hossack urged, dragging Gray from the courthouse. They jumped a fence, climbed into a waiting carriage, and were sped out of town.
     Gray escaped north to Canada. But Hossack was arrested and sent to stand trial at the federal court in Chicago.

Chicago's resistance. Strong then, strong now

     Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act was particularly strong in Chicago, the city "a sinkhole of abolition" in the words of one downstate editor. A hub of actual railroads, it was also a center for the Underground Railroad, an informal confederation hurrying those escaping slavery north to Canada. When a slave catcher arrived at Chicago in October, 1850, he was informed that his safety could not be guaranteed, and the enslaved servant he had brought with him was helped to escape.
     The same month, the Chicago Common Council — predecessor of the City Council — passed a law condemning the Fugitive Slave Act as "cruel and unjust" and ordering the police force — nine men at the time — "not to render any assistance for the arrest of fugitive slaves."
     Uncannily similar to the challenge Mayor Brandon Johnson would face 175 years later: How much cooperation must local government give to federal authorities enforcing a despised and unjust law? The Council in 1850 minced no words, damning any free-state representatives supporting the bill as "fit only to be ranked with the traitors, Benedict Arnold, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed his Lord and master for 30 pieces of silver."
     Last October, the City Council passed a similar, if less florid, resolution, focused on trying to protect children from traumatic seizure by ICE agents and urging citizens to report the misconduct they witness.
     What was motivating Chicago to push back against the Fugitive Slave Act? While it's tempting to just superimpose Chicago's current sanctuary city liberalism onto the mid-19th century city, that wasn't the case. There were only 323 Black people living in Chicago in 1850 — about 1% of the population. Illinois had passed its own "Black Laws" in 1848, forbidding the immigration of free Blacks into the state and, as amended in 1853, forbidding Black visitors from spending more than 10 nights in the city.
     "These protectors of fugitive slaves raised no objection to the exclusion of Negro testimony against a white person in the courts of law," historian Bessie Louise Pierce noted in 1940. "They seemed to see no inconsistencies in providing a separate section in the theaters for Negroes, and in segregating the races in the common schools."
     To whites, this was more about protecting their own rights than the rights of Black Chicagoans.

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'A temporary insanity'

Fashion models, Paris

     Regular readers know that I have dictionaries — dozens of them, from the oft-cited Oxford English, Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster dictionaries. to much more obscure volumes: Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, the Continuum Dictionary of Religion, or Room's Dictionary of Distinguishables, which parses the difference between, oh, jam and marmalade (the former, made from the whole fruit that has been crushed or pulped, usually sweet and sugary, the latter, a jelly in which small pieces of fruit, often citrus, including the rind, are suspended, making it tend toward the sharp and tangy).
     Speaking of sharp and tangy, today being Valentine's Day, I thought I would gather my thoughts on romance and, having none, I sought inspiration in my copy of Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary," words filtered through the mordant wit of my fellow Ohioan, who served in the Civil War, and used that grim experience to write memorable stories such as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
     His literary bias was on full display in his definition of "romance" purely as a sub-genre of literature, beginning, "Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination — free, lawless, immune to bit and rein..."
     There's more, and I'm sure it was howlingly effective in 1906, when the book was published, but frankly it fell flat for me. Pressing on, I tried the entry for "love" and was rewarded by this classic definition that might ring a bell: "A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease, like caries and many other ailments, is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient."
     I almost left out the "civilized races" part, worried it has a tang of colonialism to it. I mean, how would he know? And I'm not entirely sure what that last part, about the physician and the patient, is supposed to mean. Maybe you can help. 

      Before I returned the book to its place, I checked on "Marriage," which had the shortest definition yet: "The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two."
     Hard to argue that one. Whatever condition you find yourself in this Feb. 14, I hope the day goes pleasantly for you. Bierce, as you might know, vanished mysteriously in 1913 after joining Pancho Villa's army in Mexico. Which offers up another definition of romantic.

Flashback 2009: It won't matter, until it does

     The good news is I wrote an interesting, unusual column Thursday, related to Black History Month — if you feel reading it half as much as I felt writing it, you'll get a lot out of it. 

      And long — three times the length of a usual column.

      The bad news is that, to find that much real estate in the paper, I had to push it to Sunday. Which left me both drained and with nothing to run today.

      Thank goodness, Saturday is Valentine's Day, and I have countless Valentine's Day columns slumbering in the archive. Such as this, the bulk of which is in the form of a poem — though I would remind my slower readers that Robert Pinsky isn't coming to the Art Institute — this ran in 2009. Seventeen years ago. You missed him.

      Ron Huberman lasted less than two years as head of the Chicago Public Schools, quitting to join a private equity firm when Rich Daley announced he wouldn't run for mayor in 2011.

      The column ran when it filled a page, and I've kept the original headings in.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     Sometimes I'll be droning on to my wife about my day and I'll stop, suddenly realizing that I've overlooked the really interesting part.
     "Whoops," I'll say, "I buried the lede. . ." — "lede" being the opening paragraph and most important aspect of a story, which in news articles often are one and the same.
     More than a few readers, enjoying Fran Spielman's excellent profile Sunday of mayoral favorite Ron Huberman, no doubt had a similar moment when, at the end of paragraph 11, they learned that the new chief of the Chicago Public Schools is gay.
     Not so long ago, that bit of information would have been the lede, the headline and grounds for dismissal. Newspapers were forever feigning surprise that gay people not only lived among us, but held jobs — "He's a postman! And he's gay!"
     We have thankfully moved beyond that, though the implication in the story that Huberman's orientation will not matter at all isn't entirely correct either. It won't matter in the execution of his official duties. But it will matter, perhaps enormously, to some he had to deal with, particularly those who object to some action of Huberman's and are searching for what they consider a fault to bludgeon him with.
     Performance, not private life, should be the most important factor when it comes to educating our children. But it isn't always that way. I remember when local school councils were considered the solution to our perennial school crisis -- the notion that involved, engaged, vigorous parents would succeed where the bumbling bureaucrats of Pershing Road had failed.
     That was the theory. The reality was that parents can be just as misguided as paper pushers can be, and more than one outstanding principal got the bum's rush by his local school council because his racial background didn't match his student population's. Like the bureaucrats, the parents failed because they cared about the wrong thing.
     Huberman is nothing if not savvy, and his choosing this moment to go public with this open secret is no doubt part of some greater strategy ("Who accuses himself," Publilius Syrus wrote, "cannot be accused by someone else.") His opponents, trying to besmirch him, will certainly at some point invoke his sexual orientation, not realizing it is themselves they indict.

FLASH: POET TO SPEAK IN CITY!

     I could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

     Not incredulous, not curious
     As why I would miss the 5:12, the 5:25
     The 5:30, 5:50, 6:19, 6:55, and 7:35
     And pin my homeward hopes on the 8:35
     Submerge myself on the damned 8:35
     To face that train window face.
     Those green-gray faces, like moles, like drowned souls
     Nibbling on sacks of stinking fast-food fare
     Asking myself "What was the need?"
     A question from Pinsky's "Round."

     My boss, my friends, my wife, not one
     Bothered asking "Why bother?"
     It must seem a pointless task to ask
     Though I tried explaining anyway.
     You see, he translated Dante's "Inferno."
     Better than Longfellow, no mean poet
     But Henry's "renews the fear" can't touch
     "The old fear stirring."

     Plus, Valentine's Day two weeks away
     The guy behind "The Handbook of Heartbreak."
     (The title itself a poem) the man who wrote,
     "It was as if she had put me back together again
     So sweetly I was glad the hurt had torn me."
     About his mom

     So go, not to put on airs, since no one cares
     Go alone, to be there. "What was the need?"    

     Imagine yourself a painter of signs
     Big coffee cups splashed across bigger brick walls
     "DRINK PERK-U-UP COFFEE EVERY DAY."
     Scaffolds, ladders, turpentine
     Might you not admire a cup begot by Harnett
     His sable strand dipped in thimbles, not your broad brush
     So real you reach toward the cup, as if you could touch it
     As if, with your low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand
     You could ever grasp someone who reaches a heaven
     That's shut to you

     To paraphrase Robert Browning's poem
     About a mediocre painter justifying himself
     To a disinterested young thing with better places to go
     "How could it end in any other way?" and
     "This must suffice me here." Comforting himself
     Which I find comforting, I
     Who could write a book of the blank looks
     People gave me when I shared the news
     Robert Pinsky, the poet, is coming
     To read at the Art Institute
     Thursday, Feb. 5 at 6 p.m.
     For free.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     Publilius Syrus was an Assyrian writer of maxims who lived 2100 years ago. While a number of his sayings apply directly to Ron Huberman -- "You should not live one way in private, another in public" -- only one struck me as vaguely humorous:
     We are born princes, and the civilizing process makes us dogs.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 2009