Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS This?

     Chicago has so many famous buildings.
     The Water Tower and the Willis Tower  
     NBC Tower and  and Trump Tower
     And those are just the buildings with "tower" in their names.
     Some are modernist monsters:
     The Hancock and the Aon Center
     Some are beloved old  treasures
     The Monadnock and the Marquette
     And some are in between new and old
      Like Marina City
     This building is none of them.
     I've walked past it for years.
     And never given it a second glance.
     Never really looked at its perfect blue rectangular grid
     Until now, thinking: "That'll stump 'em."
     I can't imagine anyone knowing its name.
     Though, merciful, there is a clue tucked in.
     I'll add another one at 12 noon.
     If it stumps you
     Which I hope it will
     For once
     Post your answer in the comments section
     And remember, you can only win once per year
     So good luck
     Winner will get ... lunch with me at Harry Caray's
     If you're interested
     I told its owner I'd slide by soon
    And this will guarantee that I do.
    Assuming anyone guesses this correctly which
    If history is any judge
    They will. 
 

What is it like to step on a landmine?

     Rahmatullah Merzayee was 11 years old, almost 12, when, walking home from school in Kabul, Afghanistan, one afternoon, he stepped on a land mine.

     “After the explosion, I looked up and saw ... I don’t know the exact words,” he said. “I saw a dark environment, a windy dark, like a breeze, all around me. When I touch my legs I felt nothing. I can’t explain in words.”

Rahmatullah Merzayee, left.

     Merzayee, now 28, spoke to me over the phone from Mozambique, where he is attending an international conference on land mines, officially a mouthful: The Third Review Conference of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, running through Friday in Maputo, the nation’s capital.

     The conference drew more than 1,000 representatives from nations around the world, and the news, surprisingly, is good for once: since the signing of a global mine ban treaty in the late 1990s, production of mines has almost stopped, casualties have plummeted, and countries such as Mozambique that are riddled with land mines from past conflicts have made great strides in removing them, according to the International Committee to Ban Landmines, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its work.

     One less cheerful point is that the United States, while pouring money into combating the harm caused by land mines, is still not among the 161 nations that signed the ban.

     “The U.S. has two diplomats here, but we have nothing to report,” said Chris Walljasper, a Medill student who picked up his graduate degree on Saturday and got on a plane Sunday for Mozambique, where he’s preparing for the fall, when Northwestern’s National Security Reporting Fellowship program focuses on the issue of anti-personnel mines.
     The old argument is that the U.S. needs land mines to stave off the North Koreans. But in a world of fast deployment forces, that's not a convincing reason, and military experts have claimed that mines constrict defense more than help. Their scant value must be weighed against the fact that mines are active for decades and deliver horrific injuries to civilians — half of victims are children — far more than they harm combatants. "People put them there and then leave them behind," said Dr. Jeffrey Ackman, chief of staff at Shriners Hospitals for Children Chicago, which sees many land mine victims. "They cause a tremendous amount of damage, devastating injuries, more so in peacetime than in wartime because nobody suspects them."

     In addition to physical damage, Ackman said mines often cause great psychological harm, as villages in developing nations tend to have little access to prosthetics or rehabilitation services, and the loss of a limb often consigns victims to lives of beggary.
     After Merzayee stepped on a mine, a taxi driver rushed him to a hospital, which saved his life but amputated his legs at the knee, the first of seven surgeries. He was in the hospital for five months, and though he received top-notch follow-up — a charitable group flew him to Germany to be fitted for prosthetic legs — it was still hard to bear.
     "I felt isolated; I became unable to do anything in my life," said Merzayee, who walks with two canes. "I will be a burden for myself and my family. I felt really disappointed, felt that I am alive just breathing, not really living, not like an active person. There is nothing I can do for myself, for my family, my community. This land mine changed my life completely, I cannot do anything for my life. That was my feeling."
     But he made progress. "After a year I could stand on my legs and come back to Afghanistan and started school." Since 2008, he has worked for Afghan Landmine Survivors. "This organization is involved in advocacy and awareness," he said, hoping that mines will become beyond the pale of warfare, like poison gas.
     "The United States is a country that is a big donor for other issues around the world," Merzayee said. "[The U.S.] signing would mean we will have a world completely free of land mines, and it will encourage other nonsigners, like Russia and China, to join this treaty. If the United States joined, it will mean the world will be free of land-mine production. No stockpiles, no land-mine victims. We hope that the United States can take the lead and others will follow."
     It's a little late for the U.S. to take the lead, except in the sense of being ahead of Russia and China. One hundred and sixty one nations have traded use of a crude, almost antique weapon that mostly maims children for the moral high ground and signed the land-mine ban. We can too.

San Francisco gnashes teeth over loss of Lucas museum

   John King, of the San Francisco Chronicle, posted this insightful analysis about how his city's leaders bungled snaring the George Lucas museum. "While Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel methodically assembled a well-connected task force to explore sites within his city that might captivate the billionaire filmmaker, [SF mayor Ed] Lee made no public gesture in Lucas' direction until early May," King writes.
     And while seeing San Francisco's teeth-gnashing was almost enough to make me proud of Chicago's nimbly snatching it away, I stand by my skepticism about what King refers to as Lucas' "still-vague" museum of narrative art. Maybe it'll be something wonderful, and maybe it'll be the future Flash Gordon Museum, another white elephant that Chicago ties itself to for 75 years because of our civic habit of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure.
    To be frank, seeing Mayor Rahm Emanuel's vigorous courting of Lucas, I wish he had put a bit of that energy into persuading Chicagoans that this is a good idea. But, as with closing schools, the mayor seems to assume that people will simply trust him, or that making his case to the public is somehow beneath him. And there is a point that, once you invite the naysayers and Friends of the Park sorts in, the name of action can be lost in a fog of bickering and debate. So give the mayor credit for plunging forward, the public be damned. We've got the museum, now, and can only hope that Lucas doesn't make it just a shrine to himself, his work and his art collection—that has to be a temptation, or why else is he doing this—and remembers to create something that visitors who never heard of Obi-Wan Kenobe and friends will want to see.
    Let's put it another way. Marshall Field created the Field Museum. It's about nature, not the history of department stores. Let's hope that Lucas gets this, and hope is about all we can do now.

Rarer than a rock star: book design icon visits here

     When Doubleday asked for my input about the cover design for my first hardback book in 1994, I replied, in an Oliver-Twist, please-sir-I'd-like-more stammer,  "Well, I'd like Chip Kidd to do it." 
     I knew that was swinging for the fences, but I was young, and didn't quite realize that my request was like a used car dealer asking the local advertising agency slapping together his late night TV commercial to get Mick Jagger to record the jingle.

     Kidd is the rock star of book jacket design—turning out, in the words of Publisher's Weekly, "creepy, striking, sly, smart, unpredictable covers that make readers appreciate books as objects of art as well as literature."

     He's the one book designer whose work really lodges in the mind—it's been more than 20 years since I saw his treatment of Leslie Fielder's classic, Freaks, but it stayed with me, for obvious reasons. 

     Actually, Kidd is more than a rock star, since there are many rock stars, but there is, to my knowledge, only one famous book jacket designer, Chip Kidd.
     I had the chance to ask him Wednesday: why is that? Why should he be the only book designer of renown?

      "But there're a lot," he objected, after he finished laughing. "I don't know how to answer. There are so many terrific designers working today. There's definitely a second, a third generation." 

      We were talking because he's headlining the 10th annual Printers Ball this Saturday at the Hubbard Street Lofts, 1821. W. Hubbard, a celebration of books, posters, zines, cards and good design in general.
     The event runs from 4 to 9 p.m.  You can find a full schedule of the workshops, readings and performances by clicking here. Kidd speaks from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., and then signs his new book.
     And what will he talk about?

     "That's a really good question," he said. "I'll be in conversation with my dear friend Dana Arnett, a brilliant graphic designer and partner at VSA Partners. We'll probably just show and talk about recent and work and upcoming stuff." (According to the schedule, they'll discuss Go: Chip Kidd’s Guide to Design and to give us a preview of his forthcoming book, Judge This.)

    What else does Kidd have in the pipeline?

   "I've designed the new Haruki Murakami novel," he said, referring to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, out later this summer.  Kidd also did the cover for the Japanese surrealist's previous novel, the best-selling 1Q84. He tends to design best-selling books, or perhaps best-selling authors tend to demand him; Oliver Sacks has it written in his contract that Kidd must design his book jackets. Nice work if you can get it.
   "I've been lucky enough, for all intents and purposes to be working nostop for 27 years," said Kidd, who is on staff at Knopf. "I still get these wonderful opportunities to work on books, a lot of which are very popular."

      I asked him if he was worried about the rise of ebooks, pointing out that there are no book covers on a Kindle. 

     He laughed again.

     "No, I'm not worried about Kindles," he said. "If you look hard enough, you can find the cover. Everything that I work on gets scanned, and becomes either a cover or an icon on the screen, and you double click to make it bigger. It doesn't change the design process. It's still the same. I read the book and try to make something."

Supreme Court gets one right

  We are used to an unbroken series of small losses on the privacy front—cameras everywhere and data breaches and Facebook jamming advertisements into our lives in some new and troubling way. But Wednesday's Supreme Court ruling is a biggie when it comes to our future as citizens who have even a fig leaf of privacy to clutch in front of ourselves. My bosses asked me to react to it, which explains this rare midday blog post on our Early & Often political web site, which you should really be checking out regularly if you are not already.

     Making phone calls is perhaps the least significant thing that phones can do nowadays.

     My iPhone is a camera and a correspondence file, going back for years. It’s a digital recorder that has interviews with the mayor and assorted politicos on it, plus photos of my children and other personal data.

      I wouldn’t want a cop, pulling me over for a balky taillight, to be able to search it willy-nilly on a fishing expedition, looking for illegality, the same way he can glance into the back seat.

      The law was murky on this, and on Wednesday, in a major victory for our endangered privacy, United States Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant if they want to search your cellphone.

      “Modern cellphones are not just another technological convenience,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court. 

       “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life’… The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought. Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant.”

     To continue reading, click here.

Pssst: guns are dangerous

Bedroom in house about to burned at UL, Northbrook.

     Department of Homeland Security ...

     Gosh, that’s an awful name, isn’t it? It’s been around for almost a dozen years, and I’ve never gotten used to it.

     Anyway, Department of Homeland Security officials announced they’re seeing ...

     I’ll tell you why it’s such a bad name. Have you ever, ever, referred to this great country of ours, the United States of America, or America for short, or the U.S. for shorter, as your “homeland?” Have you ever said anything like, “I like to travel abroad, but it feels great to get back to my homeland”?

     Of course you haven’t. No American has. Pretend you’re writing a play, and I gave you the line, “We must fight for the homeland!” What kind of character would you create to utter that line? A proud Soviet officer? A jaded Nazi colonel? It sure wouldn’t be a U.S. Army Ranger who would say that.

     You wonder what kind of bureaucratic imbecile came up with the name. The same person, perhaps, who changed The Medill School of Journalism to “The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications” or who called the Bloomingdale Trail “The 606,” which will never be popular.

     Sorry. Department of Homeland Security officials say they’re seeing greater numbers of armed dopes trying to bring guns through airport security checkpoints, a reminder of what a Bad Idea a gun-carrying nation truly is, and how the sober, level-headed in our country — what few of us remain — do everyone a disservice by shrinking before NRA fanatics for whom packing heat represents patriotism at its zenith.

     I heard the news on the 7 a.m. CBS radio report at WBBM-AM. Like most nonzealots, I shrugged it off. Not as bad as those buffoons carrying their AK-47s into Targets to revel in the fact that they can.     
     Like most Americans, I’ve surrendered the fight. Our congressional leaders are bought and paid for by the NRA. Nothing to do but take cover and pray it passes.

     Which it may. This isn’t the first time Americans have armed up, a fact I was reminded of less than an hour later. On the 7:36 Metra into Union Station, I fled the bad news of today, losing myself in my book, “Brann and the Iconoclast,” Charles Carver’s 1956 biography of William Cowper Brann, the great 1890s poison-pen journalist, whose Waco-based Iconoclast newspaper gleefully scourged and scandalized.
     Then this paragraph, discussing nicknames given 1890s Waco, leapt out of the book and gave me a revivifying slap across the chops:
     "'Six-Shooter Depot' was a title bought with the blood of hot-tempered citizens who adjusted their differences according to a relaxed interpretation of the dueling code of the Old South. In the days of the cattle drives following the Civil War, Waco lay close to the Chisholm Trail, and the town supplied the drivers with recreation, which often involved high-spirited killing of one another. This buoyant mood lasted through the century - as long as guns were a usual item of wearing apparel."
     Well, well, happy days are here again!
     I don't say it much anymore, because nobody is listening who isn't at the same time hocking spit to prepare a formal reply, but I will, out of habit, restate the key, undeniable fact regarding the carrying of firearms:
     The moments when having a gun is useful are very, very few, even for police officers. Even for soldiers, one can serve years in combat zones and never fire a shot.
     The rest of the time, every second, the gun is a threat to the owner, no matter how well-trained, and a threat to whatever passersby the owner might, through mistake or anger, feel obligated to shoot. The romance of guns blurs this fact. It would be clearer with any other precaution: If I carried a welder's mask 24/7 so I'd be ready to look at the sun during an eclipse, you'd think I was an idiot. But at least I'm not going to drop the welder's mask and maim myself, which happens quite frequently with gun owners.
     The redeeming quality of Americans is that, while we have proven ourselves all too willing to embrace nutsoid self-flattering fiction, eventually the truth will dawn on us. Look at gay marriage. After decades of legal repression and social persecution, suddenly the basic fact - there's no reason gays shouldn't get married that isn't mere Bible-based bigotry - became clear, and society shifted. Some states (Helloooo, Indiana!) haven't read the memo yet. But they will.
     Ditto with guns. They're dangerous and don't help beyond whatever gild-the-lily ego boost owners get from swaggering around armed. Someday we'll figure that one out.

Notre Dame: Very Catholic and in Indiana

     Lucky is the parent who enjoys the process.
     While I could portray last year's exploration of potential colleges—14, count 'em, 14 campus visits, from Wash U, in St. Louis to Dartmouth in New Hampshire, quite a lot really—as an ordeal, the truth is I vastly enjoyed touring these historic campuses with my family.  And though Son No. 1 did decide to go to a school, Pomona College, that we hadn't visited together, an irony for certain, it was still fun and interesting to explore these places that I had heard about all my life.
     To be honest, the information sessions did tend to blend together, and our tour guides did eventually blur into one interchangeable coed, fiercely proud of her ability to walk backwards, dubbing all good things "awesome" and using "actually" as an every-other-sentence intensifier. 
      I will admit that setting about to do it again, a second summer in a row, for Son No. 2, a rising high school senior, was sort of like running a marathon, collapsing over the finish line, sprawling for a moment, then shakily getting up, turning 180 degrees and loping off to do another.
      But it must be done.
      So we found ourselves at the University of Notre Dame last Friday.

      Yes. I know. Not my choice. If I had two associations in my mind with the renown university that is near—though not in, let's get that straight—South Bend, Indiana, the first is football, and the second is Catholicism.  And while my younger boy did play for a season in junior high school, he has no great affection for the sport, nor has he shown an interest in religion in general, never mind Catholicism in particular. But it's a brave new world we're living in, and you can't very well expect religious sorts to adapt to modern life if we seculars aren't willing to at least see what they have to offer. 
      Besides, he is leaning toward business, and Notre Dame has a highly-regarded business school, not to mention a tight-knit buddy network of graduates, which couldn't hurt in the scrabble up the greased pole of life. Its Mendoza College of Business is so popular, according to Mary, the spritely young lady leading the information session, that, new this year, prospective students must declare when applying whether they are interested in attending and, if so, whether they are willing to still go to Notre Dame and study something else if they don't get into Mendoza. Perhaps finance, Mary suggested, evoking in my mind a grumbling limbo of in-but-not-quite Notre Dame students dwelling on the chill periphery of their heart's desire, trying to replicate the Mendoza experience with economics courses and what stray Mendoza class they can jam themselves into. To keep the business school from being overwhelmed, Notre Dame now limits yearly admissions to 550 students, meaning that more than a quarter of each incoming class is there for business.
     That seems reason enough to attend.

One of many redheads

      "You can be the Jew," I told my boy, half-jokingly. "They must need one." (Actually, they do. According the U.S. News and World Report, Notre Dame, among the nation's top 25 universities, has the fewest percentage Jewish students, while 82 percent of the student body is Catholic). Not to devolve to stereotypes, but I saw more carrot-haired young men in our three hours on campus than I've seen elsewhere over the past three years. "The Fighting Irish" is more than just a motto.
      Trying to get with the program, I told my lad that we'll happily show up once a year to take in a football game with him. I went to a Notre Dame game once, the only previous time I'd been on campus, and found it an epitome, a finely honed ritual of pomp and grandeur that you don't really have to care for football to appreciate. The extra tall Irish Guard, the golden helmets, the fan frenzy, I felt like I was in ancient Rome to watch a mock naval battle at the Colosseum, or an anthropologist transported back in time and permitted to observe the Mayans sacrifice atop their pyramids. It was an amazing thing to see.
      The only drawback was, the team didn't play half as well as the band, a perennial problem, I understand.
      My younger boy shot me a cold look and said, "The hell you will," or words to that effect. A newly-minted 17, he's ready to push back at the world, which at the moment consists pretty much of his mother and me. 
      After the end of a film that brought tears to my eyes, the tour guides introduced themselves and—rather charmingly—displayed their favorite dance moves, then let the visitors pick which one they'd follow. Most went with the various buff athletic sorts (one strapping young man spoke at length about his involvement in inter-mural sports, only belatedly remembering, after the next guide had begun talking, to mention that he is studying physics). My younger son chose a slight, bespectacled tour guide, Sam B., whom we later agreed was hands down the best guide we've had in more than a dozen schools, including such places as Princeton, Yale and Williams. A philosophy major with three years of Latin under his belt, he had none of the blathering bonhomie of most guides. Instead, he enthused about having had the chance to go to a monastery in France to study Gregorian chants.
      Given the reputation of football at Notre Dame, I thought both the info session and the tour showed an admirable restraint. Sam did point out Touchdown Jesus, the famed mural, and mentioned that students are allowed to buy game tickets, with the freshmen sitting nearer the end zone, advancing toward the 50 yard line as they rise toward being seniors (except for grad students, who are tucked back by the freshmen). Parents are also permitted to purchase tickets to one game a year, usually against Navy. I shot a glance at my younger boy, who seemed a bit abashed, as if suspecting for the first time that wanting to go to a game was not just a freakish desire of his own intrusive father, but might be a trait shared by other parents.
      When we got to Knute Rockne Memorial Gym, our guide observed that it was named for the famed coach. 
     "Known as the 'winningest coach in college football,'" Sam said, with almost a sneer, then added. "I don't like 'winningest'. That's not how gerunds work."      
      "Finally, a real person," said my older son, who gamely tagged along on the trip to wrangle our dog. 
      Notre Dame still has sex-segregated dorms, which isn't quite the blue sidewalks for boys and pink for girls at Bob Jones University, but seems a charming anachronism, though Sam pointed out that visiting hours are from 9 a.m. to midnight, which struck me as time aplenty for resourceful undergrads.
     The school also holds 140 masses a week, every dorm has one, though students are not compelled to go, a policy that they are perhaps more proud of than they should be in 2014. "I have many friends who are not Catholic," Sam revealed, trusting us to not judge him too harshly.
       Notre Dame's campus itself is new and deluxe-looking, well-manicured and obviously the result of a flowing cataract of grateful alumni cash (though, when the mother of the other student on our tour asked if we could see a dorm room, which are shared by up to six students, Sam told us they were "locked." It might be the first college in our experience which didn't show off a dorm—some schools start there and show several—and when I related this puzzlement to my neighbor, whose business works closely with colleges, he tossed his head back and laughed, explaining that the dorms at Notre Dame are notoriously "crappy and old" and that's why they don't let visitors see them. He added that Notre Dame has lost hot football prospects who quailed at the thought of living in the dorms). 
     I was surprised to learn that Notre Dame doesn't have a Greek system, which seems out-of-place considering how big football is there. 
     "Maybe the place is one vast frat," I mused. 
      We passed through the Jordan Hall of Science, opened in 2006, with cathedral-like stonework, including, on our way in, Madam Curie venerated with a full-body statue, like a saint, as she ought to be.  I noticed that the displays inside pointedly hail evolution, and the age of the earth, as if to say, "We might be religious, but we don't blinder ourselves with it."
     Walking out, I noticed Galileo given the same treatment, which seemed ironic, given his suppression by the Catholic church. 
     "Galileo," I whispered to my older son, pointing. "All is forgiven."
     "He recanted," he replied, dryly. 
     In my capacity as encouraging dad, I try to be supportive of my kids, and sang the official party line on Notre Dame: a fine school my boy would be lucky to get into. I kept that up, a breezy banter as we walked to the car. 
     Though my older son, acting as a sort of Greek chorus, did speak my hidden thoughts as we ambled across the tree-lined campus.
     "It's very, very Catholic," he said. "It's also located in the state of Indiana."
     Hard to argue that.