California Week #2—Chicago's few, the proud, storm California beaches

     I'm on vacation in sunny California. So as not to leave those back in Chicago not only cold, but without anything diverting to read, I thought I'd feature some of my favorite bits of California reportage over the years, like this story, where I join a Marine exercise near San Diego. 

     ABOARD THE OGDEN — Assault Amphibian Vehicles rarely sink, we are told. Hardly ever. Not a worry. Still, before we can climb into one, we have to learn what to do in case ours does, against all odds, sink. The AAVs — large, 25-ton monsters with treads and sloping sides, studded with square, wartlike nubs to screw on additional armor — wait like sleeping dinosaurs, one after another, in the well deck of the Ogden, an odd-looking ship with two steel doors at its stern, now open, to let the sea in. The waves roll up the sloping "false beach," to just before where the AAVs sit.
     The nine Marines, and me, who are going on a practice raid in the back of AAV No. 3 gather around its driver, a Marine from Florida, and listen closely.
     "If it starts to sink, strip off your helmet and your flak jacket. Puff two puffs of air into your Mae West," he says, referring to our black rubber life vests, named after the chesty star. "Just two, or you'll be pinned to the top as it fills with water and you won't be able to get out. After it fills, you'll be able to pop the hatch and get clear. Once you do, pull the cord to your CO2 canister. That'll shoot you to the surface."
     No problem at all. No sirree, Bob. I am not concerned. We all haul ourselves through the hatch — not the easiest task in metal frame backpacks, canteens, helmets, flak jackets, radios and weapons. We all take places on a pair of long benches, facing each other. I feel calm. But I also notice, when they fire up the 500-horsepower Cummins engine in the AAV, that my hand snakes under my flak jacket, to find the CO2 cord. Just in case.
     About 600 Marine reservists from the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines, based in Chicago on Foster Avenue, spent two weeks in August training in California, first at Camp Pendleton, then at sea on the Ogden and two other ships from the U.S. Pacific Fleet off the coast of San Diego.
     They were joining several thousand Marines from around the country in "Exercise Summer Storm 98," practicing attacks from the sea.
     I met the 24th's inspector; instructor, Lt. Col. John A. Morrow last spring, when the Marines conducted urban warfare training in Chicago. Morrow asked me if I was interested in coming to California. It seemed like it would be fun.
     With the back hatch closed, it is very dark in the AAV — a single, yellowish bulb illuminates the coffinlike interior. An AAV can in theory hold 23 men, but given how snugly 10 men and their gear fill it up, that is hard to imagine.
     In the dimness, I can barely see the Marine across from me. Because his face is painted with camouflage makeup, it disappears utterly. His helmet seems to float, faceless, above his uniform. As time for the raid approaches, conversation dwindles. Just after 9 a.m. we hear noises outside. A shout. Then a boom, and a low rumble. Somewhere, the sound of a bell. More shouts. The AAV suddenly jolts forward. Stops. Then begins again, tilting down the false beach and into the Pacific Ocean.
     We can't see outside — there are no windows in the back of an AAV. But we know we are seaborne by the water that starts pouring in around the front of the roof hatch, like a steady rain.

                                                             *  *  *

     "The occurrences of war will not unfold like clockwork," the Marine Warfighting Manual states. "We cannot hope to impose precise, positive control over events."
      Reading over the Marine strategic materials, on the plane to California, I was impressed by the lack of B.S.
     Words such as "chaos," "uncertainty," "disorder" and "horror" are used liberally. "Everybody feels fear," the manual says.
     I sure did. Not fear of the physical peril. I figured I'd be OK. Or, as I told my wife: "It's bad form to get the reporter killed."
     Rather, I was worried about spending time with a bunch of Marines. I'm not exactly a cringing coward, but I couldn't imagine they would take a look at me, a nerdy guy with glasses, the body shape and muscle tone of an overripe pear, and like what they saw. It might sound juvenile, but I was afraid they'd be mean. Being scorned by Marines, I thought on the plane, would not only sting, but it would be the kind of sting that lingers with a guy.

                                                              *  *  *

     After a minute that feels like 20, the water stops raining in. The AAV reaches the beach along with eight others, and cuts left — exactly as planned.
     In the movies, military assaults just unfold; men are pointed toward the target and rush at it. In reality, military operations are rehearsed as meticulously as formal weddings.
     Two days before we hit the beach, Maj. Frank Halliwell, the commander of Fox Company, the group making the raid, stood in the Ogden's ward room before a crowd of officers.
     "Good afternoon, gentlemen," he began. "We are about to conduct a raid to destroy missile radar sites in order to eliminate the threat to U.S. amphibious shipping."
     The raid was simple, on paper. His Fox Company would hit the beach, destroy any defenders, cut north, turn under an expressway, go to the site of an enemy missile radar site, blow it up, interrogate prisoners, then hightail it back to the beach and return to the ship.
    The briefing was a curious mix of concerns both military and mundane — naval bombardments and the importance of not crushing any passing bicyclists. Fact and fantasy blended; there would be an actual F-18 in the sky, for instance, along with two real Cobra gunships. But any fire from the aircraft would be "notional" — the impressive-sounding military word for "make-believe."
     The radar site would be blown up at H-50: 50 minutes after the AAVs hit the beach. The high-speed raid would take exactly two hours and 20 minutes. There was no discussion of what to do if the radar site wasn't there.
     The concept of the Reserve might be alien to some. Keeping a standing military is expensive. Military leaders realized they could maximize their muscle by keeping a reserve of trained men who aren't full-time soldiers.
     The Marine Corps Reserve was created in 1916, just in time to send reservists to World War I. The idea took hold — about 70 percent of all the Marines who served in World War II were reservists. Today, 25 percent of Marines are reservists. They train one weekend a month and two weeks a year to keep their edge.
     The first illusion shattered by watching the reservists train is any idea that it is a lark, a summer-soldier, party-with-the-buddies kind of thing.
     Everyone took the training in deadly earnest. Nobody was dogging it — the guy who came down with conjunctivitis refused to drop out and kept going, his eyes blood-red and weeping.
     The complaints I got — the late-night, bottom-rung, belly-aching gripes — were not about the pay (low), or the food (raves for the new MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat. They've got Skittles), or the quality of superiors.
     What really cheezed the men off was that Camp Pendleton was on alert for fires during their training, and thus certain exercises were curtailed. Live-fire drills were restricted. A Humvee squad could not take its Humvees off the road for fear of fires.
     "We do this two weeks a year, and it's pretty important to us to get all the training done," fumed Sgt. Tuan Best, from a Kansas City unit. "They know how essential this is to us. We need to do what we do. . . . I've got new Marines in my squad. I'm not able to do my job the best I can, which is to make sure my Marines get back from the next war."
     Then again, 2,000 acres of Camp Pendleton burned days after the 24th left.
     The AAVs pull up to a group of trucks. This is where the radar site should be, but it isn't here. The trucks are from another Marine unit, doing something completely different. There isn't much time to assess where the site might be.
     "Got an enemy vehicle coming up the road!" Halliwell shouts. We spot the enemy — actually units of the California National Guard — coming over a bridge, and rush in that direction, huffing along in our heavy Kevlar body armor, then flop face-down in the dirt, which gets kicked up everywhere. The M-16s chatter, blanks.
     Halliwell crouches in a stand of scrubby weeds and talks into the radio, strapped to the back of the lance corporal at his side.
     "We are at our objective but the unit is not here," he says. He listens a moment, then shouts to his men. "We need to move north two kilometers." The officials monitoring the raid decree the enemy destroyed, with the help of two Cobra helicopter gunships fwoop-fwooping overhead. We head north.
     

                                                    *  *  *

     Marines are used to, paradoxically, being both looked down at and up to.
     "You get a bit more respect in the suburbs," said Benjamin Ouwinga, 23, a corporal from Tinley Park. "Downtown, people look at you and think you're probably a cold-hearted person and have no education."
     "It's almost like an aura," said John Balcazar, 22, a corporal from Buffalo Grove.
     "People see the fact you're disciplined, the fact you do things in a certain way. In today's society, having any kind of mental stability is almost an oddity. There are so many flakes out there."
     The Marines are all about suppressing flakiness. Individuality is out. The Marines had me wear a uniform — I never imagined they'd do that; I figured I'd tag along in slacks and a golf shirt. They gave me the uniform of a guy who was bedridden with poison oak. I thought about it a long time, then put it on. They may have done it for appearance's sake, but I found dressing the part educational. I never worried so much about whether my hat (whoops, my "cover") was on or off. I tried to roll my sleeves the way the Marines do, but got it wrong, and two Marines did it for me.
     I felt like Richard III awaiting his armor at Bosworth Field, standing, with my arms straight out, while these two big Marines fixed the sleeves. There was a constant checking of each other, monitoring the angle of the cap, the blousing of the trouser at the boot. It might sound like fixation on petty detail, but in reality it was a form of maintaining the image and looking out for one another. I grew to like it. 


                                                      *  *  *


     Two kilometers north, Halliwell's raid bogs down. H-50 has come and gone. Still no radar site. The reconnaissance squad that led them here is missing. The radio in his helmet has gone dead. A strange squad of Marines — not enemies, not even part of the exercise — has turned up in the high weeds ahead of them. Halliwell doesn't dare move his vehicles forward until the unexpected Marines are accounted for. He doesn't want to crush anybody.
     Halliwell ends up with two handsets, one held to each ear. With the phones at each ear and a look of utter exasperation on his face, he could be any harried executive having a bad day — in civilian life, Halliwell, a resident of Bollingbrook, is the quality control manager at a Chicago plastic bottle factory. "There was no indication of a site," he says, grimacing, into one of the radios. "What should I do? Over."
     Fox Company gets back to the beach just as two AAVs break down. They will return to the Ogden two hours behind schedule, their mission unaccomplished.
     Like most Americans, I take pride living in the mightiest country in the world, without necessarily thinking about what it is that makes us so mighty. As powerful as our democratic ideals are, and as strong as our Coke; McDonald's; Microsoft economy is, they are not what permit us to blithely go about our business in Chicago, untouched by the threat of violent foreign intrusion.
     It's the Marines. And what makes our Marines the Marines, and not some dog-and-pony show that cuts and runs at the first sign of trouble, is training.
     The crucial thing about Halliwell's raid is not that it didn't succeed. The crucial thing is that it didn't succeed in California, and not East Africa, or North Korea, or the Middle East. This was a dry run. Practice.
     What happened is this. The National Guard expected to engage Halliwell on the beach, as he landed, then pull back south, setting up the radar site there so it could be blown up. But Fox Company was too quick, and hooked north before it could be engaged. So the Guard had to chase after them, coming over the ridge just in time to be destroyed. Halliwell went sprinting north after the radar site that wasn't there.
     That quick hooking maneuver, however, which caused all the trouble, also helped Fox Company two days later in a full-scale, amphibious assault. Halliwell's Marines punched through the defenders, and Echo Company came roaring ashore and wiped them out. Exactly as planned.
               — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept,. 6, 1998

California Week #1: The Search for Watts Towers

     I'm in California this week, hiking Joshua Tree, relaxing near Palm Springs, visiting the older boy at school, and trying to unwind, best I can. Rather than leave this space blank, as a non-crazy person would happily do, I thought I'd pass along a few examples of reportage from the Golden State, starting with this adventure, originally published almost 30 years ago.  I winced a bit reading it — wordy — but hope the fascination of the place compensates for my artless description. Plus a reminder of the real challenges of finding a some locations in the pre-GPS, pre-Google Map era. 

     LOS ANGELES — Whenever I'm in Los Angeles, I always do the same old things.
     There is the obligatory slow drive through Beverly Hills, staring in goggle-eyed envy at the pink sugar-cube mansions and extraterrestial vegetation.
     There is the beer break at Barney's Beanery, the browsing trip to Rodeo Drive and the meditative stroll on Santa Monica pier. The usual stuff.
     One thing I had never done, but always wanted to do, was visit the Towers of Simon Rodia in Watts. These glorious, elegant, almost surreal structures, hand-built by Rodia over a period of 33 years without welds, nuts, bolts, drawings or assistance, are internationally famous for their whimsical design and unique history.
     Described as everything from "the paramount achievement of 20th century folk art" to "petrified Christmas trees," they seemed like something that could provide a person with needed inspiration.
     Once I went as far as asking a hotel clerk for directions to the Towers. But the clerk's opinion of Watts, like almost everyone else's, had been set in stone after the rioting of 1967. He convinced me that going to Watts, for any purpose, fell into the category of Stupid and Dangerous Travel Ideas.
     But this time, armed with a map of the city and the Towers' address — 1765 E. 107th St. — I headed for Watts, anyway. I even stopped for lunch and directions — at the first hamburger stand I've seen where you receive your food on a carousel made of bulletproof glass. But that was the only ominous aspect of the trip.
     I found 107th Street easily enough. Not knowing the way the numbers were laid out, though, I kept getting lost — the street always dead-ending or being cut off by construction.

   Several times I set my sights on the Towers in the distance, only to come closer and find they were electrical pylons or smokestacks. What I didn't know, but you now do, is that the Towers are south of Century Boulevard and east of Harbor Freeway.
     Eventually, making a U-turn on 108th, I caught sight of the Towers, unmistakable, looking very much like a pair of huge cypress trees shimmering in the warm air. I sped toward them.
     The Watts Towers are located on a tiny triangular sliver of land alongside railroad tracks. Made from cement and steel rods and chicken wire, they are decorated with a carnival of cast-off tiles, bottles, shells, china, mirrors and bric-a-brac, all set in odd arrays and patterns.
     The Towers were made by Rodia, an Italian immigrant tile-setter, beginning in the early 1920s and ending in the mid-50s. He intended them as a monument to America, his deceased wife and everything "good good."
     "You have to be good good or bad bad to be remembered," said Rodia, who died in 1965 and is definitely remembered.
     What touched me, looking at the Towers, was not America, Rodia's deceased wife, or the "good good." Rather it was the personal courage and determination it must have taken him to build the Towers.
     He didn't form a committee, or ask a lot of people what they thought of his project. He didn't talk much about it — didn't go on the talk shows, didn't write a book. He just built the Towers, on his own. When he was done, he deeded the land to his neighbors and disappeared, leaving the Towers as his own enigmatic statement.
     The Towers suffered decades of neglect and vandalism, not to mention the rumblings of earthquakes and the nearby trains. As late as 1978, the city of Los Angeles was still quibbling about whether they should be preserved. They are being restored now, and are closed to visitors. But that doesn't matter, because the best view of them is from across the street.
     The two main structures, just shy of 100 feet tall, are intricate fantasies of woven concrete, managing to be both free-form and roughly symmetrical. To the right of the main pair is a smaller tower, green with soda-bottle bottoms and connected by an arching lattice of supports. Tiny pieces of mirror glint in the sun, and the eye jumps from spot to spot, taking in the common objects, suddenly made monumental by height and repetition.

     After admiring the Towers from afar, a visitor will want to go close to examine the wall that surrounds them. It is not just a barrier, but an integral part of the Towers, completely covered with the same objects. (Some enterprising soul, by counting or estimation, determined that the Towers are imbedded with 70,000 bits of broken stuff.)
     Rodia's initials, as well as random dates, can be found here and there. The objects beg to be touched. One is compelled to put a finger in the tea-cup handles jutting out from the wall, to stroke the chips of cobalt-blue glass.
     Though the Towers will be closed for years, school groups are given tours inside the walls. You can join a tour — if one is going on — by calling ahead. A small cultural center next door displays artworks, mostly from local residents.
     Even more difficult than finding the Towers was leaving them. They seem so fragile and airy and out of place in rough-edged Watts that they beg to be looked at and thought about. Turning for a last glance, I thought about Simon Rodia, finishing after 33 years, regarding them one last time, then walking away across the weed-choked, vacant lots.
                   — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 27, 1987

Help isn't coming

     Controversies boil up, cool down, and are promptly forgotten.
     But sometimes they offer a little clarity that lingers.
     Our ace police reporter popped his head in my office late last week. The Chi-Raq flag—a red and green banner from Spike Lee's movie—is flying above the American flag in front of St. Sabina Church. Cops are upset; one sent him this photo. He couldn't look into it—people are being scythed down in the city. Maybe I was interested in looking into this flag business?
     Well... that would interrupt my musing about opera. But okay.
     I phoned Father Michael Pfleger, the priest at St. Sabina, in Auburn-Gresham, known for his fiery, not always politic activism. It's a miracle he's still there. For years, he clashed with the archdiocese, and it seemed inevitable that he would be cashiered to some obscure parish. But plans to banish him always seemed to get scuttled. Pfleger's a thorn in the side of authority, sure, but so was Jesus.

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Facebook: your life's unseen audience

   
     When I was 25, I got my first cell phone—we called them "car phones" at the time, since they weighed 50 pounds and were bolted in the trunk of your car—which means I've had a cell phone for a greater portion of my life than I've spent without one. 
     Thirty years, off and on. 
     Still, there is an aroma of the new to cell phones, and always will be, the way my grandparents called a refrigerator an "ice box." 
      When some algorithm in the Facebook servers sent me the above notice, of my Facebook birthday, I was shocked but not surprised. If you had asked me when I joined, I'd have said 2009—I remember taking photos on the epic 7,000 mile road trip the boys and I took that summer, and realizing that I wasn't snapping these for albums back home, certainly not to project them as slides to squirming guests. I was taking pictures to post on Facebook. My orientation had changed. My life had an unseen audience.
     Facebook. We share our lives with our "followers"—a slightly creepy word—and they share their lives in return. If you read Dave Eggers' "The Circle" as augury, then we'll have a lot more of that, and not posting something on Facebook will be seen as strange, selfish.  The little birthday card they generated certainly screamed "me me ME!" Though Edie did manage to sneak in too, including a wedding picture that predates Facebook by a decade and a half. 
     I don't quite believe our future will be constant sharing. It already has begun to even out. In the past few years, Facebook has lost some of its mojo, become less a cool place to visit, and more a daily obligation, like flossing.  Certain sharing habits—take a look at my lunch!—have fallen from favor. Twitter is where the action is, a digital freefire zone where people draw their rhetorical broadswords and have at each other, and where news lives. 
     Eight years, Ah, the memories. Bored in Salt Lake City in 2009 before a reader told us to go to Ruth's Diner. Gry Haukland arriving from Norway to marry a guy she met on my Facebook page.  Meeting Jane Turbov at the Northbrook Public Library to play a game of Scrabble.
     For a while, high school friends were always popping up. Now Facebook's central purpose is to post my blog.  People expect to find it there. Facebook allows for a manageable comments section after columns, since I can instantly show jerks the gate, and don't have to count on the newspaper to eject the undesirables for me. That's fairly rare, since I've vetted everybody at the party—I look at the page of each new person I friend, all 4,822 of them, and simply reject anybody who seems as if they won't be happy drinking my flavor of Kool-Aid. Or because they live in the Philippines and have posted a bunch of sad, semi-cheesecakes of themselves and nothing else. I hope that doesn't seem bigoted of me to say, but it happens often. If I get a direct message from a Nordic beauty who supposedly lives in Indiana—"Hi, how are you?" I reply, "Fine, how's life in the Philippines?" and never hear from them ever again.
     Lately, more and more, there's also  Facebook messenger, which shows up on my phone. I don't know how that's better than regular texting, but some people seem to like it. 
     I still remember that first 2008 meeting at a Sun-Times conference room where some tech kid used a powerpoint presentation and instructed us how to sign up for Facebook. I was in equal measure baffled and miffed: so we were supposed to take time away from writing for a mass-market audience so we could hang around this electronic cracker barrel and chat with whoever happens to be hanging around? One-on-one? Toward what end? 
     But I am good at taking instructions, joined up, and got hooked. We all did. And the thing is not without value. That's what the doomsayers miss. People use Facebook because they like it. It adds something valuable to their lives. When I joined in 2008, Facebook had 100 million users. Now it has 1.5 billion. "Community" is the word Facebook uses to describe itself, and there is a sort of truth to that, though I prefer the line of Luna Lovegood's from "Harry Potter," which underscores the not-quite-real, not-quite-personal nature of the thing: "It's like having friends."
  

"Bit early"

     I was a bit early.
     Not by a lot: 15 minutes maybe.
     I had given myself time for an errand, take some hiking boots back at REI, but the transaction was over in seconds. 
     Now I was driving east on Golf Road Thursday, heading to Evanston to meet my youngest son, to drive him to an appointment, then meet my wife for dinner. I was supposed to pick him up at 4 p.m..
     He wouldn't like my being early; my sons, sticklers for, well, everything.  I knew that.
     And I understood it, sort of. Hard enough to have parents at all, when you're 18 and at college, never mind them showing up when they're not supposed to be there.
     So I was thinking of what I could do to kill time. Not enough time to pop into Amaranth Books on Davis. Love that place. By the time I got down there I'd need to turn around and leave. Can't be late either.
     I could just sit in front of his dorm, answering e-mails. 
     The sun was setting, nearly the Golden Hour, as it's called.
     I noticed this little restaurant.
     I almost called the Charcoal Oven "iconic", but it's not. It's obscure. Except for passing it a thousand times over the past 30 years — my in-laws, may they rest in peace, lived a block away, on Lowell—I never heard or read about it. Nobody I know has ever gone there. When I pass it at night, it's open but empty, sitting by itself on the block. Something of a mystery really. 
     Impulsively, I made a right on Lowell, glanced at my in-law's old house, cut through the alley behind the synagogue, and parked the car. On foot, I approached the restaurant. 
     My wife and I ate there exactly once. Being a block from her mother's house, it's not the location we'd seek out for dinner—not when a good free dinner served with love was a few yards away. But circumstances were such that we had dinner there, maybe 25 years ago.
     Very nice, what I remember. An apricot sour—it was that long ago, back when there were cocktails. Steak, probably. The owner had tomatoes scattered across the bar—from his garden, and gave us a brown bag of tomatoes when we left. Friendly. A pleasant meal. But we still never went back.
     Someone must go. The place has a web site, and is open for dinner every night. Its history traces back 90 years, when it was a speakeasy called The Oasis.  The sign seems to be a product of the early 1960s.
     You have to love that sign. A masterpiece of mid-century American graphics. It building wasn't always orange, but the orange shows off the sign to best effect, as does the mural painted on the side. 
     The parking lot is always empty. But it still is in business.  And strangers live in her parents' house on Lowell. So my wife and I will have to pop in for dinner some time soon. A building that quirky and, yes, beautiful should be supported.
    Snapping a few photos took three or four minutes. Soon I was parked outside my son's dorm in Evanston. I puttered around with email for a minute or two.
    "I'm out front," I reluctantly messaged him, at 3:47.
    "Bit early," he replied.

     

"It can hit you like a bus"

Susanna Phillips

     Opera is about love, or should be.
     The love that characters have for each other — or, tragically, don't have for each other — in tales unfolding in splendor on stage, awash in gorgeous music.
     And the love audiences have for the productions.
     Or, less tragically, don't have. I must admit, earlier this season, after 91 deeply felt minutes enduring Alban Berg's cacophony "Wozzeck" — "deeply felt" as in a sleepless night spent on a bed of broken brick — "love" was not the concept that sprang to mind, other than love of it ending.
     But as with following professional sports, sometimes you are left exasperated. Your team doesn't win every game, you don't enjoy every opera. That's an aspect of love too.
     Not that this will be an issue with "Romeo and Juliet," which premieres Feb. 22, when I'll be bringing 100 readers along in the 8th (!) annual Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Contest. (I couldn't bring 100 readers to "Wozzeck" without worrying about being brought up on charges at the Hague.)

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"You'll be here forever"

     I've been to a lot of newspaper staff meetings over the past 29 years, but today's was extraordinary.
     In the wake of Sun-Times' owner Michael Ferro purchasing the largest single share of the Chicago Tribune's parent company for $44.4 million, the Sun-Times' staff gathered in the lunchroom and met the new chairman of our board, Bruce Sagan, who explained what the purchase means for us.
    "The people involved in the last Sun-Times purchase believe in two newspapers," he said. "There it is, a second voice."
     He said heading the Tribune removes Ferro from managing our paper's affairs.
     "We don't talk to him except to complain about the quality of printing," he said—the Tribune prints and delivers the Sun-Times.
     Ferro will now have a major role in running the Tribune.
    "You made a mistake," Sagan said. "You educated him. He came here a rich guy who didn't know anything about journalism. The rich dabbler got the message from you."
     The Tribune is $400 million in debt, Sagan said. The Sun-Times has no debt. 
    "They took the deal because they needed the money," said Sagan, the longtime publisher of the Hyde Park Herald, who used the money he made there to invest in the Financial Times, the New York Times, where he started the Chicago News Cooperative, and the Sun-Times. "If you are going to bet on something, better bet on us. They're in disarray. He left us a growing institution."
    He said that this development gives us a renewed sense of mission.
    "We now have a focus," he said. "The other guy's still the enemy. Our job is to create the other voice in town. We want to remain a brand that people trust."
     Someone asked about our web site. Sagan said it was terrible. Publisher Jim Kirk said it would be fixed soon. Someone asked about the Sun-Times' future.
     "If I have my way you'll be here forever," Sagan said.
     Maybe you had to live under the sword of Damocles for a decade, watching the thread fray, to really understand the impact of those words. While optimism is typically misplaced in the newspaper business, I found Sagan's appearance somewhere between encouraging and stunning, like the Officer in White showing up at the end of Lord of the Flies, representing civilization and order returned. I was sitting nearby, and when the meeting ended, I couldn't resist shaking his hand.
     "Where the hell have they been hiding you?" I said.


     
   

It won't make you fat if you can't eat it

     You just don't see products with "Fat" in their brand names. Everything is "Lean" or "Diet" or "Organic" or "Healthy." I suppose there are lots of products, if you include "Non-Fat," but that seems cheating. So I was intrigued by this line of FatBoy ice cream novelties, on sale at the new Mariano's at Dundee and Skokie.

      Can you think of another example? I tried. There's Fatburger, in Los Angeles, but that's a restaurant chain. Chicago has a Fat Rice on Diversey—Chinese culture seems to still get away more with glorifying fatness; maybe it's all those buddhas or, more likely, a symptom of rampant hunger.  Given the profusion of wacky beer names, it shouldn't surprise there is a Fat Tire Amber Ale, though with its retro bicycle on the bottle. 

  Even products with chubby mascots put them on a diet—the Campbell's kids come to mind.  And with good reason: a study published by the Journal of Consumer Psychology last summer suggested that children eat twice as much cookies and candy at a sitting after viewing lumpy characters than children who are shown thin characters. 

     You know where the affection for fat children comes from? Back in days when people struggled to get enough to eat, and unchecked infectious diseases scythed children down, you wanted those apple dumpling cheeks as further evidence your child didn't have cholera. Everyone was going to die at 45 anyway, so the raft of chronic illnesses brought on by obesity, cardiac disease and such, were rarely a concern. 

    Childhood obesity had been growing for years, but now it has leveled off, according to the Centers for Disease Control, at about 17 percent, with a direct corollary to parental education. Among parents with a college education, the prevalence of obese children is half that of children of parents who didn't go to college.   

     When I first snapped the above picture, I didn't actually buy the FatBoy ice cream sandwiches. I don't eat that kind of thing. In fact, I go to Mariano's for their low-prices on Yasso bars—frozen yogurt on a stick and only 80 or 100 calories, depending on whether they are pure flavors, like chocolate and vanilla, or have 20 calories worth of chocolate chips and cookie dough pebbles tossed in. I go through one or two a day.

      But that seemed a failure of imagination and, with this post in mind, I picked up a box of FatBoy bars when I was there loading up on Yasso. 

      FatBoy is made by Caspers Ice Cream of Richmond, Utah. The company began in 1925 when Casper Merrill started selling ice cream nut sundaes on a stick made from milk from the family's cows. The FatBoy came soon after, so named because of its square shape and unusual thickness.  The company is run by Merrill's grandson, and the two original products seem to be the only items Caspers sells, though the FatBoy sandwiches come in 11 varieties and flavors, including key lime. For a 90 year old product, it doesn't seem to have had much impact on American cultural life, but that might be a factor of it being slow to get out of Utah.  

     I headed into the basement Wednesday after dinner, thinking to grab a Yasso bar, and noticed the FatBoy box, sighed, and brought one upstairs: 210 calories, which I cut by 50 calories by enticing Edie into eating a quarter. We both took a tentative taste. 

      "Buttery," I said. 

       "The wafer part doesn't taste chocolatey," she said. "It doesn't taste like anything."

      She tossed the quarter she had nibbled into the trash. I finished my FatBoy, hoping that my own boys, neither of whom is anywhere near fat, would handle the other five FatBoy sandwiches when they come home from college this spring. You want local foodstuff with unusual names to taste splendid, and I guess buttery ice cream might be splendid to some folks. But not to me. Neat retro name, though.

Autism spins kid, mom

     Jasan is 6 years old. He loves printers, elevators, and anything that rotates. With that in mind, his mother, Heidi, and grandmother Sherry are spending the morning with him at the TLC Laundromat in Crystal Lake.
     "He's always loved washers and dryers, for some reason," Heidi says."Number one, it's mechanical. It spins. He's always loved spinning things, even when he was a little baby. I have a picture of him at his 1st birthday party, sitting in front of a fan. I didn't know he was autistic then."
     Autism is a complicated brain disorder affecting about one in 68 children, according for the Centers for Disease Control. The cause is unknown, though genetics are definitely a factor. So is being male, like Jasan: five times more boys than girls develop autism.
     Autism presents itself as a spectrum, ranging from severe, life-limiting disabilities — a quarter of people with autism are non-verbal — to those who display unusual-but-manageable quirks and mannerisms. Forty percent of people with autism have elevated intelligence...

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29 days for black history, 366 for white

     February is a Leap Year this year, which means there are 29 days for the dual-edged sword of Black History Month instead of 28.  Valuable focus on a neglected and vital part of American life or another forgotten ghetto? I've tried to sort it out over the years and come up short.

     February is upon us, and with it Black History Month. Which revives the perennial question: If blacks are a vital part of American history -- which of course they are — then why put them in a separate month? Is this not segregation? What's wrong with their history being neglected . . . whoops, I mean, being taught year-round, with the rest of American history?
     It's an irreverent question, of course, but one I suspect lurks at the back of many white minds. Where's our month? If February is Black History Month, why not make March White History Month, and the papers could run thumbnail sketches of, oh, say Richard Petty, Saul Bellow and the polka.
     Well, the answer is rather like the response parents give smartmouth kids who ask why there's a Mother's Day and a Father's Day but no Children's Day: "Every day is children's day." Every month is white history month, and while the legacy of neglect has been addressed in recent years, its effects are still there.
     When I learned my American history, back in the 1970s, blacks showed up suddenly in 1770 in the form of Crispus Attucks, who is promptly killed in the Boston Massacre. ("Isn't that like the white man," I imagine some readers thinking, "he brings a black man into the history books just to kill him.")
     A couple more flashes -- the Civil War, Selma -- and that was it.
     So perhaps a little catch-up is in order. Besides, the problem isn't teaching black history in February -- it's not teaching history the other 11 months. If you want to make March into Memorize the Presidents Month, I'll stand with you.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 2, 2007

INTERESTING BLACK HISTORY MONTH

     My beef with Black History Month is it implies that somehow black history is outside and separate from American history. It isn't. Black history is American history, and vice versa. That said, people of all races are so generally ignorant of everything that has gone before them, any artifice that helps fill the gaping void is to be welcomed.
     The problem is that most Black History Month efforts are directed at children — as if they're the only ones who require a vague idea of the past — and thus we get the same tales every year: George Washington Carver and the peanut; Martin Luther King and his dream.
     What about something for those who've mastered the basics? There is, for instance, the question of how outsiders viewed our system of slavery. Charles Dickens, at 30 the most famous author in Britain, came to America in 1842 to tour the new republic, visiting prisons and insane asylums and textile mills. He never made it to nine-year-old Chicago, settling for St. Louis instead. Dickens was a keen observer, repulsed by the ubiquitous American habit of chewing tobacco and experiencing a wave of guilt when, on his way to Washington to meet President Tyler, he found himself in a slave state. Dickens writes:

     We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for at the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 11, 2008

Who buys a bookstore?

     On her 16th birthday, a high school junior named Allison Brown walked into the Book Bin and got a job as a clerk. Eventually she rose to store manager and now, 39, she became the Northbrook store's owner.
     That caught my attention. I've been a loyal Book Bin customer for 15 years, since moving to the leafy suburban paradise. As I amble on my rounds, from grocery to hardware store to post office, like the bear in a Richard Scarry children's book, I pop in to chat, buying books that catch my eye or are recommended. 

     I had to know: it's hard enough to find somebody who buys books, nowadays: what kind of person buys a bookstore?
     The same kind, it turns out, who walked in 23 years ago to get a job at one. She was not particularly bookish.

     “I was sporty,” said Alli, now married and going by Allison Mengarelli, as we had a cup of tea in the comfortable chairs at the front of the cozy store, with its fireplace and model train circling above the children’s section. “I played soccer year-round. It wasn’t that I was money-oriented.”
     If it wasn’t the books and wasn’t the money, what was the allure?
     “I just loved how I felt when I walked into the bookstore, ” she said. “For me, [I thought] ‘I want to feel that more, so I’ll get a job there.’ I think I was responsibility-oriented. I had a weekly baby-sitting gig from when I was 11 to when I was 18. I rarely missed a Saturday when I wasn’t baby-sitting for this family. I wanted them to count on me.”

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A visit from Lou Bovitch

      Yesterday's post about pausing to pray with some boys from a Jewish school prompted a Facebook friend to mention "Lou Bovitch," referring to the column below. It's flattering for someone to recall something that ran five years ago, so I thought it worth posting, not only for its own merits, but because it shows a certain softening in the author related to the visits. While I'd never go all pious on you—that would just be sad—it's natural for a veneer of religiosity to settle over man as the years go by, if only to guard against the various indignities of life.
     The poem "There is no God," by Arthur Hugh Clough captures this perfectly. It's from 1850, a reminder that those in the past weren't as rigid as we fancy them to be.

‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith,
   ‘And truly it’s a blessing,
For what He might have done with us
   It’s better only guessing.’

‘There is no God,’ a youngster thinks,
   ‘Or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
   Always to be a baby.’

‘There is no God, or if there is,’
   The tradesman thinks, ‘’twere funny
If he should take it ill in me
   To make a little money.’

‘Whether there be,’ the rich man says,
   ‘It matters very little,
For I and mine, thank somebody,
   Are not in want of victual.’

Some others, also, to themselves,
   Who scarce so much as doubt it,
Think there is none, when they are well,
   And do not think about it.

But country folks who live beneath
   The shadow of the steeple;
The parson and the parson’s wife,
   And mostly married people;

Youths green and happy in first love,
   So thankful for illusion;
And men caught out in what the world
   Calls guilt, in first confusion;

And almost everyone when age,
   Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
   Or something very like Him.

     Oh, and if you're wondering what the line about nothing being funny in the fourth sentence refers to, remember the date: Nov. 3, 2010. The Republicans crushed the Democrats the day before in the mid-term elections.


     Want to hear something funny? Of course, you do. Me, too. Though I'm not sure anything could be funny today, let's give it a try.
     So I'm listening to my telephone messages, and I hear the burly, salt-of-Chicago voice of one of our security guards. "Hello, Neil?" he says. "This is the 10th-floor desk. You have Lou Bovitch here to see you."
     That alone drew a laugh from me. Despite never having met, or heard of, Mr. Bovitch, I knew exactly who was standing before the guard, asking in vain to see me.
     I guess some background is in order.
     It was a Friday. That's important. Every Friday, almost without fail, for nearly the past decade, I am visited by a pair of teenage boys in black coats and big hats -- missionaries, though they'd hate that word -- from the ultra-Orthodox wing of Judaism.
     They want me to put on tefillin, those little prayer boxes that Orthodox Jews wear when they pray, and to talk to me about the Torah portion being read that week.
     Sometimes I'm not in my office and miss their visit, like this time. Sometimes I'm busy, or not in the proper frame of mind, and tell the guard to send them away.
     But they're kids, they get gold stars toward, I don't know, a baseball mitt or a new Talmud or something, for visiting wayward Jews and goading them to perform their duty. "A coffee break of the spirit," a rabbi called it. Or maybe they don't get gold stars, maybe the effort is an utterly selfless attempt to repair the world -- it's their ideology, not mine.
     So sometimes I let them come down and give their spiel about this week's reading.
     The education may go both ways -- I see them gazing around the office, wide-eyed, as if they've never been outside before.
     "Do you read the paper?" I once asked.
     "Oh, no," one said. "We're not allowed."
     Of course not. Religion isn't generally about expanding your scope in life, is it?
     Sometimes I even put on the prayer boxes and say the prayers, which strikes me as very odd: an agnostic indulging in this exotic bit of religious theater, one that most Jews dispensed with long ago, when jettisoning most requirements of their faith.
     I've asked myself why I do it. For me, the natural, automatic reaction to such a time-wasting demand on a Friday would be to send them away. Scram, boys, and don't come back! That would be easy enough.
     Yet I don't. I see them more often than not. That they're in their mid-teens is a factor. They're kids. Kids fall under the umbrella of indulgence that Girl Scouts fall under. The League of Women Voters could never get away with selling those too sweet, generic and not-really-all-that-good cookies.
     There is also a shock value in going through the motions of ritual. Our offices have glass walls, and sometimes I'll be there, arm straight out, wrapped in a leather strap, big square black box on my forehead and on the back of my hand, uttering the ancient prayers, and some colleague will come trucking down the hall and catch sight of this strange tableau -- me locked in some weird prayer ritual with two black-clad kids. Their eyes will widen, they'll lose a step and then hurry on, wondering what to make of that -- the resident Arch-Cynic, the Anti-Zealot, if not the Anti-Christ of Chicago, lost in religious ecstasies.
     Nobody ever asks me about it.
     Did I mention the sect is called the Lubavitch, an ultra-Orthodox group that busies itself urging Jews do the rituals that they would do unprompted if they actually believed any of this stuff? The school the boys belong to is the Lubavitch Mesivta of Chicago, at Morse and California.
     The Sun-Times' guard is new, so after the boys asked him to say the Lubavitch were here, he called me and said: "Hello Neil? You have Lou Bovitch here to see you."
     Well, I thought it was funny. Maybe you had to be there.
                                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 3, 2010

It couldn't hurt

Rob Chimberoff, who does pagination at the Sun-Times, greets (left to right) Yakov Rosenblum, 16, Mendel Friedman, 15 and Schneur Ehven, 16, 

     Prayer is defined as ... what? Talking to God? Praising His glory? Asking the cosmos for something you really want?
     That strikes me as a very limited definition. It seldom seems to work. And I just can't wrap my head around a Supreme Being as powerful and all-knowing as the Supreme Being supposed is who is also so insecure that He needs His holy ass kissed constantly.  
     I would suggest that prayer could be all sorts of things.
     For instance, most Fridays for the past 20 years, two or three Hasidic boys show up the Sun-Times offices to try to get me to pray. Because in their circles I am the notorious Meshumed fun Tshikago, or Apostate of Chicago, and the Lubavitch movement has vowed to win me over to their side.
     Kidding.

     The truth is there is some master list of Jewish office workers, and they go around trying to get them to put on tefillin—Yiddish for phylacteries, or prayer boxes—and say some Hebrew prayers. The tefillin are a black leather strap wound around your left arm—well, on my right, since I'm left-handed—and a small black box containing lines of Torah that sits atop your head, in satisfaction of Deuteronomy 11:18, "You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes." (Later in the passage the same words are slapped "upon the doorposts of your house," which is were mezzuzahs  come from).
     While most ultra-Orthodox sects of all religion are seriously into coercion, the Lubavtch are more gentle, low-key. They go around pushing tefillin out of the charming notion that doing so gets us all closer to the arrival of the Messiah (so in that sense, they're trying to bring about the End of the World. But in a good way). 

     And every week, Amy, the charming receptionist, sends an email telling me that the boys are here, and every Friday I can't act on it, because I'm home, or because I'm doing something else and didn't see it for hours later. I can't say I'm consumed with regret to have missed them.

    But this Friday, not only was I at my desk, but drinking coffee to beat the band. So much so that mid-morning I leaped up, briskly marched toward the front desk, and ran smack into Yakov Rosenblum, 16, Mendel Friedman, 15 and Schneur Ehven, 16, all students at Lubavitch Mesivta Chicago in Rogers Park. 

    Knowing when I was caught, dead to rights, I jovially waved them back to my office. On the walk, I told them about the only Bible story I quote with any regularity: Jonah is told by God to go to Nineveh and preach. Not wanting to, he flees to Tarkshish, or tries to, but ends up in a whale. Sometimes fate boots you toward Nineveh, so you just have to shrug and go.
    At the office, I automatically rolled up my right sleeve and took off my wristwatch.

   "You've done this before," one said. I don't think any of the boys had been there before. I tend to treat them as the same individuals, but the truth is, the teens who first came to see me are now no doubt rabbis in Montreal and Brooklyn with growing families of their own. 
    One of the boys wrapped the leather strap around my arm — I've never shot heroin, but there is something about wrapping the extended arm that always struck me as being like a junkie tying off his arm to raise a vein.  I also put the box upon my head, and repeated the Hebrew prayers after another one of the boys, haltingly and half-remembered.

     Why do it? A number of reasons. Altruism, mostly. The lads are here and want me to, to further the philosophical notions their sect possesses. 

    "You guys get points toward a bicycle or something for me doing this," I said, my standard joke, and they denied it, as the boys have done for decades. 

     It must also freak out passersby — I have a glass wall in the office. I like the thought of people walking by and seeing Steinberg lost in some arcane religious act with three black-hatted attendants. 
     And I do like that the Lubavitch are low-key, or at least as low-key as you can be showing up at people's offices in the middle of working day and dragooning them into your ritual. They never say I'm going to hell otherwise. They don't set off bombs. A lot of faiths could take a lesson from them. 

     But it's also a pause from the day, for me. Their reason strikes me as specious. I can't conceive of a world where the Supreme Being, throned in glory, looks up, smiling, thinking, "Neil's putting on tefillin. All riiiiight!" 
     But for me, the combination of the pause, the interaction with the friendly black-hatted boys, the doing of a small favor for them, the muttering of the ancient words, well, it all blended together to perk me up. Without going into detail I had been feeling particularly lousy Friday morning, one of those minor professional annoyances involved with the new book, one that 99 out of 100 writers would leap to have to go through in my place, but which just left me sour-stomached and frustrated and viewing the whole writing process, not as work I love, but as another damaging addiction.

     By the time the boys left, the problem, which had been a noxious fog surrounding me, blocking my view in every direction, was now a cloud on the horizon, large, yes, but no longer so present. And it was diminishing, and I was feeling my old self again. 

    Maybe that was unrelated to the prayer. Maybe it would have happened whether the boys showed up or not. But I'm not sure. The prayer probably didn't help. But it couldn't hurt.

Why 'Downton Abbey'?

     Chicagoans watch four hours and 47 minutes of television a day, on average, according to Nielsen, making us 13th in the ranking of big city TV viewing, a full hour less than glued-to-the-tube Cleveland, where they watch nearly six hours a day, one quarter of the time available for humans to live.
     Having spent my first 18 years in the Cleveland area, I can explain. You watch a lot of TV because, well, otherwise, there you are, in Cleveland.
     I tend to sniff at television. When people ask how I manage to write a regular newspaper column plus magazine articles and a steady stream of books, I reply, "I never watch TV."
     It's true. Excluding Bulls games, I don't turn the thing on, and never at a set time to watch a particular show. I haven't seen "Game of Thrones" or "Empire" or "Broad City" or "Veep" — in fact, I had to Google "Top TV shows" to generate the list of programs I haven't seen, because otherwise nothing came to mind.

     Since avoiding TV sounds precious, and I try to keep an honest column here, I feel compelled to confess that I recently went off the TV wagon, big time.

     Two words: “Downton Abbey.”
     Not only have I watched every minute of the first five seasons and the four (!) shows so far this year, the sixth and final season, but I’ve done so since the autumn, in one glorious orgy of elegant dinners and witty retorts and scullery drama. At some point every Sunday I look up and exclaim “Downton Abbey!” the way a 4-year-old would say, “Christmas!”
     It was all an accident. Half a decade of PBS hype sluiced off me without effect, water off a duck’s back. We were far from the lure of television — or so we thought — on vacation in October, hiking in Pennsylvania. My wife had found the picturesque hamlet of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and booked us in a picturesque bed and breakfast that had a decidedly unpicturesque flat-screen television.

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GQ sells its birthright for a mess of ice cream

     How magazines stay in business nowadays is a mystery. Some manage it by sheer excellence. I subscribe to three: The New Yorker, The Economist, and Consumer Reports. 
     The rest must resort to other stratagems....
     I was in the barber shop on Schermer Road a week ago Saturday, waiting for Leo to finish up with a customer. I turned my attention to a pile of magazines—are there enough barber shops and doctor's waiting rooms to keep the profession afloat?— and fished the July Gentleman's Quarterly out of the pile on a low table. Not my usual fare, but I figured, why not? See what the hip metrosexuals are up to. Nothing really registered until I got to this advertisement for Klondike ice cream bars.

     It seemed very familiar, even though I was sure I'd never seen the ad before. Nor have I ever eaten a Klondike bar, to my memory. Nor would I want to, even after seeing this ad. Especially not after seeing this ad. I paused, and began flipping backward through the magazine, until I came to this:

     
     The same stack of Klondike bars—the photo from the ad, under the serious sounding heading, "@GQREPORTS," which suggested information dug up by the hardworking hipsters on the GQ staff. I squinted hard and saw the word "promotions." Ah, paid content. 
    Here is how they described the wonders of the aforementioned Klondike bars:
    

  
     Is that not the lamest block of copy you've ever read in your life? It's one thing to sell out and pretend that the average reading of GQ is having trouble deciding what kind of frozen comestible to ask his mom to pick up at Jewel. But "a little spice to their lives" doesn't even mesh with the idea of ice cream. Nobody wants spicy ice cream. It's repulsive.
     I don't want to make too much of this.  The actual, non-paid, produced-by-journalists-of- some-sort editorial content of GQ was never exactly hard-hitting reportage: more how to wax your pubes and an interview with whatever passing 20ish celebrity was enjoying his spasm of fame at the moment. The cover story of the July issue, "The Most Stylish Men Alive" is not only banal, but uses the cliched, tired, unfortunate "Blah Blah Blabbity Blah Alive!" structure pioneered by People magazine that leads one to suspect, grotesquely, that a future GQ might turn its attention to nattily-dressed corpses.
     So hardly better than a stack of Klondike bars.        And if you pressed a gun to my temple and demanded I declare the name of an endeavor that Ryan Gosling was involved with, I'd be a dead man. Movies, based on his looks.
     But still. All a magazine, all any publication has, is its credibility, its voice. And while that voice will be stilled if it goes out of business, it can also be so strangled by commercial considerations that it loses all meaning.
    Yes, there's a lot of that going around lately. Sponsored content is not the Kiss of Death. The Tribune has its Blue Sky Innovation and, from what I've seen of it, manages to pull the somersault off. The Sun-Times has a fat wad of USA Today living inside it, which I comfort myself by observing, "It's better than nothing." The key is to have stories that are actually interesting, in themselves, despite being sponsored or appropriated from elsewhere.  It can be done.
     I haven't tried it yet, but I've considered nodding at my advertiser. Like a diver bouncing at the end of a high dive, summoning his courage, trying not to look down. This blog is just ending its third season being sponsored by Eli's Cheesecake, a financial arrangement that gives me a sense of validation, plus spending money. And though I am vastly grateful to Marc Schulman for buying ads on my blog, and though I have Eli's cheesecake right now in my freezer, there by demand of my oldest boy, who loves the stuff, I have yet to figure out how to create some editorial content here without seeming like a complete sell-out and a fraud, or even if I should make the attempt. I mean, what about those readers who don't notice that nice new Valentine ad in the upper right hand corner, who are wondering, "If only there was some rich and satisfying desert substance I could send to the significant person in my life at Valentine's Day to show just how much I care?"
     Not that Eli's has ever requested it. But I do want to encourage them to return next year. And it seems almost a creative challenge, to put my head in the lion's mouth and pull it out. Why not write about cheesecake? I write about every other flippin' thing, every goddamn day. Cheesecake can be interesting too. 
     Is avoiding that topic courage or cowardice? The Tribune seems able to manage it., and they're a respected mainstream publication. Plugging "GQ sells out to Klondike bars" into Google reveals no outrage on the Internet, which can build up a mob of criticism over a 6-year-old's drawing for his mother. Maybe this is how we do it nowadays. Maybe caring at all about this kind of thing is an antique concern, like worrying about accuracy on Facebook. Thoughts?