Bears playoff telecast exposes dark truth of Navy Pier sign — glitchy bulbs

     In my 30 years — at the end of January — as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, I've been tasked by readers with many odd missions. One gave me an urn holding a lady's ashes that he had been entrusted with. I handed the urn to her loved ones. Another reader, a VA social worker, drew me into trying to track down the family of a Marine vet, found frozen to death in a West Side doorway and headed toward a pauper's grave in Homewood. My column helped locate his family in Alabama, who had been looking for him.
     An elderly reader once asked if I could arrange for the newspaper to be delivered closer to her front door, as her driveway was icy. She was worried about falling. I knew that would prove beyond my capabilities, so I went over and scraped the ice off her driveway myself, to her surprise, and mine.
     I tend to take such situations seriously, because I appreciate people reading this stuff, and I try to help them, best as I can. Ditto for those who cooperate with being put in the paper. When I profiled a homeless man living in a van in the Glen of North Glenview train station parking lot, whose dream was to work in Appleton, Wisconsin, I phoned the mayor of Appleton to see what could be done. Nothing, as it turned out. But I made the call.
     I don't always. "I'm not a social service," as I sometimes testily snap, to my wife's consternation. But certain situations just demand action. Such as this email, which arrived Sunday afternoon from Cathryn of Burr Ridge:

     "Hi Neil. Watched Bear’s game last night & admired how beautiful Chicago presents on TV. Until the shot of Navy Pier — some lights on Chicago Children’s Museum are burned out which looked second rate on the national stage. I thought maybe you’d know who to contact so it could be corrected before next game. Thank you. Your long time reader..."

     I'd watched the same game — my wife's suggestion. "Let's join the zeitgeist!" she said, cheerily. (Zeitgeist, German: "the spirit or mood of a particular time." Shows what can happen to a person if she hangs around me for 40 years.) I'd admired the swooping shots of the glittering city and did not notice any balky Children's Museum sign. That could have been during the third quarter when, with the Bears on the ropes, we got bored and watched an episode of "Victoria."
     Something about Cathryn's request seemed irresistible. It was a trust drop. No AI aggregator is going to ask the Children's Museum about their sign. I reached out to their PR guy, who put me in touch with Peter Williams, the vice president of exhibits and building operations at the museum. I forwarded the email. Williams replied:
     "Chicago Children's Museum has an old school neon sign on the Navy Pier Head House. Sometimes when it rains, a neon transformer ground fault interrupter (GFI) will trip causing three letters to go out. Typically, the GFI will dry out and reset in less than a day. The part of the sign that went out on Saturday night was back on by noon on Sunday."

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Don't blame me...

      What do you think when you see a Tesla Cybertruck? "Moron." "Headcase." "Fear junkie." There are a variety of valid reactions. Cybertrucks are even worse than Hummers, both driven by styleless, apocalyptic nutbags, no doubt stocking food and firearms, itching for the end of the world, so they can be king. Or lord of the block. Or something.

      Tesla brought out Cybertrucks in 2023, after Elon Musk bought X and began to establish himself, not only as the personal financier for the lunatic right, but one of the loudest voices of intolerance, nationalism, sexism and ignorance rampant. People who bought one knew what they were endorsing.

      But how about regular Teslas, particularly older models, that might have been purchased back when Musk was still a high tech visionary, the man who finally made the electric car work, and not the creepy and frightening bully he became. How do you communicate that you bought the car before its creator established himself as a fascist fanboy, a right wing agitator, a disseminator of hate and unvarnished predatory masculinity on his troll farm, X, and a general enemy of American democracy and freedom?

     I've noticed several varieties of the above bumper sticker, and recognize the dilemma.  The bold thing to do of course would be to sell the car, take your losses, and buy a Subaru, as a kind of penance. But that's asking a lot, and I think that establishing your choice of car should not be construed as an endorsement of current toxicity is sufficient. I mean, I still subscribe to the Washington Post, even though Jeff Bezos has shamed it, and himself, by using its editorial pages to blow kisses and making cooing noises at our nation's liar, bully, fraud and traitor. These are difficult times, and we all navigate best we can. 

I obscured the license plate, out of kindness.

    

Will taking Greenland by force make us feel like men?

     Trivia time!
     What is the biggest nation on earth? In land area, that is. I'm not talking about largeness of spirit or national heart, qualities that are not only unmeasurable but increasingly unvalued. At least in our country. What does "freedom" mean if you aren't free to protest your neighbors being dragged away by masked thugs? What does "democracy" mean when the president talks about canceling elections? What kind of nation is that?
     Sorry. We were talking about land mass. Any idea? China would be a good guess: 3.7 million square miles. Which allows me to trot out one of my favorite obscure facts: China is almost exactly the same size as the United States, at 3.8 million square miles. (Meaning ... we're bigger! We win! USA! USA!)
     Not so fast. Both China and the United States are eclipsed by Russia, at 6.6 million square miles. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
     Still a massive country, spanning crossing 11 time zones. Land is not what they need. Yet there they are, fighting to claw territory away from Ukraine, 3% of its size. Estimates vary, but it's believed that around 250,000 Russian soldiers have died in the conflict.
     For what? I suppose you could muster some flapdoodle about resources. But it's really about pride. Russia is a failed state — when was the last time you bought something made in Russia? They don't even lead the world in export of vodka — that's Sweden. Followed by France. Then Poland. Putin attacked Ukraine as a lunge at former glory. Because Ukraine once belonged to the Soviet Union, and it's making Russia look bad — in Putin's eyes — by thriving without them. Russia can't make a toaster, but they can bomb apartment buildings in Kyiv. 
     Ditto for China — at a very big 3.7 million square miles, remember — which snaps its slavering jaws at Taiwan, 0.3% its size. A nation that was never part of Communist China. Invasion looms, even though doing so would knock over the global economy.
     Again, why?
     To argue a practical reason —oil, gas, land, whatever — is to suggest the school bully is beating up Timmy because he needs his pocket change. It gives the bully too much credit for practicality. Picking on weaker kids is what bullies do, to feel alive. To feel like men. To feel great.
      Which brings us to Greenland.
     "We do need Greenland absolutely," President Donald Trump said, preferring to buy the place, which belongs to Denmark and is not for sale, otherwise threatening to seize it by force.
     "I would like to make a deal the easy way," Trump said Friday. "But if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way."
     "Obviously," his adviser Stephen Miller explained. "Greenland should be part of the United States."
     Obviously?
     I want you to say that to the next person you see. "Obviously, the United States must have Greenland." See what kind of look you get. It's bonkers. Did we learn nothing from watching Ukraine not only fail to crumble before the Russians but fight back fiercely?
     Trump said if we don't snatch Greenland, Russia will. That's also nuts. Denmark is a founding member of NATO where, sadly, talk seems to be about how to placate Trump — the lessons of Munich 1938 still unlearned.

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When tech fails, you can always old school it

     I have never communicated through semaphore flag — I didn't get that far in Scouting. But if the need arose, through some improbable chain of events, and I found myself on a hilltop, using two flags to spell out a message to another hilltop, I imagine, in our era of Apple Watch phones and Find My Friends, I would find that very satisfying. Score one for old school.
    So while the president's inspirational pre-battle speech in "Independence Day" is stirring, the moment in the movie that I truly savor is when the world is assembling against the alien onslaught, and you briefly see a bank of Morse code operators, clicking away their dots and dashes. As the son of a radio operator, I have to love that.
     When technology fails,  the old ways bail them out. For instance, Saturday morning, Facebook served up a story written for Sports Illustrated, on how cowboy star Roy Rogers midwifed sports marketing. I was always proud of that story —the sort of oddball take I like to do on popular subjects — and it seemed doubly apt now, with the Bears and Packers in the wildcard game Saturday night (a game we watched. "Let's be part of the zeitgeist" my wife had suggested. Very exciting. “Who would think that watching football would be so much fun?” she marveled afterward). The Sun-Times ran a story mentioning how merchandise related to the Bears, the most popular team in the country, is flying off the shelves. 

     Sports Illustrated paid for the Roy Rogers story so, rather than post the whole thing and steal their clicks —I'm not AI — I posted the first half, with a link to the rest. 
     Only Sports Illustrated went out of business in early 2024, and whatever it costs to keep their archive online proved not worth the bother and expense. There is something called "SI Vault" but I can't tell if that's working either. 
     All was not lost, however. In the closet of my office are a pair of very low tech, four drawer Hon filing cabinets. Under "S" I quickly located a manilla file labeled "SPORTS ILLUSTRATED" and there was a copy of the issue, July 27, 1998, with Mark O'Meara, "The Unlikely Champion" on the cover. A photocopy of the story. And a copy of the 1960 Sun-Times article, "There's gold in the sidelines" that sent me down this particular rabbit hole. 
    Plus my contract with Sports Illustrated: $1,500. That wouldn't be a bad fee now, provided you could find a magazine to pay it, which you couldn't. Imagine how that felt in 1998.  
    I could have found some program to grab the text off the story and put it into useable form. But I'd have to track that app down and figure it out, and it took less than 10 minutes for me to type the second half of the story in, keeping with our old school theme.
    When I was done, I returned the pages to their folder and refiled them in the S section. You never know when it might come in handy again.

     

Where's a bamboo cloth when you need one?

      When I was a little boy — maybe 9, 10 — I would take an empty amber prescription bottle and create what I considered "a survival kit." I'd tuck in a needle and thread, and a tightly folded dollar, a couple blue tip matches and ... I'm not sure what else. A peppermint, maybe. Pack the thing with necessities. 

     I don't recall toting it around much — and never actually using anything in one for any real world purpose. My memory is primarily of assembling them, fitting the various elements inside. 

     You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to figure out why. It's a big, scary world, and a little fellow wants to be prepared. Nothing shameful there.

     So I get, conceptually, the idea behind the VSSL survival tube I saw for sale at the Mazda dealership in Evanston when I went there to get the filters changed on my CX-9.  In case you can't read the little canisters, there is a fire-starting kit and a candle, fishing tackle and a bamboo cloth, first aid tape and a water bag, all in an attractive gold-colored aluminum tube.

    That isn't what jumped out at me. Try to put yourself in my shoes, and look at the photo above. What is the element that grabbed me by the nose and twisted? That I couldn't quite believe.

     One hundred and seventy-five dollars. At first, I thought this must be an excess of the dealership — they do soak you. But no, VSSL is some weird generic high end brand that is applied to audio equipment, coffee and "gear" that comes in aluminum tubes.  That seems the going rate.

     Actually, my very first thought, at the price, was to wonder if there might not be a missing decimal point. Maybe the thing was $1.75. Matches. A little candle. I checked with the clerk. No. "Do you sell any of these?" I wondered. 

     Contrast the slim pickings above, most of which you could assemble from your kitchen junk drawer in five minutes for nothing, with the below survival kit I noticed on Amazon for less than a third of the price. An axe, a shovel, a tent, a lantern, ropes ... 268 pieces. Quite a lot really. 

     Maybe because I'm so sunk in routine, I don't worry quite much anymore about being ready for any proximity. Or maybe caution is so inbred into me at this point, I don't notice. If it might get cold, I'll throw a fleece in my bag. If hot, a bottle of water. If I'm going to be out at mealtime, I'll grab some insulin. But not even in a fancy kit, which are also sold. I carry the injector pen loose, in my pocket, along with a two-tablespoon screw top plastic container I tuck in a couple cotton rounds and two needle tips (since a clumsy diabetic can, in theory and confessing nothing, manage to bend the first needle against a restaurant table while trying to administer it, and need a second one). 

     I think I have a flashlight in the map pocket of my car door. And a bottle of water in the back. But that's about it. Anything else can be managed with a phone and a credit card.

     I wish EGD had a wide enough scope that I could reasonably expect to hear from somebody who actually bought such a tube and found it useful. "My Mazda seized up on the roadside and, thank God, I had a fishing line in one of the little cylinders..."

      It makes sense when you view it as another entity turning fear into money. There's a lot of that going around.

 

Next they'll claim the ICE officer was killed, but he's better now

 

     See, if only American citizens would just close their eyes, hide in their basements, and let the federal government ramp up its national goon squad of masked thugs, rampaging around Democratic-run cities, challenging brown people and randomly plucking them off the street for possible dispatch to Third World hellhole prisons, then this sort of thing wouldn't happen.
     But there was do-gooder Renee Nicole Good, 37, in her Honda Pilot, on a residential street in Minneapolis Wednesday, acting as a "legal observer" — a self-appointed concerned citizen who doesn't want to let her neighbors be secretly muscled into SUVs and whisked off to fates unknown.
     On the video, you see Good didn't comply with ICE orders to get out of her car, instead trying to roll away, and was shot in the face and killed for it. 

     Typically, I don't encourage readers to watch such death videos — they can be jarring. But sometimes they're necessary to understand what happened in a situation. You see the split second between when Adam Toledo tossed his gun away and when the officer in that alley fired in 2021, and realize he shouldn't be charged. You see Jason Van Dyke's bullets slamming into the prone body of Laquan McDonald and know his subsequent stint in prison was deserved.
     With Wednesday's fatal encounter, you see, from several angles, the yawning gap between the lies President Donald Trump and his administration instantly spun, and what actually happened. You see she was driving slowly away from the officer who ran up and killed her.
     Kristi L. Noem, aka ICE Barbie, aka Homeland Security Secretary, called Good's attempt to escape “an act of domestic terrorism,” that she “attacked them" and "attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.”
     Donald Trump somersaulted past that — rare is the lie so bald he can't embellish it — condemning Good because she “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
     I thought the Trump administration is sympathetic to citizens assaulting police officers. Or is that only while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Pity Good wasn't filmed beating a cop with a metal bar on the Capitol steps. The Trump administration might give her a medal.
     Don't worry, the ICE officer is recuperating from his imaginary injuries after being notionally run over. Just the way the "serious injuries" suffered by the ICE officer who killed Chicago cook Silverio Villegas Gonzalez in September magically got better upon closer inspection.
     This might be a good moment to step back and remind ourselves what is happening, big picture.
     Totalitarian states demand that citizens trade freedom for security by positing harms that do not in fact exist, then promising to liberate people from the perceived threat of these imaginary wrongs.

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Constant Comet

     Is there a statute of limitations for childhood confusion?

     I'm asking because ...
     Well first, let me remark upon a central challenge of the columnist. You want to straddle the unique and the mundane. Share an outlook that is simultaneously unusual enough to be interesting —not just some familiar, trite truth everybody already knows. Yet common enough to be relatable. Fresh, but not strange.
     Sigh. I might as well just tell it.
     So my wife was working, at the little triangular computer table in the living room one morning this week. And I went down to get some tea, and, in my friendly fashion, asked if she wanted some.
     "Would you like some Earl Grey?" is what I said. I was having Twinings Earl Grey. I normally go for coffee, but today didn't. Earl Grey is my go-to morning tea.
     "How about some Constant Comment?" she said. Another type of tea, made by Bigelow.
     And in the next half dozen steps toward the kitchen, I reflected on Comet, the cleanser.
     When I was a child, my mother kept a green cardboard can of Comet under the sink. I would see her scrubbing various places that needed to be scrubbed.
     When I first heard the tea name, I heard, "Constant Comet." This was reinforced, I believe, by the unique smell of Constant Coment, which I didn't like. It's the spices. They make me think of vomit. Worse, it rhymes: Comet. Vomit.
     You would think, at some point, this bolus of memory would fade. And in general it has — I mean, it isn't as if it bubbles into mind every day. That would be awful. It's bad enough to reflect on sometimes. In a rare, but particular situation.
      The phrase "Constant Comet" punches a ticket, and a few seconds later the whole "Comet ... Vomit" mental train comes chugging out of its dark tunnel, down a track that was laid around 1965.

     I suppose there must be some kind of breathing, meditation trick to get rid of that. And while there are mnemonic devices to aid in memory, I have yet to find something that aids in forgetting. Well, bourbon, yes. But that train is long gone. Time, I suppose, also does the trick, or should. But when a certain memory has eluded being tackled by the ensuing years, you're pretty much stuck with it.
      Tolstoy used to say that he and his brother, as children, believed that they could have any wish they wanted if they could stand in a corner for five minutes and not think of a white bear. Which of course is impossible. Any child, taking up a position in the corner, excited about being so near to his heart's desire, would of course conjure up the forbidden pale bruin, ruining the scheme.
     So can I bury the Constant Comment/Comet connection? Only one way came to mind.

     "Honey," I found myself considering saying. "How would you feel if we stopped buying Constant Comment? Don't ask me why. There are other teas."

      No, that wasn't going to work. I'd have to explain it. Some things you just have to live with.