Meet my metaphors #4: Smack into the mitt

     Not being a sports guy, I don't use many sports metaphors. It's never fourth and long in my world. I seldom swing for the fences.
     That said, I do have select favorites, as revealed in this 2012 column that artfully dances around something that would never get near the paper today, for a variety of reasons. First, because we have to buy our own phones now. And second, well, you'll see.

     A batter who decides to not swing at a ball lets it smack into the catcher's mitt — I don't have to explain that, right? The beauty of sports metaphors — everybody understands them.
     The original headline was "A smart phone king of the hill." Make sure to notice the game metaphor in the last sentence.

     "Can I turn Neil on?” she asked. I contemplated her ­— blonde, expectant — while weighing my response.
     Sometimes your whole career can teeter on a knife edge. The person to whom she was posing the question — a technician standing by me — said nothing. I gazed at an imaginary spot floating in the air about a foot above my head and to the left, and simply waited.
     “I’m going to let that one smack into the mitt,” I said, taking refuge in sports metaphor. They both looked at me blankly.
     “Sometimes you have to just leave the bat on your shoulder,” I elaborated. Another long pause.
     “Ohhh...” she sad, getting it, or pretending to. “Turn on” — an antiquated phrase that old people use. Shades of “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.” An inappropriate 1960s drug/sexual reference. All three of us busily turned our attention to the device that she had called by my given name. Its actual name is a Samsung Galaxy S II or, to use the vernacular, a phone.
     Smart phone week at the Sun-Times, and we all trooped up to the 10th floor to meet our new devices — our second selves, apparently. I don’t want to make too big of a deal about this woman calling my phone by my name. Lots of products have been anthropomorphized over the years. Hats, for instance. Freud wrote an essay arguing that hats are symbols for men, a common sentiment a century ago. “Your hat is YOU!” one company advertised.
     We aren’t that direct about our phones, but their impact on the murky nether worlds of the id and the ego are the same. Some of my colleagues received Apple iPhone 4s, the rest of us got Galaxies, and, vain as newspaper columnists tend to be, I instantly focused in on the pecking order aspect — was this an indication of status? Am I “out”? Have I been slighted? Apple of course is the platinum, ne plus ultra electronic device. I could see a sleek white iPhone 4 box with Rick Telander’s name written on it. Of course. The best for the best. The Samsung box, meanwhile, is half yellow with rainbow discs. It looks like something made to contain a cat toy. Was I not Apple-worthy? If my phone is going to be me, shouldn’t it — shouldn’t I — be the best possible? I raised a weak protest ­— could I not just take Rick’s iPhone instead? He doesn’t care. He doesn’t need status from his phone. I do.
     No, no, the tech folk said, obviously used to such pleading. These decisions have been made high above. The Apples are for people ... well ... who need Apples. The Samsungs....
     “Yours is bigger!” the tech guy said brightly, subtly returning to the object-as-a-man motif. Indeed it was but .... well, let’s move on.
     I was booted over to a third tech person, an earnest man in his 20s who had the tech guy outfit right out of Central Casting: blue jeans, plaid shirt, unshaven, newsboy cap. He pointed out the button used to turn the phone on, instructed me how to press that button, then became lost in trying to link to the network.
     I watched. An odd moment — the phone wasn’t even mine yet, but already on the fritz.
     “For the record, I haven’t done anything to it yet!” I announced to the room.
     “Play with it!” he enthused, continuing the metaphor, shooing me out the door. “Try new apps!”
      A few pokes and the apps popped up. Books. Lewis Carroll. “Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next.”
     You and me both, Alice, you and me both.
     An hour later, back in my office, the new phone surprised me by ringing. I took the Galaxy out of my pocket, fumbled to the phone screen, and tapped the green button. And tapped. Yet it didn’t answer. Later, my 14-year-old son — who has had this phone for a year— explained, “You have to SLIDE it.” Oh, of course. Why didn’t anyone tell me that? Seriously. At least tell us how to answer the phone. At lunch, I met my brother.
     “Got a new phone!” I bragged, then told him about the Apple v. Samsung crisis.
     “This is better,” he said, and gestured down to his phone ­— a Galaxy S. Now, I don’t know much about phones, but I know that the S II is better than the plain old S. His has a tiny keyboard that slides out — obviously a technological dead end.
     “The S3 is coming out,” my brother said. “I’m not sure when, but I might get it.” Until then, I have the best, most up-to-datest. I immediately checked to see how long I’ll enjoy the Alpha Dog Samsung. Until June 21. That’s when the new S3 arrives. Two weeks. This technological king of the hill is a losing game.
    — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 6, 2012

Meet my metaphors #3: World War II

     If I had to point to one history book that completely changed my thinking, the first one to come to mind would be Studs Terkel's "The Good War." Not as a famous as his classics like "Division Street America" or "Working," "The Good War" is a oral history of the Second World War.

      Of course I knew about the war already. Growing up in the '60s, I was brought up on it. My father had been 12 when the war ended, the prime age to absorb all the romantic details of battle without running the risk of getting killed. Though I doubt he was guiding my education, not pressing the tales of men, battle and equipment upon me, so much as I was living in the post-victory air of triumph.
     So I read books like "Air War Against Hitler's Germany" with crippled B-17s fighting off the German Messerschmitts on their way to bomb the ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt. (And the fact that I can unspool that sentence without checking 50 years after reading the source tells you something). On my bedroom door I had, not a rock star poster, but one from the Air & Space Museum called "Know your enemy" show the silhouettes of military aircraft. I knew what a dihedral is (the upward angle of a plane's wings). I not only knew the name of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, the Enola Gay — everyone knew that — but the island in the Marianas it took off from on its run over Hiroshima, Tinian, and the name of the pilot, Paul Tibbets.

     All of this thanks to "Hear it Now," a boxed set of 45s of Edward R. Murrow's aural history of 1933-1945. I played it so much I had it memorized.
     I start reading "The Good War" and met an amazing crew of pacifists, war resisters, deserters, factory workers — the cream of Terkel's leftie world. And I realize that yes, we won the war, but humanity was then as humanity is now, a broad spectrum of belief. I had bought a story that was somewhere between a fantasy and a lie. We defeated the Nazis — that was good. But it didn't make us saints, before or after.

     Even seeing the truth, or the truth as curated by Studs Terkel,  I was slow to surrender the romantic myth.
     When I wanted to say I was outnumbered, I'd evoke the pair of Navy pilots who raced to a small airfield at Pearl Harbor and took off in two fighters, rising to meet the onslaught. Here I am in 2002 writing about remodeling our decrepit farm house:

     The actual buying of the house wasn't precisely a surprise attack — I mean, we knew what we were signing. But the repercussions certainly were unanticipated, with wave after wave of repairs and set-backs and projects sweeping over us, while we dove behind barrels and tried to get our pathetically inadequate remodeling forces off the ground at Hickham Field.

     Note that, 61 years after the fact, I assume the reader will know what I'm talking about or, more likely, didn't pause to consider they might not. Although, in those pre-Google days, I should point out that George Welch and Kenneth Taylor got their P-40s off the ground at Haleiwa Field, 11 miles away from Hickam, no "h." Their squadron was originally based at Hickam, but had moved to a smaller field, which is why the planes weren't destroyed in the opening attack.
     Ten years later I was still at it, commenting on Chicago's response to a front page pan of my Chicago memoir and two others in the New York Times Book Review, posting this on Facebook:

     There are other examples — in 2019, I began my South American diary this way:

     The solidly-built young man had a full red-beard and was dressed all in black, from his watch cap to his sneakers. His new bags — hip, if luggage can be hip — were also black, as were the clothes and luggage of his friend, who wore a Dutch cap.
     A quip occurred to me.
     "Are you lads on your way to blow up the bridge over the Remagen?" I thought, but did not say. Shutting up is an art form, and mentioning obscure bits of World War II trivia — capturing the Remagen bridge over the Rhine was vital to the Allies forces drive to Berlin in the spring of 1945 — to young strangers is not a practice embraced by those aspiring to be au courant. Okay, hipsters try to look like commandos when they're not aping lumberjacks; deal with it.

     Notice that I felt the need to explain what I was talking about. That is considerate, but leaches the power from a metaphor. If you say, "I was in hell — which is very hot and unpleasant," maybe you need to find another way to describe where you are. I believe it's time to retire all World War II imagery, put it on the shelf along with the Civil War and the Battle of Hastings. A third of millennials can't say who won World War II, and I assume a significant number don't realize the war occurred.  One duty of a writer is to be understood, and while it may be satisfying to deploy a well-worn, well-loved metaphor, if it's met with a puzzled shrug, what have you accomplished? Nothing.

     That said, as with Lord Jim, freeing my mind of the Good War might not be so easy. After I wrote the above, I needed a headline for a column about Ozempic, and my first, immediate thought was, "Praise God and pass the Ozempic."  Another Pearl Harbor reference. Chaplain Howell Forgy, on the USS New Orleans, despite his non-combatant status, encouraged the line of sailors passing ammo to gunners with "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," which became a 1942 patriotic song by Frank Loesser.

    And yes, when I saw I'd mis-remembered "The Lord" as "God" I did fix it. Though there was no need. Nobody other than myself was ever going to notice.

    Not quite true. The very next day, Facebook memories served up a column from 2018: "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition to Beto O'Rourke," about the need to support Democratic candidates, such as the guy who for a moment seemed like he'd defeat Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas. Well, that's one headline trope I'm never using again. I hope.

     

Meet my metaphors #2: Richard Scarry

  

    I'm on vacation for the next few weeks. To give you SOMETHING to read, I've prepared a self-indulgent look at some of my favorite metaphors. Feel free to add your own in comments, such as "Neil's foray into butter-churning made me feel sad that, with so much momentous news going on, he'd decided to turn his back on the news and wander off into the fading past."

   The Boston Marathon Bombing occurred on gorgeous spring day in 2013. Before news of the awful crime hit me, I was strolling happily around the leafy suburban paradise of my hometown, Northbrook, taking in the splendid weather and nature reborn.

     In the solemn-though-resolute column that appeared two days later in the Sun-Times, I tried to convey the sense of comfort of that stroll, the sense of security that such terrorist attacks are intended to shatter: 

     Pedestrians smiled at the cute dog, a little girl on a scooter cast a longing look. We paused to let Janet, the always-friendly crossing guard, pet her. If you gave the people kitten faces and piglet tails, it could have been a page from a Richard Scarry children’s book.

     Perhaps that's asking a lot of the average reader. If I say my basement is the setting of a Stephen King short story, there's a good chance most people will at least have some idea what I'm talking about when I deployed that metaphor. 

     Then again, I should probably define my terms. A metaphor uses an image to explain something — my daily walk is a spread in a Richard Scarry book. As opposed to a simile, which uses "like" or "as" — my routine is like a Bear's in a Richard Scarry book.

     That said, who is Richard Scarry? Not an obscure reference, surely — the man illustrated 150 books, selling 100 million copies. But not a household name either. Chris Ware, the genius cartoonist whose work has settled into art — think of him as this generation's Saul Steinberg, to employ another metaphor — wrote a tribute to Scarry last year in the Yale Review. He describes the "big blue, green, and red shiny square of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever" this way:

     The largish (even just plain large if you were smallish when holding it) book offered a visual index of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept, ate, played, and worked.
     The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in Best Word Book Ever. Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats, foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves — they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.”  

     "Didn't seem to picture the things themselves — they were the things themselves." That's metaphor in a nutshell. Ware is seven years younger than I am, and while Scarry's books were essentials in his deep childhood — he would carry them around, mirroring his activities to the animals in the book — to me, they were a step removed, books for my younger brother, two years older than Ware. As with Sesame Street, which debuted when I was 9, I could coolly appreciate Richard Scarry from the relative maturity of being 10, but it wasn't embedded in my heart, though I agree with Ware that, "Richard Scarry somehow made me feel safe and settled."

Policeman Small

     In my pre-kindergarten years, my formative text was Lois Lenski's "Policeman Small" (1962), the last in a series of books that began in 1934 with "The Little Auto" and moved through "The Little Fire Engine," and "The Little Airplane," and such,  starring Fireman Small, Pilot Small, etc. Stories that also modeled regular life, such labelling parts of a hook and ladder truck. To compare the two artists is to realize just how complicated, how busy, crowded and diverse life can get in only a decade. Everybody in Lenski's world is white, for instance, and her books have faded compared to Scarry's work, which benefits from the characters being pigs and bears and rabbits. "Policeman Small" stood out from the others for another reason, beside its star finally making it into the title. There was music to a song at the book's beginning, "Oh, Do You Know Policeman Small." My mother would play it on the piano and we would sing together, but I would still never use Lenski's world as a metaphor — how many readers would know what I am talking about? 

     A situation I struggle against — employing an image that sails over 99 percent of readers' heads. A writer has to please himself; but, ideally, not only himself.

     With Scarry, there's at least a shot of people getting it, though I imagine most know nothing of his life and never bothered to find out — I didn't, until I read Ware's piece.

     The man himself was born in Boston in 1919, Scarry's father ran a department store, and when his son, an indifferent student, began to study drawing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, delivered this classic and very wrong prediction: "“You will live in a garret and eat nothing but spaghetti.”

     Drafted, Scarry drew his way through World War II, enjoying "the best war ever," with posts in Oran, Venice and Paris.

    Scarry was so successful that by 1967 he could take a three-week ski vacation in Switzerland and decide to never come back.  He died in 1994 in Gstaad.

    Ware makes an interesting observation related to how Scarry's ex-pat status colored his work:

     A decidedly un-American tone runs through much of it. By "un-American" I don't mean anti-American. Instead, I mean there's a top-down, citizen-as-responsible-contributor, sense-of-oneself-as-part-of-something-bigger that feels, well, civilized...the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman's guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which American was barreling in the late 1960s."

      Toward the end of the Yale Review piece, which I encourage everyone to read (It's worth the price of admission just for Random House fretting pre-publication over the title, "What Do People Do All Day?" soon to be a massive best-seller for half a century, because there were no people actually in it). Ware lets loose this glorious sentence: "Like it or not, just as adulthood runs roughshod over childhood, words chew images to shreds, and it's up to the artist — or the writer or the cartoonist — to put those images back together again."

     I certainly view my reality as far darker than Scarry's lovely world, and at times the two collide, as in this 2014 post, when I try to step out of my own jolly self-perception and imagine what my neighbors might actually think of me:

     While most suburbanites don't visit their neighbors without getting in a car, I like that we live cheek-by-jowl to downtown, or to what passes for a downtown in Northbrook, and can walk everywhere. Doing so makes me feel like a character in a Richard Scarry story, if you remember those brightly colored children's books where friendly animal characters are always going about quotidian tasks, bakers baking and police officers directing traffic and such. My self-image during these strolls is not precisely a bear in a fedora waving his paw at a pig in a white apron. But very close. (I won't speculate on how I'm actually perceived, the likelihood of Northbrook mothers cautioning their naughty children with, "Now you behave, or I'll turn you over to the Scary Wandering Man and he'll put you in a pie and eat you for his dinner.")

Frontplate of "Policeman Small" by Lois Lenski (Walck, 1962)

Meet my metaphors #1: Lord Jim

Hedy Lamar as Tondelayo in the 1942 film "White Cargo."
Thurber, writing in 1933, was referring to the book.

     I'm not in the paper for the next two weeks — taking time off. So as not to leave you in the lurch, I'm starting with a series I'm calling "Meet my metaphors." Why that? Honestly, I'm the type of writer who would rather coin a sharp, original metaphor than break real news. Assuming that's a "type" and not solely me. Is that a good or bad thing? Probably both. As always, your indulgence is appreciated.

     Lord Jim, Conrad's haunted wanderer, seemed the natural place to begin.

     Growing up, I loved James Thurber. Loved "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." Loved "The Catbird Seat." Loved the cartoons. Loved the man himself, half blind, often fully drunk, early on pairing up, quite improbably, with the trim, generally upright E.B. White. As a young man, I wanted to be James Thurber.
     I particularly loved his similes. Nearing 40, his "faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening." He worries about heading to his publisher and disappearing "like Ambrose Bierce." Both found in the second paragraph of "Preface to a Life," at the beginning of his classic "My Life and Hard Times."
    That slim volume's "A Note at the End" contains this passage that has never left me:

    The mistaken exits and entrances of my thirties have moved me several times to some thought of spending the rest of my days wandering aimlessly around the South Seas, like a character out of Conrad, silent and inscrutable. But the necessity for frequent visits to my oculist and dentist has prevented this. You can't be running back from Singapore every few months to get your lenses changed and still retain the proper mood for wandering. Furthermore, my horn-rimmed glasses and my Ohio accent betray me, even when I sit on the terrasses of little tropical cafes, wearing a pith helmet, starting straight ahead, and twitching a muscle in my jaw. I found this out when I tried wandering around the West Indies one summer. Instead of being followed by the whispers of men and the glances of women, I was followed by bead salesmen and native women with postcards. Nor did any dark girl, looking at all like Tondelayo in "White Cargo," come forward and offer to go to pieces with me. They tried to sell me baskets.
     Under these circumstances it is impossible to inscrutable, and a wanderer who isn't inscrutable might just as well be back at Broad and High Streets in Columbus sitting in the Baltimore Dairy Lunch
     There was, of course, even for Conrad's Lord Jim, no running away. The cloud of his special discomfiture followed him like a pup, no matter what ships he took or what wildernesses he entered.

      I thought about, and referred to, this passage for many years — I think it kept me from ever even being tempted to become one of those adventuresome young people who travel for long stretches, spend a long time staring at some distant horizon, considering themselves thus ennobled. Now that I reread the above, I realize that one of my favorite similes I believe I coined — that certain annoyances follow me "quacking like a pull toy duck," is just a reworking of Thurber's tagalong pup.

     Eventually I read Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim," and was surprised at how dense and difficult it is. 

    But a handy metaphor — that is, an image useful in explaining something. In 2020, trying to fathom the collapse of Republican leadership in "Struggling to understand GOP cowardice," I summarized the plot — and you know a metaphor is on its last legs when you have to explain it:

     But when reflecting on the moral repugnance of men like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — four powerful Republican senators who know better, who see what Trump is attempting, yet do nothing, or worse abet him — I search history in vain for similar craven cowardice.
     Literature offers a few: “Lord Jim,” by Joseph Conrad. Jim is a British sailor on the crew of the Patna, a ship on the Red Sea. The ship founders, and the captain and crew — and after some hesitation, Jim — abandon the ship and its 800 Muslim pilgrims.
     Only the Patna doesn’t sink. It’s towed into port, and Jim and his shipmates are publicly vilified. He wanders the world, fleeing his shame. But that’s fiction.

     The book, if I recall properly, is narrated by an admirer of Jim's, Captain Marlowe, with more homoerotic notes than I had expected in a novel written in 1900.
   Asked in 2015 to wax eloquent on the plight of Steve Bartman (have we finally forgotten?) the man unfairly blamed for the Cubs' 2003 collapse against the Marlins in a decisive game in the National League Championship, I supported his careful silence:

     What could Bartman possibly say that would reward the media for its dozen-year quest? He could have lived the existence of Job, squatting in dust at the gates of the city, and express it with the eloquence of Joseph Conrad describing Lord Jim's wanderings around the South Seas, trying to escape his shame, and frankly it would still be inadequate. Silence is his best option.

     Being a meek man afraid of rigors, of course I embrace Thurber's self-assessment, even if it means grabbing a 126-year-old character most readers have never heard of. This, from last year, writing about getting a passport of an upcoming trip aboard:

    I am what they call "a worrier." You probably already figured that out. And I knew as the cab pulled away from my house, heading off to our big trip, in addition to my worrying about the toaster coming to life and setting fire to the drapes which we don't have, and the refrigerator door hanging open, and everything else I conjure up to mock the idea that I am Conradian wanderer out of Lord Jim, I'll also worry until we get back that every checkpoint we pass would snag me on my passport. "Oh sorry Mr., ah, Steinberg, your whole trip is ruined because your passport expires five months and 27 days after this trip is scheduled to end..."

     Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Time to retire Lord Jim. Yes, I will do so. If I can. I know he's loitering languorously somewhere along one of the dusty, narrow back alleys of my brain, in white hat and linen suit, flipping through a small volume he has picked up off a stand. It will be no easy task to find him and flush him out.

 

Dunkin' Bagels

Actual bagels made in Brooklyn

     A friend of mine flew out of Midway on Friday. Had she asked me, I would have strongly advised her to a) never buy food at an airport if you can possibly avoid it and b) never eat at a Dunkin' Donuts for any reason whatsoever and c) never forget, of the range of foodstuff never eaten at the Dunkin' Donuts you never patronize, to particularly abstain from ordering bagels. You risk rending the fabric of time.
     Not to minimize her food service nightmare, which was sufficiently nuts that I asked if she would permit me to share her subsequent complaint to Dunkin's, if only to ladle the scorn upon Dunkin's that they deserve on their best day. In her defense, she was under the impression that a Great American Bagel was at Midway ("don’t mistake me for someone who thinks a Dunkin Donuts bagel is acceptable" is how she phrased it, in our considerable post -fiasco parsing) and was looking for that, when its non-presence made her stoop to order a Dunkin's bagel (heck, they can't even make a good DONUT, in my estimation). She asked that I shield her identity to escape the shame of patronizing Dunkin' Donuts — whose coffee, I am told, can be acceptable — and I agreed. 

     Greetings, your Twitter account suggested I DM you with feedback re concessions. 
     First, please find a way to put a few tables along the terminals and especially at the ends. Many of the concessions have no seating areas themselves, so you buy food that really requires more than a lap at the end of terminal B and then find you have to walk all the way back to the start to sit down. 
     Two: If you can contact whoever manages the Midway Dunkin' Donuts to pass along my input, please do: since the central DD was so jammed I walked to the end of Terminal B and ordered two sesame bagels sliced and well toasted and a medium coffee. First I had to persuade the counter person to take my order, because even though she was doing nothing, she insisted I use the kiosk. But the kiosk would not let me choose a bagel flavor. Finally she sulkily agreed to take the order.
      Some time later I got the coffee and asked where the creamers were. They seemed shocked that anyone would put cream in coffee but eventually brought me a paper cup with about two drops of milk in it. When I asked for more, like Oliver Twist, the worker turned to a manager and said, “Do I have to give it to her?” 
     Finally I had my coffee and bag of bagels and realized there was nowhere for my husband and I to eat. We ran back to the center to be able to sit and eat before our flight. Ripped open the bag and found that the DD people at the end of the terminal had put the bagels into the toaster without slicing them. I took the bagels to the nearby center Dunkin and asked the girl at the window to help me out on that. She stared at me, then continued handing out other orders as soon as I made space at the counter, thinking my problem would be attended to. After a while I realized no one was going to help me. The girl at there would not respond to me so I finally had to stand right at the window again until she asked me to move so she could hand out other orders. I repeated my problem. She claimed it wasn’t Dunkin bagels. I showed her the Dunkin bag. A manager came over and finally agreed to give me a refund and charge me for new bagels. But then he couldn’t make the register work. 
     Eventually he agreed to give me two new bagels, and when I asked for two sesame, he said Dunkin' Donuts doesn’t have sesame at the airport. I pointed out that I had just purchased two from Dunkin' at the airport. Then he got really nasty. Eventually we agreed on two plain bagels, sliced and well toasted. I don’t ask for and did not receive fresh cream cheese. And when I opened the bag, I found two plain bagels barely warm, not at all toasted. All this cost me, with tip, almost $17. I finally went to Tall Boy Tacos and got a breakfast burrito, costing me $18 more dollars. Quite an expensive breakfast. I will send you next a picture of the Dunkin with its sesame bagels—and a sign identifying them as such. Thank you.

Know your enemy: buckthorn

Fear it.

     I had more fun with my column on Arbor Day than a person should probably have while getting paid. The first draft ran 30 percent long, and I had to leave a few interesting bits on the cutting room floor. Hallmark and American Greetings do not sell Arbor Day cards, as far as I can tell — I cut that first, as it's hard to prove a negative, and figured I was inviting someone to wave their some undetected Hugs for Trees series under my nose.
    Beer companies also do up the holiday — I checked because initially I said they didn't, then thought: "Better find out." The following was trimmed from the end of the first graph:

     A few small local beer companies make an effort — Yards Brewing in Philadelphia has "ArBrew Day," giving away free saplings and beer. But the big boys stand pat, waiting for Memorial Day. A pity. I'd like to see Angry Orchard do it up right. "Slam a cold hard cider for the trees that made it!"

     One of the Arbor Day tips I suggested was this:

     Learn what buckthorn is — an aggressively invasive tree, illegal in Illinois to buy, sell or plant, that will crowd out the entirety of nature if we let it — and carefully pull the next sprout you see.

     But I couldn't imagine anyone actually doing it.
     The only lawful way to plant buckthorn is if you get a permit and are studying improved ways to kill it. Once buckthorn takes hold, you can't pull it, you have to dig it out. I try to get an early jump. I walked my yard yesterday, for the second time this spring, doing buckthorn suppression. I must have dug out 25 buckthorn sprouts. Their roots race to the center of the earth and if you wait until they're six inches tall they can be devilishly hard to extract. When we bought this property, 25 years ago, the northeast corner of our yard had buckthorn trees 15 feet tall, and without constant vigilance, they'll be back in no time. Friday I took out a tree that had hidden inside a large bush that was easily seven feet tall, with thorns an inch long (they call it buckthorn for a reason). Some of my neighbors down the block still have buckthorn hedges, decades old, and while I have considered stopping by with a gas can and wordlessly setting them on fire, that would be wrong. The birds gobble their berries and poop the seeds in my yard. Sadly, buckthorns are not illegal to own, though that would be a logical next step if any legislator wants to take the hint. We're in a war and buckthorn is winning.

We love trees. So why isn't Arbor Day a bigger deal?

"A-mal-gam" by Nick Cave.

     Happy Arbor Day! Did it sneak up on you, again? Or are you ready with the ... well, not a lot to do on Arbor Day. No gifts to give, no cards to send. No parties to throw unless you're a municipality, and even then, they celebrate by doing the same thing they do all year long: Put a few trees in the ground. It's like treating your wife to dinner at home and a TV show for her birthday.
     It doesn't make sense. Love is elusive, fleeting, heartbreaking, yet Valentine's Day is huge. Trees are everywhere, permanent, uplifting. Yet we give them the cold shoulder. Why isn't Arbor Day a bigger deal?
     "That's a really good question," said David Horvath, a certified arborist with the Davey Tree Expert Company. "It doesn't get much mention in the media. You guys aren't reporting on it."
     Oh right. Our fault. Maybe so. This is my first Arbor Day column in 30 years. Horvath must have detected my air of injury, because he mused that lack of attention might be a good thing.
     "We're doing a pretty good job, preserving trees," he said. "We don't have a lot of news stories about hundreds of acres being clear cut."
     Not yet. That may be coming, with the Trump administration dismantling the U.S. Forest Service and going gaga for logging.
     It's a good time to reaffirm our love of trees. Trees are cool, and very Chicago. How so? For starters, we have a direct, familial link to Arbor Day: J. Sterling Morton, who created Arbor Day in 1872 as a way to forest treeless Nebraska. Fifty years later, his son Joy Morton, founder of Morton Salt, created the Morton Arboretum on his country estate in west suburban Lisle.
     Arbor Day was a state-by-state affair until 1970, when Richard Nixon established national Arbor Day as the last Friday in April (though states still celebrate at peak planting times. Texas Arbor Day is the first Friday in November).
     The city of Chicago has about 3.5 million trees, and I wish I could tell you a dozen tree stories. Space limits us to one. In 1972, students voted for an Illinois state tree. The white oak won. At Austin High School, however, students disagreed, pooled their money — each chipped in a penny — and bought a black oak, which they planted in the school courtyard.
     "The black student body felt a closer identification with this type of oak," the Chicago Daily News helpfully explained. (The tree, alas, is no longer there, according to the Chicago Public Schools. "No sign of the black oak tree," said Ben Pagani, of CPS, who added engineers were sent to scope out the situation).

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A note on comments

 

"Expressman" by Norman Rockwell
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     You can't comment after stories on the Sun-Times homepage, and haven't been able to for quite a while — since 2014. Why did we stop posting them? Doing so was a pain in the ass, and patrolling the racist, sexist, unkind remarks was a full-time job — often taking more editorial time than writing the stories themselves. There was no upside. Nobody said, "Yeah, I read the Sun-Times because the comments after stories are so sharp."

     Most papers don't post them.         

     Not that the negative comments were uninteresting. They were, but in a bad way. You couldn't run a story about a 6-year-old getting hit by a bus without having the lad taunted in the comments. It was sad. To read them was to flip over a rock and expose the underside of human life, better left hidden. 

     Despite such drawbacks, I allow comments on my blog because they seem to encourage engagement, and vetting them is not particularly difficult. I get to answer reader questions. I often learn things — facts, ideas, perspectives, arguments. True, I have to read them, which takes time. Sometimes I'm torn whether something is so toxic and crazy that its entertainment value outweighs the unpleasantness of reading it.

     I vet them rigorously. I don't want to let EGD devolve into a carnival of cruelty and snark. There is enough of that everywhere else.

     But comments are valuable. They alert me to typos, errors, oversights — that's important in a one man show (though it really isn't; I have you).

     Sometimes I get sucked into personalities. I try to avoid prima donas. Only room for one of those here, me. I don't mind people telling me I'm mistaken, more or less politely — if they're telling me I'm mistaken because I'm a idiot, well, bad enough that I have to read it, it's funny that someone would think I'd want to share the news on my own blog. I'm trying to hide the fact that I'm an idiot, not ballyhoo it. 
     Sometimes I just don't feel like having a topic explored. The Israeli policy on hanging Palestinians seems patently racist, mind-boggling and grotesque, but that doesn't mean I want someone to expound upon it at length under an unrelated post. Sometimes I'm just not in the mood for a certain topic. It's my show, and I can call the tunes.

     To post or not is a spot judgment call. Sometimes I delete a remark and immediately regret it — sometimes it's a slip of the hand, honestly. I don't like out-of-the-blue comments, but sometimes an unrelated comment is valuable. Under yesterday's Ozempic post, a reader complained about these bothersome McAfee ads that pop up on the paper's web site. I asked him to send me an email, and, full-service columnist that I am, forwarded it to the paper's CEO and the editor-in-chief. Both responded — we value our readers — and said that this is a real issue, that other people have complained, including staffers, that solutions were being discussed in meetings, and they were on it. So hurrah for us, right? 

     Sometimes readers will be inspired to go on in-depth personal reminiscences — we're mostly  old, remember — and I tend to post those, though I'm not sure what they add to the conversation. When I reflect on my past, I begin by assuming, correctly, that nobody but nobody cares what happened to me, and I have to find a way to slather on enough art to make them care. Others give it a shot, with varying degrees of success, and I don't see a reason not to share them. 

     Lately, when people sign up, in my little note thanking them, I invite the new readers to comment — sincerely. I do appreciate people taking the time to read, and to comment, and feel a piece has resonated when it gets 20 or 30 comments and not just two or three. If you haven't commented yet, please do. It's fun, apparently.

    There have been, since the blog began in 2013, exactly 4,878 posts, and over 60,000 comments. Or an average of about a dozen comments per post. That isn't bad. The record, I believe, is my ill-starred 2023 introduction to Aldi, which drew 138 remarks, most of them pro-Aldi. I think comments add to the experience that is everygoddamnday.com. So long as you take the time to write them, I will take the time to read them, and post all that bring something to the table, and more than a few that don't. 

     

Praise the Lord and pass the Ozempic

     Sure, I’m taking Ozempic. Aren’t you? Isn’t everybody?
     OK, that’s an exaggeration. There’s also Zepbound and Wegovy and all those other drugs that belong to the GLP-1 class of weight-blasting tonics. Some folks take those instead (though really, just among us Ozempic users — we view those as cheap knockoffs, right? Like a restaurant serving Red Gold ketchup instead of Heinz. We’ve got the good stuff).
     Thirty million American adults — 1 in 8 — take GLP-1 drugs, which not only curb your appetite so you can be a svelter, happier, more successful you, but seem to offer a wide and expanding range of positive results, from quieting the howl of addiction to healing brain trauma. According to the rapidly building data, taking such drugs can cut your risk of heart attack or stroke by 20%. I mentioned to a young person of my acquaintance that I was taking Ozempic, and he expressed an emotion not often heard when old people are cataloging their medicines: envy. Ozempic is supposed to keep you young, he said, wishing he could get some.
     I believe that ship has already sailed for me, though freezing the decline process at this point would be welcome.
     All of this is relatively new. Ozempic received FDA approval in December 2017. Researchers are dancing as fast as they can, but if after 10 full years of use, Ozempic causes your head to tumble off your shoulders, then the joke will be on humanity, again. Remember another hugely popular drug that helps keep you thin, nicotine. People didn’t figure out tobacco’s lethality for 400 years after Europeans first embraced it. Millions still haven’t.
     Though given Ozempic’s fat-busting abilities, we’ll accept the occasional head bouncing down the sidewalk, giving it a quick soccer flick as we pass.
     Despite dieting continually for the past half-century — I’ve counted more calories than stars in the known universe — I would have never sought out Ozempic had Type I diabetes not fried my pancreas and a doctor suggested I might try it. Technically, Ozempic is used for Type II diabetes, to help your not-dead pancreas produce insulin, which doesn’t mean much if the organ is merely decorative (There’s a fun online shop for Type I diabetes T-shirts and various gadgets called “The Useless Pancreas.”) But apparently mine is still quivering, kind of — I seem to have what some call Type 1.5; doctors tend to shrug and mumble when pressed for details — so a GLP-1 drug might do some good.

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Put that mirror down or I'll sue!

"Toppers," by Jan Pieter van Baurschelt (Rijksmuseum)

     When the Trump Era finally comes to an end, with its corruption, cruelty and incompetence, that last quality will be seen almost as a godsend; we will be grateful for how the damage, though extensive, was also constrained by the unfathomable laziness and stupidity of the toadies selected for their blind obedience and nothing else. 
      A vigorous, disciplined and skilled FBI director, determined to do the bidding of his master, could have cut a swath of damage across the country. And Kash Patel, the FBI director, is trying to do just that. But he keeps tripping over his limitations, at least according to a story, "The FBI Director is MIA," published in The Atlantic. Rather than manage his 38,000 agents, Patel, the magazine said, spends his time "with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences." 
     But that isn't why I'm writing this. Patel, trained at the Trump knee, is now suing the magazine for $250 million — these lawsuits reflect the heavy-handed tactics the Trump administration is increasingly turning to trying to stifle valid media criticism. ICE will be tossing reporters into white vans next. For now, though suing is Trump's go-to move, or, rather, threatening to sue. Though I can't help but notice he has never, to my knowledge, sued anyone accusing him of molesting girls under the aegis of Jeffrey Epstein, I wonder why that is? 
     Could it be that he didn't want to end up in a court of law where the defendant would of course present evidence that the accusations are true? A thought that clearly did not occur to Patel. 
    Needless to say, I've never met the man. He could be sober as a church mouse, and dedicated to his craft, and I hope he is. 

      But I am familiar with The Atlantic, and my hunch is they would not publish such a story if it weren't true. The story is almost comically well documented — the initial humiliating vignette of Patel being unable to log onto this computer, then panicking and announcing he had been fired is "according to nine people familiar with his outreach." Nine people? I haven't read a story backing up a fact with nine sources in my entire life. The article names the bars he's drinking at — Ned's in DC, the Poodle Room in Vegas. Nor does the news shock.
     "Patel's drinking is no secret," the magazine reports, pointing out that he was filmed chugging beer with the U.S. Men's Olympic hockey in their locker room after their gold medal game.
     Suing is both bluster and blunder. Rather than repairing the damage to Patel's good reputation — not that such a thing exists — he is merely broadcasting the accusations and ensuring they remain in the public eye for the foreseeable future, or until he's summarily canned by Trump for being pathetic. 
     "Some at the FBI are concerned that Patel's behavior has left the country more vulnerable," the magazine wrote. I dispute that. Better Patel doing shots in Vegas than at his desk in DC, pursuing what FBI agents retain their sense of justice and patriotism. 
     Or as one official told The Atlantic: "Part of me is glad he's wasting his time on bullshit, because it's less dangerous for the rule of law."
    Make that two of us.

    Now Patel's genius idea is to force that official to repeat his statement in open court.  If the suit ever comes to trial. My bet is, it won't — the only question is, which is shitcanned first, the lawsuit or Patel.
 

New AI platforms hand hackers powerful new tools for cracking cybersecurity

Bundles of currency on display at the Federal Reserve Bank's Money Museum, 230 S. LaSalle St. 

     Everyone has a morning routine. With me, I open my eyes, muse darkly upon my life, then flee upstairs to my office — even before coffee is made or the dog walked — blast out the day's blog post to my hearty band of followers, then ritualistically log into a financial service company to check on my 401(k). A moment emotionally somewhere between Scrooge McDuck going down into his vault to roll around on his piles of gold and a castaway in a rubber raft checking the amount of water left in the jug. It takes a minute.
     Except one Sunday morning a few weeks ago. I plug in my username and password. Nothing. A second, more careful try. It warns me, in red letters, that a few more such attempts and I will be locked out.
     Not wanting that, I hit "Forgot password." It asks for my birthday, my email and the last four digits of my Social Security number. Normally, you never share that information. But this wasn't something over the transom; I'd logged into my 401(k) site. I plug in the info.
     No account associated with me. I try again. Nothing.
     A few more attempts, with growing alarm, that I'll spare you. In brief, my 401(k) account, with my entire nest egg needed for looming retirement, built over decades, the provisions that must sustain us on our one way journey into the dark woods of decline, had simply vanished.
     Money, as you know, is no longer bullion slumbering in vaults or even stacks of fresh currency, but mostly bundles of electrons flitting through systems of unfathomable complexity. You buy a pack of gum, tap your phone to a contactless payment terminal, and great institutions briefly kiss. Visa slips Walmart $3 and debits your account. You get a pack of Hubba Bubba Sour Blue Raspberry.
     We hardly even think about it. But maybe we should. While we're used to the idea of endless legions of scammers assailing us through every mode of communications short of semaphore flag, the latest and most ominous twist is coming from a new weapon of immense power that is already derailing modern life: artificial intelligence.
     Yes, AI. The thing that keeps trying to summarize your email. That your kid uses to write his report on Cotton Mather instead of actually doing the work and learning something. AI is so incredibly powerful, not only does it produce videos of obese porch pirates getting their faces painted with blue dye, but it can code/write computer programs.
     Or crack them. A story that might have gotten lost in the whirl of general disaster is that on April 7, Anthropic, an AI company that started five years ago and is now worth $380 billion, provided a preview of its Mythos AI model to 40 Big tech giants — Apple, Google, Microsoft, JPMorganChase. The reason for this effort, dubbed Project Glasswing, is because AI can cut through cybersecurity like a hot knife through butter, thwarting encryption, discovering hidden vulnerabilities that escaped notice for years.

     So Anthropic is giving the biggest players a chance to fix their heretofore undetected flaws before Mythos is available to the general public, one of whom might decide to type, "Drain Neil Steinberg's 401(k) and transfer the contents to my Apple Wallet."

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Barbara Flynn Currie, 'trailblazer who opened doors for generations of women' dies

     This ran in the paper on Saturday. 

     After a vote in the Illinois House on a key part of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s pension relief plan in 2016, Barbara Flynn Currie did something not often seen in these times of our divided, dysfunctional government. She crossed the aisle and shook hands with the three Republican lawmakers who broke ranks with the GOP and voted to override Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of a measure deferring police and fire pension payments.
     That was Currie, 85, who died Thursday. She not only represented her Hyde Park district in Springfield for 40 years — 20 as majority leader and the first woman to hold that role in the Illinois General Assembly — she but was a tireless promoter of active, engaged, effective government. 

Barbara Flynn Currie (Wikipedia)

     "Last night we lost a giant," House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch, D-Hillside, posted on his Facebook page Friday. "Barbara Flynn Currie was more than a leader — she was a trailblazer who opened doors for generations of women in the Illinois House, many of whom continue her legacy today. ... She set the standard for what it means to serve with purpose. Her impact will be felt for generations."
     She was an enthusiastic advocate of clean air and clean water, and juvenile justice reform.
     “Barbara Flynn Currie was one of a kind," Rahm Emanuel said in a statement. "Her intelligence, decency, and absolute command of the issues were without equal in Illinois politics... Barbara was a passionate, tireless advocate for the people who needed one most. She delivered on issues like raising the minimum wage, early childhood education, gun safety." ... She lived a life of genuine public service and leaves behind an extraordinary record of accomplishment.”
     Her district encompassed Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Shore and Kenwood, and she was a vigorous proponent of liberal causes, such as prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace and offering all-day kindergarten. She spearheaded a compromise on welfare reform and helped extend state contracts to minority- and female-owned businesses.
     In 2009, she chaired the special 21-member bipartisan committee that recommended the impeachment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
     ”We stand here today because of the perfidy of one man: Rod Blagojevich,” said Currie. “To overturn the results of an election is not something that should be undertaken lightly.”
     Every member of the Illinois House and Senate, save one, voted to impeach.
     State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, a Chicago Democrat, (14th) sat next to her on the House floor.
     "Every day was a master class in the work of the legislature," said Kelly. "She was unparalleled in debate, knew her bills inside out and backward, and could fire off a one-liner like nobody before or since."
     With women making up a record 32% of state legislatures across the country, it might be difficult to remember the male world that Currie entered. When she was elected in 1978, fewer than 11% of Springfield lawmakers legislators were women. When she announced her retirement in 2017, that figure was more than a third, and in 2025 the Illinois Legislature was 42% female.
     Then-House Speaker Michael Madigan's decision to name her as majority leader in 1997 was unexpected: Downstate Democrats felt they had a hereditary right to the position, didn’t like the powerful post to pass to a Chicagoan, a woman, and perhaps worst of all, a liberal. Women across the spectrum saw it as a milestone.
     ”Republican women gave me flowers,” Currie later recalled. “Secretaries and staff in the Capitol were thrilled. One of my girlfriends nearly ran her car off the road. The depth of excitement was really quite thrilling.”

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Works in progress: Jack Clark in Paris

Paris, 2017

     Jack Clark spends his springs in Paris — talk about a good judgment call. This year he told me he was off for France with what struck me as an air of fare-thee-well-until-I-return. To which I responded, in essence, "not so fast, bub. Would you consider writing something from Paris?" Thankfully, he agreed, asking only that I remind you to visit www.jackclarkbooks.com.

     When I was 17 or so, I was in love with Christine who lived down the block. I never told Chris how I felt but she knew and she did like me, just not in the same way. Our block, on the far West Side, was Irish and Italian, Jewish, and Greek. I’m of Irish descent. Chris was the oddball. Her family was Lebanese. I probably couldn’t have found Lebanon on a globe back then.
     Four of us would spend hours night after night sitting on Patty’s porch. She lived across the street from Chris. Patty was Greek and her parents were strict. She couldn’t leave the porch. My friend TiTi lived next door. He was also Greek and was another Chris but we all called him by his nickname, which was pronounced "Tee Tee."
     We were all American kids. I’m pretty sure that most of our parents were born here too. Mine were. So were my grandparents.
     We talked about everything and anything, usually while a transistor radio played rock and roll with the volume down low. Most of that talk is now lost to the years. But one thing I remember clearly is Chris telling us proudly that Beirut was considered the Paris of the Middle East. I think her family visited relatives every few years.
     The neighborhood changed eventually and we all went our separate ways. Chris and I kept in touch for a bit over the telephone. I only remember seeing her one more time. She was working downtown and I was going to school out by Navy Pier, trying to figure out how to become a writer. We got sandwiches at Jerry’s Deli on Grand Avenue and carried them down to the river to have lunch. And that was it. A few years later, I heard she’d moved to Denver and we haven’t been in touch since.
     In the mid-70s a Civil War broke out in Lebanon with Beirut at the center. It went on for years and didn’t end officially until 1989. It’s never really ended, not for Beirut. There have been breaks here and there, otherwise it’s been one shock after another to the current dark days.
     Whenever Beirut made the front page, I’d think of Chris and our nights on Patty’s front porch and wonder what the Paris of the Middle East looked like after the latest round of troubles.
     Many years later, I fell in love again and ended up in the real Paris. And I don’t mean the tourist city, which I do my best to avoid. Hélène and I have pretty much been inseparable for the last 15 years, except for those long months when we’re living 4000 miles apart.
     Hélène lives in public housing. I like to joke that she’s in the Cabrini-Green of Paris. But Paris and Chicago are completely different worlds, and so is their public housing.
      Chicago is the larger city both by size and population. But Paris has over 250,000 public housing units. That’s close to 25% of total residences. By comparison, at its peak Chicago had around 40,000 units. It’s now down to 15,000 with an additional 35,000 families relying on Section 8 housing vouchers.
     The residents in Hélène’s building are mostly working people and their children. Her next-door neighbor is a woman named Thérèse. She’s Lebanese. I’m pretty sure that’s where she was born. She has three grown children. They’re French.
     If we run into Thérèse on the street or in the hallway, she and Hélène usually speak in French while I twiddle my thumbs. But if I run into Thérèse when I’m alone, we speak English and she almost always ends up apologizing for her lack of proficiency. I answer that I should be the one apologizing. I’ve spent almost half of the last 14 years in France and I still can’t speak the native tongue. I have zero proficiency and should probably apologize to the entire country. Although I will say, once I gave up trying to learn French, my Paris life has become much more enjoyable.
     I sometimes like to amuse myself by looking at the listings pasted in the windows of the real estate offices. A million doesn’t get you much anymore. Not in Paris. It’s only public housing that keeps the City of Light from turning into an amusement park populated exclusively by the rich. It’s still a livable place for people like Hélène and Thérèse, a couple of single moms who raised their kids next door to each other while working full time.
      Hélène is a retired social worker. I assume Thérèse is retired too. I know she goes to Lebanon for months on end. Unlike the typical vacationer, when she comes back she sometimes looks more distressed than before she left.
     We were on our way out last week while Thérèse was coming in. “Ça Va,” we all said, as both a question and a statement. Pronounced as "sava," this is one of my favorite French expressions. You ask, "It goes?" The standard answer is: "It goes." And then you ask back, "It goes?" It’s the equivalent of "How are you? Good. And yourself?" without all those extra words.
     And then Thérèse turned my way. “Ça Va aux États-Unis?” she asked with a bit of aggression in her tone. It goes in the United States?
     How could I answer that except to say no. It does not go in the United States. Not this year. Not this month. Maybe never again.
     Her expression changed and she brought her hand to her heart twice and bowed slightly. “Désolée. Désolée,” she said.
     Once again, I told her that I was the one who should be sorry. And I am, of course. I’m sorrier than I’ve ever been and also ashamed by the actions of my own country, but that doesn’t do her or anyone else any good.
     Decades back, when we were all sitting on Patty’s front porch, the Vietnam War was going full blast, while a couple of miles east of us, large sections of Madison Street and Roosevelt Road were going up in flames.
     Our families packed up their possessions and we scattered and moved away. The war finally ended. The riots burned themselves out. But everything was different. New neighborhoods. Lost friends. Still, life went on almost as before.
     Maybe that will happen again. This period will just become another one for the history books and life will go on almost like before. I tend to doubt it but I hope it’s so.
     In the former Paris of the Middle East, they’re not looking for life to go back to the recent status quo. That’s what they’re hoping to get away from, their own dark history.
     We might try that ourselves in the coming years. But I think we’ll probably find this an impossible task. Darkness doesn’t always lead to light. There’s no guarantee that the sun will rise, that a new morning will ever come.

                                                                       — Paris, April 2026

 

Technology always wins, but we can make our own magic until then

"The Hand & The Eye," $50 million worth of high end magic palace located in the old McCormick Mansion on East Ontario. It opens Saturday. 

     A lot of old people on Facebook wax nostalgic about drinking out of garden hoses, riding in the beds of pickup trucks without seat belts and the freedom of no cellphones.
     Count me out. I was there and recall a lot of boredom. Much thumb-twiddling, whistling and staring out of windows. As for seat belts — I was riding with Phil Flanigan in his mother's 1966 Ford Falcon when she hit the brakes and I went over the front seat and knocked out my front teeth on the dashboard — baby teeth, thank goodness. Still, I'm a big fan of seat belts. They save lives.
     As for iPhones, one question: Have you gotten lost lately? Me neither. Getting lost sucked. 
     Not to be confused with wandering. Wandering is great, I went Downtown twice this week, researching columns. Marching up the wide, sunny arc of Wacker Drive, marveling at the passersby, but also thinking how soon the striding pedestrians and zipping electric scooters (c'mon guys, pretend you have brains to protect and wear a helmet) will be forever joined by squads of little rolling robots, like the pair that took out a couple bus shelters in West Town and Old Town last month. These are the last days we can pad around without flocks of drones buzzing over our heads. 

     Yes, some complain about these robots. I'm glad I'm not so touchy as to feel violated by somebody's order of beef and broccoli trying to squeeze past on the sidewalk.
     Sorry, I know, lots of delivery workers out of jobs. And cabdrivers, by self-driving cars. And journalists.
     But not yet. Feeling lousy about it doesn't help. Every technological advance in history was greeted with howls of ambivalence. When Gutenberg created movable type, some worried that the personal connection of reading an author's own handwriting would be lost. The first programmable machine was not a computer, but a Jacquard loom, whose designs could be changed by switching punched cards. Outraged English textile workers attacked the looms. Got them nowhere. Robert Louis Stevenson complained in vain when gaslight was replaced by electric light, "a lamp for a nightmare," producing "ugly blinding glare." No matter. Technology always wins.
     I say this, despite AI coming for my job. But not yet. It can form words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs. But can AI do the footwork? How is AI at rambling? At wandering in a random fashion across an urban environment and stumbling upon interesting stuff?

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Flashback 2009: Lump of coal from Keillor — His 'Christmas' gift won't keep on giving

     Garrison Keillor is coming to the Park West on May 4. I can't go — previous commitment — but I've seen him perform several times, at Ravinia and elsewhere, and know he always puts on a good show. That prompted me to look back at what I've written about him over the years — I interviewed him once, but that was already posted.

     Sidelined in 2017 over accusations of unwarranted sexual advances, none of then seemed as consequential as any given dozen crimes attributable to our president. I particularly appreciate the work he did promoting poetry, both in print — his "Good Poems" collections are priceless — and on the radio.

     This is an oddity — a pan of a little Christmas volume of his. A reminder that even the mighty — and I consider him the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain — have their lapses. I present it for the pure joy of a good pan. 

 
A CHRISTMAS BLIZZARD

By Garrison Keillor

Viking, 180 pages, $21.95

     This coming April, Mark Twain will have been dead 100 years, and were you to throw a cocktail party for all the American humorists since his demise who have created enduring fictional worlds, it would a very small gathering indeed:
     James Thurber, standing alone by the mantle, swilling his scotch and complaining how he never could manage to write a novel. Neil Simon, picking cashews out of the nut bowl.
     And that's about it. Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman would have sent regrets — already sucked into the maw of obscurity that took Bill Nye and Josh Billings and everyone else whose work is too topical or too minor to withstand the grind of time.
     Of living authors, there would only be one: Garrison Keillor, well-loved for his long-running radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," but also respected for his short stories, novels and essays. His Lake Wobegone might not quite shine equally alongside Twain's Hannibal, Missouri, but if our progeny are still reading any comic fiction writer of our era a century from now, odds are it'll be Keillor. 

     Of course Keillor can't be expected to knock one out of the park every time — even Thurber started churning out those testy complaints about grammar as he aged — and A Christmas Blizzard, Keillor's latest, is a holiday trifle that will be relegated to the scrap heap of misfires by otherwise good authors, though many of his fans no doubt would rather read a mediocre book by Keillor than a good book by anyone else.
     A Christmas Blizzard is a tall holiday tale that rolls merrily along, crammed with inventive riffs on popular culture and quirky characters, all limned in Keillor's distinctive voice. We meet James Sparrow, a fabulously rich Chicagoan with a butler and a private jet, and his wife, Joyce, and if having the two main characters named James and Joyce is too much of a sly wink for you, you better get used to it, because the Hawaiian home where James longs to spend the holiday is called Kuhikuhikapap'u'maumau and the stand-in for Minnesota where our hero gets stranded when he goes to visit his prosaically named but dying Uncle Earl is called Looseleaf, North Dakota, and there is the standard contingent of Floyds and Elmers you'd expect with Keillor.
     Despite the cute names that are more Soupy Sales than Thomas Pynchon, Keillor's wit is generally sharp and intact, and along the way he skewers Americans, from blissed out New Agers to Right Wing conspiracy fanatics. Easy targets, maybe, but it's impossible to completely dislike a holiday book that refers to "the sheer horror of 'The Little Drummer Boy.'" Though by the time we get to the talking wolf, A Christmas Blizzard assumes a random, hallucinogenic quality that makes it feel longer than its 180 pages.
     Early on, Keillor's describes Joyce's writing this way: "She was clever and facile and could spackle bright words on a page in the shape of a poem but she lacked heart." The same could be said for this novel, where Keillor revisits favorite tropes — the indignity of middle age, the quirkiness of small towns, the melancholy of love — grafting them onto a miracles-and-redemption Christmas tale that flirts with incoherence.
     Keillor's 19 previous books are listed in the front, and any one of them would probably provide a richer, more nuanced experience than A Christmas Blizzard. But if you've read them all and enjoyed them all, then you'll probably enjoy this one too, at least a little.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 29, 2009