Wheat Chex has a new box

     I feel oddly protective of Wheat Chex.
     First because it's one of only two cold breakfast cereals I still eat, the other being Shredded Wheat
    Second, because Wheat Chex seems imperiled. It can be hard to find, while Shredded Wheat is everywhere. secure. Shredded Wheat is like Cheerios — popular enough to be here forever. 
    But Wheat Chex ... it's the red-headed step-child of the Chex family of cereals.  There's always Rice and Corn and all the new varieties, Cinnamon and Chocolate and whatever, and you wonder whether they just ran out of Wheat Chex, or can't be bothered stocking it just for me.
   So when I was at a run to Sunset Foods -- trembling in the shadow of Mariano's but still managing to hold on — I paused in front of this graphic shift. The new box is on the left, if it isn't clear.  That's a good sign. They wouldn't redesign the box, then drop the product. 
    Would they?
    Since not too long ago we were mourning the change in the Celestial Seasonings box, I feel obligated to point out that the Wheat Chex redesign is a big improvement. It's cleaner. The typeface on the "Wheat Chex" is friendlier, and the see-through "X" a nice touch.

Yes, that's Elizabeth Taylor

    I did pause, uncertain, at the square of four squares arrayed on the spoon. That would never happen in the living world, of course, not unless you stuck your fingers in your cereal and set them onto your spoon like that.  Still, there's a certain purity, not unlike Wheat Chex itself, and that too is an improvement over the old box, with its droplets of milk that look like white paint.
     I probably shouldn't be eating Chex at all—the stuff is fattening as hell. A modest bowl will set you back 42o calories, with the milk, and because its mostly carbohydrates it'll leave you hungry at mid-morning. You're far better off with a grapefruit and yogurt.
     But having given up bourbon, I'll be damned if I'll surrender Wheat Chex too. Someone has to keep the faith. Breakfast cereals are on the decline, and have been for years. Sales fell 25 percent between 2000 and 2015—still at $10 billion, but shrinking.  Reasons abound. One survey said 40 percent of Millennials described breakfast cereals as "too difficult to eat," which is just sad.  They're referring to the clean-up, not the pouring milk part. But still.

1952 ad -- Wheat Chex phasing out the old name.

    Chex, by the way, was introduced in 1937 by Ralston Purina as "Shredded Ralston" (The history of breakfast cereals is intertwined with nutty American dietary fads, and just as Kellogg's started as sanitarium food for nutritional fanatics, so Ralston was related to "Ralstonism" a late 19th century movement not unlike Scientology, with various levels of progress toward a new, superior race of humans, a belief that the minds of others could be controlled through magnetism, and other assorted nutritional hoo-ha, such as a conviction that watermelons are poisonous).
    Ralston always struggled to produce a product that an increasingly important breakfast cereal demographic—children—would eat. It overcame that Hot Ralston was "steaming paste ... that children hated" by hiring Tom Mix, cowboy star, to be its mascot (his image, anyway. The actual Mix, a squeaky-voiced alcoholic, was kept out-of-sight). 
    Rice Chex was introduced in 1950, about the time the name "Wheat Chex" was introduced. Back then, the Wheat Chex squares weren't the careful geometric grids we see today, but puffier and more jumbled, closely resembling a Shredded Wheat biscuit. 

Space Patrol's Ed Kemmer finds them "tops for taste" in 1953.

    The next year Ralston tried to sell the duo to kiddies, sponsoring "Space Patrol," an early space-themed TV show. Shot on a shoestring budget with special effects considered cheesy even then, the product was woven into the plot line—members of the Space Patrol would pause from their adventures to keep their energy up by wolfing down a few bowls of Chex. 
     By 1955, Ralston Purina was trying reverse psychology. "Children," an odd character dubbed Prof. Checkerboard warned. "Wheat Chex are only for adults. Don't eat Chex."  Another commercial featured a man eating it at a fancy Victorian table complete with candelabra, announcing it was the "grown-up cereal from Checkerboard Square" (a Checkerboard is the Ralston Purina logo). 
    They kept that tack for years, edging back and forth between sincere appeals to adults and sideways pitches to kids, all the while recognizing that lots of people just didn't like the stuff ("People who don't like Chex cereals haven't tried Chex cereals," a 1976 commercial claimed, suggesting that opposition to the taste was merely notional). 
    Corn Chex showed up in 1958. In more recent years, there have been the typical palette of failed flavors-- Vanilla Chex, Honey Graham Chex. Sugar Chex. I never ate those—well, I remember giving Bran Chex a try (bleh) and Raisin Chex (not bad). 
    Anyway, too much about Chex. But we can't fret over the candidacy of Donald Trump every single day, can we? 

Flashback: Tussling with Oscar D'Angelo

     Oscar D'Angelo, the "Mayor of Little Italy" has died, the Sun-Times reported. Back in the day, I had a few tussles, and a few lunches, with D'Angelo, one of those shifty characters who gave the city its murky charm. The incident I remember most regarded planters in West Fulton Market, put in for the 1996 Democratic Convention, but a danger to traffic. They stayed in, even after a police officer was paralyzed crashing into them. Eventually, they came out, and I helped. This ran under the headline,  "City inaction on planters sure to end up deadly."

     Nobody has been killed yet.
     No car filled with children, nudging its way north onto Randolph, its driver trying to peer around the plants and planters -- a combined 6 feet tall -- erected by the city four years ago to decorate the Democratic National Convention, has been broadsided by one of the semis thundering west on Randolph.
     Yet.
     But that day is coming, despite the efforts of local business leaders, a dozen of whom gathered this week to publicly appeal to the mayor to redo the planters, a pet project of his.
     "This is a very, very dangerous situation," said Larry Pienta, a co-owner of J.P. Graziano Importers. "We told the planning department and the engineers when they first started it that it wasn't going to work, and it hasn't. Somebody is going to get killed here."
     Someone getting killed would make the job of lowering the planters a little easier. Though public complaints about accidents have been pouring out for years, nothing has been done or is close to being done to fix the situation. The suspicion is that mayoral pal Oscar D'Angelo is somehow blocking action.
     "It's true," said Chris Aralis, owner of La Quinta Food Importers.
     When confronted with the issue at a meeting at the offices of the West Loop Gate Community Organization, where he is a board member, D'Angelo reportedly said: "We spent $5 million to put those things in. I don't care if three or four people have an accident." This stunned those present.
     "We have a good relationship with West Loop Gate, and I was really shocked that one of their board members would say that," said Roger Romanelli, executive director of the Randolph/Fulton Market Association.
     Even fellow West Loop Gate officials were disturbed by the comment.
     "I'm not going to lay down for Oscar," said Tom Kapsalis, West Loop Gate president. "If he said that, he said it. He gets emotional. He gets angry, and many times he says things he really doesn't mean."
     "Those planters are always brought up," said Gail Filkowski, executive director of West Loop Gate. "The planters are the mayor's baby, not really Oscar's, not really Tom's. The two of them are involved, of course. I know they love the planters. The planters are beautiful and add a lot of green."
     Finally, after I spoke with his minions, D'Angelo consented to speak with me. He did not deny his statement, but rather tried to put it into the larger context of his life -- the millions of dollars given to charity, the decades of selfless public service, the general malice of the media.
     He was very smooth: a pleasing velvet fog.
     Fine, fine, I said. Are you against altering the planters?
     "Absolutely not," he said. "If that's what the experts say. If (the Chicago Department of Transportation) or any responsible agency said it was a safety issue, I would not be opposed. But I haven't seen a single word."
     The business leaders have been appealing to CDOT to release those figures, I said. Perhaps somebody -- an Oscar D'Angelo, perhaps -- is quashing them?
     D'Angelo said, a smile in his voice, that he "hadn't written a letter" telling anybody to withhold data, and I countered that even in my limited knowledge of politics, not many people write letters like that.
     And on and on. The need for study seems to be the party line. Kapsalis said the same thing, despite believing the planters are dangerous.
     Yet, he concluded that "I'd hate to see them changed," and suggested, rather than an immediate fix, "a little investigation" is in order.
     Meanwhile, accidents happen every day — sometimes four times a day — on Randolph from Halsted to Ogden. It is merely a matter of time.
     I am not a lawyer, but I know that part of liability can increase with advance knowledge that a situation is dangerous.
     The planters were installed four years ago; for the past three years the warnings have been sounded, unheeded.
     Nothing happened. Nobody paid attention. But they will. Just as nobody cared about selling truck licenses in the secretary of state's office until six children were incinerated in an accident with a truck whose driver apparently bribed his way onto the road, so they will also care about the planters.
     Maybe not this year. Maybe not the next. But someday a driver trying to see around those planters will be hit by a truck. The heirs will sue the city, claiming that it was warned again and again about the peril and did nothing. It hasn't happened. Yet.
     But it will.

        —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, August 23, 2000

Too close for comfort

     Forty-two percent.
     More than a third, less than half.
     That is the number of Americans who would vote for Donald Trump for president were the election today, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll.
     Which I guess could be seen as encouraging, because 50 percent would vote for Hillary Clinton. Which means the epic and undeniable disaster of a Trump presidency would be avoided were the election today which, sadly, it is not. Only 92 days of this to go, folks.
     So I don’t want to go all Debbie Downer on you. But 42 percent. Who are these people? They can’t all be the snarling haters hopping up and down at Trump rallies, gleeful that they have permission from someone in authority to take their gruesome politics out of the basement and into the light of day. Can they? I sure hope not.

     The bulk of Trump’s support is among economically stressed white males without college degrees. They thrill to his impossible idea of a big wall across our southern border, embrace his daft, anti-American scheme for barring Muslim immigrants — whoops, it seems now to be all immigrants — and fantasize at how rich we’ll be once we curl up in a protective ball, trade-wise, and the world stops eating our ...

To continue reading, click here. 

It's Sunday, give it a rest.

     Gizmo was named by the boys, when they were 7 and 8. For a character in "Gremlins," I believe. Now 12 years old, he sleeps a lot, and I suppose he's earned his rest, for a dozen years of vigilance, and constant hauteur, and strolling, and that careful monitoring of the molecules in the air that cats scrupulously perform.
    Even when sleeping, as above, he's on the job.
    He is also a living link to my wife's first two cats, a brother and sister team rescued from the Anti-Cruelty Society, Anna and Vronsky, named for the lovers in Anna Karinina.  They lived to be 19 and 18, respectively, ancient for cats. I happen to have a photo of the three of them—that's Anna, on the left. You can tell because she was always fatter. Meaner and fatter. Though able to fetch—not something cats are known to do. But we would fire those gold elastic Marshall Field's gift strings like rubber bands, and Anna would retrieve them. What people did for fun before the internet. 
     Vronsky in the middle. Sweeter than Anna, very quiet and gentle. And a young Gizmo, getting what corner of the food bowl he could. I'm surprised he survived in their company. Both are buried in the side yard now, under cat-shaped stones.
    And my point being? Well, it's Sunday. And it's August. And Saturday I didn't do much of anything. Parked on the couch mostly, reading a book: my new book, as it happens, which turned up in the FedEx late Friday, and I thought I would give an immediate read. No typos, no slap-my-forehead mistakes, which is not always the case. So that's a relief. The thing held my attention. Five years of work. 
     Five years of work, you should take a day off and read the thing.
     Gizmo kept me company the whole time, on the wing chair across from where I sprawled, his paws just so, as if he had dropped off and the little book of Cat Tales tumbled from his paws. Cats serve many purposes; reminding us to take it easy ourselves is a vital one. Gizmo wasn't working hard this weekend, and I hope you aren't either. I'm certainly not.  

Olympics a tedious, mystifying waste of time

     I missed the Opening Ceremonies of the Rio Olympics last night --a long family dinner in Evanston at the excellent Tapas Barcelona, then a stroll on the lakefront. I'm not sure what I'll be doing today, but tuning in to the Olympics is not the the dance card.

    Then again, I've made scorning the Olympics a tradition, and tend to put it in the paper, not to antagonize fans—hey, do whatever floats your boat—but as a comfort to those of us who don't share in the excitement. This is from 16 years ago, but I like to think still has bite, and I'm sharing it, even though my optimism that the Olympics were fading was obviously misplaced, as was my hope that we were learning not to be sucked into the media maelstrom swirling around us. Shows that even I was a dewy optimist, at one point long ago. 

     The Olympics are a very strange cultural oddity that should have died out years ago. I'm speaking generally. I can't refer to the current Olympics unfolding in Sydney because I haven't watched, not a minute, and I was just beginning to feel guilty about that when my colleagues in sports came to the rescue with the news that nobody else is watching much, either.
     El floppo. A big ratings disaster.
     The sportswriters, true to their trade, find this worrisome and have offered up all sorts of reasons for the collective public shrug of indifference: end of the Cold War, rise of the Internet, lack of any huge Tonya Harding-esque drama to drive people to their televisions.
     My reaction is different, and can be summed up as follows:
     Hooray!
     Our long nightmare is over. The Olympics, though not without moments of interest, are a tedious, mystifying ritual waste of time.
     Think of the opening and closing ceremonies: these gigantic displays, part May Day in Beijing, part Disney World parade grown huge on steroids, and part Mardi Gras on Jupiter, with some ridiculously bland pop entertainer thrown in for good measure.
     Think of gymnastics. How frightening are they? These poor little girls, duped into wasting their lives bouncing around floor mats and pommel horses. Their parents should be in jail. I'd rather have my boys become juvenile delinquents, making zip guns in shop class, reading hot rod magazines and sneaking smokes behind the garage, than have them spend six hours a day for a decade of their irretrievable youth trying to leap off the uneven bars and land squarely. How tragic.

Mary Lou Retton

   Remember Mary Lou Retton? She was like something out of a horror film. The bulked-up body of a monster somehow hideously compressed to tiny size, perhaps through radiation. And that fixed smile—just the right touch of Stephen King normalcy-gone-haywire. They put her on the Wheaties box, but she would have been more at home in a Wes Craven movie, still in that red, white and blue leotard, that smile still plastered on her face, but twirling and somersaulting toward her victims with an ice pick in each hand.
      Of course we would turn away, eventually, once the culture had stopped shaming us into watching, once it stopped being a patriotic duty to show up and boo the Ruskies, once the quaint allure of amateurism had been overwhelmed by the pervasive stink of commerce, once the entire thing turned into less sport and more a cattle casting call for the next two years of Nike commercials.
     Good that we are retreating, averting our faces. Maybe people are finally wising up that they don't have to sit up and beg, transfixed, every time the bell is rung and the next Huge Honking Deal announced.
     If access to information can be plotted on a curve, from the days when farmers left their plows and hurried into town when the mail packet arrived, bringing with it a 2-month-old newspaper with tales of the Treaty of Ghent, to today, when you can keep your cell phone and your Palm Pilot jiggling on your belt and be plugged into everything all the time, maybe now we are reaching some kind of limit, some zenith of access, the moment when we realize that the next challenge for humanity is no longer faster, greater access, but to think about delegating, about culling, about triaging, about learning to ignore stuff.  
     Like the Olympics.
     Think about it. Even if you expected the most incredible thing in the world to happen. Even if you were certain—if you knew—that a wonder would occur, that a gymnast would throw herself into the air, and remain there, spinning, a foot above the ground, for half a minute. Would you then watch the darn thing every night?
     No. You would wait until it happened, until news broke, then catch one of the endless replays of the miracle, on the news, on cable. You'd log on somewhere, to the site where they show the clip upon demand. That would do.
     Time does not expand, no matter the technology. And while I would hate to argue that we have reached an apex of sophistication—the Babylonians felt that they had scaled the summit because they had bronze and perfume—I will argue that it is dawning on people, slowly, that they need to be selective, to master their own destinies.
     Maybe nobody is watching the Olympics because we remember how transfixed we were by the O.J. trial. All that time wasted soaking up the endless parsings and analysis. Maybe we learned something. That we can opt out, we can ignore. I didn't watch a minute of "Survivor," either, despite the hoopla, despite readers sending in videotapes, despite colleagues challenging me, testily, saying that I was betraying the duty of a columnist to keep a finger on the pulse of the world.
     Duty shmooty. Nothing is going on in Sydney of any importance whatsoever. Feel free to ignore it and do something else: Make taffy with your kids, go for a walk, learn to knit. You'll be glad that you did, and proud, too. I am. 

                              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 24, 2000

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This is one of those cases where you've got the name already. But can you match it to the face? Or, in this case, the shore?
     I would wager that every last one of you has heard of this body of water, read about it, thought about it. But have you ever seen it? Well now you have. 
     So what is this? Because I know it's a toughie, I'll post a clue at 12 noon. But my gut says somebody will put two-and-two together. It's not within 500 miles of Chicago. 
     The winner gets .... something different this time ... how about a cup of coffee at the Chicago Sun-Times, and an official Sun-Times cup to take home? Or if you can't make it, I'll just mail you the coffee cup. 

Rejoice! The Olympics begin tonight ... in Rio and not Chicago

     A rare two columns in the paper today, the brick piece below in the front section, and this, in sports. The Olympics leave me cold, obviously and, given all the hired hype, I thought a little pushback is in order.  

     The opening ceremony for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro takes place Friday.
     A reason to celebrate because, as you know, they might have been taking place in Chicago, a kind of surreal mockery added to our usual set of grim urban woes such as holding a child’s birthday party with balloons in the middle of a blood-soaked battlefield. Dodged that bullet, for once.
     You’re not watching, are you? Whatever for?
     You do know about this internet machine, correct? That anything halfway interesting immediately will be tweeted and Facebooked and ballyhooed around the world. Why park yourself for five hours in front of the TV when you can just hoover up the highlights, should there be highlights, the next morning?
     Me, I plan to be at Millennium Park on Friday night. Some kind of concert.
     Yes, to be candid, had my wife not come up with that outing, I might have sprawled on the sofa to check out the opening festivities with all the minor countries you forgot existed marching in with all sorts of fashion nightmares: “Look, the team from Kyrgyzstan seems to be wearing green oven mitts on their hands.”
     I would indulge the dull, might-as-well-see-the-spectacle curiosity. I would flash back to the 2008 opening ceremony in Beijing, a chilling demonstration of totalitarian power, this $100 million, four-hour show of old Red Army-style coordination with 15,000 slaves in mechanized synchronization all designed to overawe viewers into submission. You couldn’t watch it and not think, “Surrender is our only option.”
To continue reading, click here. 

"Come, let us make bricks"

     I've decided to create the tradition of "Trumpless Friday," between now and the election. 

Scott Miracale at Glen-Gery

    "Please excuse any mess," says Scott Miracle as we step into the Glen-Gery brickworks, "but understand we make brick out of dirt."
     With that in mind, it's surprisingly clean.
     We are in Marseilles, Illinois, 75 miles southwest of Chicago. I'm here due to one of those delightful connections that are made in a great city. Last April, I toured the Inner-City Muslim Action Network on West 63rd Street. IMAN runs a health center, transitional residences, social halls and an art studio. There I met a sculptor preparing the monument to honor the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 1966 march in Marquette Park, to be unveiled at 67th and Kedzie Friday.
     The  bas-relief sculpture was being carved from fresh bricks, appropriately enough — King was hit in the head by one of the bricks, stones and bottles thrown by white protesters, opposed to his notion that Americans of any race should be able to live wherever they please.
     Most know about King. But bricks? I wondered where they planned to fire the monument's bricks. They pointed me toward Marseilles (pronounced "Mar-sells") to Glen-Gery Brick, the biggest brickworks in the state, last of what used to be a busy hub for brick-making in and around Chicago.
     Brick-making goes way back; it's discussed in the Bible.

To continue reading, click here.

Not a politician in sight

     Suddenly, late Wednesday, I just couldn't process another syllable about Donald Trump, his latest jaw-dropping statement, the reaction to that statement, the election, or anything political. I thought about leaving you high and dry on Thursday. But I have made a commitment (every....goddamn.,..day) so I went through my camera roll, and found these shots taken last May, hiking in Eldorado State Park, outside of Boulder, Colorado.

     They'll serve, as a springboard for the situation at this particular moment. 
     The great thing about nature — one of the many great things about nature — is how it rolls along on its own, existing outside our petty daily concerns. It was here long, long before we showed up, sits patiently our entire lives, waiting to be noticed, and it'll be here, more or less unchanged, when we're gone. Whether Trump endorses Paul Ryan or not, the certainty that his shocking misstatement of this hour and the echoes and turbulence rolling off it will be replaced by one just as bad or worse the next, none of it matters. The sun and stars wheel around the heavens, the seasons cycle by, the rains fall and dry up and fall again. The scratch we make in the earth with our boots, well, "The mountains don't care," to quote my favorite park service sign, encouraging hikers to keep their wits about them, be responsible for their actions and their safety, and not to bumble oblivious into a bad situation.
     We in the United States have bumbled oblivious into a bad situation, with half the country so warped by marinating for 20 years in a pool of right wing bile that they just can't process information anymore, and so have embraced a madman as their champion who, surprise surprise, is behaving as you would expect a madman to behave....
     Oh wait, I'm back again, aren't I? It's very hard to tear your eyes from the ongoing disaster, a train wreck that somehow manages to wreck itself anew each day, seemingly each hour. It's like that M.C. Escher staircase that goes down and down yet somehow never reaches bottom. It...
     Trees, rock, blue skies, white clouds. Colorado. I see now how people flee there and stay. It was a lovely day, hiking up the Continental Divide Trail, with our cold water and our sandwiches for lunch. After a couple hours, we found a lovely bench, with this tremendous vista, miles and miles. Not a politician in sight. I think I have to get myself back there, right away, in mind if not in body.  The rest is just a passing shadow.
  

Must our leaders be smarter than us?

     

After today's column, posted below, an anonymous reader wrote this:

     What I willn't believe is that you gave George Bush credit for anything. You wrote a column (not sure how to look up) at the end of his Presidency saying exactly that there was nothing good from it. You would not even give him credit for addressing AIDS in Africa.  This is standard oppositional crap. The new guy is terrible (fascist, communist, child beater) the previous standard bearer was much better and believable. You can's stand Trump I get it. But don't pretend to make yourself better by pretending 8 years later you ever gave Bush credit.     

     Sigh. Part of what makes dumb people dumb is they don't get the whole past-is-accessible-to-us-today-and-can-be-checked thing. Normally, I tell people I'm busy enough reacting to what I actually write without also addressing whatever you imagine I wrote. But since this wanker is so completely wrong, I couldn't resist illustrating one of the many examples of how I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt that his ilk always denied Obama. People just assume others are as unfair and doctrinaire as they are. We're not. At least I'm not. This ran before Bush even took office.

     Those Jay Leno jokes practically write themselves.
     I was reading a news account of how scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have just produced the highest density matter ever created experimentally.
     "Scientists," begins my imaginary Leno, expectantly rubbing his hands together, bouncing on the balls of his feet and surveying the audience, "at the Brookhaven National Laboratory . . . have smashed the nuclei of gold atoms together . . . creating the densest material known to man . . . outside of George Bush's brain."
     OK, I didn't say it was a good Jay Leno joke.
     But the fact is, Bush will be president in a few days, and we can expect a constant stream of ridicule based on the perception that the 43rd president is not the sharpest tack in the box.
Even NBC's hushed, reverent, presidential, image-building interview with Tom Brokaw had to include Bush's reaction to a snippet of Leno bashing Bush (a better joke than mine: basically that the president-elect and his dog have begun playing catch with a Frisbee since Bush "was tired of losing at Scrabble.") Bush replied, quite cleverly, that he goes to bed at 9:45, though first-lady-to-be Laura, who seems to suffer from candor, said that, yes, indeed it does hurt.
     The perception of Bush as dumb persists, despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, he has not uttered anything particularly stupid. Unlike with Dan Quayle, there is no enormous body of gaffes and spoonerisms supporting this perception. Bush hasn't said anything famously dumb.
Oh, there was that pop quiz of 1999, when a Boston TV reporter (TV reporters being famous for their vast sweep of knowledge) asked Bush to name the leaders of Chechnya, India, Taiwan and Pakistan.
     Bush punted all four, and while the story lingered, it did not particularly damage him among the electorate, perhaps because Americans are famously self-absorbed, and not one in a hundred could name any of those leaders, never mind all four. I certainly couldn't and neither could you.
     What has damaged Bush's reputation, I believe, is not his calling Kosovars "Kosovarians" or his C average at Yale, but his facial expression. He just looks dumb, paradoxically, because of a certain intensity, as if he is listening hard, trying to decipher a language he only barely understands. It was that lost, cross-eyed expression, punctuated by his hey-I-got-that-one-right smirk, that almost handed the election to Al Gore, whose robotic, facts-on-file demeanor has practically made being smart into a liability.
     Frankly, being smart is a liability, in the sense that being smart often blinds you to factors that frequently trump intelligence (why do you think they call it "dumb luck"?)
     Being smart certainly was Bill Clinton's undoing — it emboldened him into striding toward the mistakes and misdeeds of his presidency, under the false impression that a bright boy like himself could always bluff his way out, as he had in the past. (He did, in a way, but at what greater cost?)
     When I polled my colleagues over exactly why George Bush is seen as dumb, one blurted out: "I don't want a drinking buddy, I want a leader who is smarter than me."
     I don't. God save us from smart people. I am never so optimistic about Bush's prospects as when people are calling him an idiot. I still freshly remember an earlier president whom the chattering classes — myself among them — worked themselves into a sweat dismissing as a simpleton and a fool, filling little gift books with his mistaken statements about trees causing pollution and such. That president was Ronald Reagan, and history has been kind to him. Maybe George Bush will surprise us.      
     I mean, how dumb could he really be? He got himself elected president.
                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 11, 2001

For once, Donald Trump and I agree about something...

Display, Smithsonian Museum of American History

     One of the many benefits of not being, ahem, crazy, is that you can find value in those who oppose you.
     Had the sane path been available to Donald Trump, he might have shrugged off Khazr Khan’s scathing, Constitution-waving takedown at the Democratic National Convention, saved his silver bullets for a target more worthy than grieving Gold Star parents, even those who criticize a certain reality TV star. He could have defied expectations by saying something gracious.
     Instead, Trump leaped with a snarl into the spiked pit the Democrats had dug for him, then wriggled there for days, howling.
     The rational gambit isn’t available to Trump. One of the top hundred reasons he should never be president is he can’t restraint himself, can’t prioritize and is deaf to both grace and nuance.
     Four reasons, I guess.
     I, on the other hand, like to give credit where due, just because I can. All part of being a fair and decent guy. As much as I disliked George W. Bush, he was certainly strong on ....
To continue reading, click here. 

Nekkid photos of the (would-be) First Lady!

     Nekkid pictures of the would-be First Lady!
     Well, why not?
     From the day Donald Trump descended down the escalator at Trump Tower, declared Mexicans rapists, more or less, and launched a presidential campaign like no other, the idea of having sunk below all usual standards of taste, restraint or expectation has gotten a lot of use, if not been completely worn to a nubbin.
     Each day brings some fresh shock to raise a tingle in our blown-out senses.
    On Sunday, it was the New York Post, splashing nude photographs of Melania Trump, taken from a 1995 photo shoot, across the front page, complete with stars to obscure the naughty bits.
     Then Monday, a second front page, with nude lesbian photos of Melania Trump (which makes one shudder to think what Tuesday might bring).
     This raises so many issues I hope you will forgive me if I just number and list them, in reverse significance.
     1. In a world measured by clicks, does taste really matter? You don't read the New York Post every day—it's tawdry, though not typically this tawdry. But you'll look at it now, to check out the goods on Melania Trump. Which is what journalism has become, apparently.
     2. The whole thing could be a ploy by the Trump campaign. The New York Post, remember, is his ally, prone to splashing unflattering shots of Hillary Clinton with her ...

To continue reading, click here.

GOP profiles in courage resist "danger to the Republic"

     The Houston Chronicle endorsed Richard Nixon. Three times. Not only for his successful runs at the presidency in 1968 and 1972 but his failed bid in 1960, calling him “the better way for Americans.” It supported Ronald Reagan twice, the Bushes four times. It backed Mitt Romney, as you would expect of a Republican newspaper in a Republican city in a Republican state.
     On Friday, the Chronicle endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, long before it would normally reveal a preference.

     “The Chronicle editorial page does not typically endorse early in an election cycle,” it noted, adding that it is already painfully clear that to support Donald Trump “is to repudiate the most basic notions of competence and capability.” The newspaper continued:

“Any one of Trump’s less-than-sterling qualities — his erratic temperament, his dodgy business practices, his racism, his Putin-like strongman inclinations and faux-populist demagoguery, his contempt for the rule of law, his ignorance — is enough to be disqualifying. His convention-speech comment, ‘I alone can fix it,’ should make every American shudder. He is, we believe, a danger to the Republic.”

     True, on rare occasions the Chronicle has supported Democrats — Johnson over Goldwater in 1964, Obama over McCain 44 years later. But their defection from the party is part of a significant Republican refusal to back its own candidate, one that deserves attention and applause. Because for patriotic Americans who care about their country, just the fact that Trump is running is profoundly sad, and says something dire about the judgment of our fellow citizens. We need a boost, and these GOP profiles in courage will be remembered long after the peril is past....

To continue reading, click here. 

Don't wait until Labor Day

    Typically, I am a great fan of photography as illustration. But sometimes pictures fail you. The Sistine Chapel comes to mind. No reproduction of Michelangelo's masterpiece prepared me for the thing itself, the sheer hugeness and grandeur of its scale. 
      Or the Chicago Botanic Garden. When  I saw the above study in green and yellow, it seemed so charming, I snapped a few pictures. But when I looked at the photos back home, they seemed flat, stilted. Something had been lost.
     You had to be there. Which is a good message for a beautiful Sunday. Photographs are not real, the on-line world less so. Sometimes you just have to be there and see a thing yourself. Edie and I spent a solid hour walking through the Botanic Garden this morning, not counting the time we studied the lovely exhibit on trees and woodworking. You don't necessarily have to go to the Botanic Garden, but try to go somewhere. July has flown. August is next. Don't wait until Labor Day to get out into it. 

Favorite blog adds new feature!

      Vanity is embarrassing. Or should be embarrassing. Au exaggerated appreciation for oneself doesn't seem to give much pause to Donald Trump. But that itself is a cautionary tale to the rest of us. Don't be like him.

      So I hope this isn't a startling confession of ego and self-delusion.

      But I operate under the assumption that the columns and posts I write merit reading, or re-reading, even a year, or two, or three after they are written. I try, when I write them, to go for a tone that does not depend too extensively on the the particular issue of the moment, but instead clutch at a certain universality. You won't see a column on some fine point of the budget debate. I don't care, now, and assume few of you do as well, and none of us will care later.

      Toward that end, each morning I re-tweet what was posted on everygoddamnday.com one year, two years and, since July, three years ago. So many more people read the thing now—July will be another record month, averaging above 60,000 hits—that I thought I'd dangle past topics by readers, since they will be fresh discoveries for them. 

     These return visits have been exclusively something encouraged in the free-fire zone of Twitter. But recently Blogger began allowing us to highlight posts on our blogs, and I've added an element directly to the right of the main post  that will showcase what was here on this day in years past. I could do all three, but that's a lot so, after tweeting the stories having their birthdays, I'll select (or "curate" to use the dreaded buzzword) one post that I consider the most notable. Give it a glance and, if it seems intriguing, a read. And thank you for your patronage. 

A break from politics, sort of, with Japan's top bear

 

    This ran in the Sun-Times Friday. I didn't post it here, because I figured people had read enough about Kumamon Tuesday and wouldn't want more. But then I realized, some might have been put off by the 6,000-word treatise that ran in Mosaic, and might appreciate the 650-word, reader-friendly version. Plus it does have some elements not in the original. And how long can you puzzle over a photo? So, just in case, here it is:

     “Tell the world about our Kumamon,” urged Hoei Tokunaga, as we shook hands goodbye after a weekend together last March. That one sentence, so sincere, almost beseeching, somehow summarized my week in Japan.
     Tokunaga’s title is assistant deputy director of the Kumamoto prefectural government. In reality he is a coat holder for a teddy bear, one of 20 functionaries wrangling the massive business dealings, intense media interest and hectic publicity schedule of Kumamon, an imaginary black bear with red cheeks that is among the most popular mascots in Japan.
     Kumamon’s handlers claim he is on his way to becoming bigger than Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty. So I might as well introduce him to you, given that he is almost unknown in this country. In Asia, Kumamon sold $1 billion worth of merchandise last year.
     You may have noticed we are not talking about politics. That’s intentional. If President Obama’s passionate evocation of the power and glory that is America left you unmoved Wednesday, if Hillary Clinton’s address Thursday only intensified your doorjamb-biting hatred for her, what am I supposed to do? Politics is a 24-hour hobbyhorse and sometimes, to remain sane, a person should get off and let it rock by itself for awhile. Friday, the gateway to the weekend, is the perfect day to take a break. The bad dream that is Election 2016 will be waiting for us Monday, right where we left it.

To continue reading, click here.  

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This photograph looks, to me, like an architectural drawing from the 1960s, of some ooo-the-future modern structure, dwarfing the obligatory human figures tucked in for scale. 
     Where is it? If you're thinking, "Can't be Chicago," you're on the right track. But a place enough Chicagoans have been to that there's a chance somebody will recognize it. 
     As for prizes, well, to be candid, winners have not been claiming them, so we can do away with the canard. If the person who guesses correctly wants one, they can ask, and we'll find something suitable. Which also makes me suspect that the Fun Activity has run its course, again, and it's time to retire it. Thoughts? Otherwise, place your guesses below. Good luck.

Rahm Emanuel, dead man walking

     So how bad is it for Rahm Emanuel?
     This week, in the New Yorker article on why Barack Obama failed to close America's shameful black hole prison at Guantanamo Bay, Rahm Emanuel is portrayed as the Machiavellian manipulator who urged the president to leave the imprisoned to rot there forever and focus on more significant policy issues. 
    But it's worse than that.
    At the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Barack Obama's video showed our mayor-to-be warning that the affordable care act would cause him to lose the 2012 election. Better to leave millions uninsured than take a political risk.
    But it's worse than that. 
    The media erupted with hoots of how he was "thrown under the bus" by his old boss.
    But it's worse than that.
    He was a ghost at the convention, a "fading star," to be kind, denying that obvious fact, wandering like Lord Jim, trying to escape his shame, his lapse over the Laquan McDonald shooting following him, quacking like a pull-toy duck. Not at all the power broker he was last time. Back in Chicago, his staff is fleeing the 5th floor at City Hall like rats scurrying down the cables of a ship sinking at the pier.
    But it's worse than that. 
    I contemplated writing something on the mayor's woes for the newspaper. Then I shrugged, and thought: Why bother? It's Rahm Emanuel, dead man walking. Nobody cares about him anymore. He's not even worth making fun of. 
    Instead, I wrote about an imaginary black bear who's very popular in Japan. 
    That's how bad it is. 

Shooter for hire

     When you cover a swirling, four-day story like a national convention, it helps to have a home base. Since the newspaper didn't send me to Cleveland until the last minute, I couldn't get into the press center, and had to improvise. That involved setting up shop at Johnny's Little Bar, which was ideal for several reasons: it was only a couple blocks off Public Square, they would charge my phone for me behind the bar, and the burgers were pretty good. 
    It did get crowded, and I would slip upstairs to the empty banquet room, where I met Noah Brooks, a freelance photographer from Florida. We got to talking. There is an enormous gulf between those of us lucky enough to still be on the staffs of what remains of the great news organizations, and everybody else, in the slurry, fighting to find work and to be paid. He was on his laptop, trying to find somebody interested in his photos, trying to find somebody to toss $50 his way.
     He showed me some photos he took in Ukraine during two recent trips there. If they seem

Noah Brooks

unusually artistic, that was his goal. "I was really looking for two things: art and war," he told the Ukrainian Chicago Magazine.  
     I wanted to help him get his work seen, and told him if he sent me a few photographs, I would put them up on my blog, for what it's worth. He did, and here they are. He's hoping to go back to Ukraine in September, and could use a few connections who might be interested in working with him. 
    I don't get the sense that the photo editors of the top press organizations are reading my blog. But you might know somebody, or be involved with a social agency that needs dramatic photographs of war situations, or be involved in one of Chicago's many cultural or artistic organizations that could use his work. If so, I've got just the guy for you. He can be reached at noahbrooks99@gmail.com.

The attack of the cute robots

     Tuesday's post on cuteness in Japan and its future as an academic field was long enough, but there was more: this sidebar on cuteness and robotics. Both originated last week as a package for Mosaic, the London-based web site run by Britain's Wellcome Trust. They publish their work under a Creative Commons license, meaning you are free to repost or reprint it as you like, provided you credit Mosaic, which posts a fascinating long form journalism on topics of health and science every week, and link back to the original article.

Roomba

     When iRobot designed the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, they made it round, so it wouldn’t get stuck in corners. They made it low, so it could scoot under beds and sofas.
     They did not think about making it cute.
     “It wasn’t designed with cuteness in mind,” says Charlie Vaida, a senior manager at the Massachusetts firm, “but with the realization that it would need to move about an ever-changing home environment.”
     But cute it is, for a 3.8 kg self-moving disc. Its plaintive chirp for help when it gets stuck behind a sofa leg, and the tentative way it bangs into an obstacle a few times before turning away – a clumsy movement straight out of Konrad Lorenz’s Kindchenschema, from his 1943 paper describing the ‘innate releasing mechanisms’that prompt affection and nurture in human beings ­– have an effect on customers.
     “When they initially rolled this product out, they had a return policy: if something breaks on the robot, send it back, and we’ll return you a new product the same day,” says Brian Scassellati, founder and director of Yale University’s Social Robotics Lab.
     “The idea was you should be without your vacuum cleaner for as little time as possible. What they got was this huge outpouring of unhappiness: people didn’t want to send back their robot and get some other robot. They wanted their robot back. They had become attached to this thing, to the point where the idea of putting a strange robot into their homes is unacceptable.”
     People also named their Roombas, a common fate for cute robots. When Catalia Health tested its robotic weight-loss coaches in patients’ homes, they returned after two months to collect them. Catalia found the patients had dressed the robots up in hats and scarves, given them names, and did not want to let their companions go.
     While cuteness has long been a hook when selling dolls, purses and other consumer products, one cutting-edge area where cuteness has proven particularly vital is personal robotics.
     “Absolutely,” says Scassellati. “We design educational robots for kids. We try to make them cute and attractive. That’s a very deliberate design choice, to get over the initial response: ‘Do I want to play with this thing or not?’”
     Science fiction has trained us to expect robot butlers and bodyguards, but the first generation of consumer robots are filling more limited, psychological roles. “Most likely the first robots in your home will not be lifting boxes, carrying groceries, washing dishes,” says Scassellati. “Instead, they’ll be doing things that involve social response: reminding you where you left your keys or to take your medication, helping you do your homework. These are tasks we can accomplish without direct physical manipulation.”
     Robots right now are best at time-consuming, repetitive interpersonal tasks, and two realms where they are beginning to succeed commercially are educating small children and helping people with dementia, autism and mental health problems. One of the most successful robots on the market is PARO, a $6,000 robotic baby harp seal found in nursing homes and psychiatric institutions around the world.
     Its designer, Japanese engineer Takanori Shibata, at first thought of making PARO a robotic cat or dog – people love cats and dogs. But he realised two things. First, they tend to love either cats or dogs, so there would need to be two versions of PARO: one cat, one dog.    

     And second, they’ve seen cats and dogs, and thus a robotic replica, no matter how skilfully made, would fall into the ‘uncanny valley’ of artificial creatures who look just real enough to be creepy. Nobody wants to cuddle a creepy robotic dog.
     Most people, however, have never held a baby harp seal, and thus they accept PARO. Its microprocessors allow PARO to bob its head, look at the person holding it, bat its long eyelashes, and coo and trill in an appealing way. In 2009, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved PARO as a Class II medical device.
     The Personal Robots Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab calls devices such as PARO ‘socially assistive robots’, and cuteness is key. It consulted animators when creating Tega, a ‘learning companion’ designed to work with small children. Tega is a bouncy, furry creature. But robots can be cute without resembling living entities. Jibo, which was supposed to reach customers in April, but was held back by design glitches, is certainly cute, resembling a sleek, attentive table lamp.
     “It’s not trying to be human in any way: it doesn’t have arms, it doesn’t have legs,” Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT’s Personal Robots Group and chief scientist at Jibo, Inc., told a tech website in 2014. “It’s anthropomorphic, it’s designed to be familiar to you, but it doesn’t have to look like an animal or a real person.”
     Some day, robots might be common enough that we accept them and don’t care how they look. But right now, the baby schema does the heavy work easing robots into our lives.
     “It triggers this response in you. It’s automatic,” says Scassellati. “If we’ve done our jobs correctly, you don’t have to think how to respond.”
     For a robot, being accepted is not the only benefit of being cute. Cuteness also causes shifts in human behaviour, which cute studies researchers (read more in this Mosaic piece) are cataloguing. These help today’s primitive robots do their jobs.
     “When people respond, they speak more slowly, enunciate their words a little more clearly,” Scassellati says. “Things a robot has to process actually become easier.”
     Another benefit: people often expect robots to perform beyond their capabilities since, well, they’re robots, and making them infantile lowers those expectations. “If the robot looks and behaves as a very young creature, people will be more likely to treat it as such,” Breazeal writes in her book, Designing Sociable Robots. That means handling it gently and ­– key for the time being – not demanding too much.
     “We want to manage those expectations,” Scassellati says. “You don’t expect the cute puppy to be able to re-shelve books for you.”
     Once robots are better at what they do, and people don’t need expectations lowered, the importance of robotic cuteness might diminish. But not any time soon.
     “The cuteness factor is likely to be there quite a while,” says Scassellati.

Hillary Clinton, future president or Lucifer's handmaiden?

Henry Ford, world-class hater (National Portrait Gallery)

     Hate is in our bones.
     Maybe it’s always there, from birth. A natural defense against being eaten by bears.
     Maybe it seeps in over time.
     Either way, this election will come down to who hates whom more.
     That was clear last week in Cleveland as the Republicans poured contempt on Hispanic immigrants. They scorned Muslim Americans. And, most of all, they reviled that embodiment of all that is wrong in America and the universe, the central source of evil, princess of lies enthroned in the 9th ring of Hell beside her master, Lucifer, the beast of many names aka “Hillary Clinton.”
     They hate her as the Judas Goat for what this country is fast becoming: a less white place. They dread what is happening so much they crowned an erratic egomaniac as their savior because, well, he promises to relieve them of the awful pressure that hatred brings.
     It must be working. Nate Silver, the stats guru, said on Monday if the election were held now, Trump would win. Silver later dialed back that estimate but, to be frank, I still think Trump would win. Because to hope otherwise feels wishful. Sorry to be the one to tell you...

     To continue reading, click here.