Swinging into spring

Truth in advertising — the Waterlily Tulip, a central Asian flower is known as being first to bloom in the spring and, good to its word, was the only tulip we noticed on display at the Botanic Garden. 

     Monday was a fine day — 80 degrees at O'Hare, a record for March 30 in Chicago, with hardly a cloud in the sky. I did not shuck my responsibilities, initially. In the morning, I made progress on the advance obituary of an alderman who was much more impressed with himself than history will be. A common enough failing and I tried to treat him with a certain mortuary tenderness. Plus, worked out a few of the knots in Wednesday's column.
     But I didn't let work absorb my entire day. That would have been tragic. By noon I was heading to the park with a young lady of my acquaintance, accompanied by her parents, stopping first at Little Louie's for a char dog and a salad, eaten al fresco at a picnic table next to the playground, where dessert was pushing my houseguest on the baby swing, a new passion of hers, discovered yesterday. 
     Well, dessert was really a raspberry chocolate chip cone from Graeter's. But it wasn't as sweet as the swing time was. Then we walked toward the Basin.
      Later in the day, we all headed to the Chicago Botanic Garden which, despite the fine weather, was not particularly crowded. My son met a school friend, and just listening to their conversation was a treat. Smart kids. 
     When evening came, and I had to think about today's post, I realized I had utterly nothing to say, about the political situation or anything else. I was pleased how easily it was all shucked. Not that it isn't important; it is. It just wasn't important today. As scary as the times are, it is good to be able to set them aside for a memorable afternoon. A luxury achieved by not being afraid of anyone or anything, and having resources and family and living in a good place. None of them were accidental, or even easy. None are permanent. But they're all here now, for a time, and I'm glad to be able to appreciate them while they are. What's the Crosby, Stills & Nash  lyric? "It was a long time coming; it'll be a long time gone." Tuesday morning I'll have to get that column into final form and off to the public, like meat tossed into a river of piranha. 

     But that isn't so bad either. Monday's column on immigration drew a ton of feedback. I appreciated the praise, and gave the boggled outrage the attention it was due, which was far less consideration than I devoted to my job as a kiddie swing attendant. A man needs to have his priorities in order.
     

There is no debate over the ongoing abuse of immigrants

"The Last Yankee," 1888

     Journalism is failing America.
     At least mainstream media, newspapers and TV networks and such, the remnant still chugging away.
     What's our job? To report the news, to convey what’s happening.
     And what do we do? Describe fantasies, ghosts, processes that aren’t occurring.
     Consider the recent murder of Loyola student Sheridan Gorman, out with a group of friends at a beach in Rogers Park when approached by a masked man, shot in the head and killed.
     That was all too real.
     But the moment the suspect was identified as a Venezuelan immigrant, the MAGA outrage machine started to whir. Led by President Donald Trump, who called him “an animal.” The murder was waved about as confirmation. Because one member of a minority group always represents everybody in that group. While white folks, naturally, are individuals, each unique in his or her own way, hardly responsible for their own actions, never mind stand-ins for anybody else.
     And how did the media present this deceptive carnival? This acrobatic leap from one crime on the North Side of Chicago, one victim and one suspect, to the entire country and all immigrants everywhere? 

   A conversation. An argument. The Sun-Times called it “a national immigration debate.”
     There is no conversation. No argument. Nobody is debating.
     What is going on is dehumanization. The officially designated pariah group — nowadays, immigrants — is being stained with false rationales to justify their abuse: they are violent; they are diseased, they don't belong. If these rationals are contradictory — they are lazy and take all the good jobs — that doesn't matter. In 1930s, the Jews were both dirty vermin crouched in the shadows and jewel-encrusted millionaires secretly running the world. Few Germans seemed bothered by the contradiction.
     The nation is busily building ... let's call them “detention camps” ... for this despised group. Billions are being spent ramping up a paramilitary force to snatch people off the street. Don’t be fooled by the hesitation after Minneapolis. A temporary setback. The Democrats trying to get ICE under control is what the entire airport nightmare is about. Air travel in the United States is being throttled so we can deport more immigrants. A reminder that racism blows back on the racist. Trying to hurt others, they hurt themselves. Ask the Germans.
     Why doesn't the media hit this point harder? Our error comes from a 7th grade civics class, how-a-bill-becomes-a-law mindset. It's our job to list the excuses given, noting, eventually, how inaccurate they are.

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Chicago History Museum, 2018

Mesmee-rized

 

  
     Is AI writing advertising now too? I saw the above over Wordle, and instantly thought that, then decided, no, it sounds more like a translation issue.
     Which actually was fairly perceptive, and a reminder that social media means it is you and whatever native intelligence you've managed to develop and retain against the world. Spoiler alert: the world is winning. Then again, it usually does.
     Click on "LEARN MORE" you go to an enormous page, with many pictures of the shoe contorting, and a countdown timer urging you to buy now ("Hurry up!" is what they actually say) while this fabulous sale is going on.
     "Buy now!" is always a good indication that you should stop, think and most likely buy never.
     What they don't say is the name of the shoe — well, eventually, yes, way down the page, in a photo caption: Mesmee. Looking for an actual company, I found a review page with remarks like this:
     "0 Star Rating For Cheap China Crap Falsely Advertised As MADE IN USA!"
     "Complete rip-off and "got cheated" and "9 weeks and no shoes. 2 emails no response. these 
people are crooks of the worst ilk. do not order a thing from them." So we have consensus. The message is: always know what you're buying and who you are buying from. Cave canem.
     Oh wait. That's "beware of dog." I mean Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
Since I never criticize someone's headline without offering an improvement, even a paltry scam, let's throw "Walking shoes for elderly with poor balance" on the cutting board and see what we can do with it.
     Hmmm...how about "Stable shoes for striding seniors"? Or "You won't wobble walking in these floor-grippers." Or "Shoes for walking, not falling."
     A reminder that the problem with artificial intelligence is that it's heavy on the former and light on the latter.

Works in progress: Jack Clark on drugs

Sign, San Ignacio, Belize.

     Turns out Jack Clark and I have more in common than I thought. Back in the day, we both took a dim view of drugs. He favored beer. To me, beer was a temperance beverage; make mine Jack-on-the-rocks. That was enough.

     Like him, my stumbling block was that if I bought drugs, then I'd be a person buying drugs, and that struck me as loathsome. So while I'd partake for free, now and then, I didn't particularly like the effects, and never sought it out. Thank heaven for small favors.

     Anyway, I'm taking up space that should go to EGD's favorite pinch hitter, with a memory of the altered life. Take it away, Jack:

     I’m probably one of the last guys who should be writing about cocaine. I tried it once — or who knows? Maybe two or three times. But the night of the Super Bowl is the only time that stays in memory, that night, and the morning after.
     When cocaine came on the scene at the Lincoln Park bar where I was hanging out in the ‘70s, I’d already heard how expensive it was, so I was too cheap to even give it a try. What if I ended up liking it? I was a domestic beer drinker. That was my price level. Every so often, I’d splurge and get a bourbon on the rocks. I would never do shots of anything. I could go out with $20, drink the night away, feed the jukebox, leave a reasonable tip, flag a taxi, and still have enough left to pick up a morning newspaper on the way home.
     When people would say, “You want to take a walk around the block?” That was shorthand for Let’s go smoke a joint. I usually shook my head unless it was a pretty girl, and then I’d take the walk just to keep her company. I wouldn’t partake or at least not much. I liked that simple beer buzz so much better.
     The first time someone invited me to meet them in the washroom, I didn’t get it at all.
     My friend must have seen my confused look. He opened his hand to show me the vial in his palm. “A little blow?” he said.
     “Thanks,” I said. “But no.”
     Before long, I seemed to be in the minority. At least, in this particular bar. On my birthday in 1979, Harry invited me to the washroom. I shook my head. “I don’t do that stuff.”
     “Yeah. But it’s your birthday.”
     A few weeks later on New Year’s Day, he tried again. “I already told you, I don’t do that stuff,” I said.
     “But it’s the ‘80s now,” he said and predicted the flavor of the new era.
     Some call the ‘80s the decade of decadence but where I hung out it was definitely the cocaine decade. It started with the thought that this was not an addictive drug and ended with the realization that if you used it frequently, when you stopped, you found yourself depressed for no apparent reason.
     I believe, given enough time and a large enough grant, I could figure out the missing link.
     Before the ‘80s were over, Harry had lost his business, home, and marriage. But he never lost his sense of humor. When I reminded him about what he’d said on the first day of the decade, he didn’t remember saying it, but he was proud of himself and found it quite amusing.
     I was in my own little bubble half the time and didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on around me. I’d stopped listening to the radio around the time of Grand Funk Railroad. But I didn’t mind pumping quarters into the jukebox and getting lost in the music. Three plays for a quarter or seven for a half dollar. That seemed pretty reasonable compared to what some of my friends were spending to keep themselves amused.
     A good bar is like a decent church. It needs music, lighting, comfortable seats, an interesting congregation, and something to drink. Oh, and a religion, of course. I decided that my druggy friends thought they were outlaws. That was their religion. All that sneaking around, whispering, money changing hands or being tightly rolled, those were their rites.
     But what was I doing there? That’s probably a question that anyone who’s spent too much time in a saloon asks.
     It was a comfortable room. Everyone looks better under amber bar lights. The jukebox was great. I don’t remember most of the songs anymore and they changed records regularly, which is one sign of a good box. It was the first place I ever heard Merle Haggard’s "Rambling Fever." The B side was his great rendition of "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again.' Mink DeVille's, "Just to Walk That Little Girl Home," was another favorite. The opening line: “It’s closing time in this nowhere café.”
     It’s a great song but it doesn’t explain what I was doing in a bar where I was becoming an outsider. I was there for the moments when it all came together, the light and the music. The buzz. If you could just hold it there, right there, you might finally understand something important. This feels so good, you think. This is how it should always be. I almost feel normal.
     It never holds, of course. The room tilts, the lights get too bright, someone’s playing mediocre songs on the jukebox, it all slips away, and you’re back to being you.
     The mix of clientele at the bar reminded me of the West Side block where I’d grown up. There were doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, cops, mechanics, salesmen, waiters and waitresses, carpenters, janitors, and everything in between. A wannabe writer, moving furniture to pay the bills, fit right in. People talked about books, music, politics, anything you could think of. There were always new, interesting people stopping by.
     As the years went on, much of that diversity went away and it became, more and more, a cocaine bar. Some of the old regulars disappeared, others rarely came in. The level of the conversations dropped considerably (along with my IQ, I’ve always figured). Often, they weren’t conversations at all but a series of monologues. It was no longer a very inviting place for new people. "What’s he doing here?" was the typical feeling. Is he a narc?
     I didn’t do cocaine but I found myself being suspicious of strangers all the same. It was no longer such a comfortable place.
     One night one of my non-druggy friends invited me to the washroom. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re buying that stuff now.” I’d always thought he was a fairly intelligent guy.
     “You know, if you don’t buy now and then,” he’d said, in a very serious tone, and changed my opinion with a single sentence, “people stop inviting you in.”
     I started to expand my horizons. But if I was out and about, I’d sometimes try to make it to my old home for one last drink at closing time. One bartender liked to joke that she laid out milk and cookies for me.
     One year, I came in on Super Bowl night. I hadn’t seen the game or heard the score. “Who won the Super Bowl?” I asked.
      “Bruce and Gary,” the milk-and-cookies bartender said. These were two regulars. (I’ve changed names here to protect the living and the dead.)
     “No really?” I said.
     “Really,” she said. “Hang around. They’ll be back.”
     It wasn’t long before they were back with a cast of thousands. Well, maybe it was only twenty. I finally found out the answer to my question. Bruce and Gary had won the Super Bowl. They’d gone to some high-end bar for a big-time Super Bowl party. They’d split a $1,000 square, putting up $500 each. With 100 squares on the grid that meant the total pool was $100,000. I don’t remember how the payout worked but they’d ended up winning two of the four quarters and walked away with something like $37,000 and a TV.
     So I joined the hangers-on as we went from one late-night bar to another. I refused all invitations to the toilet but was happy to take free drinks when they were offered.
     We eventually ended up in someone’s living room, all sitting around a huge coffee table with a pile of cocaine in the middle. To me, it looked like someone had upended a 2-pound bag of flour.
      Oh, what the hell? I thought. This was a special occasion, which meant I wouldn’t have to feel guilty for never offering them some of mine.
     At dawn, there weren’t that many of us left, so I finally got to do a bit of talking. But every time I said something, a guy I didn’t know very well said, “That’s a given, Jack.”
     I’d always heard that cocaine made you feel smart. It was having the opposite effect on me.
     After a while, I’d had enough, not of the cocaine but of that guy. I left the survivors still around the coffee table. The sun had been up for a while when I made the long walk home. It was a pleasant spring-like morning and all the birds were singing the same damn song: “That’s a given, Jack. That’s a given.”
     Later, as I recounted the night to a friend, I said I’d never felt so stupid.
     “Oh, you idiot, don’t pay any attention to him,” she’d said. “He says that to everyone.”
      I probably should have thanked him. If nothing else, it had cured me of any further interest in the drug. All these years later, I don’t remember his name or even what he looked like. But I still hear those birds now and then.

Americans, once 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water,' face return to bad old days

Protesting pollution on LaSalle Street, 1970.

     In 1889, the American correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan and was momentarily impressed.
     “I have struck a city — a real city — and they call it Chicago,” Rudyard Kipling, 23, informed his readers in northern India. "The other places do not count."
     But initial approval evaporated as he looked around, noting: "Its water is the water of the Hughli," — a branch of the Ganges in West Bengal famous for its pollution, "and its air is dirt."
     Unregulated industry — enormous stockyards dumping into the canals, making them, in Kipling's words, "black as ink, and filled with untold abominations," smokestacks belching filth — will do that. Today when we call Chicagoans "gritty" we are speaking about toughness; 137 years ago, it meant they were coated in coal dust.
     What changed? Well, conscientious businesses, concerned about the effect pollution was having on the quality of life of their neighbors, took it upon themselves to clean up their acts and ...
     Ha-ha, just kidding. Early April Fool's. No, of course, business, then and now, cares only about short-term profits. But government forced them to act in a socially-responsible fashion, setting health standards and limiting pollution. Only then did city dwellers breathe easier, and "grit" could fade into colorful metaphor.
     I was reminded of this flipping open the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine and coming upon "The Dismantling of Environmental Protections — A Grave Threat to America’s Health" by a pair of Harvard doctors, Adam W. Gaffney and David Himmelstein, joined by three other health experts.
     They start with another once notoriously dirty city — Cleveland — and the 1969 combustion of its Cuyahoga River, so polluted it caught fire, "sparking national attention to environmental degradation."
     A president not famous for his selflessness, but Cincinnatus compared to our current commander-in-chief, took decisive action:
     "In his State of the Union address seven months later, President Richard Nixon lamented that Americans were being 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water' and proclaimed that clean air and water should 'be the birthright of every American.' At Nixon’s urging, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passed the Clean Air Act (CAA) with bipartisan support. Air-quality upgrades mandated by that act and enforced by the EPA are among the most effective health interventions of the past half-century, having reduced air pollution by 75% in the United States and saved at least 200,000 lives per year."
     Now our birthright is being taken away — it isn't just voting. Our country is in full retreat regarding the environment.

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Sparrows

    
     If you're not careful, trying to solve one problem, you end up creating a worse problem.

     House sparrows, such as these black-throated specimens above, were an English bird, introduced to the United States in 1851 as a way to combat caterpillars. Over the next 50 years, sparrows spread across the continental United States.
     That's an oversimplification — there were continuing efforts to bring the bird to this country through the 1870s, on both coasts.
     By the 1880s, sparrows were seen as pests, and an effort was made to undo the folly — bounties were put on them. Books were written on how to hunt sparrows. Regret set in.
     “Without question the most deplorable event in the history of American ornithology was the introduction of the English Sparrow.” W.L. Dawson wrote 1903 in "The Birds of Ohio."
     To add insult to injury, it was discovered, too late, that sparrows do not eat insects. They eat seeds, and grain.
     This sparked what was called "The Sparrow War" in the late 19th century, with some advocating their destruction, and whether they could be considered "American" birds — a designation which was not grudgingly given until 1931, according Diana Wells' essential "100 Birds and How They Got Their Names."
     At first, Wells writes, "sparrow" described any small bird. The word itself is old, from Old English spearw, , meaning "a flutterer." The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word deep into the mists of time, well over a thousand years old, offering numerous cognates, including the useful "sparrow-blasting," deployed with jocular or contemptuous force" and meaning, "The fact of being blasted or blighted by some mysterious power, skeptically regarded as unimportant or non-existent," popular around the late 1500s.
     Another useful variant is found in Wentworth and Flexner's "Dictionary of American Slang" — "sparrow cop," defined as "a policeman in disfavor with his superiors and assigned to a park to guard the grass," dismissed as "not common," though perhaps it should be.
     I expected Noah Webster, writing his 1828 dictionary, to view them as English birds, but he does no such thing, calling them, "a small bird of the genus Fringilla and order of Passers. These birds are frequently seen around houses," which certainly meshes with my experience.   

     Working backward in time, to Samuel Johnson's great 1755 dictionary, a sparrow is merely "a small bird." He quotes a line from Macbeth that at first seems bland, almost meaningless: "As sparrows, eagles, or the hare, the lion." Until you check the context — the Captain is answering a question whether Macbeth and Banquo are frightened by an attack from the Norwegians, and declares they are as little concerned as eagles and lions are when confronting sparrows and rabbits.
     Johnson wrote his dictionary practically alone — an accomplishment that was to be of great pride to his countrymen, especially compared to French team who spent decades compiling their nation's dictionary — so can be forgiven for overlooking a much stronger appearance in Shakespeare. Horatio tells his friend Hamlet that if his mind isn't in his duel with Laertes, he will find a way to delay it.
     "Not a whit, we defy augury," the melancholy Dane insists. "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come, the readiness is all."
     That sounds like a plan but — spoiler alert — the duel will be the death of Hamlet, Laertes, Gertrude and Claudius.
     In other word, thinking you are ready for what you suppose is coming, and actually being prepared for the mean trick fate actually has in store for you, can be two very different things.

Donald Trump mounts a Chicago hobbyhorse — Christopher Columbus

Columbus monument, Barcelona, Spain.

     Certain issues just seem to belong to Chicago. Dibs, for instance. That peculiar tradition of trying to claim a parking space with a few scattered chairs, or dinette tables, or whatever, just because you took the trouble of shoveling it out. A weird blend of private effort and public display, these fragile monuments to selfishness. "I went to the trouble to clear the public way, so the space now belongs to me." There's something tragic about dibs; I sometimes snowblow the sidewalks of my entire block; I don't then try to stop people from walking there.
     So it stood out, from the general wrongness of everything happening in Washington, D.C., to see Donald Trump's White House leap into the Christopher Columbus fight, erecting a statue of the great explorer near the grounds of the White House early Sunday morning. Truly, it was as if the president had issued an executive order banning ketchup on hot dogs, not to give him any ideas.
     “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero," a spokesman declared.
     I bet he is. Columbus's heroism has curdled in some quarters, particularly after the 2020 George Floyd protests, when the exact degree that our government values the lives of people who didn't have the good sense to be born white came into sharp relief. Suddenly, deifying Confederate traitors and rampaging colonizers couldn't be shrugged off quite so easily.
     Columbus statues were taken down in other cities across the country, such as Boston, Richmond and Pittsburgh. Baltimore's was broken into pieces and tossed into the Inner Harbor. The statue erected on the White House grounds, in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, was created by an artist — to stretch the term — working from the shattered Baltimore statue, fished out of the water.
     Still, Columbus seems a uniquely Chicago concern. Maybe because the city yanked three Columbus statues off the street in 2020. Maybe just from watching close up the day-to-day gyrations of old-school Italian pride groups trying to make the case that once someone is honored in a public space he therefore must be honored forever, no matter how tastes change. The issue resembles school prayer, where specific groups insist their own private devotions become mandatory public ritual.
     Maybe because Columbus, while known around the world, has been a particular fixation in Chicago, where the city's monumental 1893 fair was dubbed "The World's Columbian Exposition," part of the 19th century trend of celebrating Columbus for discovering the continent. An effort picked up enthusiastically by Italian immigrants, who at the time played then playing the despised outsider role now forced upon Venezuelans. Columbus became demonized in the 21st century for his rough handling of the discovered — raping and torturing and murdering them more than many like to see in our public heroes. Except for the president, of course, who has made a career of slathering plaudits over the most loathsome personalities,  particularly himself. 

     As a historically minded person, I generally don't like to see statues pulled down. It smacks of the Taliban blowing up Buddhas. There is an enormous monument to Stephen Douglas at 35th Street, just west of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Douglas was not only a slaveholder, but a notoriously neglectful slaveholder. Yet the edifice remains, and rightly so, because it's historic and in a part of the city not otherwise bristling with tourist sites. Besides, it's also Douglas' tomb, and it could be argued that everyone, no matter how vile, gets to slumber in his own grave.

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Flashback 2012: If they go to school, kids will know who Pulaski was

     There are so many tragedies manifesting themselves right now — a deepening war, a shuddering economy, a corrupt and cruel American government bent on its own enrichment and establishing permanence in power, for starters — this one might seem far down the tree of disaster.

     But seeing how vibrant young immigrants come to America and become the same hidebound haters and status-starved revanchists found among the native born, the subject is important enough to merit a reminder. The Italian old-guard claws at the vanished majesty of Columbus, and embraces stone cold haters like Trump when he supports them in their self-destructive folly. 

    It is natural that both strands would come together, as Trump placed a statue of Columbus on the White House grounds Sunday, to show his hand. You'd think it would chill the bones of any conscientious immigrant. No doubt they dug it. As for Poles...

    This ran when Rahm Emanuel suggested that Chicago Public School children go to school on two make-believe ethnic holidays. Spoiler alert: CPS dropped Pulaski Day as a holiday in 2012.  Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day in Illinois in 2017, and CPS decided not to make it a school holiday in 2019. Now if we could only work on summer...

 

    On the base of the Dante Award that the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans gave to me at a lovely luncheon two years ago is the inscription, “Never be a timid friend to truth.”
     Those words appear, more or less, in the 17th canto of Paradiso, the middle of the third book of the Divine Comedy, a particularly beautiful chapter containing Dante’s famous lines about exile: “Bitter is the taste of another man’s bread, and hard is the way going up and down another man’s stairs.”
     The motto on the award ­— a life-size bust of Dante — isn’t exactly what Dante wrote. He is torn whether to speak the truth and risk angering his friends or keep quiet and risk oblivion. “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth,” he tells his patron Cangrande, “I fear that I shall not live on.”
     Which is a fair summation of the thought that went through my head when I saw that representatives of Chicago’s proud Italians and equally proud Poles were objecting to Rahm Emanuel’s plan to send kids to school on Columbus Day and Pulaski Day.
     “Part of an ongoing campaign to diminish ethnic recognition in the city,” said my pal and lunchmate Dominic DiFrisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee.
     “A slap in the face,” said Gary Kenzer, executive director of the Polish American Association, whom I don’t know but I’m sure I would like if I did.
     The polite thing to do would be to cough into a fist and ignore them, confident the mayor will not cave under pressure. If he can frog-march the teachers union, he can handle the old guard ethnic guilds too. In the delicate kabuki of ethnic and racial politics, caring is best left to those with credentials.
     “Yet, should I be a timid friend to truth. . . . ” A "timido amico." Dante doesn’t add “regarding my own people,” does he? Besides, I’m sort of an honorary Italian already, due to the award, and my ancestors came from Poland; my grandfather was born in Bialystok, and even though some Polish readers seem to be unwilling to accept that a Jew can be Polish, I don’t see the conflict.
     So here goes . . .
     Our school system betrays the children it’s supposed to teach in many ways, but the worst is the abuse of low expectations. It’s always easier for a teacher to show a film.
     All sorts of secondary side values undermine education, from our state’s messed up finances to meddling parents to antique customs that should have been scrapped long ago. Why do we kick kids out of school every summer for nearly three months? So they can go into the fields and help bring in the crops. Only guess what? They don’t do that anymore. We dismiss them anyway, for a summer of Nintendo. Not all bad, of course; there’s also Little League and family vacations. But it isn’t a rational system.
     Columbus Day and Pulaski Day are similar relics, inserted into the calendar as a sop to large ethnic communities that craved honor and belonging. And that’s fine. Human nature. Have a parade, close the Recorder of Deeds office, put on a hat with a feather and go enjoy a glass of grappa or Slivovitz.
     But school is serious. Poor education is both a major cause and serious symptom of half of our problems. If you want to put a finger on why America lags further and further behind the rest of the world, you’d have a smorgasbord of reasons: broken health care, crumbling infrastructure, knee-buckling debt. But a wheezing, feeble education system designed to babysit the lowest achievers would be the ice sculpture in the center.
     We’re not supposed to make ethnic generalizations anymore, though everybody does. But if I had to use one word to describe what I consider being Italian means, its essence, I would say, “boldness.” I wish my pals at the Joint Civic Committee would have asked themselves: What would Galileo have done? Add a day of school or keep the day off so kids can hang around the mall? How about Columbus? Would he let the crew sit on deck playing cards because it’s a saint’s day, or would he have them hoist the sails and get moving toward the New World?
     And for Poles, the word I use is “hard-working.” We get up in the morning and plow. If you’d told my grandpa it was Pulaski Day and so he should sit on his butt, he’d have laughed and said, “No work, no pay.”
     Dante is advised — spoiler alert! — to “forswear all falsehood,” vex the shameful, and “then let him who itches scratch.”
     Good advice. So if you want my Dante Award back, I’ll box it up. But kids aren’t going to learn about Columbus or Pulaski or much of anything else while on vacation. Send them to school, and let the adults slake their thirst for honors somewhere else.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 19, 2012

Iran War won't be so absentee

 

     What was America's longest war?
     Not the Civil War — that was the bloodiest, 620,000 dead, with Americans falling on both sides. That ended three days shy of exactly four years.
     Not World War II — four months shorter. Not the Vietnam War. Good guess, but no. Nearly 20 years, from the first military advisers in November, 1955 to the fall of Saigon in April, 1975.

    A long time. But topped, by a couple months, by the Afghanistan War — how quickly we forget. Also nearly 20 years, from 2001 to 2021, 2,400 American military died, not to forget maybe 150,000 Afghan civilians and fighters.
     And for what? The country is under the thumb of the Taliban. Just like when we started.
     We should think hard about these past conflicts as we go sailing off into a new one. Well, we should have thought about them before we went sailing off into a new one. But thinking hard wasn't on the table, apparently. No consultation with Congress before going to war, as required by law. No communication with the American people — the opposite, we were told the job was done last year. No huddling with our allies — our former allies, fallen away after a year of Donald Trumps global charm offensive.
     Trump says the war will be Iran will be over "very soon. But Trump says a lot of things — the war is won, no, it continues. Five thousand Marines are on their way. The Strait of Hormuz will be easy to open — no, we must have the help of NATO to do it.
     The only thing happening very soon is the war's one month anniversary — on Saturday, the 28th. A good time to consider where we're heading.
     Wars take on a momentum, a weight of their own. After the first six Americans died, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth dragooned their grieving families into an imaginary chorus, urging our country deeper down the hole. Using initial to justify feeding an unknown number of soldiers into a grinder for an undetermined span of time.
     “What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family," Hegseth said. "They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done.’”
     Finish what? What is this exactly? We seem to be making the goal up as we go.
     Not to be outdone, Trump conjured former presidents expressing envy at his triumph. All four living ex-presidents deny saying that.
     If the war lasts a year, or 10, we'll want to look back and see what we were thinking when it started. The Republicans were thinking, "Whatever Donny wants, Donny gets." While Democrats gnashed their teeth and wailed, quietly.
     Afghanistan could go on for 20 years because the war was so removed from our everyday existence. Pain was felt, but not by us.

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Company man

Calbert Wright

     When Calbert Wright began work at the Ford Motor Company's Chicago Stamping Plant in Chicago Heights in 1963, the factory was a noisy, smelly, smoky hellscape with a leaky roof. Working one shift imbued your clothes with what one veteran called "the Ford smell" causing wives to demand they strip down at the door when they got home.
     And it was hot: 100 degrees on the production line.
     "Ooh," Wright said. "No fans. Water fountains were rare, very rare."
     Plus Black workers such as himself were given the hardest duties.
     "The first month, I didn't like it," remembers Wright, 85, "I said, 'I'm not going to stay here'. They had us stacking steel. We couldn't touch no presses. All we could do is stack stock. They were trying to work us like Hebrew slaves."
     But stay he did.
     When Wright began work at the age of 23 at Ford, John F. Kennedy was president. Henry Ford still ran the business — albeit Henry Ford II, grandson of the man who founded the automobile manufacturer in 1903.
     Meaning that Wright, who still prowls prowling the floor today checking that workers on the line have enough parts to keep the robots busy — and takes taking their place when they go on bathroom breaks — has worked for Ford a little more than half the 123 years since the company sold its first car, a two-cylinder, two-passenger Model A, in red, the only color available, for $850 to Ernest Pfennig, a dentist on Clybourn Avenue.
     Wright had come up from Mississippi when he was 11, and his voice is rich with Southern drawl. He had an uncle at Ford's Torrence Avenue assembly plant, and got a job at Chicago Stamping.
     Why did he stay? 

     "There weren't jobs paying like this," he said, laughing: $1.40 an hour. "Big money."
     He had a wife, Thelma — now married 65 years — and an infant son to consider. And things were changing.
     "[Martin Luther] King, plus the union, made everybody be classified," Wright said. Conditions improved. He moved up from stacking steel. "That's why I stayed so long."
     Wright's 63-year tenure isn't even the longest of Ford's 177,000 workers — that would be Art Porter, 86, who joined Chicago Stamping in 1961.
     Their longevity is especially amazing when you realize how frequently workers change employers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average worker at a private factory like Ford works 4.9 years before leaving.
     Wright has put in a dozen times that, and seen many changes.
     One of the biggest is automation. When robots were first introduced, in the 1970s, it wasn't clear whether they'd be a benefit.
     "They were throwing parts all over," Wright said. "They were dangerous. They couldn't control it. They were putting welds in the wrong place, blowing holes."

Better with robot help

     Gradually, the machines improved.
     "They got it right now," Wright said. "They come out better with the robots. They put the welds in the same place. When they manpower with a gun, they put one here, one there."
     Walking through the plant with Wright now, it's cool and almost quiet, except for the faint panoply of clanks and hisses. Only occasionally do you spy a person, shielded by machinery., evoking the quip attributed to Henry Ford: "Machines don't buy cars."
     "Them robots came in and knocked all those people out," Wright said. "Each line would have 18 people, Now they got three. When I hired in, they had 6,500 people in this plant."
     Now Chicago Stamping employs 1,100.

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Work in progress: Jack Clark on the No. 93 bus

     Not living in the city, I probably like buses more than Chicago residents do — familiar enough to grab one when convenient; not familiar enough to be thoroughly schooled in their shortcomings. Like them enough to show up toward midnight at the Kedzie Avenue garage once, near midnight, to watch one being cleaned. 

     Thus I'm happy to present the latest contribution by Jack Clark, a deep dive into a particular bus route. My guess is this won't be everyone's cup of tea, but that some will appreciate it, if only for its granular look at part of a city we all love.

     I’d write to the CTA if I could figure out a concise way to express my thoughts, which aren’t about important issues like crime on the system or whether Donald Trump will figure out some way to cut funding. Mine are closer to home: the route of the CTA’s 93 North California/Dodge bus, which comes out of Evanston and was recently rerouted so it now connects the Purple Line in Evanston, the Brown Line at Kedzie Avenue, and the Blue Line at Logan Square.
     Now before I go on, I should tell you that I can see Kedzie Avenue out my kitchen window. (I just looked. It’s still there.) And, at first, I assumed that my desire to have the extension of the 93 go straight down Kedzie on its way to Logan Square was nothing more than typical selfishness. I did a bit of research and changed my mind.
     There are two California buses, the 93, which I mentioned above, and the 94 California bus, which goes south from Addison Street all the way to 74th and Damen. Until recently, the two buses did not meet. Most of this can probably be attributed to the blockade put up by Ravenswood Manor, where California becomes a narrow side street and only runs for a single block in the half mile between Lawrence and Montrose Avenues.
     The old 93 didn’t try to get around this gap. It just gave up on California, took Foster to Kimball, went down to the Brown Line terminal at Lawrence, and started back north for Evanston.
     The new route takes Foster only as far as Kedzie where it turns south and connects with the Brown Line. A few blocks later, at Montrose Avenue, the bus makes a wrong turn. The CTA could have sent the bus the direct and logical way, straight down Kedzie, (past my kitchen window) a little over two miles, to the new end of the line at Logan Square. Instead, they decided to add a mile to the trip and go east, back to California.
     Now this makes sense on paper. It’s the California bus after all. Shouldn’t it be on California? Confusion starts as soon as the bus makes that turn. Montrose Avenue already has a bus. People have been taking it for decades without having to check to see if it’s the right one. If a CTA bus came along it was the Montrose bus. So now, of course, you have people getting on the wrong bus only to discover their mistake once the bus turns south.
     South of Montrose, California is a quiet street. There’s an ordinary residential neighborhood on the right. On the left, is first Horner and then California Park. Mostly what you see from the bus are parking lots. Beyond those, there are playgrounds, baseball diamonds, a nature walk along the river, a dog run, a swimming pool, and a bike, walking, and running path that goes under the Irving Park bridge, over the river and into Clark Park, and all the way to Belmont Avenue. There’s also an indoor sports center with tennis courts and an ice rink.
     In my several fact-finding trips, I haven’t seen anybody getting on or off the bus who looks like a park patron. I haven’t seen many riders at all. It’s a pleasant trip during daylight when you can actually see what you’re passing. At night, with the tinted windows, what you mostly see is your own reflection.
     The parks end just north of Addison where DePaul College Prep--the recently renamed Gordon Tech High School — sits, and this is also where the 94 California bus turns the corner from Addison and begins its long, 13-mile journey, south to 74th Street. The two buses, the 93 and the 94, now run together for a mile, both with California in their name, which must cause a bit of confusion. At Diversey, the 93 turns west, causing even more confusion as it drives a half mile down a street which already has a bus, and goes right back to Kedzie where it turns south for a block or so, to the end of the line at Logan Square.
     So the bus went a mile out of its way on two streets that already have buses, just so it could go two miles down another street, a mile of which is already covered by another CTA bus with a very similar name. Mass transit turns to mass confusion.
     The CTA apparently wanted to connect those two California buses, probably so passengers could transfer from one to the other. This makes sense, of course, but believe me, there are better ways to do this.
     Here’s what the 93 missed by not staying on Kedzie all the way to Logan Square. The Auto Zone auto parts store at Cullom, which is right next door to the Easy Clean laundromat. The Cermak Produce grocery store at Berteau, which is right across the street from Sanabel Bakery and Grocery, which is full of Middle-Eastern baked goods and other products.
     The next block, Belle Plaine, is where you would get off for the Village Discount, a huge thrift store. At Irving Park, there’s a currency exchange, a full-service Chase Bank, a Walgreens, and Fuller’s Pub which has live music many nights of the week and is not a bad place to watch the Bears.
     At Byron there’s another laundromat with a dry cleaners attached, and at Grace there is the Daniel J. Doffyn Post Office, which is the main post office for zip code 60618. This appears to be the only post office in the entire city that is not serviced by the CTA. Yes, you can walk two blocks from the Irving, Kimball, or the Addison bus, or four blocks from California, where nothing at all is still going on.
     I’m sure there are plenty of people who would appreciate a bus that would take them right to the front door. Of course, this would lead to even longer lines inside the post office. Well, I don’t really mind the lines. In this busy world, it’s sometimes nice to have nothing to do but think about CTA buses ambling down that orderly grid of Chicago streets. Orderly Grids. That sounds like some boring, generic breakfast cereal. What’s really needed here is a bit of sex, some drugs, and rock and roll. 

     Now Kedzie Avenue is not much on that first diversion. To my eyes, it’s one of the least erotic streets in town. You want rock and roll? Go right back to Fuller’s Pub at Irving Park. Drugs? Straight ahead on the left just past Addison. That’s where you’ll find the BLOC Dispensary. According to Google “it is a Latino- and woman-owned social equity dispensary…” They also sell marijuana and related paraphernalia. You have to go around the back to get in. I think this is to remind you how much fun you used to have sneaking around when drugs were illegal and much, much cheaper.
     Wait a minute, can you get a contact high just writing about reefer? I missed the White Castle which is kitty-corner on the other side of Addison, and the big Jewel/Osco, which anchors a big shopping center across Elston Avenue with a bunch of other stores including, believe it or not, another currency exchange and another Chase Bank. Kedzie Avenue, the financial center of the North Side. Who knew?
     From here on out, Kedzie is just about as boring as California. So, dear CTA, if you really think these two buses must meet on California itself, you could send the 93 down Elston. The two buses could kiss when they meet at Belmont, and then proceed south a half mile to Diversey where the 93 could wave goodbye and turn back to Kedzie to get to Logan Square.
     But this brings up another issue, one which I’m sure the CTA in its insular way has never even considered. The California exit from the inbound Kennedy Expressway is one of the worst exits in the entire city. It frequently backs up onto the highway. This happens because cars wanting to go east on Diversey must make an immediate left turn when they come off the exit ramp. If more than a couple of cars are attempting this, it generally blocks everybody else trying to get off and the exit backs up. I’m sure there have been plenty of accidents on the ramp and on the expressway itself because of this backup. Adding a second CTA bus to the confusion cannot help matters.
     But I have a simple solution. Let’s just send the 93 straight down Kedzie Avenue (and by my kitchen window) to Logan Square. This was how it went until the route was cut back to Lawrence Avenue in 1982, which in my mind is still sort of the recent past.
     Now the other California bus, the 94, is going all the way to 74th Street. That’s so far away it sounds like another galaxy (and let’s face facts, if the numbered streets didn’t make the South Side layout so easily understood, for most of us on the North Side, it might as well be). The bus already has to make a detour at Chicago Avenue to get around the Metra yards, which cuts off California between Grand Avenue and Fulton Street. So one more diversion on the way out of the Milky Way is hardly going to matter.
     My suggestion — after 1500 words — send the 94 down Logan Boulevard to Logan Square? It’s only a half mile. The two buses could do their little kiss, people could transfer from one to another, and then the 94 could go right back out the boulevard to California and continue on its way.
     Of course, now it’s the 94 that’s going a mile out of its’ way. But Logan Boulevard is a wide street without much traffic, so this diversion will take much less time than the one currently in place. There hasn’t been a bus on Logan since the early 1950s when the old boulevard bus system was taken over by the CTA. So there won’t be any confusion with other buses as there is on Montrose, California and Diversey.
     And the last time I looked, there was even an old sidewalk-to-nowhere left over from one of the old boulevard bus stops. So the CTA could bring back a bit of transit history too.
     Before I finish, I should tell you that I rarely take the CTA. I usually get around by bicycle, unless it happens to be really cold or it’s raining or snowing, like it’s been for the last several months.
     Now how ironic is that?

 

 

JustFoodForDogs

  

    No column in the paper today. I was on assignment for the Sunday editor, and wrote a larger piece that's running this weekend.

     "I wonder if they have any food for cats," I mused, as my wife and I drove to Highland Park. "Maybe I'll ask them."
     We don't have a cat, not anymore, having lost our Natasha last June. So no need for cat food. But my odd comment becomes less mysterious when you understand our destination: a shop called "JustFoodForDogs" in Highland Park. I guess I was trying to be funny, and failing.             
     Our Kitty, who is a dog, for new readers, or longtime readers slow on the uptake, is pushing 16 years old this summer and has been suffering from what we call a wanky stomach. As have we. I will spare you the details. Let's just say instead of taking her out three times a day, I've been taking her out five or six. This morning, my wife took her out at 1 a.m. And I went at 2:30 a.m. We know to do so because she starts crying. It's like having a newborn.  This also necessitated several visits to the vet — three, maybe four — a variety of tests, including x-rays. An expenditure, I estimate, of some $500. At least.

     We'd given her medications. We'd mixed canned pumpkin into her food. Now the vet's suggestion was to go to this JustFoodForDogs — not sure what happened to the spaces between the words, but that's how they present themselves — and secure some balanced remedy food. No problem. Had Dr. Jones suggested we go to Lourdes and wash her in the water at the Grotto of Massabielle, well, that's what we would do. We love her that much.

     I must admit, I was taken aback by the store, particularly its sparseness. The place reminded me of the Parachute boutique on Oak Street in the 1980s, when "you're going to pay a fortune on this rags" was conveyed by having just a few exquisite garments hanging from a hook or two. Or the Richart chocolate shop in Paris. Swanky dog food.

     I let out a mental slow whistle.

     Our entrance tripped some secret signal, in the back, and a young man hurried out and curated our high end dog food needs. He was a handsome young man, tall, with his face obscured by a mass of hair, and I considered taking his photograph, then thought better of it.

     We bought two forms of the food, a frozen slab and a small box of what was, in essence, cooked turkey and rice with a bunch of oils and vitamins in it , and took it home.

     Kitty zupped the stuff up. And while the unmentionable problems got only a little better, if that, we were encouraged enough to return. This time I bought three frozen slabs, each weighing 18 ounces, for a little over $30, and took them away in a little white bag, the sort of thing you'd expect at a jewelry store or expensive boutique, which I guess this is.

     Yes, it occurred to me we could whip up some turkey and rice and mash it up and save ourselves about 90 percent. But we could also make our brooms out of sorghum. "We cook our dog's food ourselves," is not a sentence that I ever want to utter. 

     JustFoodForDogs was founded in 2010 to offer "human-grade food" to canines without all the filler, sawdust and ground up horses and whatnot that must be in commercial dog food.  In addition to the stand-alone stores, they're available in PetSmart — also no space; I'm beginning to see a trend here,. Maybe the pets eat the spaces between the words.

     When I made the cat joke at the beginning of today's post, I immediately realized that I was re-working a joke David Letterman made when he visited a store called "Just Bulbs" for his show. Doing my due diligence, I dug up the sketch, and was a little shocked to see the bit was aired in 1982. 

     "Do you have any sandwiches here, do ya?" a shockingly young Letterman asks the proprietor. "So besides bulbs, what do you have here? How about shades here? Can you get shades?" She suggests he go to a store called "Just shades." And he does. "Do you sell bulbs?" he asks her, earnestly.

     That's the thing with these jokes. A good one can stick in mind for a long, long time.

     

     

Flashback 2011: 'You get a little heartbroken'

      A central hazard of aging is the risk of beginning to notice what isn't there more than you notice what is. I pondered  this last week, when I was downtown (and wrote a post about thinking the Harlan J. Berk coin and antiquity store had vanished). It wasn't just that. My general mood was, I felt like I was walking through a Ghost City of places now gone. Such as this blank storefront on Madison Street, which I had written about a couple of times when it was a tiny but scrappy cupcake shop. I have sympathy for small fry flogging their dying dreams, particularly if they are battling behemoths. The original headline was "Corporate cupcake giant moves in on 2 tough cookies." If you make it to the end, I provide an update.

     People come into the Cupcake Counter all day long, looking for cupcakes. Some even buy them at the tiny shop on Madison Street.
     Others are just asking for directions to Crumbs Bake Shop, a New York cupcake chain that opened in Chicago at the end of December. 

     They haven’t far to go; it’s right across the street from the Cupcake Counter — just turn around and walk out the door, having bought nothing, leave the little bakery that Samantha Wood and her mother, Holly Sjo, began in 2009 and keep afloat by working grueling 16-hour days, turn left, go 60 paces, crossing Franklin Street, and there you are at the 34th Crumbs branch nationwide.
     “Your spirit ...” says Wood. “You get a little heartbroken.”
     The Cupcake Counter, 229 W. Madison, is perhaps the smallest retail establishment downtown. The storefront is 9 feet wide, the total space, including the kitchen in back, is 290 square feet. For Valentine’s Day it is decorated like a kindergarten, with big red hearts cut out of construction paper.
     Crumbs is more than twice the size, a difference also reflected in its products. It’s decorated with a lovely golden graphic of a jester juggling cupcakes.

   Cupcake Counter cupcakes weigh about 2¾ ounces and look exactly like the cupcakes your mother would bake and bring to your first-grade classroom in a tinfoil-lined shoebox to celebrate your birthday. The icing can be spare — sometimes it doesn’t even cover the cupcake top, but leaves a gap of bare cake rimming the crinkly paper wrapping.
      Decoration might be a single tiny red candy heart, set directly in the center. I would describe Cupcake Counter cupcakes as simple, classic cupcakes with a certain quiet dignity; solemn cupcakes, maybe even a little sorrowful; cupcakes as Wayne Thiebaud would paint them.
     Sometimes only a handful are on display.
     Across the street at Crumbs is a different story altogether. The display case is jammed with cupcakes, ranging from 1-ounce minis to the “Colossal Crumb” intended to feed eight people. The “signature” cupcakes are 7-ounce, 500-calorie behemoths the size and shape of grapefruits, domed high with icing, studded with candy, drenched in chocolate, crusted with sprinkles. Circus-like cupcakes. Mardi Gras cupcakes.
      “Most people don’t eat them by themselves,” said Crumbs district manager Sara Fina. “They share them, because you want to try everything.”
     Its “library of varieties” are produced at an outside bakery. “We give them the recipes,” said Fina, adding that Crumbs plans to open four more outposts in the Chicago area, the latest squalls in a cupcake downpour.
      “Cupcakes, cupcakes, cupcakes,” said Sarah Levy, founder of Sarah’s Pastries & Candies, a Chicago bakery. “We are definitely being bombarded. You think it’s going to be gone but it’s still going.”
      Levy said high-end cupcake boutiques first got recognition with New York’s Magnolia Bakery in “Sex and the City” and Sprinkles in Beverly Hills.
      “Lines out the door,” Levy said.
      Sprinkles opened its first shop in Chicago last July. Magnolia is planning to open here this spring.
     Cupcake Counter cupcakes are $3 apiece; Crumbs’ signature cupcakes are $3.75. I bought a few from each store to take home, taste-test and compare, and here my David-and-Goliath story falls apart.
      Though Cupcake Counter chocolate icing has a delicate cocoa note I savored, there was no night-and-day difference. The made-from-scratch-by-mom cake and the made-by-some-faceless-contractor cake tasted pretty much the same, and my family preferred Crumbs, which does give 250 percent more cupcake for 25 percent more in price.
     Not that there aren’t reasons beyond cupcakes to patronize the Cupcake Counter.
     “It was always a dream to do a business together,” said Wood. “Mom went to culinary school; I worked in advertising. That was our dream, to do something little and have it be real. We never had the interest to have 10 locations.”
      They have a tough enough time running one.
     “Food retail is so laborious,” she said, noting they arrive at 3 or 4 a.m. and stay until 7:30 p.m..
     “That’s a day,” she said.
     As for Crumbs.
     “You want to believe that people can see through it,” she said.
     Wood looked tired. What are the chances that she and her mother will hold up against a national chain?
     “Mom and I are fighters, we will never not survive,” she said. “Someone else in our shoes, I would really be concerned. We will not compromise our integrity.”
     Her mother has not stepped foot in Crumbs since it opened.
     “Why would I?” said Holly Sjo. “It’s of no concern. I’ve been to them in Beverly Hills and in New York and they’re all the same.”
     Is she concerned because they’re across the street?
     “Concerned?” she said. “A little disappointed. We have completely different products. We make everything by scratch, by hand. We do it just like your mother would do for your birthday. Every single thing we sell goes through my hands. It’s a very long day, but for me, I have no interest to do it any other way.
     “I think our recipes are different, our visual appeal, our personal commitment, you will sense that, if you were actually lucky enough to have a mom or grandma who did that. That’s what a baker is supposed to do.”
     — Originally published Feb. 13, 2011

     

    Update: The Cupcake Counter won. All 65 Crumbs stores went out of business in 2014. Sprinkles closed its Chicago operations last year. Magnolia Bakery still has a State Street location, as well as outlets in New York, California, India, Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey and the Philippines. 

     But what giant cupcakes could not kill, COVID did, and the Cupcake Counter went out of business in April, 2020. Samantha Wood moved to Florida where she formed the Sjo Agency — named for her mother — which does support work for UHNW, or "ultra high net worth" individuals.

Judge comes out swinging in nude women's spa case

Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (YouTube)

     I wrote this assuming that the paper would dash out the word "dicks." To their credit, they did not. Score one for candor.

     Context is important.
     For instance, before we dive into today's topic, I would ask you to consider the respectable business establishment, Dick's Sporting Goods, which I patronize and recommend for its wide selection and affordable prices.
     Now, imagine a roomful of detectives, hunting for clues. We could refer to them colloquially as "dicks."
     Have I softened you up for the opening line of 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence VanDyke's dissent in "Olympus Spa v. Andretti," which dropped last week, setting the legal world abuzz? Let's see.
     "This is a case about swinging dicks," VanDyke began. "The Christian owners of Olympus Spa — a traditional, Korean, women-only, nude spa — understandably don't want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don't want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the 9th Circuit."
     The case is relevant in our world where a basic fact of nature — some people born male want to live as women, and vice versa — has become a political hobbyhorse that will only see more use as the mid-term elections approach and the Republicans seek to light a fire under their base, chilled by the skein of jaw-dropping disasters their policies have wrought.
     Back to VanDyke, who recognizes the shock value of his language. He continues:
     "You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa — some as young as thirteen — to be visually assaulted by the real thing."
     Shock is a funny thing. While it seems natural, to those shocked, it also is very specific to certain times and places. White Southerners in the 1950s were shocked at the thought of Black people sharing their swimming pools. Meanwhile, in Japan, men and women bathe naked together in public baths without batting an eye. It's cultural, not natural.
     Conservatives, remember, are capable of amazing feats of imagination, when the spirit moves. They have no trouble confabulating a fetus the size of a grain of rice into a full grown "baby," nor any hesitation dictating the most intimate decisions of biological women based on that feat of fantasy. Considering trans women as women should be a piece of cake.
     Instead, we have VanDyke deploying words like "woke" and "man" with barely concealed contempt — to me, that is the shocking part. There is no question there are slivers of life where the existence of trans people pose challenges to be sorted out. Girls high school athletics come to mind. It's that sense of angry grievance that is sad and puzzling. Why must MAGA always be the victims?

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Restaurant field notes: Mariscos San Pedro

     The rain raised a question: should we stay home?
      Actually, it was my wife who posed it, as dinnertime approached Sunday night and the rain pelted down. She asked twice, in fact: once before we got in the car, a second time as we drove along Shermer, toward Dundee and the expressway, the wipers swishing furiously.
     Though I am a committed fan of staying home, I also like to get out, now and then. True, we'd met friends for dinner the night before, to soak up the St. Patrick's Day fun at Hackney's on Lake. 
      But our younger son and daughter-in-law had suggested dinner at a new seafood place, Mariscos San Pedro, 1227 W. 18th St., in Pilsen. New to us; they'd been there several times, always a good sign. The twin lure of their company, plus experiencing a new restaurant, drove me forward. Plus I really like to go to Pilsen, and pondered whether Panaderia Nuevo Leon might be open so late on a Sunday and, if so, could we make a pit stop to load up on ginger pigs.

     Well, all that, and not becoming the sort of old boot deterred by rain. "We'd love to actually do what we said we'd do, but it was wet out..." My wife had edited herself out of the equation. Had she asked, "Should we go?" I might have given it more careful consideration. "Do you feel up to it?" was a challenge, and must be answered with a Teddy Roosevelt like thump of the fist on the steering wheel. "By jove yes! Capital day! Onward into the maelstrom!" I have my pride.

     "If April showers bring May flowers," I asked, "what do March showers bring?" To which my wife answered something along the effect of, "March monsoons bring doom and gloom."
     Prior to the rain question, she had asked, "Do we need to dress up?" A charming thought that, now that I set it down, seems plucked from a fairy tale. I called up the Mariscos San Pedro web site on my phone and showed her a video of the place. A guy in a baseball cap and half-zip. 
     "You'll be fine," I said. "It's just expensive. Expensive doesn't mean 'fancy' anymore."
      What does "expensive" even signify nowadays, particularly in regard to restaurants? During the traditional scope-out-the-menu session we'd held earlier in the day — part of the fun of going out is strategizing dinner ahead of time — I'd settled on the "Whole Dorade with Red & Green Adobo" for $48, which is $31 more than I'd spent on my Hackney Burger with cheese the night before.

Ceviche and tuna tostadas.

      So out of the comfort zone. But I'm shifting from a careful-conservation-of-resources approach  toward a fuck-it-we're-all-gonna-die-someday attitude toward life, which, after all, is to be lived.
     Though like most well-laid plans, that got scrapped in the restaurant. My son and daughter-in-law have not only been to Mariscos San Pedro before, but honeymooned in Mexico City with the express purpose of chowing down at Michelin star restaurants on a budget. So they know.
     "We'll put ourselves in your hands," I told my son. Sharing adds to the fun. He ordered.
     We started off with a snapper ceviche, served on crispy rounds, and a pair of tuna tostadas that were bright and refreshing, the serviche sprinkled with toasted coconut, the tostadas emboldened by chunks of orange.

Duck confit tamales, and pan de elotes.

      The next round was a pair of duck confit tamales with mole — rich and tasty — and a pan de elotes, which my wife found far too sweet to consume. 
      For the main course, we dug into that whole dorade — Spanish for sea bream — piling it on small green tacos. I can't say I was bowled over by its complicated panoply of flavors; it was good, and I ate it.
     Service was brisk and efficient — not a lot of chit chat. I wash down dinner with a lot of water, and they kept it coming. I'd have plunged in and grabbed an NA margarita, but nobody else at the table was drinking, beyond my son's Topo Chico mineral water, and plain water worked fine.

     One doesn't usually notice the table at a restaurant, but this one had these deep grooves radiating out from a center circle, and I pointed this out as an obvious design flaw. "They can never get that clean," I said, and we fell to discussing various solutions. We saw they had tried. One of the grooves had been filled in, with a kind of clear resin, which looks hideous, and explained why the rest weren't attempted. Maybe the tables were acquired cheaply second-hand from Dusek's, a beloved gastro-pub that occupied the space previously. But my heart went out to the person who thought, "Hey, cool tables, I'll get them for my restaurant."

Dorado

     The room, located in Thalia Hall, was long and festive, with cartoony paintings of seafood, laid out like a long-ago bar retrofitted into a hip new restaurant, or maybe a pair of bars, as there is a long second room off to the side, for overflow. The place wasn't crowded, but then it was Sunday night in a downpour.
     What most impressed me — and I hope this isn't damning by faint praise — is the wallpaper in the bathroom. Really fun, with crawfish. Once when the waitress swept by, I opened my mouth, ready to say, "I love the wallpaper in your bathroom." But she was not the talkative sort, as I've mentioned, and I try to tamp down embarrassing my progeny when I can all avoid it, so said nothing, shutting up being an art form I struggle to master.
    They had some small dessert bites — a $4 macaron, a petite scoop of ice cream. I was seduced by a horchata tiramisu — I have a powerful love for horchata which was eaten by the table, though without particular enthusiasm. I considered taking a picture of the pastry, but it didn't strike me as worth the effort. We later decided it didn't taste very horchata-like.
     I thanked my son for the venue selection and told him I'd go back — the highest praise I could muster, not adding the implied "...with you." Left to my own devices in Pilsen, I'm still making a beeline for 5 Rabinitas. Grilled chicken in garlic honey marinade. Now that's something worth going out in a rainstorm for.