Smoke gets in your eyes

   

     The air downtown tasted bad on Thursday. I had to go over to police headquarters at 35th and Michigan to pick up my new press credentials — good for getting into museums in Europe — and then decided to go to Navy Pier, to the Sun-Times office, to collect my mail. Followed by lunch at the Cliff Dwellers Club with an old boss.
     How did the air taste, exactly? Part wet campfire, part vinegar. A sour, mineral odor. For a time, the worst quality air of any major city in the world Thursday, according to one source. I was grateful that all my public transportation connections were smooth — step out of Union Station, cross Jackson Street, and the 124 bus practically rolled up.
     Huge wildfires in Canada, trapped by a temperature inversion, causing the haze. The new normal, we are told. More fallout from that global warming that doesn't exist, according to Republicans. I tried to smile when posing for my press pass.
     "See you in two years," the police officer running the camera said cheerfully.
     "I won't be here in two years," I replied, perhaps with more glumly than I intended.
     Caught the Green Line north. Waiting on the Bronzeville Platform, the city didn't look particularly hazy. The field at De La Salle High School awaited an infusion of Meteors. Alma mater of both Daley the father and Daley the son.
     Stepped out at Washington and Wabash, walked a little west and the 124 rolled up. Something was going right. I walked through the pier — a colleague greeted me warmly. At the office, I collected my mail, chatted with my bosses, complimented the new managing editor, whom I had taken to lunch — also at Cliff Dwellers — when he showed up.

     "I didn't realize I was sucking up to the future managing editor at the time," I said. We laughed. 

     Caught the 124 back to Michigan.
     Cliff Dwellers is not the fanciest club — no Union League, no Casino, no University. But it has a million dollar view, across the street to the Art Institute, north to the Bean. I'd planned on sitting outside, on their big deck. But the windows were white, like we were in a cloud. I should have taken a picture.

     "I usually ask for a table outside..." I said, to the maitre d'. "But today..."
     Waiting for my guest, I did something unusual — went directly into the bathroom and scrubbed the atmosphere off my face. That helped.
      After lunch, I made the mistake of hoofing it 15 minutes down Adams Street to Union Station. It didn't leave me feeling ill, but rather like having smoked the worst cigar in the world. When I read about all the tiny particulate matter in the smoke, I believed it.

Lincoln Park Zoo: lots of people, not so many animals.

     The lion enclosure was empty. The gorillas, gone. The rhino, which can typically be found standing stolidly in the old elephant enclosure, looking like a beast from mythology, was standing somewhere else, out of view.
     My wife and I were strolling the Lincoln Park Zoo late Saturday afternoon, a beautiful day, the zoo crowded. With people, that is. With animals, not so much.
     “Is it me,” I wondered aloud, “or is something missing?”
     We’d seen a scattering of pink flamingos. And that’s about it.
     Suddenly, the animal art the zoo has on display everywhere took on a malign significance — here are the sort of beasts you might see. If they were here. There were plenty of privacy hedges, barriers to keep the crowds back. I knew that while you might want to see animals, animals don’t necessarily want to see you.
     “Maybe because it’s late in the day,” my wife speculated.
     The animals were tired from a long day of flaunting themselves to their endless stream of guests, capering and cavorting. They were resting now, renewing themselves for tomorrow’s efforts. I thought of that Charles Addams cartoon showing a disappointed man and boy at the front door of a zoo, while a bear, ostrich, moose and gorilla exit a side door, the gorilla putting on his hat.
     “Sorry, folks,” the zookeeper says, “we quit at five.”
     One way to find out. I queried the zoo.
     “A somewhat unique feature about Lincoln Park Zoo is the commitment we’ve made to giving all animals in our care the choice and control over where they want to be at any point in the day,” wrote Anna Cieslik, PR and communications manager. “This means that if the weather isn’t great, or if they’re just not feeling like being around people for the time being, they can always retreat to their indoor habitats. As Chicago dives headfirst into the hottest days of the year, as was the case Saturday during the daytime, animals might be choosing to spend more time indoors. While that’s a bummer for someone hoping to see a lion or brown bear, it means they’re receiving the best welfare possible.”

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Publishing news

    Books are old school. I know that. The thing to do, if I wanted to grab the general public by the nose and reach them in volume, is to stare intently at a camera and deliver some brief monologue about philosophy or self-help or a history tidbit about a movie. "Did you know that Steven Spielberg wanted to make a James Bond movie, but the franchise rejected his pitches, so George Lucas...." Then endlessly blast that across Instagram and TikTok and and hope it catches attention over all those 14-year-olds unboxing the latest eye glitter.
     But there are a million guys doing that already. And have been. For years. So I'm a little late.
Besides, I don't want to make little videos hobbyhorsing trivia. I want to write books. Always have, since I was a child and making stabs at little looseleaf books — cartoon narratives, the start of books abandoned after a page.
     Eventually I'd write nine published books, starting in 1992, with a history of college pranks, which I wrote because there wasn't one, and I thought there should be. And ending — I thought until recently — 32 years later, with 2024's book version of this blog, "Every Goddamn Day," which I wrote because the University of Chicago Press asked me to.

      Writing that book was fun. Well, it was work, too, but fun work. They all are. Fun work that I want to do, even though the paycheck is not comparable to what I get writing 795-word newspaper columns. "Every Goddamn Day" got me through COVID, a pole star I could sail toward. When I turned it in, I really did tell my editor, "You don't even have to publish it, I got so much out of just writing the thing."
      Educational, and what I call "a locus of significance." Books linger. People read them. They mean something. To me, and to others, still.

     That said, when I was done, I enjoyed not writing a book for a while. You have so much time on your hands, to work out, fix things around the house.
      But I found myself writing a book again. My mother was dying, I was talking to her about our family, and researching using online sources that weren't available previously. Suddenly I was looking at the ship's manifest recording my grandfather coming to America in 1927. It seemed natural to start setting it down. 
     At the same time, Oct. 7 happened, and suddenly Jews were being demonized again, not for killing Christ, this time, or running the banks and newspapers, or driving a hard bargain, or mongrelizing the race through their support of civil rights, but for having their own nation, one that sometimes does terrible things. Suddenly our existence is a matter of heated debate, even among ourselves. By what right are we here? What are we good for?
     Ooo, I thought. Let me handle that one. So I decided to get off the bench, get some skin in the game. Both for my benefit — I do enjoy writing books — and maybe for the benefit of those who happen upon it.
     Anyway, the work progresses, day by day. The contract is written and being picked over by lawyers, and there was the first announcement Friday, reproduced above. I wanted to not steal their thunder but, now that it is out, I can't resist sharing the news here. I know actually buying a book is a big reach for some people, so I want you all to start saving now. It's coming out in the spring of 2028 and will, let's say, cost $25. So start putting away a dollar a month, and you'll be well-situated to pick up a copy when it becomes available. Believe me, I'll keep you posted.

Marvels fill the skies overhead, even in the suburbs

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy (NASA photo)

     The suburbs have a bad reputation. As endless tracts of anodyne nowhere, sinkholes of boredom and isolation, far from the meaningful lives of richness and significance that are lived by residents of cities. A slur formed after World War II, when cookie-cutter Levittown housing developments crowded out farmers’ fields and young couples swapped their cramped apartments in the teeming, dynamic finger-snapping city for identical contemporary split levels on quarter-acre lots.
     But it isn’t true. Or at least not always true.
     There are wonders aplenty in the suburbs. For instance, my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook has foxes, hawks, owls, its own velodrome, a speed skating culture that produced 20 Olympians, Prairie Grass Cafe, and the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy hovering just above our heads.
     OK, M51 is 31 million light-years away. But you can see it from Northbrook.
     Maybe I should just tell the story.
     Not realizing what splendors we already had at home, my wife and I drove into the city Saturday. She had a taste for the excellent Italian food at Topo Gigio on Wells Street, and we decided to go early and wander around Lincoln Park Zoo.
     The zoo was lovely, but missing a certain vital element — you know, it’s complicated, so we’ll dive into the zoo and what it’s missing on Friday.
     Anyway, after dinner — Topo Gigio let us sit at the table nearly three hours, thank you very much — we headed home, a 40-minute drive. As we turned into Center Avenue, I noticed two dark forms sitting on the sidewalk across from our house. People.
     One doesn’t sit on the sidewalk in the suburbs unless one is 6 years old, and not even then. Particularly not after 10 p.m. I figured this must be young people having a tête-à-tête. I put the car in the garage, went into the house, leashed up Kitty and came out. I gave the couple a wide berth, tracking them out of the corner of my eye. We do have a homeless guy who sometimes sleeps on the bench at Shermer and Walters, but I haven’t seen him lately. Kitty did her business, and on the way back, emboldened, I vectored over.
     “Good evening,” I said. “Everything OK?”

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Bastille Day 2026

Paris Opera House

     During my visits to Paris — and I've only been there three times, I'm no Jack Clark — at some point, while absorbing another tableaux of magnificence, I'll at one point think something along the lines of, "Of course it should have all been blown to flinders fighting off the Germans in 1940." 
     Instead the Wehrmacht rolled in, more or less unopposed.
     Which the Americans held against them — or at least I did — for a very long time. What was Groundskeeper Willie's phrase? Oh yes. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys."
     That was unfair. Many other nations collapsed in front of the Nazi onslaught at the start of World War II. The fist of totalitarianism can be very strong. Look at the Russian attack hammering Ukraine. A sane nation would have never started the war, or stopped after it became clear that it had become a deadlock. Four years and counting. But Putin, like Trump, enters into bloodshed with barely a thought, and continues it for the same reason. Or rather, due to one, rigid thought: he doesn't want to lose, and one way to keep from being seen as the loser you are is to continue playing after the game is actually over.
     Americans taught the French freedom. I get the sense that, with its king and its royal court and guillotines, people are tempted to place the French Revolution before the American one, with our more modest wigs and homespun fashion. The French Revolution seems older. But we declared independence from royalty on July 4, 1776, and the French didn't manage until Bastille Day — today — July 14,  1789, the storming of the Bastille prison during the French Revolution thirteen years later.
    Now of course, it is Americans who need instruction in what it means to be free. To refuse the seduction of autocracy, of just lying back and letting strongmen roll over us and do their thing. Freedom is not won, or lost, in a moment. Its loss is a long, wearying, frustrating, heartbreaking process. We've been becoming more unfree for years now. Some of us seem to be getting used to it. Or just tired. Or given up hope.
    The president and his family personally made more than $2 billion since the taking of office last year. Mostly from a crypto currency scam. Not a vast personal fortune, on the Elon Musk scale. But enough to want to hold onto. You can see why Trump is so hot to pervert elections so that a Congress that might ask, "Is this legal?" never takes office. 
     And the American people? Well, we aren't happy, except those of us who are, no matter what. Not pleased with this direction. But what are we doing about it? What can be done? Put our faith in the degraded elections, four months away, maybe? Wait for something good to happen? Hope, as the saying goes, is not a strategy. Meanwhile, unlike the French, our own nation's capital was defaced, not resisting the enemies of freedom, but celebrating them. A physical mess mirroring the moral, intellectual, legal, governmental decay we sink deeper and deeper into, day by day. When is our Bastille Day? Certainly not today, not tomorrow, not anytime soon.

    

Is AI going to kill us all? Radio, when new, also seemed a menace

     One hundred years ago last Friday — July 10, 1926 — at 40 minutes after midnight at a frantic South Side jazz age party, Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd cried out “Valencia! Valencia!” the dance craze of the moment, and with a clatter of castanets, the group swung into the number.
     “Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor,” Radio Digest noted, after the tragedy. “Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array.”
     Twenty miles away in Homewood at the transmitter of radio station WOK, Thornton High School graduate Lester J. Wolf manned the control board, broadcasting the Moon Lite Gardens fun “throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely hearts were hungry for happiness and joy.”
     At 19, Wolf lived at home with his parents and was one of the youngest people in the country to hold a commercial broadcast license.
     Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead. Eager to get the station back on the air, Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power and received a 6,000 volt shock. He fell to the floor but quickly stood up and told the studio director he was OK. But Wolf wasn’t OK. A moment later fell to the floor again, dead.
     The Radio Digest called him “the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining,” as if there might be many more. It’s hard to tell with a new industry, particularly one based on a terrifyingly lethal technology like electricity, joined to an invisible possible menace such as radio waves.
     People always expect the worse. Radio did have risks — in the early years you had to hook up heavy wet cell lead batteries, basically big boxes of acid.

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"Bagel" and "Biden" have the same number of letters — could they make it any clearer?

     My faith in humanity is such, that I can have trouble with extreme stupidity. I think: "They must be joking, right? This can't be serious." This makes scrolling through social media a challenge. Dry humor. Or sincere idiocy? 

      Usually, alas, it's the latter.

      Take the meme to the right. What they're saying is, here is this 1967 medal, showing a plane flying into the Twin Towers. They knew 34 years ahead of time. It's all preordained, part of a long term Jewish plot.
     Now look closely at the medal, and the supposed World Trade Center. See the little nubs on top? See the writing? It's clearly a torah. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out. All you have to do is look closely.

     It's the same mistake of those who see an oblong object in somebody's hands in a photo from the 1920s and declares that it's a cell phone and time travel exists. Can people be so dumb? Again, alas, yes.

     This is not news. So why am I writing about this?
     Good question. I guess Saturday was busy — working on Monday's column (AND Wednesday's column. AND preparing a string of posts to run after some upcoming surgery. AND working on the book — news about that this week. And visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo. And dinner on Wells Street, at Topo Gigio).
     So I needed to write about something. And this meme...
     I write about what interests me. Mostly. Sometimes I write about something suggested by an editor, or a reader, but I suppose that's still about something I find interesting, with a helping hand.
     Occasionally that thing that caught my fancy will resonate with readers — such as the column on Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, which pinballed across the country — so much so that an editor mentioned it to me, which seldom happens. But I knew I'd grabbed the brass ring, after John Williams asked me to talk about it with him on WGN. To me, that means I've snatched the brass ring.
     During our conversation, I said something to the effect that, if I made a practice of writing about stupid stuff found online, it's all I'd ever do. That's true. Low-hanging fruit. A duck in a bucket. Too easy. And too common. All the deniers and misunderstanders and toxic haters and glint eyed fanatics pushing every subject through the keyhole of their fixations. It's endless.
     However, sometimes something is just, well, too good to pass up. Like this meme.
     A reminder that conspiracy theories are history for stupid people. They prefer airy fictions to actual facts, I suppose, because the latter require thought, and reading, and a base of knowledge, while the former you can grab one fact — or, in this case, one mis-perception — and run with it.
     When I look through Instagram (I don't do TikTok or Threads. Instagram is plenty) and consider how much political opinion is formed by this process, and how little is formed by essays such as this one, well, the temptation is to abandon all hope. But that doesn't strike me as a success strategy either.