'The humanity of our cadavers'; Med students give somber thanks to donors

Fasciculo di medicina, Venice, 1493 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I've begun writing another long-form medical story for Mosaic—my fourth. Which always puts me in a good mood. I'm not a medical writer, but find such stories challenging to report, and fun to write. Nothing focuses your attention like a corpse, and if you can't find a way to make such a story interesting, then you're in the wrong business. I've always liked this story, for its juxtaposition of the physicality of the cadavers with the spirituality of the ceremony. Though the heads, flayed apart like ghastly flowers, took some getting used to. 

     The ceremony is in 10 minutes, but the exam is tomorrow. So rather than idly wait to honor the former tenants of the bodies they have been dissecting for the last 10 weeks, 145 first-year students at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine are busy, crowding around 18 cadavers in the brightly lit room, poking and prodding, using the remains as fleshy 3D road maps to the densely packed, vastly complex systems of veins, arteries, nerves, ducts, glands, muscles, tendons and other elements that make up the human body.
     "Probably a genioglossus of the tongue," says Andrew Hantel, gently lifting a stringy beige mass of flesh atop the neck of a cadaver, its skull gone, the trisected head peeled back like a banana skin.
     "Where is the horn of hyoid?" asks Wes Barry, referring to a bone that supports the tongue.
     The class is "Structure of the Human Body," better known as gross anatomy, for centuries the cornerstone of a doctor's education (the name has nothing to do with disgust; "gros" is French for "large"). For most of that time, medical students had to use stealth when acquiring bodies to dissect, plundering fresh graves and bribing officials at pauper's hospitals.
     Stritch gets its bodies in a far more direct manner, paying $1,500 apiece to the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois.
     While books and computers are helpful—entire human bodies can now be explored online —it isn't the same.
     "We have a lot of computer resources," says Dr. Frederick Wezeman, director of gross anatomy at Stritch. "But the actual experience of dissection is elemental to the learning of medicine. Nothing can really replace anatomical dissection by the student."
     Students in olden days had a habit of treating cadavers irreverently, placing them in comic poses—playing cards or smoking pipes—and photographing themselves clowning around with them.
     That's taboo today. The practice at Stritch—and many medical schools worldwide—is to conduct ceremonies of thanksgiving to those who donated their bodies, though the actual beneficiaries are not the donors but the students, who hopefully will become better, more caring doctors when confronted with living patients.
     "We try to keep the students focused on the fact this is a human being, as opposed to just an anatomical specimen," says Dr. Wezeman.
    "The students understand that these cadavers aren't just meat," says the Rev. Jack O'Callaghan, senior chaplain to the medical school, who enters the room just before 8:30 a.m., when the cadavers are covered with white shrouds.

'THESE SILENT TEACHERS'
     The ceremony begins with Sister Brenda Eagan, director of the university ministry.
     "The first time you gathered in this anatomy lab, everyone looked nervous," she says. "That was Oct. 12, and you gathered here to bless and thank these silent teachers for offering themselves."
     She is followed by Dr. Wezeman.
     "Someone, some time ago, before you arrived here as a medical student, after thought, prayer, conversation, reflection and emotion but with full intention, made a decision on your behalf," he says. "You thus became a beneficiary of a gift from a total stranger. . . . We hope you will always remain appreciative for this gift."
     The 23rd Psalm—"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death"—is read, and a pair of students, Mona Patel and Dan Micheller, offer reflections.
     "We must not forget to recognize the real contributors here, which are these respectable bodies before us," says Patel. "Their one altruistic act has changed many things about us. . . . I wonder if they knew that they are gifts that would not only allow us to open a body full of anatomical structures, but a whole new chapter into our personal development. . . . I value that this stranger, whose real name I will never know, has allowed me to examine, palpate and learn from his human body. . . . What I really would have loved to do is hold my cadaver's hand and say a sincere 'Thank you.' "
     "It's been 10 weeks since we first set foot in this anatomy lab," says Micheller. "Ten weeks since formaldehyde became our scent of choice. Ten weeks since the beginning of our remarkable journey. Ten weeks since we unzipped those white plastic bags, lowered the wet sheets and were introduced to our traveling companion and true anatomy teacher. . . . Take a moment to think about the things we get to do every day—from feeling the unique texture of lungs, to peering inside a human heart—things others can only imagine. In this process, it's easy to view the cadaver as a biological specimen, however, at the same time, minor details—bright pink nail polish, whiskers on an old man's cheek—remind us of the humanity of our cadavers."
     While these students avoid the mockery of bygone days, they are still students, and do indulge in a bit of gentle lightheartedness by naming their cadavers—Gertrude, Sally, Mildred—"old people's names," explains one, apt since the majority of donors were elderly.
     As soon as the ceremony concludes, the sheets are drawn back and the students return to studying—in the morning, they'll confront these same bodies, with numbered tags marking structures they will identify—or fail to identify.
     "Where's the inferior laryngeal artery?" asks Drew Benjamin.
     Emil Fernando expresses a sentiment that isn't surprising in students who, having crammed to learn each strand of a human body, are now confronted with the real thing and required to name any given part.
     "Everything looks the same!" he exclaims, gazing hard into the jumble of flesh.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 23, 2009

You believe your wild improbabilities, I'll believe mine

A Section of the Constellation Cygnus, (August 13, 1885) by Paul Henry (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Taylor Swift lives in my basement. I saw her. Well, saw a flash of something once out of the corner of my eye on the stairs. But I'm convinced it was her. I've also snapped a photograph — it looks like a murky blotch, because it was dark, but it's definitely her. I know it. Some nights I awake to catch a scurrying sound, which seems like a few faint notes of "Shake It Off" filtering through the walls. It's the only explanation.
     Convinced? Would it help if I point out that I am a professional journalist, for whom honesty and observation are vital skills?
     No? What's the matter? Closed-minded? Hostile to Swift, an intelligent and talented young woman? Can you prove she isn't there?
     If you don't believe Taylor Swift lives in my basement, then why would you — or anybody — ever believe that UFOs are visitors from outer space? A far more incredible claim, incidentally, since there can be no question whatsoever that Taylor Swift exists somewhere. The same could never be said about visiting space aliens.
     Why is this important? As if 2017 hadn't been a carnival of fabrication already, thanks to the current occupant of the Oval Office alone, in mid-December came news of a government program investigating UFO sightings, and Navy pilots' encounter with — something unexplained. Exactly the sort of mixture to add fuel to the fires of uncritical belief: a secret program, a murky video, testimony from Top Gun types.
     The murky photographic evidence — is there ever any other kind? — is of a "white tic tac" that appeared in 2004, supposedly, on the cameras of a U.S. Navy pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor, whose encounter off the coast of San Diego while flying a F/A-18F Super Hornet was enough to immediately convince him that whatever he was seeing was "something not from this Earth."
     That's quite a leap.

To continue reading, click here.

"Be strong, be clean."

 

     When I heard on the radio that Thomas Monson died Tuesday, I immediately knew who he was, even before the newscaster identified him. Not just for the reason many do—he is cited in a line in "I Believe," a song in the wildly-popular 2011 musical "The Book of Mormon"—"And I believe that the current President of the Church, Thomas Monson, speaks directly to God"—but he also has a cameo in "The Quest for Pie," my as-yet unpublished memoir of traveling out West with my boys in 2009. We pull into Salt Lake City and, of course, head directly to the Mormon Temple, where soon we were treated to Monson's take on pornography.

     “Let’s get started,” said Sister Cross, a missionary from Australia, a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered woman with reddish brown hair who looked like an Olympic swimmer.
     “Welcome to Temple Square,” chimed in Sister Sarah, a missionary from Japan, petite and dark-haired. Both wore long skirts, short-sleeved white blouses under sweater vests, kind of a demure 1950s schoolgirl look.
     We had arrived at downtown Salt Lake City perhaps an hour before.
     The young woman behind the desk at the Peery—and wow, these Utah gals are good-looking—tapped at her computer, and happily welcomed us a day early. The boys got their own suite—I had one a floor above. Suddenly, everything was gravy. The car was safely parked—on the street across from the hotel, no parking problems here, apparently—we decided to walk to the Mormon Temple, the lone point on our agenda. Because really, what else is here?
     We walked the six blocks from the hotel—pure blue skies ahead, the streets wide and completely empty of pedestrians. Walking must be an exotic practice in Salt Lake City. Lots of construction going on, cranes everywhere. Kent, charmingly, thought the Mormons were a brand of Jews, since they had a temple, which I only realized after he pointed out a large Jewish star worked into the architecture. I did my best to explain what Mormonism is—a funky outshoot of Christianity, with golden plates and Joseph Smith. Many people consider them strange, but in my view they are only unfamiliar. All religions other than your own are strange when you first learn about them, and it is one of those tragic ironies of human nature that a person can cleave to the most rococo faith, jammed with the most elaborate rigmarole and hushed mystery hoo-ha, which of course are believed sincerely as merely the ineffable will of the Lord God Almighty made manifest, and that person can nevertheless turn with a snarl to mock someone else for belonging to a bizarre cult.
     That’s a big reason religious conservatives are often so hostile to other faiths—not because they’re so different, but because they’re so similar, and it’s a short leap from seeing how ridiculous other beliefs seem to beginning to suspect how ridiculous your own are, too. Thus other faiths must be ignored or trivialized or suppressed because respecting them will, eventually, cast doubt upon the One True Way. It’s easier to burn others than to question yourself.
     Our guides engaged us—a strategy to draw the marks in. What, Sister Cross asked the boys, did they know about Mormonism? I stepped in, offering that I had tried to explain Mormonism to them in the car on the way over.
     She smiled, indulgently.
     "What did you tell them?" she asked.
     I told her I had said that, in the same way Catholicism is Christianity with an overlay of distinctive Catholic trappings—the pope, the Holy Trinity, transubstantiation and such—so Mormonism takes a base of Jesus-worship and festoons it with the specifics of Mormon history: Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, the Angel Moroni, golden plates, a genealogy fixation. . . .
      She said nice try, but no cigar. The key aspect of Mormonism, she said, is that unlike other religions, it has a living prophet, still, to this day, Thomas S. Monson, the 16th living prophet, who traces his ancestry directly back to Jesus Christ and is in regular communication with God.
     The Visitors Center at the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City dwarfs the one in Los Angeles, and is filled with large painted murals from moments in Mormon history and idealized depictions of life—“Our Heavenly Father’s Plan For Families” — with happy white people sowing grain, marrying, teaching their children, their faces awash in joy and light, frozen in ecstasy. It reminded me of North Korean propaganda. Even the occasional black or Asian or Hispanic person thrown in for minimal racial balance looked bled white in this setting. The boys and I delicately picked our way over the place—beautifully designed, Smithsonian quality, with maps and mannequins, artifacts, videos, tableaus, models—then signed up for the tour.
     Sisters Cross and Sarah explained to us how God had led Brigham Young to the present location in the 1840s, where he stuck his cane in the ground and decreed this was the spot where he would build his church.
     We were walked through the enormous hall where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performs. Music has always been an important part of Mormonism and, given the chilly reception the idea of Mormonism gets in the rest of the country, the choir is something of a goodwill ambassador, or was when I was growing up. Now they don’t seem as big a deal, or perhaps its presence is just overwhelmed by the rising din of society.
     Kent admired the scale model of Jerusalem—Mormons tend to like Jews, even more, it sometimes seems, than Jews like Jews. Ross—who always pays close attention at museums—strayed from the group, going into the little glassed-in booths off to the side where snippets of taped lectures from Monson, the latest prophet in an unbroken line from Young, were being played on TV screens.
     “Be strong, be clean around such degrading and destructive content at all costs,” Monson was saying, in a talk entitled, “Be Clean.” “I add particularly to the young people, my beloved friends, under no circumstances permit yourself to be trapped by the viewing of pornography.”
     “Of all Christianity, this is my favorite faction,” said Ross.
     The missionaries were obviously poised for us to express interest in Mormonism—maybe whisk us off to a special chamber for further instruction, or that baptism I had waved off in Los Angeles. Yeah right, I thought, that’s going to happen. It’s an insult, really, how these folk expect you to readily drop whatever dogma you’ve believed all your life, and your forebears before you, and accept their faith based on some murals and a few lines of ballyhoo. But I suppose it does happen. Soft-willed visitors must sign up on the spot. I wondered if it goes the other way, wondered how many guys try to corrupt the missionary spokeswomen—that must happen too. At least the attempt must happen; I doubt many missionaries are led astray, though you never know. Not the sort of thing I would attempt, though it was entertaining to ponder the concept—they seem to feel entitled to pressure you into considering their way of life, why shouldn’t turnabout be fair play? Maybe God wants you to do whatever the heck you want.

-->

Kokoraleis already free to wander back into mind, bringing his horror

Human Head Cake Box Murder, by Weegee
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Violent crime is down, yet we don't feel safer.

     Homicides dropped 15 percent in Chicago in 2017; shootings down too.
     Doesn't help.
     Why? Many reasons. First, our murder rate is still very high — 664 people killed in Chicago last year, more than in New York and Los Angeles combined.
     Second, Chicago has become a punching bag, our crime problem as a presidential punchline.
     Third, the media is more attuned to crime. Racism used to prompt the mainstream press to ignore entire neighborhoods, places it now tries to do a better job of noticing.
     Fourth, crime is so awful it resonates, echoing in ways that have nothing to do with statistics. If there were one shooting in Chicago last year, that would be a lot if the person shot were you. Were there just one murder, the world would still become a tragic and dangerous place for hundreds of friends and loved ones of the victim.
     Lastly, not only do we have this last year's crimes to ruffle our sense of security, but crimes from the past have a way of wandering back to disturb us anew.
     "They're letting Kokoraleis out," I said grimly to my wife over the breakfast table.
    "Who?" she replied. Because she never worked at a newspaper. Never, as I have, filled in for the beat reporter at the Cook County Criminal Court, 26th and California. Never sat in the grubby press room, at a little metal desk. Never idly pulled open a drawer and noticed a manila folder labeled "Kokoraleis." Never flipped the folder open and began to read.

To continue reading, click here.

I'll take two semaphore flags and a 16X Powered Riser Adapter Card

     Once, the challenge was writing the new year on your checks.
     A few days into 1994 you'd still be writing 1993.
     Darn this relentless change!
     Ah, hahahahaha.
     Now we've got new devices and concepts flung at us like overripe tomatoes while the stalwarts crumble.
     I had one of those moments last week when you can almost feel the howling winds of change.
     Friday night, a friend asked my wife and me to stop over for dessert.
     Tea. Christmas cookies. Doesn't sound like the prelude to challenging your concept of the monetary system, does it?
     So we're sipping tea, nibbling cookies. Enter the son, back from college. Up from the basement where he's . . . doing what? Guess! Running a train set? No. Mining crypto-currency? Yes. All the kids are doing it. We adults troop downstairs to watch.
     A metal shelf. And a dozen or so black slabs of video cards, electronics. Glowing red lights. A flat screen spitting strings of numbers.
   
To continue reading, click here.

New Year's Day

Hercules Resting, Florence, late 15th century (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

  
     I've always enjoyed New Year's Day more than New Year's Eve. It hardly seems necessary to point out why. New Year's Eve is pressure—the year is counting down, gotta get out, gotta go somewhere fun, gotta then have fun, gotta make the most of these remaining hours of indulgence and excess before the rigor of the New Year sets in and we try to become the people we believe ourselves to be.
     Crowded rooms, friends and strangers, noisy, dark, smoky. Even when I was drinking I never really liked it. Especially when I was drinking.
     By New Year's morning, that has changed. The light dawns. Real life returns, which is celebration aplenty. There are no demands, no appointments, no countdowns—a few New Year's Day parties, low key affairs where you may arrive when you wish or not at all. The day is cold and sunless and still, a beginning, an opening note, pregnant with promise.
     "All is quiet," U2 sings, "on New Year's Day."
     Indeed it is, a kind of blessed quiet, a morning stillness. Little to do, little that can be done. Doing nothing is a vastly under-rated activity. Reposing, reclining, napping, thinking. It's very hard to fuck it up, to do it wrong. Even world class revelers know that the time comes to retreat, retrench, rethink.
     "And if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch," Hunter S. Thompson wrote. Wise words.
     A time to reflect, to assess, to take stock.
     "Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold," Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary on Jan. 1, 1660. "I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three."
     Thoughts have a way of quickly turning to the future.
     "My wife … gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year."
     She wasn't, as he would discover. Then onto the nation.
     "The condition of the State was thus; viz. the Rump" —perhaps the best term ever applied to a legislative body— "after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again. The officers of the Army all forced to yield. Lawson lies still in the river, and Monk is with his army in Scotland. Only my Lord Lambert is not yet come into the Parliament, nor is it expected that he will without being forced to it. The new Common Council of the City do speak very high..."
     See how tiresome politics become? How evanescent? How meaningless to all who come after, assuming they weren't meaningless at the time. That's why I avoided year-end summations this year—we all know what happened. Anyone who doesn't know by now never will. Better to stick to yourself.
     "My own private condition very handsome," wrote Pepys, a view common among 26-year-olds then and now, "and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor."
    Sounds about right. 
    "I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts," he wrote.
     That's a plan. I'm going to do that too. And continue to resist the temptation to look ahead, at least for today. We don't have to squint and attempt augury. We just have to wait and find out. Besides, who can tell? It's been such a random and strange year, of daily if not hourly shocks culminating in a deadening sameness, surprise after surprise pelting down on our sodden, blown-out senses. I wouldn't hazard a guess what will happen Jan. 2, never mind the entire year. For people who press, I say, "I think in 2018 the rubber will really hit the road." What does that even mean? I sure as hell don't know; I suppose, as real and stark as it has been, I expect it to get realer and starker. 
    But not today.  Today the world is born anew, a fresh day, a new year.  A good time to pause, to breathe deep, rest and prepare for the task ahead. Good luck. Coming home last night from our New Year's fun, I parked the car, then squeaking over the snow to the house, looked up at the crisp black sky, the stars twinkling through the -2 degree gelid air. I picked a promising star and wished, out loud, "I hope 2018 is a good year." It wasn't much of a strategy, but it will have to do, for now. Happy New Year.

Flashback 2010: Carol, I miss you already

    On Saturday, reader Judy Liston Gross posted this on my Facebook page:

 Hi Neil. Could you please repost the column on Carol Moseley Braun? I can't find it in my "saves." It was a great column!

     I wouldn't call it "great," but it was fun, and caused Braun to go on television and denounce me as a wife-beater and a drunk, then send minions over to picket the paper demanding I be fired as a racist, hitting the trifecta of slander if ever there were. 

     The column was entirely true, borne out by subsequent events, and the only regret I have is that every single column I write isn't this sharp. I've referred to the column several times over the years, but never printed it in full, and of course the Sun-Times archive isn't available online, for reasons mysterious. 
     So here it is, a souvenir of a rough-and-tumble era in Chicago politics—is there any other kind?—and some light reading for a cold, cold Sunday morning, and as good a way as any to usher out the old year. The past is gone, but there's a value in returning our gaze to it, now and then, if only for a chuckle.

    "Surprised."
     No, even better: "quite surprised."
     See, that's why I revere Carol Moseley Braun, in an ironic but very real sense, and will miss her when she returns to the deep obscurity she popped out of to stage her quixotic quest for mayor. Because she can say things like "I was quite surprised" after state Sen. James Meeks dropped out of the mayoral race last week.
     Moseley Braun, the former senator, former ambassador, and current would-be mayor, was caught off guard when the pastor of the Salem Baptist Church took his ball and went home, while even third-rate pundits who live in the suburbs saw this coming a mile away.
     From this column exactly 11, count 'em, 11 weeks ago:
     "This is Meeks' way of dropping out of the race," I wrote, on Oct. 11, after Meeks, in the first of a series of jaw-dropping gaffes, vowed that he would keep his day job running a mega-church after he was elected mayor—a premise that might have pleased the flock "but, to non-parishioners, it seems a preacher-slick way of saying, 'I quit.'"
     Such obviousness whizzed past the brand of savvy that Moseley Braun brings to the table, and is why part of me wishes she had a snowball's chance in hell of becoming Chicago's next mayor. Never underestimate a politician's entertainment value.
     What will we get under a Rahm Emanuel administration? Ruthless efficiency punctuated by the occasional burst of colorful ire. How about Gery Chico? Complex policy initiatives seasoned with accusations of back scratching.

     It'll be a tough task, just keeping up with all that.    

     Contrast those with a hypothetical Carol Moseley Braun administration. My job would be a breeze. Imagine the lush displays of ridicule that would blossom in the loamy soil of her rule. I'm half tempted to go into denial, after Emanuel is elected, and write columns tracking, not his advent, but the lurches and stumbles of an imaginary Mayor Moseley Braun.
     I initially considered writing this column as a mock endorsement of Moseley Braun, but held back out of sincere concern that her campaign would miss the joke and issue a press release ballyhooing the fact, the way it did last month after a black weekly published a poll that had her nudging ahead of Rahm.
     "CAROL MOSELEY BRAUN BEATS ALL MAYORAL CANDIDATES IN LATEST N'DIGO POLL" her campaign trumpeted, which sounded good until you read the fine print.
     "Moseley Braun received 27.4 of the vote, Rahm Emanuel had 22.7 percent," which wouldn't be bad if the opinions being gathered were collected from a representative slice of the city of Chicago. But they weren't. The sample being polled, N'Digo cheerfully explained, was overwhelmingly African-American women, most of them friends of the publisher. In other words, Moseley Braun issued a press release bragging that she bested Rahm Emanuel, barely, among politically-active black ladies, nearly a quarter of whom were voting for Emanuel.
     See why I'll miss her? That's like me bragging that I beat Rahm Emanuel 3-2 in a poll of those sitting around my dining room table, if you take the joyous yip of the puppy as a vote for me. Would you view that as a mark of certain Steinberg victory, or a sign that two members of my own family wouldn't even vote for me?
     Alas, after February we won't have Carol Moseley Braun to kick around anymore, and I for one will feel the loss. She represents the egomaniacal muddle that Chicago black leadership has slid into, where calls for imaginary and self-destructive racial solidarity trump minor concerns like reason or history.
     Which is why Meeks, in the comment that sealed his fate, could dismiss women and Hispanics as not being worthy of the title "minority." Politics is the art of drawing people in, not shutting them out, and candidates such as Meeks fail because they don't grasp that what drives them to their feet, applauding in the pews on Sunday, lands with a thud when delivered to the city in general.
     I hope some ambitious University of Chicago sociology graduate student does her masters thesis on the search for a so-called "consensus" candidate among the marginalized black power structure in Chicago; it would make for a fascinating study in magical thinking.
     "It is long past time that we build on the tremendous successes of the great Harold Washington," Meeks said, trying to bow out with a little style and instead reflecting his lack of a grasp on historical fact. Washington was a dynamic guy, lovable and funny, but "tremendous successes"? Point to one. Point to one mild success of the Harold Washington administration, beyond making part of the population feel better about themselves. Other than that, Washington was pretty much stymied by the rebellious City Council — he could barely seat his appointees — for his entire first term, and while that wasn't his fault, it's nothing to engrave on a coin either.
     The campaign for the February nonpartisan election is like the Warner Brothers cartoon before the main feature. We get Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner flinging anvils at each other, and it's all good fun. Then, after Feb. 22, they vanish and we move on to the real show.
                          —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 27, 2010

She had no idea why the crowd was cheering — State of the Blog, IV

Revolutionary Calendar, by Louis Philibert Debucourt (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     You know what's great? That in 2017, despite the president of the United States being a malicious idiot, emptying gas cans of hatred in every direction, then flicking lit matches at combustible poison, we haven't seen any big conflagration. 
     Yet. 
     Yes, hate crimes are up—against Muslims, against Jews, against Hispanics—and I don't want to minimize them. But they're still hate crimes, not patriotic duties. No gangs of Red Hats swagger around the streets, pulling off hijabs, brazenly breaking Jewish shop windows, terrorizing Hispanic passersby, which at the beginning of the year I half expected we'd see by now.
     So be thankful for small favors. The nation, as bad as it is, is not as bad as it could be.  And might yet become.  
     A reminder of the benefit of low expectations. As pervasive the damage caused by the corrosive mendacity of the Trump administration—to the tax code, to the environment, to the judiciary, to the press, to the Republican party itself—it's still better than I expected.
     Which is almost comforting, in a weird way.
     I know what you're thinking: but Neil, how about your blog? How is that doing? 
     Glad you asked.
     I ended last year's summary of the every goddamn day's modest but steady increase in readership since it first began on July 1, 2013, with somewhere between a modest prediction and a fond hope: 

     At the end of 2013, after six months of existence, the daily average readership was 918. By Dec. 30, 2014 it was 1200. The end of 2015 was 1539, and now it's 1730, nearly double what it was three years ago. And the numbers are trending upward: January, 2015 was the first month to break 50,000 readers—this year, every month since May has done so, with two breaking 60,000, including a record November at 65,166. My gut says in 2017 we'll reach 80,000.

      Turns out that was doable. EGD hit 89,085 readers a month in October, and at the end of November the blog was averaging 2177 readers a day for the year, a healthy 25 percent increase over 2016. In 2014, no month posted above 50,000 readers, and in 2017 not a month posted below. For the first 11 months, the blog averaged 66,115 readers a month—meaning that 2017's monthly average was higher than 2016's peak month, which is progress.
    And then came December.

    I'm keeping December out of the yearly readership calculation because it was something of a black swan event. My Dec. 2 trifle comparing videos by Pink and Amanda Palmer went viral, or my version of viral, cracking 50,000 hits. It was being retweeted in Tasmania. Thus December's readership topped 120,000 for the month, making about 850,000 total for the year.  I think a million hits in 2018 is possible.
     Okay, enough numbers. So where are we?

     With four calendar years under my belt, and not a day missed, the blog has long become an ordinary part of the day, like brushing my teeth. Sometimes I create something intricate, three days out of seven I use my newspaper column, now and then I dig something relevant out of the archive and print that. The photographs are almost always mine, though I have begun turning to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which in February made 375,000 images from its collection "available for free and unrestricted use," searchable and convenient, a kind of artistic image public utility.  It has made pairing illustration with my theme far easier, and while readers haven't remarked on it, I like it.
      I'm painfully aware of what small ball the blog is, on the scale of kid toy testers raking in millions on YouTube. I must admit, when I see Sheldon Cooper taping his poignant "Fun with Flags" on "The Big Bang Theory" I squirm a bit in recognition. Counter-intuitively, the big numbers generated by the Amanda Palmer post were more disconcerting than encouraging, because they reminded me what the blog isn't: a significant cultural force. It's a whisper in a hurricane of screams.
     Then again, my vegetable garden is not ConAgra either, yet I still plant tomatoes every spring. Small is fine if it makes you happy, and in general, EGD does.
     My job at the Sun-Times allows me to range across the field of my interests and write things I care about and am proud of. The blog is an outgrowth of that—if I had to put in long days pulling the oars at some generic corporation I couldn't do this. The inky mothership changed owners over the summer, and the good news is the new guys seem to appreciate what this blog represents. For the first time they've actually spoken about somehow incorporating it into the paper's framework. I want to make sure that in doing so I don't lose control, and can maintain the spirit of the thing. It would suck if I could no longer swear. The conversation is glacial and I'm not expecting anything to actually occur anytime soon. I'll keep you posted.
     Not to overlook my perennial holiday sponsor, Eli's Cheesecake. Thanks to Marc Schulman for his tireless support, and if you read this every day, and still somehow haven't ordered a cheesecake, for yourself or a loved one, then go do it right away. It's both good karma and delicious. When my boys pull open the freezer, there is always cheesecake there.
     What about the writing? I've had a few highlights. On January 21, when my wife went downtown for the Women's March. I kept the home fires burning, posting photos and reports from friends at the marches in Chicago, Washington and Michigan.  In February, pieces like "The Dark Before the Darkness" tried to process the shock of a Trump presidency, and offer some welcome mockery of initial Republican fumblings, like "Meep Meep," a view of their efforts to scuttle Obamacare through the lens of Wile E. Coyote. 
     April 1 I teamed with New York graphic designer Tim O'Brien for a satisfying prank postage stamp—my fourth most popular post of all time—and ended the month bringing readers along on my trip to Italy and Paris. Speaking of the world's garden spots, in August I went down to Carbondale for the eclipse.
    I won't recapitulate them all—you can browse. I've taken to re-posting items from one, two, three and four years ago. First, some then get a surprisingly large secondary readership—hundreds of clicks. Second, it allows me to fix typos and formatting snafus and, honestly, enjoy a piece I've often completely forgotten about and third, it subtly encourages the notion this stuff has an afterlife and merits reading, not just today, but into the future. Someday I won't be here, but it will, and if one person on earth reads one column every day, I'd feel I had done something were I, you know, able to feel anything at that point.
     So not bad. The blog could always be better, and I'm working on that. Thank you all for reading what I have to say, and for writing in, and keeping a lively, and generally polite conversation going in the comments section. I'd feel really stupid if nobody read the thing.

Children of a cold sun

Cold City, by Paul Klee (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

     If you think you have it bad, consider the arctic wooly bear caterpillar, who spends the bulk of his life frozen solid.
     Ground squirrels hardly fare better: hibernating up to eight months a year, though every two weeks they tremble back to semi-warmth, then return to their winter coma.
     Consider today’s column to be a written version of the squirrelly shiver, a healthy shake to wake ourselves up, get our blood going after too long a period at low temperature.
     The coldest Chicago Christmas in a decade, with the promise of single digits until after New Year’s. Days and days that can seem forever.
     “There’s no end in sight” began the official National Weather Service report Thursday, indicating that Friday will rise to a balmy 18 degree high, only to slam back down to 2 below by nightfall; down to – 25 with the wind chill.
     So let’s talk about cold.

     If you could go back in time a thousand years, stride into a snow-covered winter encampment of Saxon marauders, boldly tap a fierce thane on his bearskin shoulder and ask how he is—”Hū eart þū?”—he might tersely reply, “Cald.”
     The blunt word, aptly frozen, comes down to us practically unchanged. The original language of the 1390s Canterbury Tales is almost incomprehensible today. But “cold” stands out. Consider a line from The Miller’s Tale:
     “And caughte the kultour by the colde stele.”
     Or in modern English:
     “He grabbed the poker by its cold end.”
     No other word really can replace it. “Frigid” and “freezing” and “arctic” and “icy” and all the other synonyms are fine, in their place. But none fit real life. Nobody stamps into the house, stamping, and exclaims, “It’s Siberian outside!”
     Sometimes, tiring of constant repetition of the c-word, I’ll try, “It’s like being in outer space,” thinking of that scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey” where David Bowman blasts unhelmeted into the air lock of the Discovery. (It’s not. Outer space is minus-450 degrees).
     Writers struggle to do better.
     “Children of the cold sun,” begins the David Wolff poem that Nelson Algren uses as an epigraph to “The Neon Wilderness.” Algren clutches at the most basic metaphors.
     “You was stopped so cold like a popsicle,” he writes in “Never Come Morning.” “As cold as the edge of a spring-blade knife.”
     Warming to my theme, I headed over to the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications noon press conference, and was reminded of the relative quality of cold: 16 degrees was practically balmy compared to the minus-5 of earlier in the week: so cold I had put on shop goggles to walk the dog.
     “We recommend avoiding any unnecessary trips outside,” said Dr. Allison Arwady, chief medical officer at the Chicago Department of Health.
     Now she tells us, I thought. She did recommend high energy foods, which made me feel a little better about the leftover Christmas cookies I had inhaled that morning. Not pigging out, but powering up!
     The rest of the press conference was the usual stuff — call 311 if you have trouble with heat or need transport to a shelter. Though there is a 50 percent chance of snow Friday, and acting Streets and Sanitation commissioner John Tully used a term I sincerely admired: “we have a team of 211 pieces of snow-fighting equipment out there.” “Snowfighting equipment” — don’t you love how that adds an element of the heroic to what might otherwise be considered the mundane act of plowing and salting? I do.
     Heading out of the house Thursday, I had noticed small birds, none weighing more than an ounce or two, picking at the feeder. We complain about the cold, while birds stoically cope with it.
     “It’s truly amazing,” said John Bates, associate curator of birds at the Field Museum. “Some species have managed quite well.” They fluff their feathers, eat a lot, have special capillary webs warming their feet.
     Birds employ one strategy people should emulate.
     “They don’t have a lot of exposed skin,” said Bates, noting that snowy owls not only have feathered legs but feathered toes.
     Those arctic caterpillars, by the way, eventually unfreeze and live their lives as fully as they can in the brief period of warmth allotted them. As must we all.

Conversation with a crook

The Fortune-Teller by Georges de La Tour (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   

     Anyone who asks you how you are on Facebook is a crook trying to perpetrate a scam.
   Or such is my experience. 
   Occasionally I will accept somebody's offer of friendship only to have them immediately ask me how I am. 
     Real people don't do that.
     I sometimes reply, "How is life in the Philippines?" which usually shocks them into silence—I've noticed that a lot of these come-ons seem to originate from the Philippines.
    Why bother? Some innate hunger to reach out, to communicate. A desire to let it be known that I'm not being fooled.
    Lately, since they never reply, I just ignore them, and block the person I just friended. 
     Although on rare occasions, sometimes I play along and see what happens
     Like this message. It began benignly enough.


     But soon it took a curious turn.
      I suppose I was interested in whether this might possibly be a sincere person themselves taken in by a fairly notorious scam—the famous rich person giving away money ploy—or, far more likely, some kind of fraud who'd capitalize on my greed to try to extract "earnest money" from me. The type of swindle that was old at the time of "Paper Moon."
    Mention of Zuckerberg sent me immediately to a post on Snopes, the useful debunking site, where they categorized it as a "something-for-nothing" hoax in a post from the end of 2015.
      An appealing, easy-to-believe idea, that a man as rich as the founder of Facebook might give money to random strangers.


         Online scams extract an estimated $13 billion a year from the credulous. I used to marvel at the obvious falsity of those "Dear Beloved, I am a Nigerian prince..." emails, until I read that they are intentionally crude, to cull out the savvy. Makes sense. Why should a busy swindler waste his time leading somebody along, only to have them grow suspicious halfway through the scam? Better to show your hand early and cull those who notice: although I believe the "50,000.00 USD" from James Bradshaw, rather than being an intentional lapse, was just someone who lacked the command of English idiom.
     For some reason, maybe it being late, I felt a puckish whimsy, and decided to lead the conversation into an unexpected direction.
     He plodded forward, oblivious to the meat of my reply. 
     Under most circumstances I would have a difficult time lying to somebody, even a faceless scammer. But this time I got in the spirit of the thing.
     We think of the Internet as such a wonder, and it is. But I can't help but thinking, between the Russians stealing the 2016 presidential election, and uncounted people, many elderly or simple, separated from uncounted billions of dollars by this kind of fraud, whether we will not someday decide that the Internet was a steep price to pay for quick delivery of gym shoes and books. On some days Facebook seems, not a social medium at all, but just another way to be lonely.
     We mustn't blame the Internet of course. It's just a tool. And fraud is nothing new. If you haven't looked closely at the painting above, "The Fortune-Teller" by Georges de la Tour, do so. Notice the young woman at left, picking the dandy's pocket, and the one at right cutting his religious medal. A common theme in art when this was made, around 1630. Unless it wasn't—some believe the painting, which came to light in 1960, was a forgery from the 1920s which, given the theme, is just too delightful.

    Nothing changes. "People are the worst" my older son says, a truism for the ages. They will line up to rob you, or worse. One of the memes that made most impact on me in the past few months was that the United States is learning now what Germany learned in the 1930s—that one third of the country would kill the other third while the final third watches. I'd like to insist that isn't true, but it is, here, there and everywhere people live.
     A few turns of fate and your or I might be robbing the credulous via the Internet too; I'm sure there are more than a few GOPs in my spam filter who believe I already am, peddling liberal lies for those too ... well, whatever we're supposed to be ... too something to embrace the glorious truth that is Donald Trump. 

      About this point I gave up, blocked James Bradshaw or, rather, whoever was masquerading as James Bradshaw, and went to bed. I'm sure whoever was on the other end never gave it a second though, merely shrugged, baited his hook and moved on to the next of Facebook's 2 billion users. There's always another sucker around the corner, eager to believe, just waiting to be fleeced.

'Truth crushed to the earth will rise again'

Time Carrying Truth, by Laurent Cars (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Christmas 2017 is in the can, another heirloom ornament to be carefully boxed up and exiled into the attic for another 50 weeks.
     Did you have a good one? We did the traditional Jew 2-Step: Chinese food and a movie—"Call Me By Your Name," not my pick; imagine a gay Woody Allen movie without the witty dialogue. My younger son summed up the problem most succinctly: "They weren't people." My assessment comes in second: "It made 'Toy Story' seem like a documentary.'"
     Over now. On to the obligatory Year in Review. Though I always chafe at that, because it implies our years are memorable, and they're not. Before parading by the lowlights of 2017, let's put it aside and consider, oh, 2007.
     Just 10 years ago. George W. Bush was president. Can you remember a single event from that year? Not in your own life, not little Aiden being born, but something from the larger world? Let's see ... White Sox won the World Series in 2005 ... that's close. Obama was elected in 2008, closer still... Hmm, in 2007 ... ahhh, nope, can't do it.
     Can you?
     Cheating, through the wonder of the Internet, I plug in "noteworthy News Events of 2007" and get Time's Top 10 stories, starting unpromising with 1. "Transition in Pakistan."
     I'm sure a big deal in Pakistan; here, not so much.
     Of the 10, only two seem at all significant today: the debut of the iPhone, and the Virginia Tech shooting. The rest? Recall of Chinese Toys? Protests in Burma?
      See that's the problem. You need perspective to know what developments will actually resonate over the years. Of course 2017 will be remembered as Donald Trump's first year in office, as well as, maybe, for the carnival of revelations of heretofore hidden instances of sexual harassment. I'm not convinced that the second isn't a mania, a fad like goldfish swallowing, instead of an actual shift in society's frequently-dismissive treatment of women. Being a sexual predator sure doesn't seem a bar to the Oval Office.

To continue reading, click here.

"Though the frost is cruel" certainly rings true

The Stoning of Saint Stephen by Domenico del Barbiere (Met)

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay 'round about
Deep and crisp and even

     Kinda late for Christmas carols, ain't it Neil?

     Not really.

     For as many times as you've heard the bouncy opening lines of "Good King Wenceslas," have you ever wondered exactly what "The Feast of Stephen" might be?

     Of course not. That's my job.

     The Feast of Saint Stephen is today, Dec. 26, also known as "Boxing Day." A holiday in Britain and Canada.

     While the Feast of Stephen honors the first Christian martyr of the same name, Boxing Day has nothing to do with pugilism. 

     Rather, it was a day when Christmas boxes were delivered to the poor and to tradesmen—an early form of re-gifting, I assume. You took the fruit cake you didn't want, re-wrapped it and delivered it to the butcher.
    As if that weren't enough, today is also the first day of Kwanzaa, the holiday created in 1966 for black people who wanted a Christmas unsullied by white folks—and given the way white people leave claw marks on Christmas, the stink that Fox News sorts makes over questions like what color Santa Claus should be, who can blame them?
    That's too glib—Kwanzaa is really a celebration of African cultural heritage, and whatever its roots, Kwanzaa is now more of an auxiliary celebration than a replacement. It's there if you want it. Maybe I've been cocooning extra hard, but Kwanzaa seems muted this year—perhaps the trickle-down effect of Trump's general racial contempt. Perhaps people keeping their heads low. Perhaps I am mistaken. 

    With Christmas, 2017 in the books, it's time to begin performing the rites on the year. Typically, in the media, that consists of re-burying celebrities who died over the past 51 weeks, of highlighting the various horrors that occurred, and surveying where one could go to party on Dec. 31.

     I'm not sure I have the stomach for any of that. 

Saint Stephen

     Last year's dirge for 2016 still seems sadly apt.  We already had a sense that Donald Trump wasn't going to rise to the occasion of the presidency, but rather would pull the office down to his level of pettiness, narcissism and deceit. Though it was shocking just how readily an army of GOP quislings lined up to flatter and applaud, that wasn't entirely unexpected either.  Enough; it was bad enough living through 2017, forgive me if I pass on the opportunity to reprise it. 

      Not that we want to forget history. Every time someone speculates whether evangelicals will survive supporting Roy Moore, or Trump, or whatever jaw-dropping moral wrong they're endorsing at the moment, I feel compelled to observe that Christianity endorsed both slavery and Jim Crow for several centuries and came out just fine. It'll survive this too. As St. Stephen reminds us, mythologizing wrongs committed against your own faith while shrugging off crimes your faith commits against others is what religion does, has done, and always will do. Don't hate me for pointing it out.

Aire Ancient Baths brings Roman luxury to River West

  
 
     When I wrote about "111 Places in Chicago That You Must Not Miss"—the column where I go to Englewood to get a cup of coffee—I spoke with its author, Amy Bizzarri. We talked a bit about Red Square Spa, and she mentioned this new Greco-Roman bath that had just opened, too new to be included in her book. I asked her if she planned to write about it, and she said no, so I snapped it up. That's TWO columns I've gotten from her. Thanks Amy.

     What do Chicagoans have in common with ancient Romans?
     Beside living in a crumbling empire ruled by an unstable tyrant, that is.
     Well, we've got our own Roman bath now.
     Aire Ancient Baths Chicago, 800 W. Superior, opened late last month.
     Doing my due diligence, I noticed something surprising: The Tribune, Crain's, Chicago Magazine, TV stations, all noted that a Spanish company was opening a 20,000-square-foot bath complex in the basement of a rehabbed 1902 paint factory in River West. Then all overlooked one vital step in the journalistic process: The actually going there part.
     As a former card-carrying member of the Division Street Russian Baths, I sensed an opportunity, and visited Aire last week.
     But not before getting in the spirit by reading Seneca's Epistle 86, where he discusses Roman baths. Seneca habitually praises the simple life, as only a fabulously wealthy man can, and so lauds the rustic baths of yore, with their chinks admitting light, so superior to the marble splendor of the baths of imperial Rome, with their big mirrors and fancy windows.
     Seneca's scolding, combined with Aire offering a $450 bath in Spanish wine, inclined me to expect over-opulence. A place for Trump-era plutocrats to percolate away their excess cash.
      So I was pleasantly surprised, walking in, to discover Aire has found the sweet spot between spartan and excessive. The tone is not gilt but exposed brick and rough-hewn beams. You are assigned a white glass locker, change into a bathing suit — it's co-ed — and little black water shoes, then plunge into the bath complex.

To continue reading, click here. 

A visit to the old Division Street Russian Baths.

The Men's Bath, by Albrecht Dürer (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Not everybody understands the importance of sometimes stopping what you're doing and just relaxing. Water helps. Tomorrow I'm reporting on Chicago's newest public bath, which I visited last week because I am a fan of its oldest, the Division Street Russian Baths, opened in 1906 and surviving to this day under the unfortunate name of the Red Square Spa. 

    To get us in the proper aquatic mood, today I'm re-visiting the old Russian baths toward the end of their existence, in the late 1990s. 

     Monday, 8 a.m. Just one customer at the Division Street Russian Baths: me. "No people because it's Monday morning?" I ask, hopefully, of one of the masseurs.
     "No people every day," he says.
     I undress, wrap myself in a sheet, and head downstairs, pondering this mystery. "No people every day." I haven't been here in a year. I used to go all the time. My brother and I were members; we'd try to slide by once a week to take the heat and get a massage before breakfast. It was great.
     But life got busy. He's busy. I'm busy. Everybody's busy. I've been meaning to get here for a long time, but was galvanized into action by something a computer consultant was quoted as saying in this newspaper: "My time is super-valuable."
     That sentiment clung to me for days, like grime, and I felt the need to steam it away.
     I greet Jimmy, who—after not seeing me for at least a year—asks about my brother. "He's real busy," I say. Jimmy steers me over to say hello to his dad, Joe.
     Joe Colucci, the owner of the baths, is 92 years old. He's a former Kaiser-Frazer dealer. That was a kind of car. Before selling cars, he was a bigshot with the Herald-American. That was a newspaper.
     We talk. I tell Joe he's looking good. "I'm a cripple," he says, pointing to an aluminum walker that he didn't have last time I saw him.
     The baths are one of what I call "second-tier Chicago treasures." The first tier are places like the Water Tower or the Art Institute. They're institutions that are not going anywhere. You don't pass the Water Tower and worry: "Boy, I hope nobody decides to pull that down." You don't pay your entrance fee at the Art Institute and think: "There! That'll keep them in business for another day."
     But the second tier—they are also institutions, they also make Chicago what it is. But their futures are less certain. When I drove over to the baths, for a frightening moment, I thought they were gone. I would have been shocked but not surprised. Who can spare a few hours to sit and take the heat? We're all busy. Our time is super-valuable.
     Some institutions shift: Wrigley Field used to be second tier; now it seems safely first tier. The Music Box Theater on Southport is second tier, bucking the huge social shift caused by videotape. You buy a ticket, you not only see a classic movie, but also perform an important civic duty.
     The baths are swimming against a social current even stronger than videotape—indoor plumbing. When they were built, in 1906, few working-class people had their own bathrooms. You shared. They were crowded and foul. Going to a public bath was a luxury. The Park District ran dozens of them. There were dozens more private bathhouses. Only Division Street is left—a Roman senator could walk in, take one look at the hot and cold pools, the masseurs, the birch branches, and know exactly what was going on.
     Downstairs is eerie with no one in it. The big empty shower room, the fixtures high up on the wall, cascades of water pouring from them. None of those modern austerity fixtures, hurling a trickle against your chest.
     The empty steam room. I take the worn piece of wood—it might have once been a 2 x 4, and lift the handle on the metal oven door. It clangs open, and I stoke a half dozen scoops of water from a large bucket onto the glowing red stones—you have to do it just right or you'll scald yourself. The steam rolls out of the oven, and I can feel the heat rising as I take my seat on the dark wooden benches.
     After about 45 minutes, I go upstairs to the sleeping room, to get a massage. The sleeping room is a large, dimly lit chamber, with six metal single cots and two massage tables. I don't think there's another room like it in the city. You lie on your back, on a single metal bed fitted with clean sheets, and look at that pressed tin ceiling, painted white, with flickering shadows from the spinning fans. It's an image out of Ellis Island, out of Nelson Algren.
     A brief rest, then back downstairs, for more heat, a scrubbing with a rough sponge, a dip in the cold pool, more heat. A handful of customers—no more than six—arrive by noon. I had planned on spending two hours, but accidentally spent four. Difficult to pull yourself away from the steam room—so hot, it makes all the so-called saunas in health clubs seem like tepid, moist places. Will it be here next time I come back?
     Where else can you sit, parboiling in the heat, waiting for the moment when you seize one of the black rubber buckets filling under the taps and dump a blast of revivifying cold water over your head? That sounds harsh, but feels great. It wakes you up. It makes you feel super-valuable.

              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 28, 1998