Flashback 2006: Alanis hijacked my son's iPod

     Talk about eerie synchronicity. I dug this up last August and set it aside ... for reasons I can't recall. Looking for something to run tomorrow —working on a big project, no gas in the tank — it appealed to me because my wife and I were just talking, yesterday, about whether we had spoiled the boys. We decided, no, we did not. Loved them, yes. But didn't spoil them, and failing to get them exactly what they want for Hanukkah seems to reinforce that. 

    In addition: a couple weeks ago, a reader was trying to think of the name of a person I'd written about "once married to the futurist John Naisbitt." I dug around, and she turned out to be Noel Brusman, mentioned in the third item. 

     And finally, the real icing on the cake, wondering how I should illustrate this, I looked around my desk, and noticed the self-same blue 2006 iPod, sitting within arm's reach. I have no idea how it got there. Cleaning out a drawer, probably. Nor how long it has sat there. But it came in handy.

OPENING SHOT

     Like every youth in the U.S. not yet old enough to drive, my boys asked for a Nintendo Wii.
     They didn't get one. Oh, I dutifully went to Best Buy a week after the frenzy of the game system's release, assuming that, as per plan, there would now be plenty on hand. The clerk gave me a strange look, as if I had asked him to snip off his pinkie finger with a cigar cutter.
     No Wii, no way.
     "I'm not lining up at midnight," said my wife, a sentiment I shared. So we — and this will seem like child abuse to some — didn't get the boys what they wanted most. We gave them other things.     

     The older boy got an iPod Nano, of which we'll hear more later. And a set of Dante/Beatrice bookends. And other cool stuff — there are eight nights of Hanukkah, remember. The younger one got an electric keyboard and a tennis racket and more.
     I mention this just in case you are planning to spend the weekend in frantic search of whatever your child's heart desires for Christmas. Because children are mercurial. Yes, it is disappointing not to get what you want. But getting what you want sometimes only defers disappointment for the 10 minutes it takes for the kid to realize what a pile of junk he has been pining away for. An adult can exert judgment — we are allowed, though we forget that sometimes, in our quest to give our loved ones the perfect childhood that we didn't have either.

YOU WANT IT TO WHAT?

     Imagine the spoon was invented recently — say a few years back. What a marvel. No more complex and cumbersome mechanical devices conveying soup to your lips with a linked series of little buckets. No more sputtering suction pumps.
     A "spoon'' — what a great name for a product. So sleek. So well-designed. We'd all go spoon crazy. You buy your spoon, take it out of the box, admire its pure lines, then hurry to your steaming bowl of soup and — splat — it doesn't work. Hey, this isn't right! You try it again. Sploosh! Maybe you're using it wrong — maybe it isn't the narrow end, but the convex side. So you try that, the gentle dome of the spoon facing up, of course. More Campbell's Cream of Tomato in your lap.
     That was me with my son's iPod Nano. No sooner did we give it to him, then he wanted to open the plastic box it came in. Kids are funny that way.
     The job was quickly delegated to me. At first the box seemed seamless, as if the device was imbedded in a lucite brick. Then I studied it under a bright light, found a discreet little tab— designed by Swedes, surely. I pulled it, and the brick opened. Magic!
     Flush with success, I linked the gizmo — the size of two matchbooks laid end to end — to my kids' computer downstairs. That computer told me that I would have to download iTunes 7.0. But the program wouldn't download for reasons mysterious — the computer gave me one of those useless messages, telling me to go into my system's administrator. Huh? What? Like go into his office?
     Instead I went upstairs, where my computer downloaded iTunes fine. It also took the liberty of starting to load the songs from my own iPod file onto my son's new Nano, starting with A, as in Alanis Morissette.
     "Not age appropriate?" my wife said, all sweet naivete, when I ran to her frantically.
     "'And are you thinking of me when you . . . ' " I sang, and here I put a little oomph into the obscene verb, just like she does, "f - - -  her?"
     "Oh," she said.
     Of course the songs wouldn't come off. There's a "RESTORE" button that's supposed to wipe the slate clean. In theory. In reality it didn't. My older son kept popping in from time to time.
     "Got it going yet, Dad?" he'd say, brightly, his face shining with love and trust, while I fussed and sweated.
     That was three days ago. The good news is it didn't become the Hanukkah when Dad went gibbering down into the basement, grabbed a 4-pound drilling hammer, and pounded a brand new $149 iPod Nano to flinders.
     The bad news: It still won't play music. Except Alanis Morissette.

DEPT. OF CORRECTION

     In my item Wednesday about "Noel Brusman's son Dave," a photo caption mistakenly identified the Chicago airman serving overseas.
     He's actually Dave Naisbitt, brother of John Naisbitt, a social studies teacher at Hinsdale Central, himself a noteworthy personage.
     "He is a wonderful guy, a terrific guy," said Dr. James Ferguson, principal of the school, when I called to make sure John Naisbitt is really there, so as to reduce the risk of having to correct a correction.
     Not only is he there, he's busy. Naisbitt helped form the school's "Citizens Club," which this year collected 300 boxes of medical and school supplies, blankets, Beanie Babies and assorted items and shipped them to Afghanistan. (And yes, both are the sons of the bestselling author of Megatrends, also named John Naisbitt -- John Harling Naisbitt, while his son is John Senior Naisbitt, which is why I didn't refer to him as John Naisbitt Jr.)
     Whew! Now you see how these errors get in the paper . . .

TODAY'S CHUCKLE:

     This one -- sent by Larry Brody -- is too funny not to print.

     A lawyer was riding in his limousine when he saw a man along the roadside on his hands and knees, eating grass. He ordered his driver to stop and got out to investigate.
     "Why are you eating grass?" he asked.
     "I don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass."
     "Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the lawyer said.
     "But sir, I have a wife and two children with me. They are over there, grazing under that tree."
     "Bring them along," the lawyer replied.
     They all climbed into the car, and the lawyer instructed the driver to proceed to his house.
     "Sir, you are too kind," said the man. "Thank you for taking us with you."
     "Glad to do it," the lawyer replied. "You'll really love my place. The grass is almost a foot high." 

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times,  Dec. 22, 2006

People still exist even if the Trump administration refuses to see them

     If the phrase "object permanence" doesn't mean anything to you, then you probably haven't spent much time lately sprawled on the floor next to an infant.
     My granddaughter has, among the phalanx of educational toys vying for her attention, an object permanence box, which is basically a wooden cube, a little smaller than a square Kleenex box, with a hole in the side. Colorful cloths are tucked into the hole and disappear. Then they're pulled out of the box, and reappear. Voila!
     Why is this important? Let me pull a few lines from a recent academic paper:
     "Knowing that objects continue to exist when they cannot be directly observed or sensed is called 'object permanence.' This fundamental cognitive skill is important for working memory and allows us to form and retain mental representations of objects.
     "For example, when a ball rolls under a couch and out of sight, infants who have object permanence understand that the ball exists. They may persist in attaining the ball by moving their body in various ways to look for and reach it even though it is hidden from view."
     Wobbly object permanence skills is why peek-a-boo is so entertaining for very young children. The beloved grandma mysteriously vanishes behind a wall of hands and then — peek-a-boo! — she magically appears, out of nowhere! It's great fun.
     Once mastered, object permanence stays with a person. Your keys fall into the couch, you retain an idea of where they might be — between the cushions — and look for them. You don't shrug and forget the keys exist.
     But object permanence is failing at the highest levels of government, where the current administration seems convinced that if certain narratives, or group of persons, are hidden from view, then they — and the challenges they present to whatever homogeneous white straight society they obviously hope to build — magically vanish.
    Does violent racism constitute a significant thread throughout American history? Delete a few web sites, scrap a few plaques and — presto chango! — never happened. Our kids are back to learning about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
     Do trans people trouble you? So vexing, what shall we do about high school girls swim meets? The Trump administration is vigorously trying to scrub trans people from public life — from passports, from the military. Medical care they need to live their lives is being criminalized.
     In July, the Trump administration ordered the LGBTQ+ youth suicide hotline shut down, an astoundingly callous act.

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Is there an unsullied spot for new filth to spatter?

      There is a chance — slight, but delicious to consider — that at this point, one can err too far in caution. Resignation even. The belief that nothing can touch Donald Trump, while valid, based on hard experience, might be old hat. 

      Yes, the default has to be: his cult doesn't care, hasn't cared for years, that he's a liar, bully, fraud and traitor.  Nothing, most likely, can change that. A century after death, they'll be worshipping him like Christ, sitting cross-legged on the ground outside their temples, chanting, scanning the skies for his return.
      Nothing upends that. What are the Epstein revelations compared to, oh, sending a mob to trash the Capitol? Or unleashing masked federal thugs on innocent immigrants? Or failing to do what he can to stop Putin from crushing Ukraine? 
      Not much. Certainly not much new.
      So yes, social media blows up for a few days with the latest accounts of Epstein's emails. The juicy tidbits. Do they tell us something new about the man who bragged about groping women against their will? Who ogled teen pageant contestants undressed and speculated on the sexual appeal of his own young daughter? Who slept with a porn star, cheated repeated on each of three wives?
     Not really.
     But there is the straw that broke the camel's back. The possibility, anyway. Is this it? I doubt it, mainly because history commands otherwise, and hope is a luxury we can't afford. Or as a wit —okay, me —put it years ago: once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     Until it does. 

Flashback 2008: Like the first nick in a new car

     Yesterday being Nov. 14 led to the column on World Diabetes Day, so why not take that lead, and also pivot today's post off today's date? This ran in the paper exactly 17 years ago. It's notable for several reasons. The opening observation holds true for people who are NOT being dragged off the street and muscled into a van. Yet.

    The number of papers sold announcing Obama's election is worth the price of admission — I won't give it away here. But DAMN! 

     Though my primary takeaway from this is: the wheel turns. It sure turned from the first week of eight years of Barack Obama to the current nadir — O were it so! —of the Trump enormity, with Megyn Kelly actually trying to defend Jeffrey Epstein by pointing out that "he wasn't into, like, 8-year-old girls." Those MAGA sorts, always managing to limbo below the moral bar, no matter how low it is set.

     The problem with grasping a crisis is that while it's going on all over, it can still seem contradicted by localized events — thus, on every cool day in July, those ideologically opposed to the idea of global warming get to shout, "See? Fifty-nine degrees in July — some warming, huh?"
     Or last week. We went to Abt, the electronics and appliance giant in Glenview.
     A mass of humanity that defies description. Police cruisers parked on Milwaukee Avenue, cops using flares to control traffic. I think we got the last open parking space, a quarter mile from the entrance.
     "What is this, 'Free Day'?" I asked my wife as we struggled like salmon to get in. "Isn't there supposed to be a recession going on?"
     There is. Looking at Abt as evidence of financial hardiness is like pointing to the freezer compartment in the kitchen of a house ablaze and saying, "Fire? What fire? Look at all this ice." It's something they should teach in school, along with the alphabet, but don't: One example isn't proof.
     Newspapers are too self-referential. The guy who delivers your milk doesn't pause to expound about the magnificence of the dairy profession, the gorgeous red sunrises, the solemn dignity of cows.
     So I held back on the following, tucking it into columns and then plucking it back into the electronic limbo where bits and pieces wait for their chance at life in print.
     But a marvel should not go unremarked upon. And now that the phenomenon is waning, I have to add it to the record.

     Every day for a week after the election of Barack Obama, employees coming to work at the Sun-Times' building at 350 N. Orleans were greeted by an incredible sight: people lining up outside our store to buy back issues of the newspaper, particularly the one announcing Obama's election. Sometimes, the line has been 50 deep, and, yes, I counted, and asked, "Why wait in line?"
     "It's a piece of history," explained Haroon Rajaee. "He represents the true American spirit. This is what America is about."
     "So few [black men] on the cover they aren't looking for," added Gregg Parker, tamping down the protests around him with an indignant, "I'm just keeping it real!"
     The Nov. 5 issue of the Sun-Times shattered our circulation records — 900,000 copies, last time I checked. Nor is the phenomenon limited to Chicago -- across the nation, people are saving mementoes.
     A reminder of newsprint's role as official imprimatur of fact -- if it's in the newspaper, it's true, in theory. People who can scarcely believe Obama won want to hold the confirmation in their hands.
     "Give me the ocular proof!" Othello demanded, and a newspaper is just that.
     They also want something to pass along to generations unborn, as Michelle Holmes, editor of the SouthtownStar, said, "Nobody bookmarks a Web page to save for their grandchildren."
     Not yet anyway. There is an eagerness among some to embrace anything that squirts into their in-box as fact, however improbable. They'll get a text message, "SPACE BEES DOOM WORLD TUES." and start eating all the cookies.
     For the rest of us, we like verification in print. Which raises the troubling question: If there were no newspapers, how could we be sure that anything really happened?
     The stock market has been fluctuating wildly for weeks. Yet the Wall Street Journal on Thursday felt confident dubbing the latest dive a result of the market cringing away from Obama's "anti-growth" policies. Which raises the humorous possibilities of wondering what other quotidian woes can be set at the feet of the president-elect?
     I stamped inside Friday, brushing the rain off my hat.
     "This rain. ..," I thought. "It isn't natural, not for November in Chicago. It must be the heavens spitting cold disapproval down upon the Obama administration forming in Kenwood."
     OK, so maybe you can do better. But it's hard to top what people are offering up sincerely.
     "So what do you think will be his 'Bay of Pigs'?" asked the wise old city editor, and I nodded and pondered.
     The Bay of Pigs, for those just joining us, was the first big stumble John F. Kennedy made after he took office. The Eisenhower administration had cooked up a harebrained scheme to try to overthrow Fidel Castro by training Cuban nationals into a ragtag army.
      The invasion was set to go, and Kennedy, worried that he'd seem weak if he spiked Ike's Cuban D-Day, gave it the green light. The whole thing was an embarrassing fiasco, evidence that our bright young president had flaws.
     But somehow, the morning after Barack Obama's election didn't seem the time to speculate on future failings.
     They will come, of course. The Obama presidency will have highs and lows, like any other. But trying to anticipate them is futile — the weeks after Kennedy was elected, few knew about this lunatic CIA plot moving forward in the swamps of south Florida.
     Futile, and a little overly cynical, even for me, who has a tendency to stand in the back of weddings as the bride and groom kiss, feel that one moment of sappy sentiment, then bat it away by reminding myself the truth — that they'll both live their lives and grow old, and the man will die at 64 and the woman will go on another 25 years playing bingo and end up in an ammonia-scented day room somewhere, and the wedding dress she so carefully folded and preserved and stored on a shelf for 70 years will go into the trash.
     That's the truth — or, rather, it's a truth. The thrill of anticipation people are feeling now is also true, and one can embrace that, too, and probably should, because it was a long time coming, to quote the song, and it'll be a long time gone.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 15, 2008

World Diabetes Day points to often-ignored ailment

     The first reference to insulin in a Chicago newspaper was both late and maddeningly provincial.
     The Chicago Daily News debuted the name of the lifesaving hormone that regulates blood sugar on the Feb. 13, 1923, editorial pages, in this embarrassing piece of whimsy mentioning the city's king of electricity and rapid transit:
     "To quiet a tormenting doubt whether insulin, the new diabetes cure, was or was not named in honor of Samuel Insull, we asked a doctor about it. He tells us that insulin was named from the so-called island of the pancreas. What a delightfully-romantic ring there is to the islands of the pancreas! One might almost do a ballad about them: 'Twas off the pancreatic isles/I smoked my last cigar."
     The Daily News, perhaps significantly, was studded with advertising for quack diabetes remedies like Warner's Diabetes Cure, mineral baths in Texas promising relief, and Sulferlick Mineral Water for those who couldn't make the trip.

     Kellogg's Bran continually ran ads mimicking news articles, promoting itself as a "constipation corrective," pointing out that "90 percent of all illness can be traced to constipation! It is responsible for most cases of diabetes ..."
     The Chicago Tribune at least shared the reason that the Daily News was waxing poetic on the subject: Drs. Frederick Banting and John McLeod were in town to talk to the City Club about their 1921 discovery, which, in May 1923, the Daily News finally got around to explaining in detail.
     I mention all this because quackery is on the rise again and because Friday — Nov. 14 — is World Diabetes Day, the date chosen to coincide with Banting's birthday. In 1923, an estimated 1% of the American population had diabetes. Now, about 10% of adults do, with one-third prediabetic.
     Diabetes is divided in Type I and Type II. The latter — 90% of cases — is where a body can't use insulin produced by the pancreas to process sugar in the blood. It's caused mainly by obesity, with help from genetics, and can be controlled by lifestyle changes and drugs like Metformin. Type I, also known as juvenile diabetes since it often presents itself in children, is when the pancreas no longer makes insulin, and it must be injected.
      Regular readers know I contracted Type I a year ago — through some undetermined autoimmune disease. Diabetes is not bad, as far as chronic conditions go — no surgery, no radiation, you don't have to die early, necessarily, if you do what you're supposed to do. In my case, that means swallow four pills a day, inject long-acting insulin every night and short-acting insulin as needed, should I decide to, say, eat pizza or sushi or some other high-carbohydrate food.

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Happy Feast of St. Cabrini

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini's arm bone, on display at her Lincoln Park shrine.

    There are a lot of Catholic feast days — 25 in November alone, by my count. Starting with All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day, at the beginning of the month, all the way to St. Catherine Labouré and St. Andrew, at the end.  Most months have about two dozen such holidays. You can't celebrate them all.
    Well, not being Catholic, I don't celebrate any of them. Except for St. Valentine's Day, I suppose, though the Catholic Church removed that from the official calendar in 1969 due to lack of historical documentation —they weren't even sure which of several Valentines were being honored (I feel safe speculating that the Vatican was perhaps prodded by the gross chocolate-and-flowers commercialization of the day).

      But sometimes a feast day pops up to be noticed, and since today —assuming you are reading this on Thursday, Nov. 13 —is the feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, I think we can pause to notice her for several practical reasons.
     The tireless social activist —think Jane Addams in a habit —was the first American saint (Nov. 13 was the day she was beatified in 1938) and a resident of Chicago. There is a shrine to her in Lincoln Park, incongruously nestled within a luxury high rise, that EGD visited in 2018, and you can dive into that experience here. 
     St. Cabrini is the patron saint of immigrants, which of course makes her relevant as heck. Gov. JB Pritzker has taken to repeating himself when he talks to national media, and it might be a change of pace if he looked into a camera and intoned: "The upper right arm bone of Mother Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants, is on display in a reliquary on the North Side of Chicago, and it guides us as a beacon of shining moral clarity to do the right thing," Sure, he'd get laughed at, but it might give pause to a few of the Catholic revanchists who are cheering on the current administration.
    Mother Cabrini herself was something of a mess. Pathologically terrified of water after nearly drowning, she chose a vocation that prompted her to cross the ocean 27 times. She also had, in the carefully chosen words of one account, a "frail health and nervous temperament" and was frightened of failure. 
    You can get insight into her situation by considering the "peace prayer" credited to her which, if you want to mark her day, is supposed to be said in her honor, perhaps along with lighting a candle:
     "Fortify me with the grace of Your Holy Spirit and give Your peace to my soul that I may be free from all needless anxiety, solicitude and worry. Help me to desire always that which is pleasing and acceptable to You so that Your will may be my will."

     The word that leaps out of that, for me, is "needless." A lot of worry is protective — am I being scammed? Is it safe to cross the street? Has this milk gone bad? Should I go see a doctor about this? Is there something else I could be doing to help my country?

     The key is not to let anxiety become a default position, the low level hum that sours your waking moments without really helping at all. But we are getting into the realm of St. Dymphna, a 7th century Irish teenager who is the patron saint of mental illness. Her feast day is May 15. Until then.

     

'Days of Rage' evokes protests of 1960s and resonates today in a big way

 

Dontaye Albert (left) confronts Olivia Tennison in Steven Levenson’s “Days of Rage.” 
Photo by Sam Bessler

     "Standing up and saying 'no' is the least I can do," says Jenny, part of a three-member, cash-strapped Ithaca commune trying to get themselves — and anyone else they can enlist — to Chicago to protest the Vietnam War in "Days of Rage," the Steven Levenson play on stage last weekend, and next, at the Greenhouse Theater Center on Lincoln Avenue.
     After weeks of effort, they've signed up two people — five if they count themselves.
     Current events have a way of resonating with history. America's undeniable current slide into authoritarianism evokes the 1930s: all-powerful, venerated leader with his thumb jammed in every aspect of public life? Check. News media condemned while ridiculous lies are promoted and believed? Double check. Powerless groups blamed unfairly for social ills and persecuted in public displays of random cruelty? Yup, got those too.
     Meanwhile the reaction, of some, to that slide harkens back to the 1960s, when youth took to the streets to raise their voices and tell themselves they were accomplishing something.
     It's an awkward fit, as the whole-world-is-watching grandiosity of the 1960s is generally missing from the inflatable-frogs-will-lead-us "No Kings" rallies, where the whole point seems to be registering massive opposition while demonstrating that sending in the military is unwarranted. They're trying to shore up the American system, not smash it.
     "Days of Rage" opens with the show's focal point, Jenny, played with understated mastery by Olivia Tennison, leafleting outside a Sears store on a cold day. She's confronted by employee Hal (Dontayecq Albert, in a fine post-college stage debut) whose younger brother is in Vietnam. Her face is a symphony of disgust as Hal at first tries to get her to move on, then trots out his own paltry revolutionary bona fides: "I broke a toaster oven."
     Hal is stirred into their distinctive mix of political agitation and sexual drama, as what starts as a love triangle turns into a love pentagram. He becomes the voice of the outside observer with a foot planted in the real world while his new radical friends quote Engels and spin their schemes.
     "This is how the process happens. Revolution," says Quinn (Amanda Hoople backstopping the cast with unshowy precision).
     "By yelling stuff at people?" Hal wonders.
     Though set in October 1969, "Days of Rage" makes scant attempt to capture the era — from pre-show punk rock a decade in the future, to language mostly devoid of 1960s lingo while including a few anachronistic touches —"Totally!" — to Spence's Warby Parker-ish eyeglasses (Matt Tenny brings energy to the role, but not authenticity: he's a buff 21st century man cosplaying his grandfather).
     The anachronistic aspect annoyed my wife, while it merely puzzled me. It's not like 1960s-era dress of threadbare radicals would be expensive to replicate, prompting me to check when the playwright was born: 1984.
     It starts slow, but Levenson picks up the pace in the second half, and "Days of Rage" builds in force and well-deployed surprise. Throughout is much oblivious ridiculousness.
     "I hate white people," says Peggy, the manipulative new convert, oddly eager to join their ranks, and herself white (played with scheming glee by Aliza Broder). "I can't help it. I always have."
     But Jenny grounds us back in why this tumult is happening — napalm burning children alive in Vietnam. While Spence wonders how the towns around concentrations camps could go about their lives pretending nothing was going on.

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