I've been reading lately about artificial intelligence, how someday it will replicate the judgment that people show, and threaten human primacy. We won't need writers, artists composers. Machines will do it better.
     To which I think: hmmm, maybe yes. Or maybe no. Given the difficulty that people have consistently demonstrating the mental acuity expected in a full-fledged person, machines have a long, long way to go.
     Even a task as simple as mine, on this blog: toss up something interesting to others once a day, every day.
     In the three and half years I've done this, I've developed a few readers—just passed the 2 million mark, which is either moderate success or abject failure, I can't decide: another difficult human judgment call.
     In that time, nobody has ever volunteered to write a post.
     And then, March 10, I received this:

     The link was to a quarry equipment supplier in Australia. Curious, I replied, linking to my Thornton quarry post:

     Ten days passed, while my custom content was being crafted. Then this:

     Attached was this story: 

4 Tips For Gravel Driveway Maintenance

Lofts Quarries

First impressions are the most important, right? So when someone comes to your home, the outside is the first thing they see. That’s why having a beautiful driveway is so important, and gravel driveways can look particularly impressive.

Water problems

You might find that you’re having water problems on your gravel driveway, with ruts, washouts and birm. This likely means that you have drainage issues. You’ll need to evaluate your driveway to decide the best way to fix it. If you have higher areas around your gravel driveway, you could add more gravel to make it higher. Alternatively, you could also install a ditch or culvert to help pull the water away from where it flows over the gravel.

Remove debris

An easy way to help maintain your driveway in pristine condition is to ensure that you keep removing any debris. This could include leaves and sticks, and the longer your avoid the problem, the more time consuming the task will be later. Try and get them removed once a week to keep on top of the problem.

Keep on top of weeds

Even with landscaping material underneath the gravel driveway, weeds can still be a problem. The best and easiest thing to do is to keep applying weed killer to the surface, to stop any pesky weeds growing through.  

Despite this, they can be challenging to maintain. To help, we’ve created our top tips to keep your gravel driveway looking brand new all year round.

Cover potholes with more gravel

Ok, this is just a quick fix, but it’s still useful if you’re short on time. Your gravel driveway is likely to develop potholes, and these can be fixed by using a shovel to even out the driveway. Simply even it out and tap it down. Be aware though that this will leave a weak area, so the pothole is likely to come back.

     Now do you see why editors are always so drawn and testy? Look back at what I requested: "something about Loft quarries." And what I got: something about weeding and pouring more gravel on your driveway. 
     Did I mention Loft Quarries sells gravel? It does.
     I could have rejected it. But assuming Jyoti Kakkar is a real person—the name might sound exotic to you, but there are 23 Jyoti Kakkars in Linked-In, and I imagine this one in some windowless room the outback, among 300 other women tapping at keyboards, and did not want to vex her, nor add to her life's burden. I wrote back what every writer the world over longs to hear:

     Redline Media seems to be in the business of helping companies with their online presence. As their web site puts it:

We assist our clients by integrating creativity with today’s technology in order to achieve your online business objectives. By working through a goals-based assessment of your real-world business requirements, we will develop effective online and offline strategies to provide a measurable return on investment. 

     Remind me to kiss the ground in my office. I should experience the nauseous crack of doom in all this, should feel like a Neanderthal, standing in the damp, dark chill of nighttime on the veldt, gazing in dumb envy at the cook fires of the Cro-Magnon men who will replace me. My old boss, Michael Ferro, now the master of tronc, certainly believes machines will be constructing watchable videos and writing news stories any moment. Certain short, generic news items are already computer-generated.
     But I just don't see it. Yes, the Internet is created by vast banks of young persons working for peanuts churning out material such as the above. But would you honestly spend much time on-line if that was the general quality of what it offered? Hell no. Even if execution gets better, much better? The human mind is a profoundly complicated organism, and most owners of it can't write a halfway engaging post or edit a decent video. 
      Still, this experience is, I hope, worth thinking about, while human thought is still occurring online and not just dead algorithms grinding away. Some money must be trading hands, somewhere, right? How this Australian gravel company can find it in their interest to hire this marketing company to generate content on my page, through the good offices of Jyoti Kakkar is an utter mystery. Though let me point out that I'm sure Ms. Kakkar is a fine individual supporting a family or just starting out in the world and I hope she is not too distressed by seeing the, ah, addition material that I've generated to frame her piece. But she should know, you reach into the dark box of the Internet, you never know what is there, waiting to sink its fangs in you. 
     

Trump twists crime numbers to demonize immigrants

   

     The realm of integers — numbers such as 1, 2, 3, 4 — is perfectly divided between odd and even. There are as many even whole numbers as odd. That isn't my opinion. It's just a fact.
     Were you to respond, "Oh yeah, what about 13? Kinda blows your theory out of the water, Neil, don't it?" you would be a fool, because focusing on 13 does not change the larger situation. Were you to add, "And don't forget 15. And 17. And 19, 21, and 23. I rest my case," you would not be cementing your victory, but further illustrating your folly.
     Because evidence is not proof. This is easy to see in math, where emotion is at a minimum. In politics, however, as the Season of Trump illustrates to our daily amazement, emotion reigns supreme. People pretend to be analyzing when, in fact, they are buttressing their own rigid beliefs with cherry-picked data points.
     Regular readers might have noticed that I don't visit Trumpland much lately. For the simple reason that the media is turning a thousand spotlights on the flaming disaster, and my adding one more wouldn't provide additional light. Repetition becomes dull, and readers deserve regular relief from our national agony.
     However, some things are so horrible that every responsible American must point at them and scream "NO!" Such a pressing wrong is Trump's Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, or "VOICE," a government agency designed to demonize undocumented immigrants by drawing attention to crimes committed by them, in an attempt to justify his anti-immigration policies. Trump highlighted VOICE in his address to a joint session of Congress Feb. 28.

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"You need to link the ducks"

      How wet is our yard? We have ducks. This happy couple hang out after a few puddles form — at least I assume it's the same couple. I can't believe that whenever it rains a pair of ducks happen by. I always pause to admire them, and for some reason, Saturday, seeing ducks reminded me of this column, which really has nothing to do with ducks other than the cabbie's enigmatic phrase, which I used as a headline. 
    It's from four years ago, when my book about Chicago came out, the New York Times panned it, along with two other books and the city itself. A shocking thing — I took it as cosmic payback for my caring what the Times or anybody else thinks, and wrote a column about it. That helped give me strength to endure later seeing the Tribune take the author of the slur out to lunch to hold her hand and coo sympathetically to the hurt she suffered because proud Chicagoans objected to her deluded calumny. I myself couldn't face her — when WTTW phoned, and asked me to appear on "Chicago Tonight" with her, I replied, "I'm not going to try to out-hiss that snake." It was the right call. 

     At 5 p.m. I lowered the venetian blinds, put on my sport coat and then my raincoat and stood in the office, mustering the strength to leave.
     The phone rang — my father.
     "Mom told me," he said. "It's hard to believe. Are you sure? They don't do that sort of thing."
     "Well . . . they made an exception for me," I said, with a rueful laugh.
     "Maybe you should write a letter to the editor," he suggested.
    "I'm not going to do that, dad." We talked some more; I said I had to get going: promised a friend I'd go to his cocktail party, to add my single sequin's worth of luster.
     "But I'm really glad you called," I said. "That means a lot to me. Love you."
     I took the elevator down to the street.
     "A taxi, young man?" Marvin, the always-friendly doorman called out as I pushed through the revolving door.
     Normally, I would walk — between the river and Wacker Drive, past Marina Towers, turning down State Street. I like to walk. Never tire of being downtown, of seeing the buildings, the people, the trains. It's beautiful, and a joy just to be there. But the phone call meant I was running a little late and, to be honest, I was so heartsick, I didn't feel like walking. I didn't feel like anything.
     "Yeah Marvin, a cab, thanks," I said. He blew his whistle, a boxy maroon Royal Three CCC cab rolled up."17 East Monroe," I said, getting in. "The Palmer House."
     "How is your day?" the driver asked.
     "Lousy," I said. "But if I told you why my day is lousy, you'd laugh at me. So tell me, how are you?" His day wasn't doing too well either. The chip from his cellphone? He had removed it, folded the tiny chip into a receipt, like so — he showed me the receipt — and put it in a padded envelope. But somehow the chip had fallen out and was lost in the cab.
     "It held many special pictures," he said — of his fiancée, for instance. I offered suggestions for finding the errant chip, and asked him to pass the padded envelope back to me.
     "Sometimes a second set of eyes helps," I said, peering inside, feeling around. I scanned the carpet in the back, scrutinizing every speck. He seemed discouraged.
     "Is this your cab?" I asked. He said it is. "Then look for it in the morning," I said. "It has to be here somewhere." He was worried it had fallen into the gearshift.
     "It's hard to lose something," I commiserated. "I bet it'll show up."
     We crossed the river and were in the Loop now. What, he asked, about my day?
     My day, my day. Was I really going to tell the cab driver about my day? Why not?
     "Well I'm a newspaper columnist, a writer," I said. "I learned that on Sunday, the New York Times is going to slam my book about Chicago. A complete pan. On the cover of the Book Review. I not only embarrassed myself, but drew contempt upon the city."
     The cabbie wasn't having any of it.
     "No, no, no!" he cried. "New York cannot review Chicago!" He glanced back at me. "You're upset? C'mon now. Street cred. That's what they just gave you. Street cred."
     He was jubilant. "Street cred?" I smiled. Nobody ever suggested I had "street cred" before. I asked him his name: Christian, from Nigeria, driving a cab 10 years.
     "I'm an American citizen now. I'm a Chicagoan," he said. "I love it. I've been to New York, and you know what? They put garbage in their streets. Chicago is one of the best cities that have ever been. No no no no. It's a privilege to be in Chicago. No please sir." He chortled. He handed back a receipt.
     "Please write down the name of the book—I want to read it."
     "Cost you 15 dollars and 58 cents on Amazon," I muttered, scribbling. "My handwriting isn't the best," I added, handing it back, reading aloud what I had written: "You Were Never in Chicago — Neil Steinberg."
     "One reason is, they feel embarrassed. You tell your wife..." — I had told him I was reluctant to tell her about the review — "...she will laugh at you. She will laugh and say, 'What does that matter?' They are unhappy. Unhappy people, they try to hurt other people. New York and Chicago are completely different. You need to link the ducks."
     I'm not sure what he meant by that last part, or if I heard it right through his accent. But I liked the sound, and took it to mean, "You need to make sense of a crazy world."
     "And you're upset?" he laughed again. "Are you serious? Your wife is going to have a ball! That's the way that I feel." We pulled up to the Palmer House. He was laughing and to my vast surprise, I was too, shaking my head, the stone on my heart miraculously lifted.
     I tipped him very well, and told him I thought that God had sent his cab to me.
     "Keep your head up — you're a Chicagoan!" he called after me as I walked into the intricate glittering splendor of the Palmer House. He's right: You need to link the ducks.
                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 21, 2013

Meep-meep

   
 
     I came to awareness in a particularly mediocre time for children's cartoons, the mid-1960s. Huckleberry Hound. Beanie and Cecil. Magilla Gorilla. Not exactly art for the ages. Not exactly "Krazy Kat." The Flintstones wasn't bad—we didn't know it was a bald rip-off of "The Honeymooners." But it was on at night; intended for adults. People forget that.
     Luckily, there was relief, in the form of Warner Brothers cartoons. They had begun their lives in the 1940s in theaters, part of the elaborate set piece that was going to the movies, along with newsreels and travelogues and such, intended to pad the intervals between features. They had ended their useful cinematic purpose, and were now pressed into endless duty in the saw-dust floor vaudeville of Saturday morning VHF television. There they stood out like a Fabrege Easter egg set among plastic ones: funny, well-produced, fast-paced, artistic, mini-movies. They easily withstood being watched over and over and we did.
     Of course I was a Bugs Bunny fan, appreciating his mordant wit and detached style that at the time I didn't realize was lifted from Groucho Marx. The Road Runner tended to bore me, with its constant chases and desert dry locale and hardly any witty dialogue at all. The occasional boast or "ulp" from the inevitable loser, the sputtering mockery of "meep-meep" from the inevitable winner.
     But the cartoons did give us a classic trope, a metaphor, a stock character in the form of Wile E. Coyote or, as he would put it, in an arch, thespian voice completely at odds with his mangy, underfed demeanor, "Wile E. Coyote"—pronouncing it "Kie-oh-tay"— Genius." It was on his business card.

    He came to mind Friday afternoon, frozen in that eternal moment after he has grabbed at the Road Runner and plunged over a cliff, that instant where he looks at the viewer, his pupils dilating, before hurtling to earth with a twanging "Ptooooo," and then the Doppler effect whistle of a falling bomb.
    How very like the Republicans,  fulminating against ObamaCare for years, pinning their hopes on the liar, bully and fraud Donald Trump, grabbing at the prize, too crazed and egomaniacal for caution, then tumbling to earth at their own hand, with only each other to blame. The whole quest, a fervid revenge fantasy straight out of "Moby-Dick"—maybe Ahab would be a better motif for today, but let's dance with who brung us.
     The Republican replacement of ObamaCare was certainly a Rube Goldberg device on par with the elaborate Acme contraptions that our unfortunate canis latrans would uncrate and attempt to use to snare our his swift nemesis, inevitably with disastrous results.
    Wile E. was the definition of pride, going before a quite literal fall. As are Paul Ryan, et al. Swelled with the wealth of their business masters, and the power they wield, or could, if they could only agree, they view those who think otherwise, who, oh for instance, see the value of helping people get health insurance with such utter contempt, they are so certain, they failed to notice the American people tiptoeing out of their tent. Only 17 percent supported their American Health Care Act. They elected Trump to repeal and replace ObamaCare, not spike it and replace it with a thinly-disguised jackpot for the rich. The Republicans always insisted it would be replaced with something better, or at least similar. Not gutting the health care of 24 million Americans to put more money into the pockets of the wealthy, all for the chimera of "access" and choice, an obvious dodge that operatively was like a tyrannical father throwing his children in the street, explaining that he doesn't want them limited to the narrow range of choices in his poor larder, but is encouraging them to sample the cornucopia the world has to offer.

     Being geniuses, they just assumed the gullible public would just fall for whatever has they served and, I suppose, given the election of Donald Trump, they had good reason to think they might pull it off.
     Though if there is any moral here, the failure of the Republican efforts to pass their sham health insurance plan is a reminder that believing you're a genius and actually being a genius are two very different things.
     I don't want to treat lightly the national tragedy that is the Trump administration, nor the disastrous Republican Congress ripping up the planks of civil, decent, intelligent society. But this latest, biggest, most risible failure of a string of failures has to be encouraging to those of us in the fact-based world. To see Trump chortling, still, about the potential collapse of ObamaCare—something that could still happen, given the country is in their hands—you'd think he doesn't realize there are millions of American lives involved. And of course he doesn't.

 

A joyous mother of children, thanks to Planned Parenthood

Tre and Courtney Everette with their children, Dru, left, and Kinlee. 

     Adults waved off Courtney Everette's painful menstrual cramps. Just part of the joy of being a woman, the teenager was told. Deal with it. So she did, for years. Until one day when she was 17, staying with her grandmother.
     "She recognized things seemed a little more intense," said Everette, now 35. "I was really rundown. The level of pain was getting worse."
     Her grandmother took her to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed endometriosis, a condition where the tissue usually forming each month inside a fertile woman's uterus instead grows outside it, in the abdominal cavity, leading to scar tissue, cysts, pain.
     Added to those woes, for Everette, was fear of infertility.
     "Even at 17, I knew I wanted to be a mother," she said.
     Endometriosis can be treated, however.
     "I was lucky," Everette said. "My doctor told me my best option was to use hormonal birth control, and that would reduce pain and preserve my fertility."
     Time went by. She attended graduate school at DePaul.
     "Back then, you got kicked off your parents' insurance at 21, 22. So I got booted and found myself unable to afford the hormonal birth control I needed to manage my endometriosis," said Everette. "I called a good friend, crying, and told her 'I'm in pain and really worried this is going to hurt my chances to be a mother.'"
     The friend replied: You're in a big city. Chicago has to have a Planned Parenthood.
     It does. So Everette went...

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Shedd fish food for thought

 © Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

     Today is my 30th anniversary on staff at the Sun-Times. Last year, I marked the day by posting a favorite story, and I think I'll continue that tradition.
     Though it does seem an apt moment to pause and ponder: 30 years at the paper. Quite a lot really. How did that happen? Just lucky, I guess. The opportunity arose, I gave it a try, and kept beavering away while the industry fell apart around me. Kind of like Sweet Pea crawling through a clangorous construction site in a "Popeye" cartoon. Whenever I got to the end of one girder, another arrived and swept me to safety.
     It's a good job—work at something I enjoy, with like-minded professionals, generally, plus good pay and benefits. Old salts rhapsodizing their own careers tend to overlook the latter, as if it's beneath notice. It's not. When my side of the political spectrum is ululating in horror at our fellow citizens who voted for Donald Trump—how, HOW could they do that?—I try to remind myself that I am employed, have been for decades, that whenever I jam my hand into my pocket there is money there, and how very, very disturbing it would be for me if that were not the case.  
     Still, working in the same place for nearly a third of a century can seem timidity. In my defense, I took some breaks. A year when Ross was born; three months for Kent. A few months to visit my brother in Japan. A few for a book. Some time for rehab. Close to two years away, total, which I think is beneficial in any career. Didn't earn as much as would be the case had I never stepped away, but I had a better life.
    Nor did I cling desperately to the job. I kept my eyes open. I did quit once, handing my polite resignation letter to the editor-in-chief. But he talked me off the ledge.
     I went in at 26 and now I'm 56. My whole life only to find myself on the downward slope. But not, I believe, coasting. Not yet gone too far into decay. Still pedaling hard. 
     Regrets? I am in no way a Big Cheese. No $20,000 Clarence Page speaking gigs in Paris. I bet that's nice. I would have liked to been a George Will-like player for a while, my face set in a mask of self-importance, striding into the White House to canoodle the president.  
     But as T.S. Eliot said, "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." I never phoned it in. This work was always important, to me if to nobody else. It was what I wanted to do with my life and I did it, and it was fun, and I like to think I was good at it, and am still good at it. The Trump enormity reminds us that this stuff is important, or can be, if people only pay attention to it.
     I didn't write to cause change, which is good, because I didn't. My highest goal is to hold the interest of readers, and I think I do that. To think about life, and sniff out compelling facts. An ideal story, in my eyes, has three things: a good lede, a few astounding facts, a few strong quotes. This story has all three. A concise, surprising start. One of the favorite facts of my career—what the Shedd Aquarium uses to make seawater. The "oh wow" moment when I noticed the big boxes of the stuff. And the ending quote, I'm proud of drawing that line out of her. 
    And I'm also proud of how the story came about. It didn't arrive as a press release. It was my idea. I had to badger the Shedd. The notion that someone would write about how they feed fish, well, it just didn't scan.  "Most people can't keep a goldfish alive" "I implored. "You feed tens of thousands of fish every day." Eventually, over years, I wore them down, or more likely just found the right person to ask, and someone relented, allowing me to look behind the scenes. The Sun-Times gave it the space it required, and played it prominently—pages 2 and 3.
    Anyway, to the story. Thanks for reading these past 30 years. I think I have another decade left in me. I hope you stick around.

© Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

     Fish eat fruit. And vegetables. Some do anyway. Lungfish nibble lettuce. Stingrays eat their peas, though floating peas will clog a tank's filter if you're not careful. The Shedd Aquarium goes through about 4 tons of fruit and vegetables a year.
     Aquatic creatures have a range of surprising eating habits — some turtles like bananas. If you asked which eats more, an 80-pound sea otter or a 2,000-pound whale, most people would probably guess the whale — much bigger — and they would be wrong. It's the otter. Otters have no blubber, and thus must consume a quarter of their body weight every day to stay alive.
     When you think of feeding fish, what do you imagine? Tapping a small canister of dried fly flakes over Goldie's bowl? Just doing that can be enough of a challenge. What must it be like to feed the roughly 32,500 animals housed at the Shedd Aquarium? Seven days a week, 365 days a year?
     How do they do that?
     "Everything is compartmentalized," said Michelle Sattler, the Shedd's collections manager. "We have reptiles, birds, mammals, invertebrates, fish. We have everything." (People might forget the Shedd's birds: 20 penguins, plus two owls and two hawks).
     Sattler's particular responsibility is the Caribbean Reef, a 90,000-gallon tank housing hundreds of fish, from 60-pound stingrays to butterflyfish weighing a few ounces. Divers go into the reef to feed the fish, which I always thought was purely for show, but has a practical purpose — some fish are aggressive and territorial, and if aquarium personnel just dumped food into the top of the tank, as with goldfish, half of the fish would starve to death while the other half got fat.
     Yes, fish can get fat. That's why the Shedd keeps track of what many animals in its care eat, particularly larger species, and uses clickers to train some fish to eat on cue.
     Piscine competitiveness makes hand-feeding less fun than it looks — it isn't all floating around and answering tourists' questions. Divers can get beaten up by hungry rays.
     "The stingrays in the Caribbean Reef, they're big and they're strong and they can be bullyish," said Sattler. "They weigh 60, 70 pounds and they can push you around, if they feel like they can get away with it."
     What else do fish eat? Just about everything. The Shedd uses 100,000 crickets a year. Plus tons of a seafood gel. Then there's regular seafood — the Shedd buys a quarter million pounds of restaurant-grade seafood each year — shrimp, herring, squid, mullet, mackerel. The staff checks over every last smelt in the Shedd's five kitchens.
     "We have a crew that start at 5 a.m. We do a quality sort that usually takes four hours," said Madelynn Hettiger, senior trainer, of the marine mammal department. "We look through every single fish, to check for missing eyeballs, to see there are no tears or breaks in the skin, no freezer burns" (important because bacteria that could harm the Shedd's fish could settle in the cuts).
     If you've ever grumbled about the admission price at the Shedd ­— and who hasn't, with an adult pass being $28.95? ­— think of those ravenous sea otters.
     "It costs more to feed five sea otters than all the animals in the oceanarium combined," said Hettiger.
     Increasingly over the past decade, the Shedd raises its own food for its animals.
     "If we can grow our food here, we do," said Mark Schick, manager of special exhibits. "There are several advantages ­— one, we know we always have it." Which isn't always the case when grub is jetted in. The Shedd has had some nervous moments in the past due to shipping snafus, suddenly out-of-business fisheries and the occasional gulf hurricane. It isn't as if you can serve your sea lion a few TV dinners while waiting for FedEx to track down that shipment.
     "If you want to get a cheeseburger, there are many places out there," said Schick. "If you want mysid shrimp, there are very few places out there."
     Thus hidden from visitor view, in low spaces behind the tanks, is a burgeoning effort to raise food — water fleas, crayfish, rotifers — for the Shedd's collection.
     "It's far less expensive to grow food here than to ship it priority overnight," said Schick.
     Living food is necessary, because some fish will eat only moving food and won't touch prepared food. They also have to raise food to feed the food that feeds the fish. That explains the 24 bubbling gallon bottles of algae, the various shades of green denoting degrees of maturation. (The Shedd also makes its own sea water using — what else? — crates of Instant Ocean, "The World's No. 1 Sea Salt.")        

     One mainstay of the Shedd food program has an unexpected nostalgia connection — mysid shrimp — which have the benefit of being able to stay alive in suspended animation until needed and mixed with water, a talent developed in dry African lake beds, which gave them a passing fame under a different name in the back of comic books.
     "Sea Monkeys," said Schick. "Remember when you were a kid?" He feeds the quarter-inch-long brine shrimp — which, contrary to the comic illustration, do not have faces or hands, but look like tiny translucent grains of rice — to the Shedd's sea horse and sea dragon collection.
     "If we were buying them, it would be hundreds of dollars a week," said Schick. "Raising them is a fraction of that."
     As with most people, fish crave variety in their diets.
     "Salads are great for you, but you don't want salad every day," said Schick. "With fish, it's the same way. We like to spice up their diet and enrich them with living moving targets." Sometimes food is frozen into ice blocks, or tucked inside feeder balls, just to keep it interesting.
     As much a routine as feeding fish at the Shedd is, as with human food, there is an aspect to feeding that transcends the physical. The staff, which sometimes names the fish under their care, develops attachments to certain fish and demonstrates those attachments through food.
     "I have a fish that, for me, is very coveted," said Sattler, who has been at the Shedd for 14 years. "It's a beautiful little fish, When I took the exhibit over there was one individual of this specifies, I saw it, it was smaller, hanging out in the corner, I asked, 'What is that fish?' They said, 'That's a boga.' It's beautiful."
     She encouraged the Shedd to collect more bogas.
     "I have a group of them, kind of like my babies," she said. "Even though the exhibit gets fed four times a day, I like to go up to the top and sprinkle food for them."
     Because you love them?
     "Yes," she said. "Because I love them."

                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 3, 2013

© Shedd Aquarium/Brenna Hernandez

Pablo Neruda, your guide to the Home + Housewares Show

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     "Amo las cosas loca, locamente," Pablo Neruda writes. "I have a crazy, crazy love of things."     

     Me too. So I seldom miss the International Home + Housewares Show, which ended its four-day run at McCormick Place on Tuesday. No one tells me to go; I just do, for the joy of wandering around, checking on old favorites — Igloo is 70 years old, and now sells coolers lit from within by LED bulbs. Noticing new trends: everything is organic, or else silicone.
     The show is so vast — 2,200 exhibitors, 62,000 attendees — it helps to have a plan to approach all these sponges, buckets, hangers, trash baskets. The great Chilean poet's "Ode to Common Things," a series of 25 poems lauding commonplace objects, sounds as good as any. The Nobel laureate begins with a general "Ode to Things" and the line above, then gets specific, fast.

     "I like pliers...."

     "One of our best-sellers," said Perrine Giacomazzo, marketing director at Kikkerland, a company founded to market Dutch design (the name means "frogland"). She explained that putting wood on the seven-in-one multitool made it into a popular gift item.

     ". . . and scissors."

     "The popular one is this one," said Naomi Ogawa, secretary at B.H.P. Industries in Japan — half of the show's exhibitors are from overseas. She is referring to the "Almighty" titanium coated multi-purpose kitchen scissors. "The five-in-one. We have five functions, like can opener, driver thing, walnut cracker. This one is for peeling fish skin."

     "I love cups, rings, and bowls—"

     "Bowls are the new plates," said Nicole Ramos, sales manager at Denby USA, the American arm of the 200-year-old British dinnerware manufacturer. "A shift on how the millennials and people of today are eating and entertaining. People don't entertain like they used to, not these big family gatherings or formal dinners anymore. We've recognized that, and shifted our focus to people who just sit and eat dinner in front of the TV, and if you eat dinner in front of the TV it's safer out of a bowl than a plate."

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"It's not my wife's cooking but we have to eat"

    Given the constant tarantella of confusion and malice that is the Donald Trump administration, missteps from a few days ago take on the air of ancient history. But somehow his budget spiking Meals on Wheels, and his underlings' insane defense of scrapping such an important program, seem to epitomize the short-sighted meanness of our government. 

     It has been nearly 20 years since I went around with a volunteer from The Ark, delivering meals to the homebound elderly. But their need and gratitude are a vivid memory, and the cheery determination of the volunteers, which will continue with or without government support.

     Abe Ginden takes a gnarled, work-worn hand and affectionately pats the top of a covered aluminum pan.
     "She's nice," he says, referring to the food platter as if it's the elderly lady whose name is scrawled on top -- one of 30 shut-ins receiving meal deliveries from Ginden through a program run by the Ark, a Jewish social service agency.
     Ginden knocks on the door. "FBI—open up!" he jokes. But the woman on the other side doesn't want to open up. As do many clients this particular day, she tells him to just leave the food outside and go away.
     "I get this every day," says Ginden, 69, setting the food down. " 'Leave it at the door.' They don't want to get out of bed."
     About 31 million U.S. citizens were age 65 or older in 1990. The figure will balloon to 70 million in the next 30 years.
     For the portion of these people who become infirm, the choice will be either institutionalization or relying on home services such as the Ark's, which not only provides food but a link to the outside world which -- accepted or not -- is offered every day.
     If the rejections bother Ginden—a World War II Navy vet -- he doesn't show it. At every house he says something pleasant, either through the door or into the intercom.
     "Hot stuff!" Ginden shouts, pressing the buzzer for the apartment of Harry and Rose Goldberg.
     The Goldbergs not only let Ginden in, they are waiting—beaming—in the hall to welcome him into their modest 1-bedroom apartment.
     Harry Goldberg, 85, is 5 feet 10 inches tall and 116 pounds; he is the very definition of the word "gaunt." Still, he appreciates the food.
     "It's not my wife's cooking, but we have to eat," says Harry of the Ark's food. "She was a terrific cook, and I'm not saying that because she's my wife."
     "You can't have everything," says Rose, his wife of 62 years, who at times seems distracted, as if listening to music far away.
     "She's got her ailments," Harry says.
     Both agree that Abe Ginden is as important to them as the food.
     "The best," Harry says. "He's a doll. There's not enough he can do for us." Harry's voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper: "He'll bring in extra rolls. I don't know if it hurts him with the company, but he brings us bagels. Sometimes, a challah."
     "It's such a nice service," Rose says. "And this kid here; they don't come any better."
     Harry was with Globe Glass for 40 years, and fought as a 60-mm. mortar gunner in the Pacific. "Five hundred and seventy-five went in and only eight came back," he says.
     Ginden chats for a while, then returns to his route. Many of his customers have grave illnesses.
     "Cancer," Ginden says of a client before ringing the bell. "He's all cut up. A nice guy. It should happen to a dog and not to him."
     But the cancer patient greets Ginden at the door and updates him on his situation while accepting the foil pans of warm food.
     "Forty days in the hospital," he tells Ginden. Of the food he says: "Very good."
     The service is not free; clients pay as little as 50 cents a meal and an average of $4. "It gives them pride to pay something," says Edna Traube Feldman, the Ark program's coordinator.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 4, 1998

Not having health insurance can be as deadly as terrorism

  

     March 6. Two weeks ago. Does the date stand out in your mind? It should.
     On that day President Donald Trump signed his second travel ban, denying visas to residents of six predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days and barring all refugees for four months.
     The order was called "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States." The administration argued for its necessity using words related to protection: security, safety, risk. "We cannot risk the prospect of malevolent actors using our immigration system to take American lives," said Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly.
     Also on that day — the same day — Republicans offered up their plan to dismember Obamacare.
     No one spoke of protection or risk. Instead, Obamacare was being dismantled in the name of . . . what's that word Paul Ryan kept using? Right, "access." If the government stopped blazing a route to insurance, Americans would be free to wander into the marketplace and buy whatever insurance they like, the sky's the limit, provided they can pay for it — which many can't.
     So one measure, the travel ban, is being taken to protect American lives. The other, to give them access to options.
     But what if we took those two values and swapped them? Apply concern for access to the travel ban, and security to Obamacare. What would that teach us?

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Flashback 1998—Preschool: a matter of life or debt

    With Northwestern nearly snatching victory from Gonzaga—we was robbed!—Saturday afternoon, I fell to wondering what I'd written about my alma mater over the years. I tiptoed into Nexis and found of a 1997 column that was such a bitter keel-hauling of my alma mater that I just couldn't bring myself to re-print it now, not with my kid having two years to go there. 
    But I did find this, from the summer of 1998. I would point out that the toddler we ponied up the big bucks to go to pre-school—the Apple School, in the shadow of Cabrini-Green, if I recall—is now 21 and we're still paying for his school!  Though there was a break, here in the suburbs, and the end does hove into sight, at long last. One more year, and he finally gets to spread his wings and fly into life, his tank topped with expensive education, while his mother and I, our vitality drained by paying for it all, economically and emotionally, are discarded like two dry husks. Such is life.

     There was an article in Harper's awhile back by a man who had driven his family deep into debt. Despite an income, with his wife, of $ 100,000, they had been plunged into bankruptcy and ruin. Their home was beset by bill collectors and credit card companies, all demanding, in shrill and rising tones, the tens of thousands of dollars the family owed.
     What had brought them to such ruin? Gambling? Drugs? Psychic hotline addiction?
     No; private schools.
     The family has three children and, unwilling to subject them to public schools, wrecked themselves trying to pay for private education.
     I have been thinking about that family all week, brooding, like Saul in his tent, over their fate, the first whiff of which, I believe, I have just deeply inhaled. Wearing roller skates and poised at the top of that short slope to utter financial disaster, I felt the first sharp poke in my back.
     Our 2 1/2-year-old was accepted into a pre-nursery school for the fall.
     People who are reading this on farms, with the wind rustling the willows and their children playing out back with Spot the dog and Fluffy the cat, might not quite understand the concept of a pre-nursery school. "What kind of people would send their li'l ones away so young?" says grandma, coming through the screen door with a freshly baked huckleberry pie.
     "I don't know, Nana," says Bea, drying the dishes with a patch of homespun and gazing at her children, running through the rye. "It must be a city thing."
     You're right, Bea, it is a city thing. Though for the life of me, I can't understand it either. My mother didn't pack me off to preschool until I was 4, and then I made her pull me out because there were other children there and, frankly, I didn't like them.
     Two-and-a-half hours a day, three days a week. It isn't as if we're sending him away to a boarding school in Switzerland. (Hmmm . . .) Just enough to get him to learn to share his toys and finger paint and socialize with others and be spared the life of maladjusted elitism that, well, afflicts so many people nowadays.
     Then there is the break it provides his mother. A few gasps of air; the difference between swimming and drowning.
     My wife searched for a preschool with the tenacity of a young actress trying to land her first role, and with about the same initial success. The prestigious day care a block from our house (it's in a brownstone, like an embassy) rejected us with a form letter (a form letter addressed to a different child but sent to our home, to add insult to injury). Other places turned up their noses as well.
     Finally, the call came, just when she had given up hope. I was there when my wife took the call. It was like one of those Publishers Clearinghouse commercials.
     "It's pretty expensive," she said, a little later, after composing herself. "What do you think?"
     "Well," I said, "given the fact that you wept like a baby for joy when they called, I guess we sort of have to."
     Now, with so many columnists making up things nowadays, I want to point out that the above conversation really, truly happened. We also discussed whether we should pay for the school by not paying our real estate taxes. I called out after her, as she hurried to the school to give them our check, "Honey, remember to rob a liquor store on your way home."
     The preschool tuition, I noted with horror, was as much as the tuition I paid Northwestern University the fall semester of my freshman year.
     I'm certainly not looking for pity. I just want readers to understand that, when I start writing column after column about our cute little farm 50 miles away in Harvard, Ill., I didn't move out of the city on a lark.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 25, 1998.

Hoosier Mama

      I have witnessed Muddy Waters sing the blues and Arnold Palmer nail a putt and Michael Jordan dunk a basketball and Paula Haney make pie crust. Though I was almost as surprised to see her at the back of her capacious pie emporium in Evanston late Thursday as I would have been to have been to spy any of those gentlemen, there among the mixers.
    She was flour-dusted and a bit bedraggled—it was about 8 p.m.—hauling crates of eggs from one place to another. The decent thing would have been for me to order my pie and let her be.
     But I like connection. And even though it was quite a number of years ago that we spent some time talking, in her Chicago Avenue kitchen, about her mother, and Indiana—"Hoosier Mama Pie," is both a pun and a biographical detail— while she rolled crust, and I felt I knew her, a little. And of course I've been eating her pie with both hands for years. So I waited until she looked up, and I did a small salaaming gesture, both palms outward at forehead level, then lowered with a deep nod. Respect to the master.
      She came over, wiping her hands on her apron. I said I was surprised to see her here late, doing back kitchen stuff, and she said, "This is fun. Yesterday I had to do insurance," and we talked a bit about work and careers. My younger boy was sitting at a table, with my wife and the out-of-town relations we had brought to show off the place. I told Paula that my advice to him is to do whatever he loves, because you end up working an awful lot, and it's hard enough when you love it, and she agreed. I asked if she had plans to open another place, and she startled a bit, it seemed to me, in a kind of horror at just the idea. Oh no, the two shops are plenty, though the original Chicago storefront is going to be expanded.
     I ordered the "pie flight," three half pieces to share with my wife. The chess pie, which I adore, and the pear and fig, my wife's choice, and the Earl Grey custard pie, which is sublime. They were out of Earl Grey—a bitter disappointment, but I forgave them, it was late after all—and the clerk suggested I try grapenut custard instead. I was dubious, but he assured me it was incredible and of course it was. 
    The flight was finished far too quickly, my wife gallantly allowing me to scrape up the final crumbs of crust—think Tony Bennet singing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" which I once heard him perform, standing directly in front of me at a party. 
     When we were done, I looked down at the bare plate and had a thought ... I'm a little ashamed to admit what that thought was, but I will: "Let's order another flight." Shocking, I know. I did not, I rush to say, act on that very decadent thought. One pie flight is enough, thank you, and part of the allure of pie is you can never get as much as you'd like.



   

"Pornography for the blind" — the audio book adventure

     This column is, in a way, a result of my trip down to Wayne County in early January. I wanted an audio book to pass the time on the long drive downstate, and grabbed George Packer's "The Unwinding." But the rental car didn't have a CD player—outdated technology—so the box sat mute on the passenger seat. I began listening to it when I got back, driving around town. It got so I looked forward to any errand, the longer the better. But I just don't drive that much, and at disc 10 I crossed the Rubicon, copied the remaining CDs onto my iPod, and listened to them while walking the dog, folding laundry or cleaning the kitchen. Something about audio books migrating from the car, where they had always belonged, to the rest of life, seemed to magnify their importance. It got me thinking whether I was processing the book in the same way, listening to it, as I would had I read it. Which put me in the right frame of mind to be interested in the book below. 

     Before Scientific American even published Thomas Edison's letter announcing his plans to to mechanically reproduce speech, the press was predicting the end of reading.
     "Why should we learn to read when, if some skillful elocutionist merely repeats one of 'George Elliot's' novels aloud in the presence of a phonograph, we can subsequently listen to it without taking the slightest trouble?" the New York Times mused on Nov. 7, 1877 after hearing of the device.
     A century later, "Cannonball Run" star Burt Reynolds recorded "Moby-Dick."
     In between, much debate over whether popular fiction should be made available to those with impaired vision or was that "pornography for the blind?"
     We are in the golden age of audio books, the fastest-growing sector of publishing. About 125 new audio books are released each day.

       One of those new titles, "The Untold Story of the Talking Book" by Matthew Rubery (Harvard University Press: $29.95), was also published in printed form, luckily, because that's how I noticed the book's cool dove gray cover and grabbed it.
     This is one of those books that keeps flinging marvelous facts: "in the fourth century, St. Augustine memorably recalled his astonishment upon finding his teacher St. Ambrose reading silently to himself." As it does, the book raises intriguing questions:
     "What exactly is the relationship between spoken and printed texts?" Rubery asks. "How does the experience of listening to books compare to that of reading them? What influence does a book's narrator have over its reception?"For the first 50 years of recorded sound....

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Rachel Maddow fires at Trump, blows off her toe

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S. Alaska Hawaii (detail) by Nam June Paik

      Like a lot of people, I noticed Rachel Maddow's tweet Tuesday evening, the one where she ballyhooed having Donald Trump's tax returns. Something smelled wrong about it, but it didn't cost anything to turn the television on at 8 p.m. and see what was up. 

       I have to admit, I've never tuned into her program before, though I've caught snippets, online, and she seems an intelligent person, good-hearted and thoughtful. 
     But generally, getting your news from television is like trying to breathe through a straw: a lot of effort for a little result.  Fox News is unwatchable agit-prop for right wing zealots, and CNN's reputation died when Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared in 2014, the network veering into some weird Twilight Zone of round-the-clock speculation, time-filling and tap-dancing. It was closer to performance art than reportage, with crazy speculation and holograms, a stain that can never be removed.  MSNBC, well, I really didn't have a preconceived notion about them. Somehow related to NBC. 
     So my expectations were not high. Maddow began by ... well, I can't say exactly what she was doing. "Setting the stage" someone tweeted, when I began urging her to get on with it already. Establishing that yes, people were in fact interested in Donald Trump's tax returns. And those returns could show all sorts of interesting things, like being indebted to some Russian gentleman who paid more for one of Trump's houses than it was worth. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. The same couple ideas, worn to a nubbin like a toddler's adored blankie. Then a commercial break. We were introduced to David Cay Johnston, who won the Pulitzer Prize -- not the gold standard of excellence she seems to imagine it to be -- who has a book on Trump out, and received the two-page photocopy in his mailbox. Twenty minutes into the show ... nothing.
     I went to the kitchen for a snack.
    Eventually, after much waving of the photocopied return, it was revealed that, in 2005, Donald Trump earned $158 million and paid $33 million in taxes, and it was so obvious, at least to me, that Maddow had been played— by Trump. You want taxes? I can see him sneer, here's taxes. The few pages that don't show the depth of his enslavement to the Russians, or his miserable cheapness at charity, or any of the dozen deficiencies that make Trump an unfit president and are the reason he wouldn't release them. He earned a lot of money in 2005 and payed a defendable share of tax. This wasn't a revelation, it was a blow job under the desk, the tax return version of that New York Post headline "Best Sex I Ever Had." You could tell it was a plant because the White House confirmed its authenticity, and the pro forma howl of outrage was just a wee bit muted. 
     I understand there is time to fill and eyeballs to attract. But the Donald Trump presidency is a true crisis, and goofy shit like this minimizes it. Maybe, in my ignorance, I gave Rachel Maddow a stature she didn't deserve -- a friend who watches MSNBC said the entire three hour block on MSNBC is always talking heads hyperventilating about every Trump nuance "like their hair was on fire." 
    Our nation is in danger. This is not the time for publicity gimmicks and cheap stunts to hook an audience. A hundred and fifty years ago, newspapers would print melodramatic fiction. You'd get to the end of the story and there would be a line, "And that is what it might have been like had all the animals escaped from the zoo Tuesday!" The modern world killed that, supposedly, and Maddow's tax return PR grab was a step back toward P.T. Barnum because what she claimed, while literally true, wasn't true in the way she pretended it to be. She didn't actually have what she pretended to have: something significant. It was like my claiming I have a new Ferrari when what I really have is a new Ferrari tire. 
     Whenever I write about Trump or anything related to Trump, my readership goes up 50 percent. So by that logic, I should write about Trump continually. I don't because a) some days a half dozen outlets say everything there is to say about that day's outrage and I don't see the need to pile on or echo; b) four years is a long time, and we need to take a break from just gazing in horror at the calamity; and c) other interesting and important stuff doesn't stop going on just because our country is on fire.
     If the sun were suddenly about to explode, but we had a month to live, we would not want to spend it reading "New Details on Sun Exploding" every single minute. We'd get it, and only want to hear truly significant stuff ("Here's the Date the Sun-Will Explode.") Nobody wants a list of stars that aren't blowing up in a month.
      That's why I avoid the "orange Chee-to" cheap jabs at Trump. I don't care that Melania is staying at Trump Tower, or that he golfs every weekend even though he promised he'd never take a vacation. That lie has to get in line behind all the others and it's a long line. What I care about is that he is a deeply un-American hate monger, in thrall to the Russians, who is working to undermine the country morally, economically, physically -- yanking away health insurance from 24 million people, many of whom are so out to sea they voted for the man. That every day he works to undermine the legitimacy of the media, the courts, the idea of truth itself. He's a liar, a bully and fraud. The rest is just window-dressing. 
     That's what's important. And Maddow yelling "Fire!" Monday night, well, it makes battling the blaze that much harder. It gives Trump the chance to say, "See, the media scum saw the taxes," when we didn't see anything at all. It casts an important voice into disrepute -- she could say she has Steve Bannon's head on a pike, details at 9 p.m. EST, and I'm not sure I'd tune in.  Rachel Maddow is still one of the good guys, but less an asset today than she was Monday. And the worst part: it was a self-inflicted wound. Someone dangled a few photocopies at her, she drew too fast and blew off a toe. 

"Pain is the great destroyer of language"

Gold Star Monument, "I gave my best to make a better world,' Nashville, Tennessee.

   
    This is one of those columns where writing it was the easy part. The daylong trick was cutting it from 1100 to 679 words. There was the poetry aspect and the head trauma aspect and the VA botching its job aspect, with the very quotable Dawn McGuire saying things such as "I feel like I'm married to Wittgenstein" of her time getting her masters of divinity at the Union Theological Seminary. It wasn't on point, but how often do you get to use a line like that? 
    I somehow managed. If you want more of McGuire, do get her new book, American Dream with Exit Wound, which I've read and recommend, or her previous one, Aphasia Cafe. You can hear her reading a heartbreaking and smart poem from it, "Aphasia Breaks the News," originally published, mirabile dictu, by the American Academy of Neurology Journal, by clicking here. 

Dr. Dawn McGuire

     Neurology, the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology, publishes papers on brain science with titles like "Vesicular acetylcholine transporter defect underlies devastating congenital myasthenia syndrome."
     It also, marvelous to relate, prints poetry. And yes, the poems are peer reviewed.
      In 2012 it published "Poems from the Aphasia Cafe," from a book by Dawn McGuire, a San Francisco neurologist and poet. McGuire's poems echo her work with shattered minds, particularly wounded veterans — "aphasia" is a term for loss of speech through brain injury. McGuire, who grew up in Appalachian Kentucky and studied at Princeton and Columbia, does not mince words when talking about the vets under her care.
     "They come back and are expected to reintegrate without any attention to the fact they are often very young men who have been asked to really split their psyches and do things that the culture and family they grew up in would find abhorrent," she said. "There's nothing like boot camp for reintegration, where they can see they've been split by these experiences, by what they've done, what's been done to them. There's no way for vets to re-enter the regular community."
     Boot camp for returning vets is a great idea. We put soldiers through intensive training before they serve, but they're left on their own when they come home and often need help most.

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