Wildcats beat Panthers

     In my four years as a student at Northwestern, I never went to a football game, and attending one Saturday afternoon, I tried to cast my memory back more than three decades and figure out why. 
     The best I can come up with is I had no inclination to go, and nobody asked me.  I can't recall what I did on Saturday afternoons instead; studied, I suppose. 
     It probably helped that the NU football team in the late 1970s and early 1980s was particularly lousy—they only won one game during my undergraduate years there, and students had to satisfy themselves with tearing down the goalposts after they set some kind of collegiate record for losing.  I also vaguely recall that, coming from an Ohio high school with a powerhouse football team, it was something of a relief to not have to think about football.
     The Wildcats certainly did well Saturday, crushing the Eastern Illinois Panthers 41 to 0 by the end of the third quarter, at which point my wife and I decided, after two and a half hours of football, we could go to dinner knowing the game was safely in the bag.
     We were there because our kid was there. All the incoming freshmen were, running onto the field before the game in one of the many ceremonies cooked up since I've left. Clever, in that it gets the new student to at least one game, and puts 1,000 additional spectators in the stands, though the game seemed well-attended. He waved to us as he passed by, which we took as a triumph.
     This weekend is Parents and Family Orientation at Northwestern, crammed with receptions and seminars and events, that my wife and I have been gamely attending. I've found that, in general, I am infected with more school spirit as a parent than I possessed as a student.  I am not, by nature, a joiner, and as a young man, the idea of being part of something as vast and old as a university struck me as a dubious honor, something I should hold at arm's length. I never bought a college ring, or a yearbook, or a piece of purple clothing. I wanted to shine on my own, not reflect glory by association. Besides, they let me in, so really, how exclusive a place could it be?
     Watching the game, we shouted and cheered and, I noticed with a mingling of amusement and horror, I sang faintly along when the band played "Alma Mater."
     "Hail to purple... hail to white ... hail to thee, Northwestern."
     So what changed? Some mellowing with age, I suppose. I've had my life to achieve ... well, not a whole lot, not compared to my classmate Ben Slivka, who donated a dorm. Though I did raise a kid who got into Northwestern, which is certainly something. He picked this school, and the school was kind enough to return his embrace. To feel anything short of at least appreciation, if not affection, would stink of ingratitude.   
     I tried to squint, and see the campus as it might be to someone viewing it with new eyes, and not somebody who has been visiting off and on for the past 37 years, mostly to use the library for the past 33.  A big, beautiful place.
    And the game was fun. The weather was perfect, the predicted rain did not come, a slight autumnal chill in the air. The announcer, perhaps in deference to Northwestern's storied academic rigor, kept inserting a few fancy words into his play-by-play patter.
     "He is met by a plethora of Northwestern tacklers..." he said at one point.
     "Brought down by a deluge of Northwestern tacklers," at another.
      On our way to our car, we stopped at a shop on Sherman and bought a decal that reads "NORTHWESTERN" in big block letters for the back window of the van. I never had one as an alumni, would have been horrified at the thought of displaying that kind of thing. But Saturday it was my idea to buy it. When it was merely my school I couldn't take pride in the place. But now that it's his, satisfaction comes easily, a natural part of the pride I feel for him. 

Racing toward his future.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, enough already. I've been waaaay to sympathetic when it comes to picking out Saturday fun activity photos. It isn't really that the Hive is so good, it's that I'm just a big old softie. No more! It's time to just stump people, and to do that, I need something really hard, like this single jeering face tile I noticed downtown. It might be difficult to make him out in the photo above, so I'll give you a close-up. 
     There. Take a good look.
     So where is this guy, who seems to be roaring in derision over your inability to place his location? I imagine to have any chance of success, you'd have to not only have noticed him, the way I did, but also remember the location, which seems a near-impossibility. 
    To show my confidence in the difficulty of this week's activity, I should offer something good as a prize? How about a signed, hardback copy of my last book, "You Were Never in Chicago," a $25 value, at least, assuming that it being defaced by the author doesn't reduce its worth. Place your guesses below. And good luck. 

Google in the driver's seat

     A man wants to drive.
     Sexist? Sure. But we live in a sexist society. I didn't invent it, I'm just trying to live in it. Scanning 25 years of marriage, I'd say I drive 95 percent of the time. Maybe more.
     I like to drive. It feels strange to sit in the passenger seat watching the scenery go by. Powerless.
     Which is why I've been following the advent of Google's self-driving cars.
     They're curiosities, now. Only four states allow them even to be road tested—California,

Nevada, Michigan and Florida, though this month the tech giant is scooting vehicles around Austin, Texas, through a special arrangement with the government there. They always have a human driver, in case something goes wrong.
     But that will change. You'll eventually see one, then a few , then they'll be everywhere.
     The artificial intelligence required -- perceiving conditions in real time and reacting to them -- is incredible, and it's amazing that in the 2 million miles driven, there have been a handful of minor accidents, and all of them are the fault of other, human drivers; mostly rear-end collisions when the Google car is stopped at a light.
     But what interests me most is not the hardware or the software, but the wetware: how Americans will accept the the cars when they're introduced. Right now Google is talking about 2020, which is just around the corner. We'll do so grudgingly, I assume, given our worship of freedom, the open road. Born to Run, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in their '49 Hudson. "The road is life." How will we sit passively and let a silicon chip do the driving?
     The same way we gave up galloping horses for sputtering black Model Ts. There will be psychological hurdles. I noticed in the official Google video of the first civilians to ride in the car, the 12 are mostly senior citizens, with one middle-aged woman and one child. There isn't a male between the ages of 12 and 60, with the possible exception of one grey-haired guy who's blind. While that might be coincidence, it also might be because we expect Daniel Craig to be working the gear shift of his Aston Martin Vanquish, not puffing out his cheeks with his hands on his knees and watching the world go by.
     But it will happen, just because the cars are so much safer. Let's say you spend $1500 a year on your car insurance, and the insurance on a self-driving car is $150. Suddenly you can save half the cost of your car over its life expectancy. Most people will do it.
     About 32,000 Americans died on the road last year, in accidents that were caused by excessive speed, drunkenness, stupidity, texting, aggression, lack of care and general obliviousness. Not problems that will be associated with the Google self-driving car, though it will take us a while for us to see that clearly, to recover from what we can call Myth Hangover—the tendency to react to technology based, not on actual reality, but on stories.
     Look at security cameras. For decades, the idea of being recorded in public places was filtered through George Orwell's 1984, where a repressive government uses cameras to spy on citizens. That such cameras are actually used to catch criminals and -- for you fans of irony -- hold excessive and racist police forces to account, has been very slow to register. We're still scared of Big Brother.

     One person run down by a Google car will cause more fuss than 1,000 killed by careless drivers. The tolerance for harm from technology is all out of scale. We're still afraid the machines will get us. The Google self-driving car will play out as the latest installment of the John Henry saga. For those not up on your folk songs, John Henry is a steel driving man, pitted against a steam drill, vowing to "die with a hammer in his hand" before he lets the steam drill beat him down.
     And—spoiler alert!—die he does. The steam drill wins. The steam drill always wins. Paul Bunyan notwithstanding, loggers use chain saws instead of axes. The century when people drove their cars will be a misty romantic memory, like the era when they rode horses and dipped candles. Not that there won't be all sorts of blustery macho pushback from a culture that spawned the Fast & Furious movie franchise The self-driving cars will be portrayed as weak and tepid, like clip on ties and package vacation tours. But we'll accept them, just as no city worker breaking up an old patch of concrete with a jackhammer frets, "You know, it would be so much more spiritually satisfying to use a sledge hammer and a spike to do this." Get used to those Google bean cars, because you'll be seeing a lot of them.

"Jigglypuff, I choose YOUUUU!"

     Today is a milestone in the Steinberg household. Since we took Ross, our oldest, home from the hospital the day after he was born, at the end of October, 1995, to now, we've been a house with kids. 

     That holds true for a few more hours. Tomorrow we cart his younger brother off to college, leave him with an awkward hug, and return to a house devoid of children for the first time in almost 20 years.

     I'm not complaining. Too many parents have too many true heartbreaks for me to bitch about sticking our landing and seeing them off to their next stage in life. I'm not sad (not sad not sad not sad!!!) so much as reflective: I never thought of parenthood as a phase, a period, a span of time with a beginning and an end, but it obviously is. Of course they always remain your boys. Just not boys sleeping in the bedroom up the stairs. 

     This column floated to the surface a few weeks back because I was followed on Twitter by some Japanese Pokemon fans, for some unfathomable reason. "Didn't I write something once...?" I asked myself, and dredged this up. It's reflects the whole boy dynamic in its prime, and holds up well, I think, and makes for a better read than whatever more timely navel-gazing I'd scrape together from a head that, at the moment, feels full of cotton, rags and the dust of old memories. I'm sure someday I'll reflect and come up with something pithy and interesting on the transition. But today is not the day. I'd rather think about Jigglypuff.

     God, this is so embarrassing.
     Before my boys ever knew what a Pokemon was, before they had ever expressed their deep undying love for Pikachu and pals, their father would, on occasion, let out a squeal of "Jigglypuff!"
     He did this so often that they, too, took to squealing "Jigglypuff!" even though they didn't know what a Jigglypuff was, did not know that he (she? it?) is a pink, spheroid, vaguely feline creature in the extended Pokemon family, not to be confused with the similarly round and pink Wigglytuff, whose ears are more rabbitlike.
     What happened is this. My brother Sam, who has spent years in Tokyo, invited me over to drink a few beers and compare the wreckage of our lives. On the second beer, he asked me if I wanted to play something called "Pokemon" on the enormous television set dominating his living room. This was maybe five months ago.
     We each took little consoles to twiddle with, and had to select characters, which we then set to attacking each other in a dramatic city in the sky. I ended up with Jigglypuff, the aforementioned pink sphere that sang and floated and, at times, shouted "Jigglypuff!"
     I had never played a console game like that before. I have not since. We went at it for a few rounds. His creatures kicked the tar out of my Jigglypuff, and we eventually tired of it and stepped out to the porch.
     I did not sense that this was a phenomenon poised to sweep the land — Pokemon is (are?) on the cover of Time magazine this week, and the Sun-Times has joined the universal clamor.
     And why not? There is certainly something infectious about it. At home that night, during our customary pillow war, I took to emitting triumphant shouts of "Jigglypuff!" whenever I'd bop one of the boys with a big pillow. It was just a funny word.
     Then my wife, perhaps responding to the radio beams broadcast from Burger King, controlling our thoughts, dutifully rented a Pokemon video. I upbraided her — why would she let the boys watch a street gang of cutesy Asiatic marshmallows have at each other? We agreed not to show the boys the tape.
     But one night she went out. I was left alone, caring for the boys, who promptly began tearing down the walls. The video was right there. I slipped it into the VCR.
     Their reaction was incredible. They froze, in front of the television. Ross, my oldest, just stood there, petrified, his mouth hanging open. Kent sat so still, so unblinking, I was afraid he had stopped breathing. They were like statues, the shifting light from the television dancing off their faces. The pose was so extraordinary — bug-eyed, drop-jawed — that I went to get the camera. When I returned a few minutes later, they were in the exact same positions. Ross hadn't even sat down.
     "Video heroin," I told my wife. "Buy the entire series. Our long nightmare is over." She shot me that look, and returned the tape.
     Yet that half-hour of Pokemon was enough. They were hooked. When a few figurines washed up at work, and I brought them home, it was like tossing chunks of raw meat into a tank of piranhas. The boys shrieked and thrashed and battled over the things, over Gengar with his glowing eyes, and Shellder, who squirts water.
     "What it is?" my wife asked. "What is the attraction?"
     "Are you kidding?" I said. "Scores of cute tiny creature toy things beating the crap out of each other? It's a little boy's dream."
     Rather, what amazes me is the response by supposed adults. "For many kids it's now an addiction," Time intones.
     The movie just came out. Burger King just stirred the pot with its giveaway last week. "Addiction"? Aren't we jumping the gun a bit? It's a fad that could end Tuesday. Were yo-yos an addiction? Trolls? Those little dolls girls wore in plastic lockets around their necks?
     Then again, perhaps I'm biased. I was a GI Joe addict (recovering, I should say. A recovering GI Joe-aholic, since I find myself still yearning toward the astronaut GI Joe in his Mercury Redstone capsule. Sam had one; I didn't. One day at a time, Lord, one day at a time).
     "Is it bad for them?" Time ponders, in apparent seriousness. (Time used to be known for its ridiculous, Henry Luce-inspired gravitas, and it seems to be going back to those terrible days).
     Worse than Power Rangers? Worse than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Fantastic Four, Mighty Mouse, Tom & Jerry, Popeye, and every other childhood hero who made a point of pelting those in the general vicinity, stretching back to Hercules? I don't think so.
     The important thing to remember is that children would not embrace this sort of thing unless they needed it somehow. We could take away all the toy weapons, all the violent characters, and kids would have their Sally Empathy dolls kick their Carole King figurines to death. That's how kids are. If we take the toy guns away from our boys, as punishment, they shoot each other with plastic fruit.
     Don't worry about kids. They'll be fine. But what does it say about the adult world where a major news magazine spends 13 unreadable pages parsing the latest childhood fad? I have only one word for that: "Jigglypuff!"

         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 21, 1999

Keep your phone until it breaks

  

    Gary Shteyngart's novel, "Super Sad True Love Story,"  takes place in a dystopian future, where we all hang "apparats"—souped up cell phones—around our necks on cords, like security passes. The devices share information with each other, and notify us of the credit rating of the people nearby. Are they Low Net Worth individuals or, better, High Net Worth individuals?
     The specs for the new Apple iPhone 6S are released Wednesday with great ceremony in San Francisco. The 6S will not include a function evaluating the financial solvency of those around us — something to look forward to — and indeed, the general insider view is that the incremental improvements will not charm and thrill the phone-buying public in the way that they expect, almost demand, to be charmed and thrilled.
     A better camera, a faster processor, and that's about it.
     Though lack of electronic marvels will not stop people from lining up to buy the new phones when they become available in a month or two.
     Which makes this an apt moment to whisper, under the roar of unmerited Apple hoopla, a few words in support of my own philosophy toward phones: Use them until they break.
     That sounds practically Amish, and I hope I'm not tarring myself as a Luddite. But that attitude has guided me from my first cell phone, a 50-pound Motorola behemoth bolted in the trunk of my Chevy Citation in 1984 to today. If something works well enough, keep it.
     My own phone is an Apple 4S, introduced in the hazy yesteryear of 2011. And why did I choose that particular phone? I didn't. The paper issued it to me, and in my world, that consideration dwarfs all others. If Apple introduced a new phone—let's call it the Apple 7—that allows you to communicate with your dead relatives, I would not buy one over a lesser but free, to me, company model, not if it involved my personally entering into one of those hellish phone agreements, which the paper shields me from, a perk I consider on par with health care.
     I know, because earlier this summer my younger boy needed a new phone after his broke when he was about to go on a trip overseas and immediately required an operative phone to constantly reassure his mother he wasn't being held captive in a cave. I accompanied him to the T-Mobile store to get one, a transaction at least as complicated as buying our house and involving as many forms. Later, my wife studied the bill — she does that kind of thing — and informed me that T-Mobile had socked us $50 for a phone case that we were told was free, a point I remembered clearly because my heart had swelled in gratitude at the gift. And as much as I wanted to take the pile of paperwork and march right back to the T-Mobile store and demand satisfaction, I had, in the sign-here-and-here-and-here whirl of getting the phone, initialed a page buying the case, and I decided it was worth fifty bucks not to ever return to their pink-tinged perdition.
     I know I'll sound like Andy Rooney passing a kidney stone, but I'll say it anyway: I don't want a new phone; I don't want new features. I have a hard enough time grasping the features on current phones. I'll give you an example.  The aforementioned younger boy and his spanking new, expensively-cased phone leave for college Friday. My wife has been busy equipping him with necessities. During one recent trip to Target, I was given the simple task of picking out a flashlight, because she imagines the lad will need one, both to guide him through the smokey halls to safety and to shine menacingly under his chin while he tells The Hook to his wide-eyed classmates at the wiener roasts we imagine these college kids are fond of holding.
     So I'm standing in Target, looking at my flashlight options, and my first thought is: Thirty bucks for a flashlight?  Sure, it's titanium. But he'll never use it. I decided to look for a cheaper flashlight that would still be adequate for sticking in a drawer.
     An hour later, this thought came to me, like a bubble rising in warm honey: ....you know... his phone.... which he always keeps on him ... already has  a flashlight ... built in.
      I was tempted to tell my wife, "No flashlight necessary, honey, but what about a camera?"
      I resisted. All this is stressful enough as it is.

Chicago needs more tweets!

     A Canadian motivational speaker listed the "September Top 100 Twitter Users in Chicago, Illinois" and tweeted congratulations to me for making the list,. I'm No. 78.
     Which surprises me. I don't feel like I tweet all that much: the column on the days it runs, the blog on the other days, a few times in the morning, plus posts from exactly one and two years ago, to pump the numbers up, not to forget the occasional bon mot. 

     In the roughly 1575 days since I joined Twitter in April, 2011, I have issued some 9,300 tweets, or about six a day. That doesn't seem like it should get me on the Top 100 list. It makes me wonder if their count is flawed—this wasn't produced by the Bureau of Standards, but some guy in Toronto. Or perhaps it is correct, suggesting that Chicago might really be the small time backwater we all passionately hope it is not. 

    Anyway, it reminded me of this 2011 column I wrote welcoming myself to Twitter, and given that it will be new to many, I thought it worthy of revisiting. And to the rest of you, get tweeting. I should not be on that list.

     Friday after work, instead of bolting for the train, as is my custom, I strolled to Tribune Tower, pausing to pop my head in the Billy Goat Tavern, where I was rewarded with a hearty hello from Bouch Khribech, a wiry busboy when I met him 20 years ago and now a burly bartender, and from his brother Marco, who called over Rick Kogan.
     If you don't know Kogan—and if you don't, you might be the only Chicagoan who doesn't—he's a veteran, shoe-leather reporter, with a gruff, nicotine-and-bourbon voice, the only man I've ever met who not only calls other men "honey," but makes it seem a macho trait, like carrying a Buck knife clipped to your belt.
     It was the last day of Social Media Week, a global conclave welcoming our shiny communications future. Normally I avoid these somber wakes for journalism, since after the mourners depart the profession always gets out of the coffin and goes back to work.
     But this one had an intriguing title — "Reinventing a Media Career on Alternative Platforms" — plus an all-pro lineup: the Sun-Times' own Richard Roeper, a columnist and radio star; Robert Feder, fearsome online media critic; Steve Dahl, the radio legend, and a TV news reporter named Nancy Loo.
     Kogan was going, too, so we headed off together into the Tower, through its Gothic horror show of an entrance, with the enormous map of North America, mute testimony to the terrified isolationism that once gripped the place. In the seventh floor meeting room I found friends I hadn't seen in years, so more hugs and handshakes, smiles and updates.
     The 90 minutes of discussion can be boiled down to this: Twitter is important. The service, which allows you to shoot 140-character messages to others and in turn read the haikus they write, is the barge that will carry our society wherever it is drifting to, and if you are laboring away at some outdated mode of communication—say, slowly writing stuff that will be printed on paper and flung at people's front steps—you are a brontosaurus in a tar bit, bellowing your indignation, unheard, as you slowly sink into the bubbling mire.
     Still, the session was a lot of fun—primarily because Kogan and I, like two seventh-grade boys in the back of health class, kept up a running banter of highly uncharitable thoughts regarding the proceedings.
     Leaving, I felt reassured that I could safely skip Twitter, just as I never owned a CB radio or watched "The Sopranos."
     But the next day uncertainty set in. I should see what Twitter's about. So I dropped onto Roger Ebert's website—somehow I knew this is a topic the tech-savvy Ebert would comment on, and sure enough, there it was, upper right corner, an essay on "some observations about successful tweeting."
     Ebert has 532,782 Twitter followers, and while he mercifully offered me an out—"You may well have better ways to spend your time"—he also clearly explains Twitter's appeal: "The stream, the flow, the chatter, the sudden bursts of news, the snark, the gossip, time itself tweet-tweet-tweeting away."
     That last part makes it sound like opium. But I signed on, figuring, "Why not? I can always quit," went to create @NeilSteinberg, but found I had already done it, apparently, long ago. A whopping 16 people were following me, even though I hadn't tweeted a thing. Well, mustn't keep my public waiting . . .
     Hmmm, for my first tweet . . . something pithy, Oscar Wilde-like—that's what Twitter seems to be: millions of would-be Wildes, Shaws and Whistlers, furiously flinging bon mots into the ether, hoping for a good ripple.
     The first thing that came to mind was "What hath God wrought," the message Samuel F. B. Morse sent to inaugurate the Washington-Baltimore telegraph line on May 24, 1844. Not Wildean, but certainly very me. So I sent it and signed up for various feeds—the Sun-Times, of course, the Associated Press, Rich Roeper, Sarah Silverman, who shares thoughts like "Don't forget to play catch with your kid" and "Quiet moment with my dog." She's supposed to be funny, right?
     The ironic thing is, while social media might indeed be the future, someone still felt obligated to gather people in a room on a Friday to tell them the good news. Which means, in my mind, the future ain't quite here yet. To be honest, after Kogan, I liked the gathering-in-a-room part best. It didn't matter what for—we could have been swapping meatloaf recipes. I would have preferred that, frankly, because I like meatloaf, and while a new recipe might come in handy someday, I wouldn't also feel obligated to bake a meatloaf every three hours for the rest of my life, which is what Twitter seems like right now.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 26, 2011

Maybe the mail stopped at a bar

     Running a restaurant is more than just cooking up good food and getting it to the table.
     Though many fall short even on that basic task.
     There is also service to get right. And decor.
     Beyond that, there is filling the role of being a business in a community, with teams to sponsor and charities to support.
     All of which Harry Caray's, the landmark steakhouse and Italian restaurant on Kinzie, not to forget its various satellite locations, does exceedingly well.
     Or rather, does well when the United States Postal Service manages to deliver their mail.
     Pull up a chair.
     Tales of the ineptitude of the local branch of the post office are such a Chicago tradition, you hesitate before offering up a new one.
     You ask, does it meet the classic standards? The piles of letters found burning under a viaduct? The sacks of undelivered mail discovered in a disturbed postal carrier's home? The bar is very high.
     But heck, it's Labor Day weekend. I shouldn't even be working. And while Harry Caray's CEO Grant DePorter certainly plays the media like a conductor directing a well-trained orchestra, and could generate press for a stoplight changing, there is sincere interest here.
     I hope.
     A stack of letters that Harry Caray's sent exactly 10 years ago was delivered last week, the moldy envelopes arriving to their startled recipients, in some cases, with others returning to the restaurant office.
     "People are getting mail all over town, 10 years ago to the date," said DePorter, marveling at a particular return-to-sender letter from Children's Memorial Hospital.
     "They said they couldn't locate it," he said. "You would think the post office would know Children's Memorial has moved."
     In 2012, from Lincoln Park to Chicago Avenue, changing its name to Lurie Children's Hospital.
     Mark V. Reynolds, spokesman for the USPS' Chicago office, said that forwarding instructions are only good for one year, then mail is returned to sender.
     From how Grant was talking, I envisioned a burlap sack stuffed with mail moldering in a forgotten corner of some vast postal facility. It turned out we're talking about six letters—one delivered to the Cubs, one delivered to Chris Chelios' charity, and four returned to Harry's.
     So far. DePorter worries there are many others he has yet to hear about.
     "This is like the Nielsen ratings," he said. "Where one person represents 100 more."
     He first learned of the problem last week at Wrigley Field, fittingly.
     "Andrea Burke, who works with the Cubs, ran up to us and said, 'You will never believe what I got in the mail,'" said DePorter, "an envelope that was mailed 10 years ago that contained gift certificates for Fan Appreciation Day in 2005,"
     At first he thought it was funny.
     "Like a time capsule. Then I got the letter from the Restaurant Association."
     A letter contained gift certificates for a silent auction.
     "They never got my charity stuff and I was the chairman," said DePorter. "I was guy calling people to say, will you donate? You never know the ripple effect. Ernst and Young never got my thank you letter for their event. The letter to Children's Memorial Hospital had a certificate for dinner with Cubs manage Dusty Baker. They could have gotten a lot of money for that, but it never happened because the certificate for the dinner never arrived. There's probably a lot more. This is only the tip of the iceberg."
     DePorter speculated the mail was "probably under a table for 10 years."
     The post office couldn't offer much light.
     "This is a mystery," said Reynolds, vowing to investigate. "We need to know what happened."
     Don't hold your breath, though.
     "The only person who could tell us what happened to the mail is the mail itself, if it could talk." Reynolds said."This is highly unusually, an anomaly. Mail may be found in equipment we thought was empty. It does happen, unfortunately."
     I've known Grant for years, and he is devoted—perhaps even obsessed—with the image of the restaurant. The idea that people were promised something from Harry's and didn't get it horrifies and torments him.
     "I think people were too embarrassed to call us out on it," he said. "I didn't know they were mad at us."
     So look within. If you harbor any lingering, decade-old resentment against Harry Caray's for not sending that gift certificate they promised, well, maybe they did and it just didn't arrive, for reasons that will probably never be known.
     In 2005, the Postal Service handled 211.7 billion pieces of mail. Last year it was 155.4 billion pieces, a 25 percent drop.
     "This is why FedEx is doing so well," DePorter said.

Religious bigots aim at gays and harm themselves

     Black people can be bigots. Some deny this, but then, bigots always deny their irrational prejudices are motivated by baseless prejudice, preferring instead to pretend they are based on practical experience, solid science, or, when all else fails, religion.
     I know this because when the civil rights struggle of our time, the growing acceptance of gay, lesbian, transgender and other assorted folk into the realm of accepted humanity, is called that, sometimes African Americans will complain to me, and vigorously point out that while race is naturally assigned—by God, if they are so inclined—and unchanging either way, that sexuality is a choice, sometime a sinful choice.  
     That isn't in any way true, but a good try.
     The struggles of the civil rights era are evoked in the push for gay rights because they're so relevant. For instance, today, the New York Times ran a story about Kentucky clerk Kim Davis going to jail rather than issue her gay fellow citizens marriage licenses, as the law compels and a court has ordered her to do. It explained how her defiance has rallied American mullahs to press their lost cause of intolerance anew, It mentioned how 13 of the 67 counties in Alabama, like Davis, stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether rather than comply with the law and end discrimination against gay people. 
     This is called, in the vernacular, "cutting off your nose to spite your face," and evoked a similar practice in the 1960s and 1970s, where small towns in the steamy Deep South would fill in their swimming pools with dirt rather than integrate them. They'd rather no one swim at all then let those black kids in with their white sons and daughters.
    They no doubt could quote scripture and science. 
     I remember that because it was a particular horrible and telling detail, and showed the ultimate self-destructive quality of being a bigot. While prejudice certainly hurts the object of irrational scorn, it also blows back on the prejudiced. Your worldview is skewed and nobody gets to swim. Or gets issued a marriage license. 
    The more particular hatreds fall into disrepute, the easier it is to see the damage that bigotry causes the bigoted. Regarding race, a person who openly expresses a contemptuous racial prejudice will now suffer more than the minority being condemned. Regarding sexuality, the backwoods religions making a last ditch stand against gay rights are undercutting whatever fig leaf of moral authority they might have had, much more than they are stopping the rapid progress of human rights in this country. Sad that they don't see it, but then if they did, they wouldn't behave the way they do. 

Foes of Iran deal toeing Israel's line

   

     When John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, voters were uncomfortable with the prospect of being led by somebody who wasn't Protestant, and aired their fears.
     Could Kennedy, they wondered, as a Roman Catholic, manage to put the interests of his country ahead of pressures from the Vatican?
     Kennedy was forced to repeatedly address these worries. Speaking to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, he first chided his audience for ignoring issues like poverty and Communism, and instead forcing him to talk about whether he'd take his marching orders from the pope.
    "Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured -- perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this," he said. "So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again — not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me —but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act."
     Kennedy was good to his word. In the countless histories of his all-too-brief administration, JFK has been accused of many lapses, but excessive zeal for his Catholic faith and fidelity to its teachings are not among them.
     That is not surprising. The idea of divided loyalties is typically a baseless slur, tossed  at anyone who is different, suggesting that our country's common interests are being subjugated to some outside loyalty.
     The same accusations have been hurled at Jews, after they got a country of their own, Israel. And these insinuations always seemed the same kind of disguised bigotry that Kennedy faced. 
     Until now. 
     Look at the Iran deal. Who can say there isn't a segment of American Jews who are , if not exactly following the orders of the Israeli government, then buying its worldview, hook, line and sinker, and passionately opposing American policy for that reason alone?
    Here Barack Obama, the president of the United States, has worked out an agreement that he and our five most important allies feel is the best strategy to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. 
     Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, however, believes that any agreement with Iran is worthless and prefers steep economic sanctions leading toward pre-emptive war. He has been trying to undercut the deal, and is aided by a distressingly large cast of allies in the United States, mainly the chorus of Obama's fanatic GOP foes—not one Republican in Congress supports the deal—and that slice of American Jewry who believes that supporting Israel means endorsing anything its government does, no matter how misguided.
     Netanyahu might be right, I should add. Or might not. Nobody knows, and those who claim to know are just bluffing. We have only one past, but a multitude of futures, and we can never tell how our actions now will affect what unfolds.
   The stunning thing is, in all the discussion of the merits of the deal, the fact that our president supports one side, and the head of another country, even a country as historically friendly as Israel, supports the other, hardly enters the calculus. I'm mentioning it here because I haven't heard anybody mention it. Maybe it's a naive point, but there you go. 
    At the end of last week it seemed there are enough votes in Congress to keep the deal from being overturned, though the We-Never-Lose-We-Just-Fall-Back-and-Keep-Fighting Republicans are already digging to find creative ways to undercut it.            
     Tough economic sanctions that isolated Iran certainly didn't keep it from making the progress toward a bomb it already has. And a deal might allow them to continue, aided by renewed economic support. Everyone suggesting the best route are really guessing, based more on their biases and partisanship than any cool analysis of fact. The bottom line is, if Netanyahu embraced the deal, the critics here would fall in line. But he doesn't, so they echo his denunciations. 
     That isn't good for the future of Jews, already a dwindling minority facing rising anti-Semitism. I'm not saying that we should keep our place; just that we should consider whether throwing in our lot with foreign leaders in fevered opposition—so extreme that the Anti-Defamation League found itself accusing certain Jewish groups of anti-Semitism— is a long-term success strategy. 
     Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is a blip. But someday a viable Jewish candidate will runs for president, and somebody will raise the question of whether he (or she) will do what's best for our country, or owe special allegiance to Israel. Those critics will wave the bloody shirt of the fierce opposition to the Iran deal as evidence, and who will be able to say there isn't some kernel of truth there? The best defense will be the existence of J Street Jews who did not dance to whatever tune the current administration in Israel is piping. But that is a a nuanced argument, the type all too often lost in the gale of political discourse. Whether the deal will work or not is unknown by anybody. We'll have to find out. But that the debate has undercut the always tentative position of the American Jewish community is a certainty.  

The cucumber you just ate might kill you.

     "Would you like some cucumber with that?" my wife asked, busying over the stove while I read the paper at the kitchen table.
     "What, in the eggs?" I said, wincing slightly. She was making eggs before our walk in the Botanic Garden Saturday morning.
     "No, on the side."   
     "Sure!" I said. 
     It's hard to wait, and a plate of sliced cucumbers was just the thing to nibble on. Healthy, cool, refreshing.
     "Cucumbers make a good appetizer," I observed, and she agreed.
    We ate our eggs, sipped our coffee, read our papers.  I kept working on the cucumber slices. One slice left.
    "Would you like the last slice?" I asked.
    "No, go ahead," she said. I ate it, reflecting on how much I like cucumber.
    "Let me check the computer and we'll go," I said. I like to keep tabs on the blog. 
     I go upstairs, call up Twitter. This is the first tweet I see: "Woman dies from tainted cucumber, prompting recall in 27 states."

    
     I click on the article and read it carefully.  Yes, Illinois is one of the 27 states.
    Well, I ate the first part of this particular cucumber ...Wednesday, in a salad. So if it were infected with salmonella, I would have figured it out by now. Whew.
     Or so I tried to reassure myself.
    Unless, that rebellious part of my brain that likes to cause trouble countered, the end you ate Wednesday wasn't the part with the salmonella. That was the part you and your wife ate just now!
     Can there be salmonella on one part and not another? It's just a certain bacteria, right? It can be just on one spot. On the other hand, the woman who died was 99 years old. A bout of salmonella, while unpleasant, probably won't kill me. 
     What would kill me—what is killing people—is inactivity. Earlier this morning I read an Economist story that inactivity, worldwide, is "the new smoking," and "a silent killer" that is now the fourth leading cause of death, after high blood pressure, smoking and high blood sugar. 
     "C'mon, let's go for our walk," I told my wife, heading downstairs after posting this. If I'm going to keel over, I want it to be at the Chicago Botanic Garden. 
     

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     It's pretty clear what these are: three merry-go-round horses. But where did I see them? A museum perhaps? Or a carnival? But I've said too much. 
     The person who knows the exact location of these three equine beauties will receive one of my now truly dwindling stock of 2015 blog posters, suitable for framing or thumb-taking up on a wall. Place your guesses below. Good luck.

Top Ten Reasons McDonald's is Tanking

     These are dark days for McDonald's. Sales are down 11 percent this year, profits down 30 percent. Their Asian market is crumbling. The second September in a row when their financial news was grim. 
     Not that McDonald's isn't desperately trying to arrest its tailspin, tossing out qualities that once made it distinctive, experimenting with radical notions such as letting customers choose what goes on their burgers. Or, starting next month, serving breakfast all day. McDonald's seems to be back-engineering itself into a real restaurant, a version of Woody Allen's joke about Noel Coward buying the rights to "My Fair Lady," removing the songs and lyrics to change it back into "Pygmalion." McDonald's is transforming itself into Denny's with a clown.
     It isn't working, judging by a recent survey of American consumer opinion.
     "Consumers don't think the food is high quality, healthy or even that tasty," began a scorching piece in Crain's by Peter Frost. "The restaurants seem dated and unwelcoming. For a fast-food restaurant, it takes too long for customers to receive their orders. And even accounting for changes that McDonald's is making or considering, nearly half of Americans say they wouldn't increase their visits to restaurants operated by the nation's largest fast-food chain."
     I sure wouldn't. I'm sticking at zero. Why? I could list 50 reasons to despise McDonald's. But, space being limited, we'll limit ourselves to 10:

     Top Ten Reasons McDonald's is Tanking

     1. Ambiance. Ever since the cheery red and white tile drive-ins were replaced by horrible 1970s brown mansard-roofed monstrosities, McDonald's has been lost, decor-wise. Urban restaurants have a vibe that is half psych ward, half homeless shelter. Sometimes they display a few relics of the local culture that was, in part, displaced and destroyed by the arrival of McDonald's, which only makes it worse.
     2. Omnipresence. Rarity creates value and overabundance erodes it. There are just too many McDonald's: 32,000 worldwide. The market is glutted. The corporation seems to realize this, closing 700 McDonald's franchises this year alone, trying to cut their losses.
     3. Ronald. Everyone hates him. He's frightening. A scary clown. That sex toy mouth. Those leering eyes. You never see a child holding a Ronald McDonald doll. And if you did, you'd pity that child. It would be disturbing, like a toddler cuddling a skinned goat's head.
     4. Marketing. Last week, when Burger King challenged McDonald's to join them in creating a McWhopper for the International Day of Peace, I immediately knew McDonald's would pass. The behemoth is slow on its feet. Compare the oafish, witless, nearly hysterical images that McDonald's serves up to, for example, the humor in Geico commercials. Fifty years of watching McDonald's ads and I couldn't cite one specifically. Well, maybe that "Two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun" drone that nobody wanted rattling around in their brains. The marketing is as bad as the food.
     5. Employees. Harried cogs, desperately lunging to serve up the slop. Their "Guh-

morn welkamtuh'm'donal" has the emotional heft of "Order 'n' geh-out!" This is not to besmirch the employees themselves — no doubt decent folk plunged into an impossible nightmare of minimum wage slavery, fighting to keep a shred of humanity intact while endlessly repeating some mechanical functions. Does Amnesty International know about this?
     6. Blandness. Nothing in McDonald's is spicy. Even their attempt at a burrito tasted like a pot of paste. McDonald's idea of acknowledging our nation's rich ethnic diversity in their fare is offering green shakes at St. Patrick's Day.
     7. Happy Meals. Anyone who has ever had kids loathes McDonald's for reaching over our heads and luring our precious children into their trap with cheap trinkets. They're drug dealers, hooking the young on heavily breaded processed chicken.
     8. McRib Sandwiches. No more need be said. Those responsible should stand trial at The Hague.
     9. Competitors. Just as Detroit never got off its fat and satisfied posteriors until Japanese carmakers swept in and ate their lunch, so McDonald's was satisfied with futile half measures — look, we've got muffins! — until Five Guys and Red Robin and all sorts of good-burger-at-a-good-price joints came along. The spell was broken and people suddenly realized, "Wait. I'm eating this garbage when I could be eating actual food?!"
     10. The food. Last and least. The burgers are predigested mash. The fries are sugared. The shakes, frozen gray gruel. Believe me, I ate my share. No more. Now, if I enter a Metra car where someone is eating McDonalds, I have to hold my breath and hurry to the next car.
    Don't get your hopes up. McDonald still took in $27 billion last year, going gangbusters with those who don't know any better.The amazing thing isn't that McDonald's is in trouble; the amazing thing is it has lasted this long, and no doubt will go forward, for years, beccause many people can't stop themselves from eating it. Even I do, when abroad. Once I was in Vilnius, and thought I'd visit the local McDonald's — an ironic tradition of mine. I've eaten at Mickey D's in Tokyo, in Paris, out of anthropological curiosity, perhaps mixed with an unrecognized homesickness. But the one in Lithuania was so jammed I could not get in the door. A mass of frenzied customers. Not that I was disappointed to go elsewhere.

Move over St. Sebastian! Welcome Kim Davis, a new martyr joins the firmament

     So let's see where we stand.
     Rowan County clerk Kim Davis can't issue Kentucky marriage licenses to gays, even though that is her job requires it and a court has ordered her to, because God is against gays getting married, in her estimation, and being party to it would put her soul in peril.
      "This is a heaven and hell issue for me and for every Christian who believes," she said, dragging a whole lot of people unwillingly into her God-made-me-intolerant camp. "I weighed the cost and I'm prepared to go to jail. I sure am."
      So here is my question:
      If God Himself wants her not to issue marriage licenses to gays, and she isn't doing so, to save herself from eternal perdition, then why isn't that something worth quitting your job over?
     People quit their jobs over all sorts of lesser reasons: to get a higher paying job, because they were slighted when it came to raises and promotions, because they clash with a boss.
     Having a duty you are ordered to perform that conflicts with the desires of the Lord God Almighty—in your own narrow, antique, fucked up notion of what religion means, that is—seems like a really good reason to turn in your resignation.
     But she doesn't. Because she isn't really trying to pay respect to her own notions of faith, but to mess with the lives of people she hates. She could have been released by promising, not to issue the licenses herself, but just to refrain from stopping the other clerks, one of whom is her son, from doing so.  Religion inspires many people to selfless acts of kindness, of charity, of good works, even to people different than themselves. 
     While to others, it's just a twist on solipsism, one more reflective surface in the hall of mirrors that is their lives. She isn't hurting innocent Kentuckians who just want to get married. She is the vessel of God, like Joan of Arc.
     Now, like Joan, she is jailed. Making her a martyr for all the halfwit haters who believe right along with her.  Even if she spends one night, it is the equivalent of the pyre in Rouen, at the center of the Place du Vieux-Marche.  The smoke rises, the faithful are put to the test. 
     “Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country," Mike Huckabee, one of the throng of Republican presidential candidates, tweeted. "We must defend #ReligiousLiberty!”
     Madness. We in the fact-based world must keep foremost in mind that religious factionalism is what makes so much of the planet a blood-soaked hell. If every official enforced the law based on his, or her, own perception of divine will, the world would be anarchy.  That GOP leaders are cravenly backing her is near-treason, undermining our nation of laws in favor of faith-fueled anarchy.
     To be a martyr, one needs to suffer. A night in jail, or two, is little cost for the leap in station Kim Davis, hero to the cause, is about to experience. The crowdfunding. The best-selling God is My Co-Pilot ghost-written autobiography recounting her Golgotha, her sufferings for her beliefs. The made-for-Christian-cable TV special. The high-paid speeches. It would seem impossible, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. 

Hell and other feats of religious imagination

     There is no hell.
     No flames. No fiery pit ringed with horned demons using pitchforks to keep sinners' heads under the boiling lead.
     Sorry if I'm the one to tell you. 
     No hell. How could there be? Not only don't I believe in hell. To be honest, I have trouble believing anybody believes in it. How can they?
     Rather hell was a story, obviously, concocted in order to get people to behave in a certain way that they might otherwise not behave. Maybe they'd want to fool around before marriage. Hell kept them in line. Maybe they considered slacking off on their obligations to the church. Hell was what awaited them if they did.
     But the fires of hell cooled, in our modern world. I've never met anyone who sincerely worried about going to hell.

    So new stories had to be crafted, by those who would control the behavior of others.
    For instance, babies.
    Not born babies -- I'm not sure "born babies" is a term, as opposed to a neologism required by where we're going.
    But pre-born babies. What are under all other circumstances called "fetuses." In order to enlist them for their purposes, religious fanatics promote these forming fetuses to full babyhood, and use them as puppets to boss around women.
     Under any other circumstance, nobody believes it.
     Think about ordinary situations, outside the realm of the abortion debate. Outside the confines of the story. 
     Even the most conservative woman, upon learning she is pregnant, does not cry, "I have a baby!" (the confused answer would be "You do? Where?")
    She would say, "I'm going to have a baby." Future tense, not needing to add, "Once this fetus is fully developed and born."
    Until then, it isn't a baby yet. It's a proto baby. A fetus.
     But just as some unseen region underground was converted to hell, so fetuses, hidden out of sight, were backformed into babies, one of many disingenuous tricks to corral and control women, who lately tend to break free.
     You can tell that even the people who insist that fetuses are babies, for purposes of banning abortion, don't really believe it, because if you say, "So should we send women who have abortions to jail? For murdering these babies? Is that what you want?" most will just give you the I-refuse-to-think-about-this look. Because they don't really think it's a baby, they're just telling others that, to get them to conform, the way villagers cowered at the prospect of hell.
     They also keep changing the story, adding new details, trying to keep it fresh and convincing. 
    In Ohio, the Republican legislature is expected to soon pass a law making it illegal to have an abortion in order to avoid giving birth to a baby with Down Syndrome.
     A similar law is on the books in North Dakota, making it illegal to have an abortion due to concern over genetic anomalies, though nobody has been prosecuted under it and there is question whether anybody could be, as it is an unconstitutional intrusion into the mindset of a woman.
     You can't make a legal activity illegal because of the reason you do it. It's a lousy reason, oh, to go to college in order to drink beer. But you can't pass laws trying to stop it. 
    The reason a woman has an abortion is only on the table in the minds of those who want to ban all abortions for all reasons, picking Down syndrome out of the same impulse that caused them to pick abortion in the first place: they see it as a realm where they can push their religion in a way that otherwise would be completely unacceptable and, as it is, is accepted by a narrowing segment of the country.
     The Down syndrome aspect is a compelling detail, in their minds, a way to keep the story fresh, like Dante taking hell and giving it nine rings and winged demons.
     Advocates of the law, who otherwise don't give a damn about Down syndrome, have been focusing on the full personhood of those with Down syndrome, and they are correct. But then the non-Down Syndrome people who would be born would also be full people, or would be, were they not aborted first, just as both people with Down syndrome and without would be born were it not for contraception, which fanatics have given up fighting in order to fall back to a line drawn at abortion. 
     They'd of course like to just ban abortion period, but Roe v. Wade seems to be preventing that, at the moment. So they nibble around the edges, throwing stuff up, seeing what sticks. Maybe the Down syndrome ploy will work. If not, there's always a new gambit, a new tangent to take the narrative down. The only thing not on the table is letting women make their own moral choices for themselves, unhindered by law or outside meddling. The way that religious fanatics came to their beliefs. But that would be impossible. That would be like a Saudi sheik letting his wife drive.
     Ohio governor John Kasich, by the way, who is presenting himself as the voice of moderation, has signed 16 separate abortion restrictions since 2011. Quite a lot really. I grew up in Ohio, and don't remember it being the fundamentalist backwater it seems to be becoming, but I've been gone a long time, and it has been on hard times, and nothing like economic downturns to encourage people to really get their backs into manhandling the lives of others.
    So keep in mind: there is no hell, and no babies involved in an abortion. It's just another lie that gets repeated so much people pretend it's true. I almost said, "no heaven either," but I know lots of people view heaven differently, because it is where they imagine their loved ones dwelling in eternal bliss. A beautiful and a comforting image, and not one I would strenuously contradict. Because life is difficult, and people believe, and do, all sorts of things in order to get by. To throw stumbling blocks in front of others who are in difficulty is wrong. I wouldn't do that to a grief stricken person just to prove a metaphysical point, and I'm an agnostic. You'd think that a religious person, awash in the kindness that religion supposedly imbues, would embrace that. Would not identify women coping with unwanted pregnancies as the moment to to try to spread their faith by hallucinating their rice kernel-sized fetuses into the Gerber baby. But apparently religion as an impulse toward loving kindness only goes so far.  Or at least that story is whispered very quietly, by some people under certain situations, compared to the fantasy that gets thundered by huge choirs of the faithful, trying to force others to follow their religion, not through hell, whose fear has cooled, but through law, this time in the name of imaginary babies.

Jury duty

     "Belts off, jackets off, pockets empty."
     In line at the Daley Center, last Thursday, 8:20 a.m., just another John Q. Citizen arriving early for his 8:30 summons .
     "Belts off, jackets off, pockets empty," a sheriff's deputy cries, to no one in particular, like a 19th century vender selling fruit off a cart.
     Juggling a cup of coffee, a briefcase, jacket and ID, I slide off my belt and coil it in a grey plastic bin, along with the fistful of change the letter told us to bring for vending machines.
     While most people to whom I mentioned my pending jury duty expressed sympathy, even pity, my mood is light. Anything that involves enforced idleness, reading and snacks can't be that bad.
    "Belts off, jackets off, pockets empty."
    Putting my belt back on by a table past security, I try to make small talk with the guy arranging himself next to me.
    "Another indignity of the state," I venture.
    "I got better things to do," he mutters, darkly, and I almost ask, "Like what?"
     But that seemed impolite, perhaps even unwise. I'm at court. This guy might not be a juror, this guy might be here to go on trial for throttling some wisenheimer.
     I say nothing.
     Up to the 17th floor, where we are assigned to groups -- I'm Panel 9, and given a slip of paper saying so. We're invited to sit in a sea of chairs. I pop a green tea mint, crack David Axelrod's "Believer"  (excellent, filled with trenchant insight and telling details). and begin to wait. 
    Forty minutes pass.
     At 9:10, a video. "Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, my name is Timothy C. Evans..."
    See, I know Tim.  I've dealt with him a dozen times. I'm certain they'll never pick me for a jury. A newspaper columnist married to a lawyer. Never. A couple hours of leisure and they'll send me on my way.
    Famous TV newsman Lester Holt pops up. We learn fun facts. "Circuit court is a state court, not a county court." Four hundred judges, eight divisions, with 2.4 million cases a year. Lester Holt appears. "Your name was picked at random. It is impossible to know how long a trial will last."
     Those of us going to trial. My wife agrees with me. Never in a thousand years.
    "If you are excused you must not take it personally.'
     Oh don't worry, Lester, I won't. 
    The music swells.
   "You are now ready to serve as a juror in the Circuit Court of Cook County!" 
    Or be dismissed from serving, as the case may be.
     Another ten minutes pass. Panel 3, is called Panel 5.  Panel 7...
     Just before 10, they call ... Panel 15. "Hey!" I think. "Unfair! Go in order." 
     About 10:15, we're called. Panel 9 escorted to a courtroom, where a judge tells us that the lawyers saw our faces and decided to settle.
       I half expect we'll be dismissed right then. Instead we begin an odyssey, the Wandering Jury.  Led to one courtroom, then another. No one is ready for us. Back to the 17th floor. Finally, about 11 a.m. we are escorted to a third courtroom, then told to take lunch. Come

back in two and a half hours. I Divvy to the office to do a bit of work and show off my JUROR sticker, my red badge of civic duty.
     At 1:30 we reassemble at a courtroom. Judge Jim Ryan welcomes us affably. We take seats in the jury box and he explains the case.
     A young woman driving an Acura was rear-ended by another driver on Grand Avenue. Her insurance company paid $4,400 for repair and a rental car, and now the company wants to collect from the guy who rear-ended her, an unshaven, handsome, vaguely menacing young man in a black v-necked sweater.
     For a moment, I wonder if we've begun the trial. No, this is "voir dire," jury selection. We are asked if any of us have been in accidents. Any lost our license? Any have trouble with the idea of an insurance company recovering damages?
     "Mr. Steinberg..." one lawyer begins, reading from a form, and I sit up straight, smiling, ready for my moment in the spotlight. Time to be recognized, lauded, then dismissed. "...your wife is a lawyer. Will that affect your ability to view the case impartially?"
     "Umm, no," I say.
    There is a break. After five minutes, we are told six have been chosen. I'm among them. The other 12 are given their freedom.
     The case takes two hours, start to finish. It consists of lawyers quizzing two witnesses: the woman whose car was hit, and the man who hit her. Nobody questions the facts. Two photos are introduced into evidence: one of the woman's crushed bumper; the other of the man's car stopped on the grass beside a building. 
     Back in the jury room, I'm elected foreman; I'm not sure why. One woman suggested it, everybody else went along and I accepted. 
     So what do people think? I poll the jury. Five find him negligent. One just can't.  "It could have happened to anyone," she says. For 40 minutes we go back and forth. The guy was obviously inattentive; I point out that he could barely pay attention during the two hour trial. Society demands drivers stop for cars making lefts. If you don't, you're negligent. Case closed.
    We argue with her, but  gently, respectfully. She seems fragile, about to cry, and goes into the bathroom for a long time and doesn't come out. When she does, I ask if there's any chance she'll change her mind. No.  I ask the others if there's any chance we'll come to her way of thinking. No. I have no interest in browbeating the woman, nor in drawing this out pointlessly. While I think he's liable and should pay, I'm not an agent of the insurance company. I send a note to the judge that we're deadlocked. We get certificates and checks for $25 and are out by 5 p.m.
     Two lessons. One, you never know what will happen when you go to law. Here I was certain I'd be dismissed, and end up jury foreman. Second, it's a flawed system—the guy was negligent—but one person can derail the whole thing. Still, it works, sort of. Everyone was exceedingly polite, and thanked us for us doing our civic duty. Compared to the bloody chaos in most of the world, our justice system is a gift.