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.

To continue reading, click here.

Maybe Brad Pitt will be the first. Maybe not.

     Did you see that Brad Pitt told Esquire how, after seven years sobriety, he has returned to drinking. At 62, he "got back off the wagon" and is now drinking "in a more restrained manner."
     Hmm....
     That was surprising. Even more surprising are approving reactions like that of the New York Times: "Brad Pitt’s Return to Drinking Is Not Unsafe, Experts Say, but It’s Not for Everyone."
     Double hmm... Maybe that's a sign of the high esteem he enjoys. The idea being, "If Brad Pitt is doing it, it must be okay."
     Like everyone else in America, I like Brad Pitt — a skilled, versatile actor. And wish him nothing but the best.    

     However ... I don't think that's how it works. And the mumbling experts the Times assembled basically said, "If you need to quit but can't, or don't, then drinking less is better than drinking more." 

     Which doesn't quite add up to "Not Unsafe."

     I would suggest his going back to drinking is not not unsafe. Indeed, it is very unsafe, somewhere between extremely risky and certain disaster.
     I am no expert, of course. The best course is to run your own sobriety, and let others run their sobriety, or lack of same. I do know that my own route has required not drinking anything for ... more than 20 years. But Pitt's announcement reminded me of the words of David Foster Wallace, in his masterpiece "Infinite Jest" which, if you haven't read it, is about semi-pro tennis set against a backdrop of addiction. Wallace writes:
     "That nobody who's ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance against has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever."
     So maybe Brad Pitt will be the first. But I know how drunks and addicts tend to jiggle the locks of their cages, and wonder. So my advice is, if you noticed this story and thought, even for a moment, "Hey ... look at that ... maybe ... reality has changed!" I hope you come to the immediate conclusion, "Nope. It has not. Same old reality. Just because this poor fellow is deluding himself doesn't mean I need to follow him over the cliff." 
    Or if you are determined to give it a go, my sympathy, and I would urge you to wait. Just a year or two. Then check back on Brad Pitt. See how well his plan works out for him.

Pumpkins, pensions, and the CTU's 'cooked' books

 

Just like the Illinois Policy Institute says: Illinois grows more pumpkins than any other state.

   Is criticism a crime?
     As fond as I am of teachers, generally, and despite being a good union man myself, I couldn’t help but shake my head in wonder at the Chicago Teachers Union, which I consider a fairly savvy organization, suing a pair of conservative watchdogs, the Illinois Policy Institute and the Liberty Justice Center, for sinking their teeth into CTU finances and accusing the union of using “cooked” books.
     First, way to turn a spotlight on their accusations. Believe it or not, I’m not checking the Illinois Policy Institute website every morning to see what’s in its crosshairs. Doing that, right now, I see their top story is on ... pumpkins.
     “The state produces enough pumpkins to make nearly 8 billion pumpkin spice lattes, the most pumpkins in the U.S.” At first I thought it must be a mistake — the colorful, pumpkin-centric page labeled “Illinois Policy” must be different from “Illinois Policy Institute.”
     Nope. Same folks.
     But is it true? According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the top producer of pumpkins in the country is ... Illinois, head and shoulders above the rest, responsible for 40% of all the big orange squashes grown nationwide.
     Did you know that? I did not. Score one for the Illinois Policy Institute.
     The second story “Chicago Teachers Union Undermines Yet Another Charter School” begins: “The Chicago Teachers Union’s relentless attacks on charter schools has claimed another victim. The Chicago High School for the Arts announced it will not renew its contract with Chicago Public Schools, citing financial struggles. It will stop operations at the end of the current 2025-2026 school year.”
     Is that true? The selective enrollment, privately managed school will stop operations. But the school itself will transition into a public school. You could also say ... as a Sun-Times story suggested last month ... that CPS stepped in and saved the school after its operators decided to abandon it, one of the many downsides of privatizing public education. As a rule, the Chicago Public Schools are not shutting down schools willy-nilly, at least not since Rahm Emanuel left office.

To continu reading, click here. 

The Tide goes out

 
      The internet is considered a constant distraction from the "real world" — the solid, fleshy, non-virtual realm of tangible existence.
     And I suppose that's mainly true.
     But online can also birddog you toward aspects of living existence that you might otherwise miss.
     Consider the bottle of Dreft, above.
     I was writing Monday morning, wanted to take a break, and thought I'd do some laundry, something I haven't done since my surgery. I filled a laundry basket, dragged it downstairs with my good arm, stuffed the clothing into the washing machine. But when I went to pour in some Tide, there just wasn't quite enough for a full load.
      I looked around the little laundry room for fresh bottle, went into the basement where my wife stores her supplies. Nothing, which is odd for her. She normally stocks up at Costco. But she's been real busy attending to my needs, so no criticism implied or overt.
     Looking down, I noticed the bottle of Dreft above, on the floor next to the dryer. Left over from when Grandkid #1 was staying with us. I figured, sure it's for babies, but it'll wash grown-up clothes, too, in a pinch. Right? I was about to add it to the Tide already poured when I looked closely at the label, wanting to confirm it was detergent and not, oh, lye or bleach or something else unsuitable in a detergent-like bottle. 
     Nothing. Which struck me as odd. So I took my phone and plugged in "What is Dreft?" and was informed that, yes, it is detergent, for baby clothes.
      But curiosity lingered. Why nothing on the label? I asked the Internet again, and was told that brand awareness is so strong they don't want to waste space stating the obvious. So that yes, the word "detergent" is there. But in very tiny type. I looked again, scanning every square inch of the label, and finally found it.  

    Can you? Probably not in the photo above. It's right above the numeral "64."  Then I looked at the Tide bottle. At first glance, it didn't seem to be there either. But careful study found it, in two languages, just left of the "CAUTION." 
     Odd, right? I began looking at packages for other kinds of products. Oreo gives up the game by boldly declaring "MILK'S FAVORITE COOKIE." Band-Aid practically is a noun itself, but maintains its trademark status by adding "Brand Adhesive Bandages" in small, but locatable letters. 
     Odd with detergents. Maybe the word doesn't test well. 

Government keeps close tabs on delis, on funeral parlors not so much

 

   Burying a loved one is much harder than buying a corned beef sandwich. More expensive, too.
     Trust me, I've done both.
     When my mother died last year, my brother and I were immediately faced with a series of difficult decisions. She had bought burial plots in Colorado. Bury her there? I pictured the two of us standing in some windy nowhere in Boulder County, at a funeral attended by nobody else. No. We'd bury her here and put mountains on her grave marker — you can get those, for an additional charge.
     Speaking of money. I floated an idea: donate the body to science? It would save, oh, $20,000 of our father's dwindling savings. That would pay for his care for, gee, almost three months.
     "A funeral is part of doing the right thing," my brother said, invoking our mantra for handling our parents' affairs. So we had a funeral.
     With a corned beef sandwich, there are also choices: Fatty or lean? Rye or a kaiser roll? Hot or cold? Don't forget condiments. But those are easier: fatty, rye, hot, yellow mustard. Far less expensive, too. At Kaufman's Bagel and Delicatessen in Skokie, it'll set you back $14.75.
     Given the two experiences — the heart-rending, hugely expensive funeral, and the pleasant, not-that-costly sandwich — why is it the state of Illinois so thoroughly inspects delis while so being so lax about monitoring funeral homes?
     "I have so many inspections I can't see straight," said Bette Dworkin, owner of Kaufman's. "The Skokie Health Department, three times a year, a thorough inspection, inside and out. Weights and measures comes in. A whole list of backflow devices need to be tested."
     Meanwhile, Illinois funeral directors are licensed but not the funeral homes that they operate, which are inspected when they open or change hands, and never inspected again, unless there is a complaint, and sometimes not even then. Which leads to periodic stomach-churning horrors, such as the 56 decomposing bodies found at a funeral home in South Deering, documented in the Sun-Times this past week.
     Across the border is a much different situation.
     "In the state of Wisconsin, there is licensing of the actual physical plant of the funeral home," said Michael D. Sharkey, a funeral director in Wisconsin for 30 years. "They do not do that in Illinois. When something goes wrong, nobody notices. That comes as a surprise to some people."
     Sharkey is uniquely situated to compare the two states, being the legal representative of both the Wisconsin Funeral Directors Association and the Illinois Funeral Directors Association, as well as the associations in South Dakota and Minnesota, where he lives.
     "The other big difference is that in Wisconsin, all regulatory actions are taken by the DSPS — the Department of Safety and Professional Services, all under one roof," he said. "In Illinois, the comptroller regulates crematories and the [Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation] regulates funeral directors, two separate agencies."
     Which leads to buck-passing.

To continue reading, click here.