"Plain Clothes Tracy" wouldn't do.

      Statues must be hard. Because it's so easy to get them wrong. In June, I observed how significantly off the statues of Barack and Michelle Obama are at the new Obama Presidential Center. Not a lot. But enough, and what was extra surprising was that no one else remarked upon it, not that I heard anyway. Maybe it's considered impolite. Maybe pointless — the statue is cast in bronze and there. Not a lot anybody can do about it at this point.
     Because I am such a critic of statues — I tend to speak up when I find one lacking — I should take a moment to say how much I admired this statue of Dick Tracy, which I noticed earlier this summer strolling the hopping Riverwalk in Naperville after dinner with friends. Maybe cartoons are, counterintuitively, easier to render in three dimensions. Also notable is who the artist is — Dick Locher, the cartoonist who took over drawing Dick Tracy from Chester Gould,  creator of the strip. I actually spoke to Gould, once, asking him to draw the cover of a magazine I worked for. He agreed.
    Now that I think of it, I have a vignette about Gould developing the strip in my recent book, "Every Goddamn Day.' This might be an apt time to share it.

     Oct. 4, 1931: He was supposed to be a modern version of Sherlock Holmes. The deerstalker hat swapped for a snap brim fedora. But the same sharp nose for clues, the same determined jaw. The idea came the previous May to Chester Gould, an artist for the Chicago Daily News who draws other people's comics and illustrations of oriental rugs. All these headlines about gangsters murdering each other, only to go smirkingly free. Law-abiding citizens are fed up. Criminals ought to be caught. Somebody ought to catch them. Gould drew up some sample strips of what he called “Plain Clothes Tracy” and sent them off to the Tribune Syndicate — his 61st comic idea sent over the past decade. On Aug. 13, he received a telegram. “Your Plain Clothes Tracy has possibilities. Would like to see you when I go to Chicago next.” Two days later he was in Joseph Medill Patterson's office. “I think the name is too long,” Capt. Patterson said, promptly solving the problem himself. “John Tracy ... Fred Tracy ... Dick Tracy. Let's call this fellow 'Dick Tracy.' They call detectives 'Dicks.'” Patterson also suggested the backstory: the murder of his fiancé's father prompts Dick to join the force. That plot line runs today in the debut Sunday strip, kicking off a saga that will continue unbroken for 90 years, spawning radio spin-offs, movies, toys. The comic becomes famous for its rogues' gallery of villains whose appearance reflects their criminality: Pruneface, Flattop, Wormy. And of course that prescient two-way wrist radio. Gould will keep this first strip framed on his office wall for the rest of his life, along with the telegram delivering the good news.

Voting is being wrecked. Voting is being wrecked. Voting is ...

"One Vote Can Change the World" by Bisa Butler

     I try not to repeat myself.

     Let me say that again.
     I try not to repeat myself.
     Why? Well, for starters, it becomes dull. The second time never carries the punch of the first. You've read it before, maybe. The impact lessens.
     Even if I try to switch things around.
     Repeating myself is something I try not to do.
     But what if the same thing keeps happening? Something important. And any other topic, well, pales in comparison.
     On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court said to President Donald Trump, in essence: "Sure, go ahead and mess with the mail-in ballots, part of your general campaign to undermine and muddy elections, in case your side loses and you have to toss over the game board and cry 'Unfair!' your go-to move for years and years."
     In October 2016, when it looked liked the tide might be turning for Hillary Clinton, Trump fired off a series of tweets.
     "Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day."
     And ...
     "The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary — but also at many polling places — SAD."
     And ... speaking of repetition.
     "Election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign ..."
     Then he won, and ... poof ... suddenly the election was fine. Though Republican candidates, in parroting Trump's claims, would insist that elections that they themselves won were also rigged. Which would be funny if the situation weren't so terrifying.
     In the 2020 election, which Trump clearly and definitively lost to Joe Biden, the only dramatic attempts at election fraud were the president's, demanding that Georgia election officials "find" votes to put him over the top. Since then, he has machine-gunned lies about the election.
     Not to forget the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. After which the nation reelected him anyway, which tempts a person to give up, sit back and declare we deserve whatever we get.
     Maybe we do.

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Cats want to be naughty

Casper, in action.

      We have a pair of houseguests, Casper and Boo, taken in for a month. Our son's cats, now ours, temporarily. 
    The cats have been here before. We know the drill. Before they arrived, away went the Venetian glass atop my wife's dresser. Out came the napkin rings.
    Napkin rings?

Boo

     

     Any idea? That is the difference between you and me, and the genius of my wife. Cats can leap. Even onto the upper shelves of our hutch. And cats can knock things over. In fact, they seem to enjoy it. So rather than park all our stuff in a box for a month, my wife has taken to setting out golden napkin rings. For the cats to knock over — well, cat, singular. Boo is a sedentary cat, with no tail and a tiny head, the size of a ping pong ball, and hardly moves, never mind leaps anywhere. She's like a little feline cow. Occasionally she will pad over to my office, and hurl herself toward my lap, reaching it, with an assist from me. There I stroke her until I have a kitten of fur in my fingers. But that's it.
    Every morning, when I get up, I collect the napkin rings off the floor and return them to their places. Really, sometimes, I feel like we work for the cats. 
    But this is the genius part. If she catches him in the act, my wife scolds Casper. For knocking off the rings. That she placed there for him to knock over. Because she knows cats. And knows that cats want to be naughty. Want to piss you off. So she does a bit of play-acting. To keep the cat happy. 

White Sox might bring in popular Japanese mascot to pinch hit

 

Kumamon, at his birthday party in 2016

     Readers make suggestions. Some are anatomically impossible and best ignored. Some are for stories that deserve consideration. This idea immediately caught my attention, even though it is not only about sports — never my strong suit — but about the White Sox, specifically, their rookie first baseman.
     “I noticed that Munetaka Murakami was born and raised in — Kumamoto! Home of your favorite mascot,” Peter Erdelyi wrote in mid-July. “Kumamon is almost all black — a Sox logo would look great on him. Kumamon Night with free little Kumamons to the first 20,000 attendees, along with a mascot race with Kumamon, with the person behind it all with his brilliant suggestion to the Sox, Neil Steinberg, throwing out the first pitch.”
     Never heard of Kumamon? He is, to quote Tom Waits, “Big in Japan.” Kumamon is what the Japanese call a yuru-kyara — or “loose character.” That traditionally gets translated as “mascot,” though it doesn’t do the reality justice. They’re far more complicated. Kumamon is to Southpaw, the White Sox mascot, as Anna Karenina is to Raggedy Ann.
     Ten years ago, I traveled to Kumamoto, in southwestern Japan, to attended Kumamon’s birthday party, along with 50,000 other guests. It was nuts.
     As if reading my mind, the team held a bobblehead night for the slugger, bringing his parents over to throw out the first pitch. I thought that might moot my reader’s idea. But there’s always next year. I reached out to Brooks Boyer, in charge of marketing for the Sox, who I found in a good mood. The team is doing great this year, particularly compared to the three previous, especially-awful, 100-plus losing-game seasons.
     “I can expect us to be fighting for a division in late October,” Boyer said, “These guys are super likable and competing their butts off. So it’s been a lot of fun.”
     Fun is the operative word in baseball lately. As illustrated by the recent Banana Ball phenomenon, fun is very big at the old ballpark. As are Japanese players. In case you’re paying even less attention to sports than I am, the biggest star in baseball is the insanely skilled Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers. I told Boyer that keeping far-from-home Japanese players happy seems a challenge for teams.
     “You try to keep all of your players happy,” replied Boyer. “When we signed Murakami, we asked him if there are things from Japan that maybe we don’t have here that would create a more comfortable experience. We were thinking about rice cookers. But the very first thing he said was, ‘Could we get a washlet — a bidet — in the clubhouse?’”

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Days of beauty and tomatoes

     Sometimes simple is best. Like slices of homegrown tomatoes on a piece of fresh challah, spread with butter, eaten on the deck in your own back yard in summer.

     The tomatoes are the big news. After, well, too many years of having them just not come in — hard green spheres that never ripen — they are bountiful this year. The only thing I did differently this year was, early in the season, hit them with a few doses of Miracle Grow Tomato Plant Food. So maybe they deserve the credit, not me.

    I can't even describe how a tomato freshly picked from the garden tastes. Not like grass. Not like a store-bought tomato. It tastes like sun, and laughter, and summer. Not something to be expressed in mere words.

    The challah is from Kaufman's, in Skokie, so was fresh and superlative. Sent by a reader as part of a care package to make sure I wasn't starving while laid up. Thank you for that — thanks to all the good wishes from everybody. Very much appreciated. Had I thought about using this photo, I would have moved the ashtray out of the shot — readers zero in on a detail like that. Don't worry; the ashtray is from my hometown of Berea, Ohio, and hasn't been used in years — I usually smoke a cigar on the front porch, flicking the ashes into the hydrangeas. I noticed the ashtray in the basement a couple months ago and brought it up, but haven't used it yet, haven't smoked a cigar in months — tobacco and healing from surgery do not go hand in hand. Not even this week after a former colleague, doing a wellness check, brought by a trio of my favorite Rocky Patel Vintage 1990s from Iwan Ries. Though the day I light up one of those bad boys draws ever nearer. The surgeon said Thursday I can go without a sling, in the privacy of my own home, and I have been reveling in that, though eventually the arm becomes taxed and I sling up again.
     The weather was so nice, my wife suggested breakfast outside. Sitting on the deck for that hour, with the tomatoes and the challah, hot coffee plus a few — okay, four — Kaufman's cookies for dessert might have been the best hour of summer. Though, as I told Edie, it wasn't really four cookies. One was a rugelach.

 

Promise Willie

  

"Africa The Land of Hope and Promise For Negro People's of the World" (detail) by Bisa Butler

     Thursday was Google calendar scams — at least three, maybe four. The first alerted me that I was scheduled to answer a subpoena. I knew this was nonsense, and knew not to click on anything, so copied the law group supposedly involved and checked. A common phishing scam, designed to get you to react and serve up information. Deleted that, along with the subsequent notice of various illusionary depositions and hearings, bearing official-sounding gibberish: "Settlement Release Update — Review and Confirmation for Final Execution."
     Around 9 p.m. my attention was caught — how could it not? — by the title of one of my books. "You Were Never in Chicago." in the subject line. I got one sentence into it. "I almost didn't write this email" but by the second, "I wanted to approach you differently because authors receive enough messages from marketers who begin with praise and quickly move toward a package, payment link, or call" realized it was another AI book marketing come-on.
     I wrote about such ploys last March. Still, I quickly scrolled through it. Fourteen hundred words. If AI is going to become our overlords, they're going to have to learn the value of brevity. There was nothing I'd note here, until I got to the end:

     PPS – I'll leave this entirely with you. If it resonates, say the word. If not, no hard feelings. Either way, keep sharing your curious, insightful, and deeply human voice with your readers. We need more voices like yours.

Warmly,
Promise Willie
Book Marketing Strategist

     "Promise Willie"? Promise Willie! Is that a great name or what? Can't you see him? Waking up in his cinderblock home in Abuja or Manila. Catching a bright yellow danfo minibus or a colorful tuk-tuk to the sprawling call center he works in. Maybe grabbing a quick akara and pap from a street vendor for breakfast on the way in? Firing up his 30-year-old Dell and seeing who he can rip off today?
     Honestly, I considered responding "By God, yes, let's do it!" just to have further interaction with Promise Willie. He could be a character in a novel.
     But alas, that would probably be as unfulfilling as whatever sham marketing he was offering. I moved on, not even bothering to delete the email.

     Honestly, the junkier social media becomes — Facebook, Instagram, Gmail — the easier it is to ignore. They're doing us all a favor. 

Do legal challenges to hate speech protect Jews or threaten them?

Bess Myerson

     Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss America, was crowned on Sept. 8, 1945. In the hazy nostalgia that passes for historical understanding nowadays, people might assume her victory was due to the warm embrace that America gave all things Jewish after the horrors of World War II.
     It wasn’t.
     James Loeffler starts his new book, “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America,” with Myerson’s win, noting that old habits die hard. Sponsors who traditionally embraced Miss America got cold feet. The Catalina Swimwear Company, which provided bathing suits for the contestants, withdrew its promised contract and scholarship.
     “Several corporate sponsors refused to hire a Jewish spokesmodel,” he writes. “The Ford Motor Company reneged on its pledge of a gift of a new automobile.”
     Odd — you’d think that Henry Ford, who’d accepted a decoration from the Nazis, might be eager to put some distance between his company and his former pals. But no.
     Such expectations wilt as you read Loeffler’s book, which uses antisemitism to skillfully explore the difficulty of legally squelching haters in a nation whose First Amendment sanctifies free speech.
     A significant chunk of Americans sympathized with Hitler before, during and after World War II — 70 new American antisemitic organizations appeared within a year after Myerson’s win.
     The first two sections of the book focus on events in Chicago. We think of the city as a liberal bastion. Now, maybe. But not in 1946.
     “Chicago,” the American Mercury wrote, “the birthplace of the German American Bund and scene of the greatest wartime seditious activities” — a Lane Tech grad was landed by U-boat during the war with a raft of Nazi spies — was on its way to becoming “the hate center of the nation and the staff headquarters for incipient American fascism.”
     Thus in February 1946, notorious antisemite Father Arthur Terminiello, on a coast-to-coast speaking tour promoting Christian Nationalism, held a packed rally on the West Side. Protesters rioted outside and Terminiello was convicted under a Chicago ordinance against disturbing the peace.

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