'Help me write'

     I read my email. Maybe that's old fashioned of me. I do so because a) I am old-fashioned; b) I'm also interested in what people have to say; b) some readers point out mistakes that I can then fix; c) others share interesting opinions, or situations I should be aware of.
     Then I answer my email, often. Because: a) it seems polite; b) sometimes, in crafting an answer, I coin phrases I like that can use later; c) it helps cement my bond with my audience, such as it is.
     Of late, artificial intelligence, as part of its general insertion of its enormous big money bazoo into our lives, has started offering email suggestions to me.
     For instance. Ken W. of Palatine writes:

     "Donald Trump has spent a lot of time lately calling all kinds of smart people 'stupid.' This is particularly rich coming from a guy who has an IQ of 72 and has the reading ability and temperament of the average 6th grader. He may want to be America’s Hitler, but happily he’s nowhere near smart enough despite his self assessment of being a 'stable genius.' He should have gotten the opinions of the other horses first."   

     While I considered a response, I hit "Reply" and my thought process was stalled by seeing a box filled with this hint, light gray, as if being whispered by some computer Cyrano de Bergerac:

     AI was putting words in my mouth, or trying to. And trite words at that — "a way with words" is a cliche, and not my voice. I tried to delete the suggestion, and instead it became regular print, ready for me to click on SEND. I defined and deleted it, then wrote my own answer:

Ken:

What's the truism about Trump? Every accusation is a confession. Thanks for writing.

NS

     My next step was to shut the damn AI email prompt thing off. I put the matter to AI, ironically enough, and got this instruction.

         Believe it or not, I made sense of that — went to the little gear icon, clicked it, and found my way to this.

     I shut the "Smart Reply" off and a few others for good measure, then returned to answering my email.  

     Not that AI gave up. When I go to reply, there is still two little glyphs — a tiny hypocycloid that seems as if it wandered off the old US Steel logo and a little pencil. Plus the plea, "Help me write," a phrase I've never uttered in my life.

     Now, there is no way I'm going to go with my gut and pronounce AI a bubble. I've seen too many dramatic social changes — heck, I remember pundits seriously explaining how restaurants will go out of business unless diners are allowed to smoke in them. Plus all those hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into it — they must know what they're doing, right? I mean, they can't be throwing their money away? Can they? That would be idiocy.
     Then again, put that way, maybe it is a bubble. There sure is a lot of idiocy going around.

     

Next, dyeing the river green will be cast as a terrorist act

 

     Like any small boy, I have a keen eye for both guns and boats. So, of course, I noticed the M240 machine gun mounted at the bow of one of the Coast Guard's Defender patrol boats cruising the Chicago River.
     This was back in the elysium of 2012, when it was a simple matter to invite myself aboard for a lake patrol, checking the fire extinguishers on pleasure boats and seeing just how fast the twin 825-horsepower Detroit Diesel engines could go, powering a pair of Rolls-Royce Waterjets — basically underwater jet engines — with nothing as dinky as propellers necessary.
     The Coast Guard public relations representative at the time was reluctant to tell me the boat's top speed — 40 knots, according to its own website — and one fun aspect of the resulting column was digging up details the Coast Guard flack refused to divulge, citing national security, that were nevertheless ballyhooed online. Small wonder why they never invited me back.
     Fun is the first casualty of authoritarian regimes — as we were reminded when President Donald Trump, through his puppet FCC chairman Brendan Carr, turned an ephemeral Jimmy Kimmel routine into a permanent, maybe important, chapter in American history.
     Not the brightest media strategy. I'm not sure how Trump squares his self-assigned greatness with a furious need to denounce every high school talent show snickering at him. It seems the mark of a deeply insecure individual.
     He should be used to it by now. Mocking would-be tyrants is a patriotic duty. Though aspirant strongmen, unwilling to trust the machinery of democracy to keep them in power for as long as they want, aka forever, try to squelch the rising laughter, often by pushing their power into places it doesn't belong.
     There was an unfunny chill to see U.S. Border Patrol boats cruising the Chicago River on Thursday — well, I didn't see them, myself, I was at the Newberry Library studying French maps of Chicago from 1825, researching a column for next month. But the Sun-Times got pictures.
     Four boats, packed with armed men, slowly cruising the river.
     It has to be funny, too, right? Social media must be awash with memes of brave aquatic centurians patrolling the mean waterways of Kill City, the masses of neon green kayaks and floating tiki bars peddled by celebrants working off their margaritas digitally erased.
     What could the Border Patrol possibly be doing here? Not a lot of immigrants without legal status arriving via the Chicago River — though it's amusing to imagine how that would work.

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Flashback 2011: Borne back ceaselessly into the past

    Every morning I check Facebook memories. It serves up vignettes of the boys at home, and columns I'd forgotten about, such in this enigmatic entry:

    Of course I had to know what headline I was talking about. I went into NewsBank, and found the column below, whose headline is taken from the last line of "The Great Gatsby" — "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
    The column is a reminder that no kindness goes unpunished. I'd thought to write a column celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Book Bin, my local bookstore, and tripped over the fact that the current owner was not the person who started it, an error on my part for sure, with the slight mitigation that she allowed herself to be interviewed on the topic and never said anything to make me think otherewise. Anyway, this is a lot of fun — notice my various descriptions of Northbrook — and I thought it might amuse you on a Sunday.

     Sue Warner has a gold charm bracelet, and on that bracelet is a charm that has a dollar bill tightly folded in a little box, and on that box is engraved "Book Bin 11-11-71." The date she and three other women opened the little book shop in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, though I’m tempted to start calling it "my many-chambered warren of secrets of Northbrook."
     I met Warner, a resident of the puzzle box of mystery we call Northbrook, after Sunday’s column on the 40th birthday of the Book Bin, juxtaposing its survival against the collapse of the Borders behemoth, also 40. I interviewed Janis Irvine, the store’s current owner but not — as I thickly assumed — its original owner.
     "I started the store," Warner said, claiming that Irvine, who bought the store later, is inclined to sometimes obscure that fact.
     "This is not the first time this has happened in print," she said. "I’ve lived in this town 44 years, there are lot of people who’ve lived in this town for years, and they all get madder than heck at her when she does this. She doesn’t need to do that. . . . People who were there for the original opening, it makes them furious, because she wasn’t even my first employee. If you want to know the truth, for a period of time I didn’t even go in there."
     I should point out that Irvine never claimed to have started the store — I asked what inspired her to enter the book business, but not directly whether she was the founder.
     Every story has two sides, and after I picked my jaw off the floor, I phoned Irvine.
     "Good God, the woman is never going to stop," Irvine said, after I told her why I was calling. "I started working there the next year. I never intended to lie to you or take on another year at the store I started at in 1972."
     Did I mention that the two women were business partners for 20 years? They were.
     The more I dug, the more worried I became. Irvine says she started working at the Book Bin in 1972. So is that true?
     "I was the first one hired in 1973, and worked there 17 years," said Sissie Erinberg, a resident of the hall of mirrors also known as Northbrook. "Janis came in after I was there."
     For the record, the store was unarguably begun by Warner, her old college roommate Judy Rummler, plus Joyce Eddington and Georgeann Butterfield. "We each put in $2,500, got a line of credit from the bank," said Warner.
     And how, I asked Warner — not wanting to repeat my original blunder — did the idea of starting the Book Bin first come to you?
     "If you want to know the truth, my first child was a year old and my husband asked me, ‘What are you going to do now?’ " said Warner. "The question rankled me."
     And that’s how the bookstore got going.
     Or was it?
     "Joyce Eddington was the one who got us together" said Rummler, who now lives in Minneapolis.
     "It was Sue Warner and I," said Georgeann Butterfield, who lives in Connecticut. "We pulled in the other two."
     At this point, rather than engage in full-blown battle over the origins of a humble book shop in the scorpion’s nest of lies known as Northbrook, seeing how I have to live here, at least for a few more years until my two boys are out of high school, and given that stopping by the Book Bin is one of the few remaining pleasures in my life that hasn’t been plucked away by grinning fate, I’m going to draw this matter to a close by declaring all parties innocent. Of course, Janis Irvine would want credit for a store, which, if she did not actually whelp, she certainly weaned, and of course, Warner et al would want their role as the birth mothers recognized.
     No, the fault is entirely mine, for assuming that the woman celebrating the store’s 40th was the same woman who started it, for dangling the apple of credit where I should not have dangled it. A savvier guy wouldn’t have done that. What’s important is that the store is here, now, celebrating its 40th with a party and a 40 percent off sale from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. And amazingly, Warner, Rummler, Erinberg and myself all plan to be at Irvine’s party.
      "I’ve had a lot of jobs in my lifetime, but the most fun job I ever had was there," said Rummler. "It was a labor of love. The most important thing now is not to hurt the Book Bin. I’m sure it was a misunderstanding."
     "I loved it. I loved opening the boxes of books. I feel very loyal to it," said Erinberg. "She’s done a great job of keeping it open."
     "I’m extremely proud of it, that doesn’t take anything away from them; Janis and [her husband] Lex have done a wonderful job," said Warner. "But I also think the rest of us should be remembered for making it happen."
      And now you have been.

Flashback 2011: Enjoy a local bookstore while you can

Book Bin's old location on Church Street, 2016.

     "Moonstruck" is one of my favorite movies, despite a prominent role played by Nicholas Cage. It's so well-written, with many memorable lines that prove useful in regular life. "Your life is going down the toilet," alas, has been deployed more than once.
     And a useful edict that I considered just last week, while modulating my tone about the Charlie Kirk candlelight vigil — "Don't shit where you live." 
    With that in mind, I've never posted the pair of 2011 columns about my beloved local bookstore, "The Book Bin." Mainly because the second, which I'll post Sunday, caused the then owner to give me a stink eye whenever I walked in, making me feel even more unwelcome than I ordinarily do most places anyway.
     If you don't remember the 2011 columns, you can read this and try to imagine what sparked a firestorm of controversy and recrimination. You can wonder, but you won't hit on it because, to quote a truism not in "Moonstruck," you never see the bullet that hits you.

     Most books are published on Tuesdays, the day when what few bookstores remain put them out on sale, one of those quaint traditions of publishing about to vanish along with the stores themselves.

     Jackie Collins’ 27th novel, Goddess of Vengeance, was one of the books published last Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Dillon Perlow stopped by the Book Bin in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook to pick up the copy the store had tucked away for her.
     “A girl has to have a little light reading,” explained the Glenview woman. She also bought Linwood Barclay’s The Accident on the advice of Nancy Usiak, a Book Bin saleslady.
     As the two books were being rung up, the women talked about what they were reading.
     “I just finished Language of Flowers,” Perlow said.
     “I read Story of a Beautiful Girl,” Usiak replied. “I found it more impactful.”
     “I just loved that one,” Perlow agreed.
     An average day in the life of a small independent bookstore, one with a children’s section with toys in the back, a faux fireplace with comfortable chairs in the front, a store that has been in business for 40 years.
     Meanwhile, in the city, a better-known bookstore, Borders, was marking its 40th birthday, coincidentally, by going out of business. The last day of its last downtown Chicago location, on State Street, was Wednesday.
     “STORE CLOSING — EVERYTHING MUST GO — 90% OFF” read the stark red and yellow signs in the windows of Borders. Inside, the shelves were mostly stripped. The remaining books weren’t worth the match needed to burn them: Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal. Sydney Omarr’s Astrological Guide for You in 2010 and How To Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green.
     Bargain hunters milled around — there was always a crowd at Borders; it was, for those of us so inclined, the place to go, to stroll after dinner and, maybe, pick up a book.
     Obviously not an experience people valued enough, as consumers learned to prefer the undeniable Christmas morning joy of receiving another smiley face Amazon box.
     Borders was founded in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Mich., by brothers Tom and Louis Borders. Their chain steadily expanded until, at its peak, it had more than 500 stores.
      The Book Bin was founded in 1971 by Janis Irvine and her husband Lex.
     Irvine said someone approached her about opening a second store in the late 1970s, but she turned him down — with two stores, she reasoned, she’d always be in the back room, working, and wouldn’t be out front talking with customers about books, the part she loves.
     She has no joy seeing the giant crumble.
     “It really is not satisfying,” she said. “To see any bookstore close breaks my heart.”
     And Borders once was really something.
     “You had to take an examination [in literature] before you could become a salesperson at Borders,” she said. “They were terrific.”
     Large or small, each bookstore that closes, Irvine said, means one less place “where people can go in and exchange ideas and talk about books.”
     Perhaps the most incredible thing about the Book Bin is, though small, it is staffed by four saleswomen, plus a high school clerk.
     “We never sit around reading,” Irvine said, and indeed, as frequently as I stop by, the stock always seems to have changed — Wednesday the new Jackie Kennedy interview book was published, and three copies were already prominently displayed.
     Make no mistake. Books as tangible objects are doomed. In 2011, for the first time, sales of e-books surpassed sales of adult hardback books — Amazon delivers more e-books than paper books. That’ll never change.
     People like to save money, and to do so will ditch human interaction: first telephone operators, then gas station attendants, then bank tellers and now bookstore clerks.
     I try to focus on the advantages. As a guy who once lugged around bricks of Remembrance of Things Past, I appreciate the new technology. But oh those drawbacks: I never would have read Alfred Lansing’s gripping adventure Endurance if a young Adam Brent hadn’t pressed it upon me in his father’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue. Stuart Brent’s is long gone, as is Adam’s shop on Washington Street. Someday they’ll all be gone.
     But not yet. The Book Bin, for one, remains, at 1151 Church St., and on Thursday, it celebrates its 40th birthday from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Everything in the store during those hours will be an Amazon-like 40 percent off. There will also be wine and hors d’oeuvres — try getting someone to squirt that into a Kindle along with your e-book.
                — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 2011

How much is that doggie in the window affecting business?

     A Tribune was accidentally delivered Tuesday along with my Sun-Times. Since there was no point in giving it back, I took a peek at what the competition is up to.
     Most of the front page was dedicated to the proposed City Council ordinance to permit dogs in restaurants. The headline, "Dogs in restaurants?" betrayed the Trib's notorious bland literality, while the Sun-Times mustered our usual flip wordplay,"DOG DAYS OF BUSINESS?"
     The Tribune's Jake Sheridan kept up a tone of solemnity throughout, indulging in a bit of levity only toward the end, noting, "Sorry, cat, turtle, bird and koala owners, the measure would only apply to pooches." (Certainly capable of my own grim literalness, I couldn't help but note it would be illegal to bring a koala into a restaurant no matter what the City Council does, as koalas are protected animals, illegal to privately own in this country.)
     My colleague, the indispensable Fran Spielman, punned right off the bat, "A City Council member from Lincoln Park wants to throw a financial bone to Chicago restaurants fighting for survival ..."
     But neither the Tribune nor the Sun-Times delved much into the key question: How's this going to work? Sure, leashes will be required, but a dog on a leash can still maul another dog. Will hot dog stands echo with the barking of hot dogs? Or will a sweetly slumbering Muffin become a welcome feature at every corner bakery?
     We don't have to guess, as I like to say: We can just find out. Plenty of Chicago watering holes advertise themselves as dog-friendly, and I set out to take their temperature. How much is that doggie in the window affecting business?
     "We love having dogs on the patio," said a bartender at the Harding Tavern, 2732 N. Milwaukee, which announces "Our Patio is Dog Friendly" on its website.
     "It's nice for the neighbors to be able to come in," continued the bartender, who did not want to give her name. "We've never had issues with any dogs."
     Chicago's most canine-welcoming bar might be Cody's Public House at 1658 W. Barry. Named for the original owner's dog — a bloodhound — the West Lake View neighborhood tavern keeps a glass jar of dog treats on the bar and prides itself on its dog-friendliness.

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New word: Chomo

 

     I was in DC recently, walking back from the Washington Monument to my son and daughter-in-law's place, when I noticed this enigmatic poster with an unfamiliar word. 
     "Chomo" sounded vaguely Spanish, like cholo, a young street gang member. No need to guess; as a fan of learning new words, I plugged it into Google even as I strolled away.
     "The term 'chomo' is a derogatory slur that means 'child molester'" Google AI began. "It originated in prison and is now sometimes used in broader contexts. It is considered highly offensive and is used to label and ostracize individuals convicted of sex offenses against children."
     A reminder that, as inclusive as many like to be, sometimes ostracization is a good and necessary thing. 

     I considered whether a photo of the poster should be shared — I would hate for this slur to be  directed unfairly at any particular individual. But it is an interesting, relatively new word, so I digitally obscured the face of the person depicted so he cannot be identified. 

     AI can't always be trusted either, so I dug into the etymology.

    "As soon as a Chomo checks into the Fish Tank, every convict knows about it," Jimmy A. Lerner writes in his 2003 "You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish," the oldest citation I could find. 

    "Chomos may be people who trafficked in children or abused children during pornography," Carmen M. Cusak writes in her 2017, "Pornography and the Criminal Justice System."

     "I simply passed it along, thinking someone in the chomo's (child molester) unit would want to know," writes  Chad Holloman in his 2022 prison memoir "Cries for Carteret: My Shot at Redemption," finding himself deemed "responsible for taking the chop out since it was me that dug up the dirt on him."

     The word is defined in William K. Bentley and James M. Corbett's 1992 "Prison Slang: A Dictionary of Words and Expressions Depicting Life Behind Bars."

     It could be argued that the word really isn't of much practical use for most people outside the prison system, thank goodness. Though that's the funny thing with new words — you don't need them until you do. I tucked it away for future reference.

     

     

Trump prescribes lethal advice for American parents

     It's been a year since I came down with Type I diabetes, and everything is butter. The Dexcom G7 rides on the back of my upper arm, a smooth high-tech medical barnacle, whispering my blood sugar data to my cell phone, which reports a healthy 5.7 average blood sugar. The insurance kinks have been worked out. Now CVS and Walgreens send me chirpy little texts announcing it's time to collect bottles of pills and injector pens of insulin — those pens are a marvel, with their 4 mm lubricated needles. You don't feel them going in.
     But technology, no matter how wondrous, cannot conquer human blundering. Last week, for the first time, at bedtime I picked up the orange NovoLog Flexpen instead of the gray Lantus SoloStar for my nightly insulin shot. Twenty units of the long-acting Lantus insulin is just right to tuck me in and keep my blood sugar steady. Twenty units of the short-acting NovoLog could send me to the hospital.
     Fortunately, I noticed the pen color as I was swabbing its tip with alcohol, put it down, and picked up the proper pen. But it was a sobering moment — no matter how finely tuned these systems, carelessness can still mess things up, big time.
     The United States is enduring a master class on how human error can undercut quality medical care. Our secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been clawing at the American system of vaccination, based on his unsupported folk beliefs that vaccines cause autism, which they do not. Calling Kennedy a "vaccine skeptic" is like calling an arsonist "flame curious."
     The damage has already begun. West Texas reported 762 cases of measles, and two deaths since January. In 2024, there were no cases in the entire state of Texas — which can be expected, since vaccination rate has gone steadily down across the country. The "herd immunity" that protects the unvaccinated is eroding.
     On Monday it was the pain-killer and fever-reducer acetaminophen's turn to face baseless government censure.
     “Taking Tylenol is not good,” President Donald Trump said repeatedy during a briefing at the White House. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.”
     He was referring to pregnant women taking Tylenol, but that detail kept being dropped. He did not cite research but a gut feeling.
     "We understood a lot more than people who studied it," Trump said, praising Kennedy, to his right and and — in one of those surreal notes found in nightmares — Oprah's Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, nodding to his left.
     Acetaminophen doesn't cause autism — studies that suggested it might were confounding taking Tylenol with the conditions that Tylenol was being taken to treat. It was like saying white canes cause blindness.
     Trump shifted from Tylenol to vaccines.
     "They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies it's a disgrace," the president said. "I think its very bad. It looks like they're pumping into a horse. You have a little fragile child and get a vat of 80 different vaccines, and they pump it in."
     In Monday's most reckless moment, Trump urged parents not to give newborns their routine hepatitis B vaccinations because "hepatitis B is sexually transmitted. There's no reason to give a baby who's just born hepatitis B. I would say wait until the baby is 12 years old."

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