Please stand by....

     This being my own personal blog, I've tried to tread lightly and be respectful when it comes to matters involving the mothership, the Chicago Sun-Times. They pay my salary, and so I try to be dutiful about not simply posting my entire columns here, but instead sharing only a portion, then linking back to the paper's website for the rest. Clicks are important, in setting advertising rates and such, and I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me.
     Which has worked fine, up to now. I feel bad asking readers to click on a new site 1/4 way into a post, but nobody has ever complained, which I take as an endorsement. 
      The first glitch occurred yesterday when the paper, which is in the midst of jazzing up its computer site, somehow cut many of the links that I've inserted to columns on the Sun-Times web site. Some work, but if you click on others, you are routed to the Sun-Times home page but not the article you're trying to finish. 
      My apologies to all readers who have been frustrated—were this problem in my own hands, I'd be moving heaven and earth to fix it. But it's not, so all I can do is wait, like you. My bosses at the paper assure me it's going to be remedied soon, and I am passing that assurance on to you. Both the Sun-Times and I value our readers—that's why the paper is trying to build a better on-line experience, and why I'm pushing to have those links back up as soon as possible—and appreciate your bearing with us during these awkward moments. Thanks again for patronizing my blog, and everything should be back to normal shortly.  

                                                                                  The management

"Will you be taking bread service with us today?"

Bread service at Shaw's Crab House

     
    "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" asked the maitre d', a young lady I had never seen before.
     My immediate reaction was to burst out laughing, but I manfully suppressed that.
     My college pal Cate and I were in Shaw's Crab House last week, sitting at a small table in the bar, where we have met for lunch for the past ... gee ... several decades. Since the woman offering us "bread service" (where's that term derived from? Table service? Funeral service?) was doodling on her desktop in kindergarten. 
     Shaw's is off my usual round of restaurants. A few blocks too far from the office, and I'd have to walk past Harry Caray's to get there, and why would I do that? Harry's is cheaper, and the food is better, and they somehow manage to retain their staff, thus it's possible to get to know them. I've been going to Shaw's since it opened, but still don't know anybody there and never did, nor do they know me, which takes the blush off a place.
    "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" 
    Maybe its the carbs, Cate suggested, during our immediate post-query analysis of this puff of pomposity. Maybe so many diners are now leaving their bread untouched that it seems a waste to just bring it out then throw it a way. 
     Pretty to think so. I suspected economy. Bread costs money, money not spent if you don't bring it, just as some restaurants have stopped automatically bringing water, to save themselves the expense of washing the glass. 
     Still. A salad at Shaw's is nineteen bucks. They should just bring the damn bread. "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" while pinning the needle on the orchid-sniffing feyness meter, is only the polite form of "We're withholding your bread basket unless you specifically request it," which is just wrong. What's next? The napkin menu? "Could I interest you in a fine bleached white 300 thread count Egyptian cotton?" 
     I think that's what makes the phrase so noxious. A strange marriage of thrift and pretense. Usually, elegance involves luxury. "Would you care for some caviar?" To try to nudge something that heretofore standard into that camp—"And will you be purchasing full restroom access this evening?"—it becomes a ludicrous insult. 
     What I actually said was, "I was thinking about that bread this morning." Which is true. Always really good bread at Shaw's, though we never had to beg for it before. They brought us a pair of fresh cheese-topped rolls and few flats of crackers topped with some pungent seed, anise or fennel or some such thing, that were quite good.
     Somebody ought to rate downtown restaurants by their bread. Petterino's has the best: a warm glazed Parker House roll, with a slice or two of complicated black Russian bread thrown in. Gene & Georgetti bread is your basic French bread baked that morning at D'Amato's. Cold, a little dry on the outside, which is just as well because you don't want to waste your appetite on bread there anyway. Harry's has an Italian bread, warm, worth the indulgence. They never ask you if you want it. Of course you want it. The challenge is not to order seconds.
     "Will you be taking bread service with us today?" The right answer, I see now, is "I don't know, will you be giving it?"   

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Well, this is an inviting bed, scattered with pillows. 
     Only it's not a bed, technically.
     A bit busy, perhaps, just right to catch a brief nap.
     But don't, because ... well that would give it away. You'd get into trouble. 
     Where is this place? It isn't my bedroom—my taste is better than that. It isn't a bedroom at all. It's ... where?
      The correct guess—and heck, it'll probably be King Dale, he's won it three times already—will get a bag of very tasty Bridgeport Bubbly Creek Coffee (I'm going to have to stop giving it away, to make sure there's plenty left for me).
      Oh wait, I said I'd tell you about its unusual name. Kinda late to open that can of, er, coffee. Next week. Good luck. 

      Clark St. nailed it below. If you want to know the gory details:

Japan bows to North Korea

     Where does one begin?
     On the plus side, it isn’t America groveling at the feet of a tin-pot North Korean dictator, afraid that somebody is going to ... do what? Scramble the Fandango website? Set off a stink bomb at a multiplex? Does anybody really fear that North Korean agents are going to mow us down if we buy tubs of buttered popcorn and go to see Seth Rogen and James Franco’s “The Interview,” the now-shelved bromance comedy depicting the assassination of Kim Jong-Un? Heck, after the slaughter at Aurora, Colorado, we worry about that risk already, when we see any movie, tempting fate that our matinee will be the one where some deranged gunman or al-Qaida wannabe decides to go out in a blaze of glory. How can we then cower in front of hypothetical North Korean henchmen? Heck guys, get in line. Fear is a big tent, there’s plenty of room for you.
     My bet is whatever information Sony hackers dug up is so embarrassing that all they had to do was dangle it and the studio began inviting theater chains to drop the film. Although I can’t imagine what: The terabytes of emails already leaked suggest Hollywood studio executives are vain, insecure backbiters complaining bitterly about stars and each other. Stop the presses.
     No, this isn’t the American people who failed. We’d have formed block-long lines to see the film, whooping and grinning at the cameras, delighted to waggle our middle fingers at this third-generation madman.
     Rather, it was Sony, the Japanese conglomerate, that quailed, pulling the plug on the film’s Christmas Day release. Which in a selfish sense, I was glad about, because given the pressure from North Korea, suddenly seeing a Seth Rogen movie shifted from a lapse in taste to a patriotic duty. I would have been obligated to attend, only wishing the North Koreans would also command all Americans not to drink Jack Daniels.
     I should add that I’ve never seen Seth Rogen movies. They could be sublime. They could be “La Dolce Vita.” But I doubt it.

     There is a delicious irony to Sony spiking the film. Because the Japanese have a long history of hating the Koreans. One enters a fraught zone when making sweeping generalizations. But I feel on firm ground, with enough experience to safely say that, as much as Americans like to castigate ourselves as perennial bigots, and rightly so, as Native American killers and black enslavers, the Japanese are our equals, also world-class haters, but unlike us, they can't come to grips with their history of brutal prejudice and gut-churning atrocity. 

     Whatever bad you have to say about America — and some seem to vomit forth a geyser of condemnation on command — our faults are no big secret. Whenever I wish we could go back to the heroic George Washington chopping down the cherry tree version of American history I was taught in first grade by Mrs. Farmer, I think of the Japanese frantically trying to sanitize their history, an effort that intensified since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took the leash off ultranationalists, now going after journalists and historians for daring suggest that the Japanese did horrible things during World War II which — spoiler alert! — they did.
     I have only room for one story.
     My parents hosted a Japanese college student to fill the hole that we kids left by skipping off to college. The teen was supposed to join other Japanese students taking a trip to Niagara Falls, which became a weepy crisis for her - though born in Japan, her great-grandparents were ethnic Korean, so she had a special passport. She was afraid her classmates would see it while crossing into Canada, afraid of the undying shame it would cause her. She never went.
     Pause to think about that. Her great-grandparents. It's as if some Chicagoans had "shanty Irish" stamped on their passports.
     'The Interview" is one lost battle in a long war, a war we'll win, because the truth will out, eventually. This is what makes Kim Jong-Un such a wonderful, transgressive object of ridicule, because we absolutely shouldn't laugh at him. The horror he, and his father and grandfather before him, inflicted on North Korea and the world is real, even if we'll never see it, never grasp the millions of Koreans who starved to death. No black and white newsreels to carve the horrors into memory. Not to forget the 36,000 Americans killed in the war his grandfather started.
     I like to think Sony has a plan, to stream the movie on Netflix, or whatever. Do it on the 4th of July. Because capitulation is the gift that keeps on giving, and every nut with a grudge will be inspired by this.

Merry Christmas, whoever you are.

     This is the season when Christmas cards flow in, often containing the square of folded paper that is the traditional Christmas form letter, detailing the doings of the card-sending family. It's amazing that such letters have survived into the Facebook era, which is basically one continual year-long Christmas letter.  Our family never sent such letters ourselves — too disorganized, too self-aware, too concerned about foisting the minutia of our lives upon uninterested others — but one Christmas I did decide to take a whack at what our letter might be like, if we wrote one, which we don't.

Dear Close Friend:

     Where has the year gone? Can it already be mid-December and time for my chatty-yet-impersonal, guarded-yet-revealing, folded-up-and-tucked-into-a-pre-printed, computer-addressed, won't-offend-anybody-of-any-faith "holiday" card? Yes, indeed it is.    
     So a great, big Steinberg family "hello" to you and your household, from me and my household and of course our cats here on Pine Grove Avenue.

     And what a "year" it has been! We were all shaken by the incident last March, but have adjusted ourselves very well to our new manner of living and will get by best we can.

     But enough of vaguely worded personal calamity. On to the thinly disguised bragging! Enclosed are photos, scanned through our color printer and cut out (actual photographs are so expensive, particularly when you send them to 160 close friends) from our trips to Tiki, Questamel, Rustania, Ishmaelia and Outer Borgundi. As you can see, we had a lot of fun! And went to many great places!! Places that you could never dream of going!!! Ever!!!!

     Before I forget, some news about people you've never met, don't know and couldn't care less about: Michael is fine; Clara learned to play the flute and hopes someday to do it well; Aunt Prang is recuperating since her accident; Tad and Mindy and Wendell and Steve also send their regards, as do Hap, Molly, The Big W, Po-Po and Mr. Hester.

     On the family front, everyone is fine in the Steinberg

household. My wife has taken up artwork, covering page after page with distinctive, tiny, intricate drawings made up of circles and squares and death's heads. I'm just so proud of her.

     Our "boys" are of course a year older and cuter than ever. Little Krandel turned 2 last June and has mastered the art of climbing to very high places, closing his eyes and pitching blindly forward, counting on good old "Daddy" to drop whatever he's doing and lunge across the room to catch him. What a little dickens! I haven't missed yet, though I once had to drop a tray of heirloom glassware and leap over an ottoman to grab him six inches from the hardwood floor.

     His brother, Rosensweig, is 4 but can already punch his dad hard enough to leave him doubled over, eyes tearing and gasping for breath. I call him "My Little Jack Dempsey," and he has the same fierce vigor and sense of adventure as the young Manassas Mauler.

     The cats, whose photo I am enclosing, dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus, are as affectionate as ever. It seems the wife or I can't sit down, particularly when lightly dressed or holding a cup of hot coffee, without having one or both leap into our laps and dig their needle-like claws into us. We just love them, even when they scamper yowling across our faces at 5 a.m.

     Work is, as always, fun and stimulating, and I truly feel, as my boss is constantly reminding me, "lucky to have a job at all."

     And that's about it. I hope you don't mind the impersonality of a form letter, but I'm so very busy, doing so many important things, and have such a vast number of dear, close, personal friends such as yourself, well, I know that you understand. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or whatever it is you celebrate, whoever you are. I love you and miss you and would be thinking of you, if only I had the time.

                                                Yours in holiday cheer,

                                                The Steinbergs

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 14, 1999

Show the damn movie

    
    UPDATE: Late Wednesday Sony Pictures cancelled the opening of "The Interview." So file the below under "Bravado, Useless Examples of." Although the point stands. Security is a real concern, but so is the ability of repressive regimes to drag us toward their worlds where security trumps all. It's a surrender on our parts.

     I've never seen "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" or "Knocked Up." I somehow missed "Superbad," and "Pineapple Express," and all the other other Seth Rogen movies. I didn't see a single one, unless you count "Kung Fu Panda" which I do recall catching on TV, though he only did a voice for that, so I'm not sure that counts.
     Still, I am planning to attend "The Interview" when it opens Christmas Day, provided that it does open, that American movie chains don't really cave in, as they seemed to do on Wednesday, bowing to one anonymous threat, announcing they will refuse to show the movie because Kim Jong Un doesn't like it. 
    The Hollywood Reporter is saying that the top five movie chains are refusing to show the comedy, whose plot revolves around a CIA attempt to assassinate the North Korean dictator. Sony Pictures, which produced the movie, told theater owners to go ahead and drop the movie, if they wish, and Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas and Cineplex Entertainment did exactly that. 
      All due to a fractured warning that does seem translated from the Korean.  
       “Keep yourself distant from the places at that time," something called Guardians of Peace intoned, referring to screenings of "The Interview." "If your house  is nearby, you’d better leave.”
     It was like the fist-shaking monologue of a bad movie villain: 
     "Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001.”
      Well, we won't be seeing it if we let ourselves be threatened, will we? And the world is already full of fear, apparently. On one level, I understand that. Nobody wants to be a victim. The news is filled with atrocities lately. Remembering the Aurora, Colorado "Dark Knight" slaughter, why volunteer to be cannon fodder for some international vengeance bloodletting masterminded by a humor-deficient Korean madman?
     I can think of a good reason. What kind of precedent is this setting? Making a threat on-line is the easiest thing in the world. If this works, won't any halfway edgy creative work that offends anyone anywhere then be fair game? Cower now, and we'll spend our lives cowering. I'd say the theater chains should lay in some extra security, show the damn movie, and patrons should show up to demonstrate that we are still America, still a free country, where satire dares to show its face. I know I'll be there.
    Oh, and I did see that James Franco movie, "127 Hours." Quite good. That gives me hope that seeing "The Interview" won't be purely an excercising in preserving free speech. 

"llinois orchards are apple shy"

     Well, THAT was easy!
     The way it usually works is that a questions comes to mind — such as "Hey, what happened to the apples this year?" The apple tree in our backyard didn't offer up a single Golden Delicious. Unless the squirrels (boo, hiss) stripped all the apples before I could even see them. But that's doubtful.
     So the question forms, then I dig, in this case probably call the Chicago Botanic Garden, whatever National Apple Board is out there, find the truth, write it, serve it up here piping hot.
      But the apple question, well, it formed, but never got answered. Other stories crowded it out. I dropped the ball, err, the apple. I forgot.
      Then Edie and I were walking Sunday in the Botanic Garden, taking advantage of the mild weather. The Botanic Garden can be surprisingly beautiful in winter, even without its flowers, offering up a muted palette of soft browns and quiet grays. We were strolling through the apple orchard, and came upon this sign. 

      There we go. I should point out that the apple harvest for the nation as a whole was up this year. Washington State is the center of American apple production,  harvesting more than 100 times the apples that Illinois does, and there the weather in 2014 was just fine.  The apple crop was depressed in the Upper Midwest, and even then, other states fared better than Illinois, which is fourth, apple wise, after Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. 
     Okay, better end it here, before this turns into another grapefruit story. I was certainly interested in that, and if you aren't, my apologies, and we'll try this again tomorrow.