Each society picks one of many paths

      It was a long week, between the crazy weather—a 50 degree shift, from 15 below Monday morning, to 35 degrees now—and more than the usual work. Phone calls and interviews and fact-checking. Whatever the reason, I just felt ground down. I even took the Brown line down to Congress instead of hopping on a bike.
      "Thank God it's Friday" I told co-workers on the elevator, not a usual cliche of mine, as I gratefully left the office and headed over to the Lyric Opera to see Johann Strauss' "Die Fledermaus," a sugary linzer torte of an operetta, with catchy tunes and dancing girls and a plot of masquerade and mistaken identity. The first act takes place in a sumptuous house, the second in a palace, the third in a jail, and it was good to see the Lyric return to its gorgeously ornate sets -- no bare stage with a strip of neon here—lush scenery and colorful, intricate costumes. No bats however — "Die Fledermaus" is "the bat" in German — but there was a guy flapping around in a bat wing costume, at one point.
     The superb cast is headed, aptly, by an actual Austrian, soprano Daniela Fally, who plays the saucy parlor maid hot to shuck her duties and head to a fancy party, unaware that she, like  the rest, is being drawn into a velvet trap -- "The revenge of the bat" — an elaborate prank, sort of the 19th century Viennese version of "Punk'd" with music and lots of Champagne.
      There are many reasons to love these Viennese operas -- Franz Lehar's "The Merry Widow" is also a favorite.  Not just for the music, but the wit, the easy immorality — everyone in "Fledermaus" is cheerily cheating on everyone else, or trying to. The constant drinking, the unashamed adoration of wealth. It probably wasn't all that great to live through, especially for the majority who weren't wealthy. But it sure is fun to watch.
     Despite the pure entertainment value, I can't help but find myself wondering where they went wrong, the Germans and the Austrians — Strauss was an Austrian, and his life overlapped for 10 year with his countryman, Adolf Hitler.  Here they were having so much fun. And then ... 
     Okay, stop. Not much upside in going there. History is set, done. But the future is not. It is yet to be determined. And the only thing to do after contemplating the Road Not Taken for the light happy people who wrote entertains like "Fledermaus" is to recognize the various elements at work in every country, in our own country. America is a light happy place, too, as well as a dark dangerous place, with deep poverty and ignorance, abundance and education, all grabbing at the steering wheel, trying to point our country in one direction or the other. It matters which direction we steer. Is health care a basic human right, or a kind of intrusive government oppression?
     So which will it be? If the United States is to become a xenophobic nest of heavily-armed haters, well, you can't say the seeds weren't there. Or if we are to somehow hold onto our progressive freedoms, our respect of diversity and social progress? We see the tug-of-war, and sometimes wonder if it's worth it. At least I do.  After Chris Christie ran into his traffic jam scandal this week, I dipped into the Troglodyte Right Wing press -- the Drudge Report, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named at the Tribune, that sort of thing, to see how they were spinning it. Oh. My. God. It was almost breathtaking, the warped, nasty blowback, a realm of almost pure hallucination. How to argue with that? And what's the point? The temptation is to draw back, shiver with disgust, leave the field, lose oneself in art. Turn up the opera. Let them fight over this thing. 
     But art refreshes, thank God, and I left "Die Fledermaus" renewed to my purpose.  It was dark and rainy and slushy and Metra is still having trouble making the trains roll. But none of that bothered me. Seeing something so light and funny and happy, and done so well, is a bracing reminder to push for the good.  This is the point. To keep ideology from squeezing out our quirky musical selves. To hold onto what's good.
      And it is a good production. I won't review it, but the cast was outstanding. Emily Fons' archly scowling drag turn as Prince Orlofsky and Bo Skovhus' eagerly debauched yet somehow naive Gabriel von Eisenstein. Fred Wellisch's happily drunken turnkey Frosch has the best line of the night, trying to silence a singing prisoner with, "You're not in an opera house!" It takes a second to register and the audience laughs, because of course, we are in an opera house.  There's a lesson there -- we forget we're in a place where we can always hear music, but we really are. Frosch shuffles off with "and now it's time to make room for the Mayor of Toronto," one of the several topical references that help keep the humor fresh. He didn't say "make room for Rob Ford," because not everyone would know the mayor of Toronto by name, despite his extreme notoriety.  Which has to be encouraging too. Politics is forgettable and temporary, but important. Art is memorable and permanent, but unimportant, in that it doesn't set the policy of the day. But art is in another sense keenly important, in that it revivifies those who fight the good fight. Which starts up again on Monday.  There are also three more performances of "Die Fledermaus" next week, so if the walls close in, you'll know where to go. 

Photo by Dan Rest, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago

Sort of like an app, only paper.

     Kofi Acquah-Dadzie, Assistant Registrar and Master, High Court of Botswana. Francois Bujon de l’Estang, Ambassadeur du France. Richard Melman, Chairman, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.

     If I were to come up with a new technology that would take your business information — name, phone number, address, the logo and particulars of your place of employment — and somehow worm that data into the lives of random people you met, where it would live for months and years and decades, popping up now and then, I bet I could score big on the technology front. Give it a funny name: “DataBlast,” sell stock.

     Alas, business cards are low tech, 31/2-by-2-inch rectangles of stiff paper. A centuries-old technology, the descendant of calling cards. And I’m finally getting rid of mine. All of them. 

     Ethan Matlin, Fiddler. Junaid M. Afeef Esq., The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. Roel M. Doherty-Roque, Police Officer, 20th District/Lincoln Station.  

     Blame it on not having a proper New Year’s resolution. I’ve already lost weight. I still don’t drink. Somehow my attention was drawn to all this clutter, drawers of stuff, papers and files and coral reefs of useless junk that I have set aside for some purpose and now are just in the way. I figured, get rid of it. I figured, start with the business cards.

     Why not? Some are for defunct establishments: LaSalle Bank, now part of Bank of America. Aigre Doux, now the Gilt Bar. The Division Street Russian Bath, now enjoying a second, snazzier life as "Red Square."
     Some are from defunct people. Phil Pagano, the Metra chief who stepped in front of a train. Did I really meet him? I don't recall. But I must have; I've got his card.
     Some I kept, intending to write stories. I have several cards from the Cactus & Succulent Society of Greater Chicago, picked up during its annual show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I always meant to join, not out of any particular love of cacti, but out of the charmed notion that there would be all these comic political dramas going on in the society, bitter power plays and raging conflict. But it seemed too unhinged a project, even for me, and I never followed through.
     I did actually pay dues and join the Napoleonic Alliance ("William Hurlbutt, President") and found myself at its annual dinner, holding a glass of Champagne high and crying, "Vive l'empereur!" Can't make that up. The phone's disconnected now.
     Martin L. King, chairman, Rainbow/PUSH. Frederic P.N. Chang, vice minister, Republic of China. Colin Hall, Allen Edmonds Shoe Corp.
     The cards got me wondering — with email, LinkedIn, Facebook, you just don't go digging for business cards the way you used to. How are they doing, as a product?
     "People still need them," said Jack Serrano, partner/manager of AlphaGraphics, one of the larger producers of business cards in Chicago. "They're a good tool and a big part of my business. Especially traveling overseas. Huge in Asia. You can't say hello without a business card."
     That's even true in this country. People who don't have business cards are unemployed. (Though there must be a separate column in the jokey, grandiose faux business cards that newly retired men seem compelled to print up for themselves. They strike me not as dashing, but desperate.)
     Serrano said the trend is toward double-side, with shiny stock — like Susan Goodenow, vice president of branding & communications at the Chicago Bulls, whose card lists their six NBA championship years on the back and has rounded corners, another popular touch. Hers, I'll keep.
     The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce has a square QR Code — you take a picture with your phone and it gives more info. It looks like a black blot, to me, but then a few years ago I thought people who wore their security passes on a lanyard around their necks look like sheep. Now I wear mine.
     Some cards yanked me back to where I got them. Touring UIC's Illinois somber Craniofacial Center with Dr. Mimis Cohen, Division of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Cosmetic Surgery — facial prosthetics. Some left me puzzled: Who is Alexander A. Babich and what is the American Multiethnic Educational & Promotional Center? No clue.
     I couldn't throw them all out — Robert W. Fioretti, never know when I need to call him. And some were personal. June Steinberg, Independent Beauty Consultant for Mary Kay Cosmetics (Hi mom!). Rabbi Mordechai Tarkieltaub, Certified Mohel. Circumcised both my boys without a hitch. In business? Dial the number. A come-on for a Bahamas cruise. "You'll have a fabulous time on your free Bahamas cruise. Press one now." Pass.

Tough geese

    It's amazing how quickly we get used to stuff. I was walking across the Loop Wednesday and thought, "Wow, this is great. It has to be 15 degrees outside!" And I wasn't being sarcastic. Fifteen degrees would have been knee-knockingly cold last week. But on Wednesday it was 30 degrees warmer than it had been in days. Happiness.
     In other words, it's all perspective. Not a very profound thought, I know. When I was a kid, my mother had a philosophy which boiled down to, "Be happy you don't have cancer." I'm not sure she actually said that, or I was just summarizing her thoughts. It's not the most practical outlook, once you realize you're setting the bar fairly low. You might as well say, "Be happy you're not dead" and then the people with cancer can be happy too — which, now that I think of it, they often are, perhaps for that very reason. 
     First, you don't have to be happy all the time. Bad stuff happens, you get to be upset. Our society puts such a premium on being positive, on calling in the grief counselors the day after the massacre, we forget that it takes time to grieve, takes time to heal.
     Unhappiness, on the other hand, can happen over time, or can happen in an instant. The same "getting used to stuff" mechanism that works when things turn from bad to less bad also cuts the other way. Just as 15 degrees comes as a relief after 15 below, so after a few days of perfect 70 degree weather in Bali, you walk outside and its 60 and raining and you think, "God damn this sucks!" It takes an act of will to remind yourself, "But it's still not terrible, and I'm still in Bali." 
     A delicate balancing act then. Too accepting, and you can rationalize any misfortune and you have no standards. Too discriminating and nothing is good enough. 
     Crossing the Orleans Street bridge, I saw 16 geese huddled on the ice on the Chicago River (only 13 are in the close-up above). At first it seemed  an unwise spot for geese to camp out—aren't they cold there?— but then I thought: they're geese. Trust them. They must know what they're doing. They're close to water. What else should they do? Check into a hotel?
     Maybe that's the final message. You have to trust instinct, including your own. Just as you shouldn't doubt geese -- they've survived a very long time, they're up on this cold weather stuff — so you shouldn't doubt yourself, too much. A little is okay. Then you accept the situation, whatever it is, give yourself time to stumble around in misery, for a while, then yank the reins and guide yourself into the relative warmth of happiness, if you can, because you only get X amount of days, and you might as well be happy, generally, however cold it is outside, whatever your circumstances. 
    Fifteen degrees is pretty cold, usually. But this week it's warm. And it's going up to 40 by the weekend, which will feel like paradise. Forty degrees. I wondered what the geese could possibly be thinking, inside those walnut brains, as they tucked their heads against their bodies and waited. And my hunch was, if you could read their minds, you'd know the geese are thinking: "Spring's coming."
     Or perhaps I'm being wistful. Perhaps the geese were thinking, "Fuck, it's cold on this river!"

 

Do we expect Rahm to vacation in the Dells just to make us happy?

     In the suburbs, we do a little something I call “maximizing our advantage.”
     That means even though we’ve pretty much got it made already—nice houses, generally; good jobs, often; and our kids pampered at top schools, frequently—we still can’t help going that one extra step into the ridiculous, the whole pump-Mozart-into-the-womb, sit-waiting-in-the-SUV-in-the-fire-lane-instead-of-parking, gild the lily and scrape out the last drop of privilege we are convinced is our due route that leaves some—or at least me — wishing we’d leave well enough alone.
     Sunday, just after noon, the robocalls and texts flooded in from Northbrook District 225, lighting up six, maybe eight cellphones and computers associated with our household, telling us in close harmony that school was canceled. After I got over my mild surprise that my two brainiacs were grinning widely and practically vibrating with glee (really, it was like seeing Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein pump their fists in the air and start woofing because the particle accelerator was down), I was immediately troubled that Chicago schools hadn’t done the same. They seemed intent on marching their kids like doomed polar explorers heading into the frozen wasteland of Monday.
      Why? What did the suburban school districts know at midday that took the city until evening to figure out? Wasn’t the weather the same both places? Were the lives of city children not quite as valuable as our own babes? And in the northwest suburbs, going to school on a dangerously cold day means something very different than in the city. School on a subzero day in Northbrook means a line of Honda Odyssey vans delivering their precious cargo, Gortexed and Thinsulated and decked out in hand-knit wool Peruvian hats for the 10-yard stumble from the curb to the door. In Chicago, geez, who knew how many of the 400,000 kids, who risk being murdered on a warm day, would go astray in the 15-below-zero trek to school? Frankly, I suspected some federal finance was at the back of the CPS mind—losing one school day cuts X percent of money from Uncle Sam. Can't have that. Then Karen Lewis and the teachers union called for school to be canceled, and while I doubted their intentions, too—teachers demanding a day off, now that's unexpected—I gave them credit for being right. A few hours, then CPS finally lurched into motion and canceled class. Well glory be to God. Still, it's scary how long it took.
     Yes, it's more complicated than that. You could argue that, for a lot of kids in the city, it's safer to be at school than at home, warmer with more food and less chance to get into trouble. On the other hand ...
     OK, let it drop. Bad enough to be cold without being frenzied, too. Reading coverage of Rahm Emanuel's fresh-from-Indonesia, I'm-in-command Monday tour in both papers made me think everyone had gone a little cabin crazy. In the Tribune, he was tanned. "Nice tan, Mr. Mayor!" opined one of their columnists. The editorial in the Sun-Times noted, "He didn't even look especially tanned." Which is it? To me, Emanuel always looks tanned. His father was an Israeli, remember, and he has the olive-complexioned Sephardic Jew thing going on.
     Besides, complaining about his vacations is silly. It's begging him to deceive us. He's a rich guy. You think New Yorkers were twitting Michael Bloomberg for having his own jet? Rahm goes on the nicest vacations he can, just like you do. His only mistake is not being upfront, not saying, "Hell, I'm off to Indo-freakin'-nesia!" Sure, the Bungalow Belt, with its envy-based view of the world, is going to hate him. Bulletin: They'll hate him anyway. Had Rahm taken his family to Noah's Ark water park in the Dells for Christmas, he'd be slammed for that, too.
     There are two bedrock truths about the mayor that cut through this silliness: A) he's doing the right stuff to fix Chicago's horrendous problems, basically, and B) nobody's going to run against him in 2015 anyway.
     Pensions, crime, schools. People complain about how his solutions affect them, specifically - sure, unions don't like losing pension perks; I hated losing mine, too—but you can't say he isn't making the right decisions.
     Given the lack of an opponent in 2015—the most significant figure contemplating a run some 13 months from the election is Ald. Bob Fioretti, a nice enough guy, but more buzz-saw fodder than buzz saw—Rahm could have stayed in Indonesia Monday, Instagramming back photos of himself on a beach, flipping his famously truncated right middle finger at the camera and telling the suckers stuck at home to stay warm, and it wouldn't really affect anything.

     

Divvy Diary: There's an app for that....

     Despite — or maybe because of — how it's slowly crushing journalism, I'm interested in observing technology's steamroller as it  inches forward. Such as this guy in his mid-20s who wrote an app for Divvy bikes just for the hell of it. What I didn't mention in this column is that my 47.5 miles on the Divvy bike puts me at No. 15 on the Leaderboard. And yes, I planned to ride Monday, just for the insanity factor, but Divvy closed the system down again, for the second time in a week. I want my 20 cents back! 

    Necessity is the mother of invention, and also can drive you to new apps — those small programs that live on your cellphone, for my readers who still subscribe to Life magazine, at least deep within the smithy of their souls.

     The app that tells you where the nearest Divvy bike station is, for instance, I downloaded while straddling a Divvy on May Street. It was a wetware problem — the phrase “May and Fulton,” where the station I sought actually was located, had somehow morphed into “May and Kinzie” in the faltering, moist organic circuitry of my brain. Loading the app was easy, took a minute or two, and I parked and headed to Jupiter Outpost for a sandwich — one advantage of Divvy, it expands the range of places to eat.

     Not necessity but vanity inspired me to load the DivvyBrags app, which lets members see the length of their bike trips. The app’s 25-year-old creator, Alex Soble, savvily tweeted me of its December rollout (a PR trick that can elude even seasoned pros: notice what someone in the media does and approach with matters of actual interest). Since he asked, I thought I’d check it out.
     As so often happens with new technology, there was a moment of shame. Since Sept. 3, I have been keeping a record of whenever I use the bikes, jotted on the inside cover of my red 2013 Brownline daily planner. It turns out that Divvy already does that for me, keeping a tally every time I remove a bike from a dock, and the app takes that information and generates distances. If you take a bike from station A and leave it at Station B, you've ridden X amount of miles.
     Soble improved Divvy's tabulations. Divvy's "Trips" page includes trips of three or eight seconds, which in my case means I inserted a bike in a dock that locked but did not wink its confirming green light. So I put my key in, yanked the bike back out and put it in the next open dock, because if I'm going to leave this $1,200 bike, I want to see a big green thumbs-up. DivvyBrags eliminates these microtrips of less than a minute, telling me that between Sept. 3 and Dec. 20, I took 46 trips, covering 47.5 miles in 7 hours, 49 minutes. (My flawed "Write-it-down" system only recorded 31 trips).
     What possessed Soble to create the app?
     "I make Web applications," he said. "It was an idea that took hold and I couldn't not make it. This was irresistible fun."
     Which is also why I write about Divvy.
     The app will graph your stats and let you download them. It also produces a "Leaderboard" ranking total distances, crediting one Jennifer Saito with 1,477 miles on a Divvy.
     It took a week for the South Loop resident to create, but there were snags along the way. When Soble first rolled the app out in September, it required Divvy users to share names and passwords. That was a no-no.
      "Divvy blocked the script and shut down the app," he said. "I wasn't going to do anything malicious. At first that seemed like that was the end of the story. But I went to talk with some Divvy nerds, and one said, 'You can still do it, you just have to be an extension. Something you plug in.' I went home and started working."
     For DivvyBrags 2.0, Soble sent his code to Divvy's parent company, Alta Bicycle Share.
     "I think I kind of took them by surprise the first time," said Soble, who met some Divvy reps for coffee. "It was a little tense at first. But I sent them the code, to say, 'hey, here's what I'm going to do.' " They signed off.
     "We like DivvyBrags a lot," said Elliot Greenberger, point man at Divvy. "It shows how passionate our riders are about Divvy. But it also lets riders view and compare their trip data in a fun way. Our only concern was making sure the program didn't violate our privacy policy, but Alex discovered a way to protect rider info using a Chrome extension. Our technology team reviewed it line by line to make sure it holds up."
     Some 200 people have loaded the app; to do so, go to divvybrags.com. Soble is fourth on the Leaderboard, with 504 miles.
     "I use it in the summer every day," he said. "Much less in winter as it got cold. The app itself is a little bit of a motivation. If I'm trying to decide, use the Orange line or, hey why not get a little more exercise in and log another couple miles?"
     Ah, competition.
     For readers who just don't get the appeal of Divvy bikes—and you know who you are— Soble explained the attraction.
     "The street can be a very tribal place, and Divvy is the newest creature on the block," he said. "Riding definitely makes you feel alive, feel your heart beat, feel the wind, the snow. I'm a fan of the experience. Of course, I haven't wiped out yet."
     Something for us both to look forward to.

  

A la recherchez du froid perdu

Just because it's cold, doesn't mean we can't have fun. My oldest son, Ross, had heard that, when it's this cold—16 below—a cup of boiling water tossed into the air will instantly become steam. QED, it appears to be true. 

     The other day I mentioned my affinity for weather stories, which sent me searching through the Nexis newspaper archive for the article I wrote containing a string of quotes from Chicagoans all describing the weather as "cold." I couldn't find that, but I found these two, both from a cold snap of exactly 20 years ago, in January, 1994.  The first revisits the city during previous deep freezes. The second does something I imagine most pedestrians itch to do on very cold days: ask that guy without a coat: "What the hell are you thinking?"

From the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 1994:

     One good thing about weather this cold is that it creates a kinship with Chicagoans of the past, all of whom lived in a city that is no stranger to below-freezing temperatures. Some cold days to remember:

Sunday, Jan. 20, 1985. Temperature: -27, a record low. Wind chill: -78.

Lake Michigan, 1/6/14, Photo courtesy of Bill Savage

     St. Agnes Eve, the coldest day of the year according to folklore, made believers of Chicagoans previously unfamiliar with the obscure Jan. 20 holiday. Ardie Rowe, a doorman at the Ambassador East hotel, had an especially bad day. Even the tips were bad. "The people are rude. Their cars won't start. They think it's your fault there are no cabs," he said.

Saturday, Dec. 24, 1983. Temperature: -25. Wind chill: -82.

     The day broke a Christmas Eve record that had stood for 111 years. CTA buses and trains were off schedule, with intervals between trains of up to 30 minutes. At Cook County Hospital, frostbite victims were showing up in the emergency room as often as every 10 minutes. "It's like the world is an ice slide and Cook County is at the bottom," said Dr. Larry Schmetterer.

Sunday, Jan. 10, 1982. Temperature: -26. Wind chill: -81.

      The Chicago Fire Department had one of its most difficult days ever, with frozen fire hydrants, high winds and icy conditions. More than 600 firefighters were ordered to start work at midnight Sunday instead of waiting for their regularly scheduled starting day, Tuesday. Fire Commissioner William Blair left town for a weeklong vacation in California.

Thursday, Feb. 9, 1933. Temperature: -19.

     A.M. Krahl, of the Pure Milk Association, reassured the city that "Chicago's milk supply was not endangered." Farmers had been appealed to by radio to "bring the milk through" and had responded nobly, he said. Movie stars Mary Pickford and Edward G. Robinson, who were passing through town on their way to the coast, met for the first time and had a snowball fight.

Thursday, Feb. 9, 1899. Temperature: -21.

     More than 1,000 homeless people sought shelter at Chicago police stations. With the 30 men working two miles offshore at the 68th Street crib running low on food, a dramatic relief effort was mounted. "Six stalwart men" dragged a sled piled with 400 pounds of food across the frozen lake, but were turned back by a break in the ice. The tug Morford made it the next day, but was crushed by ice floes after reaching the station and unloading supplies.

Monday, Jan. 25, 1897. Temperature: -20.

     On its front page the Chicago Record newspaper listed not the cold temperatures, but the philanthropy of Chicagoans. Mayor Swift appealed for donations: "The present severe weather must naturally excite the keen sympathy of every kindly disposed person for the worthy and suffering poor." Topping the list was Peoples Gas, which gave $ 1,000. Potter Palmer gave $ 200. The Northwestern Yeast Co. donated 100 loaves of bread.

From the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 15, 1994:

     You always see him.

     On days like Friday, when the cold is like a draft from outer space; when fashion goes out the window and even the young and hip drag out their woolen long johns and Yukon mukluks, there he is: the guy walking down the street without a hat, without gloves, in a thin jacket that wouldn't be out of place in May.

     His name is Ron Holzapfel. He is 28 years old and an architect working downtown. He may not be the same guy everyone sees, but he will stand in, a sort of Everyunderdressedman.

     Of course he has an excuse.

     "I didn't think it would be this cold," explained a sheepish Holzapfel, walking west on Lake Street, his hands reddening, his head hatless in the minus 42-degree wind-chill.

     In his defense, Holzapfel pointed out that he was only walking two blocks. "I can deal with it for two blocks," he said.

     Sort of like liquid nitrogen -- you can put your finger in, so long as you pull it out real quick.

     While Holzapfel was hurrying to his office, some actually found enjoyment in the otherworldly temperature -- an official low of 8 below zero at 8 a.m. at O'Hare Airport.

     A full dozen people were on the ice rink downtown at Skate on State.

     "This is my first experience with cold weather," said Lisa Comeaux, who -- of her own free will -- left her home in New Orleans, where it was 62 degrees Friday, to visit her friend Mary Gay and the frozen world in which she lives.

     The two -- both nurses -- said the weather was not impeding their skating fun. "It's bearable," said Comeaux. "I thought about losing my toes to frostbite," said Gay.

     Another skater, Greg Hill, woke up Friday morning in Nashville, Tenn., where it was 35 degrees warmer. He then got on a plane and -- without being forced -- came to Chicago for vacation. "We said, 'Why let cold weather stop us?' " said Hill, 24, who skated for 20 full minutes with his wife, Shannon, before they decided they had had enough fun.

     Then there were those whose routines were not about to be interrupted by something as paltry as the city being plunged into an icy hellsbroth of mind-numbing cold, the likes of which has not been seen in nearly a decade.

     "I'm frozen," said Gerry Mayo, 62, pedaling his bicycle down the wind-whipped lakefront near Montrose. "(The weather) never stops me. I live on the bike."

     Mayo did admit that while on a summer day he may bicycle more than 50 miles, on Friday he expected to do about six miles.

     "This is not very bad," he said. "Just my toes."

     Jennifer Stern, 22, was one of the committed masochists who jogged along the lakefront near Fullerton, where Lake Michigan, thick-looking with the cold, surged and steamed.

    "Why?" asked Stern, not breaking stride. "Because I hate running on a treadmill."

Hot fun in the Fire Sudatorium

     When it's cold outside, why not go where it's really, really warm? Thus many cold-climate cultures embrace the idea of saunas, steam rooms and bathhouses.  The Scandinavians—Swedes, Finns and such, are especially big on it, as are Russians. The Greeks and Italians helped invent it, and the Japanese developed the practice into ritual and art. Native-Americans had their sweat lodges. The current crop of Americans...well, not so much. Which I suppose in one way speaks well of us — we're busy, making money. The descendants of Calvinists and Puritans, we spurn comfort, pleasure and relaxation. But in another sense, it suggests something bad, that we fail to pause and just savor life. Inspired by this crazy cold, I paused to do some savoring Friday in one of the warmest places around. My report:

     Americans are bad at lolling. Or maybe it’s just me; I don’t want to be one of those guys who project their own faults upon the world, one of the many men who, to quote Thoreau, “mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere.”

     We certainly are good at sprawling in front of the television. But lolling is different from sprawling. To loll is to idle away time “in a lazy, relaxed way.”

     I did that Friday, or tried to. It being so cold, with the promise of worse on the way, it made sense to head for King Spa.

     If you are not familiar, King Spa is a vast Korean establishment in Niles. At 34,000 square feet, it claims to be the largest Asian spa in the United States. The place is a strange mix of taste and kitsch, lovely Asian artifacts and huge cut amethysts with price tags slapped on them, granite counters and chairs upholstered in salmon Naugahyde and scrolled gilded woodwork that is half Louis XIV, half Lewis Carroll. If Kim Jong Un built a health club, it would look like this.

     You pay $30, men go one way, women the other. Stash your shoes in little lockers, your clothes in another. Off each gender’s locker room is a steam room and four pools, from quite hot to icy cold.
     I slid into the water at 10:55 a.m., thinking, "half an hour." That seemed the limit of sybaritic luxury. While the old Division Street Russian Baths, of which I was a member, could be deserted on a weekday, King Spa was hopping with a diverse mix, heavy on Asians and Russians, but with a cross section of Americans too—college kids, seniors. I closed my eyes, sank to my chin and listened to the murmur of languages.
     By 11:15 a.m. I was in the hottest pool, gazing at the clock, wondering why I am deficient in the idling-away-time, doing-nothing department. Can you even loll through force of will? That sort of wrecks it, doesn't it? As it was, I was on the clock, being paid and researching a column, so it didn't even count as true relaxation. Rest makes me antsy. Something to work on in the new year.
     I got out of the pool, dried off, put on a gray cotton uniform: shorts and a T-shirt (women wear pink, kids yellow).
     On the main floor, the spa has nine sauna rooms, heated to different temperatures (one is an Ice Room at just above freezing) and employing various supposedly healing and revitalizing materials: salt, charcoal, stone and such. Normally I'd sneer at the mystical pretensions of it all—"The pyramid-shaped sauna channels metaphysical energy coupled with the unique healing effects of 23 carat gold"—but that would lose the spirit of the place, like a visitor to Disney World observing that real elephants could never flap their ears and fly since the surface-area-to-weight ratio makes that impossible. Thanks professor.
     The hottest room is the "Fire Sudatorium," a beehive-shaped chamber where you sit, sweat and endure as long as you can—in my case about four minutes—before you bolt for the low entrance. It felt tribal.
     After 90 minutes my wife and I met at the restaurant and had a passable pitcher of some milky rice beverage, a spicy salad with walnuts and eight fried-vegetable pot stickers, all for just under $30.
     Walking to our table, I was slightly surprised to see, out the window, snow—Oh right!— and this is an indication of the relaxed mindset you fall into, between the uniforms, the burble of languages, the heat, the cold, the water, the chairs. By the time we left, 2 p.m., after three hours in the place, I felt rejuvenated; OK, maybe not rejuvenated, but not as crappy as I had felt going in.