Happy New Year, and follow the damn law

    We're a nation of laws, when convenient.
    If you're a conservative, for instance, trying to spin your fear of Hispanics into something noble, then respect for the rule of law is a hugely convenient fig leaf to cover your shame. You can cry a river over the stern demands of legality as you explain, again, how you would love to relieve the 11 million immigrants who live in a twilight limbo, would leap to give them hope for a measure of dignity and protection, but gosh, they entered the country illegally, and so the law requires them to be punished forever.. 
    It doesn't. But that's their story and they're sticking to it. 
    Except when the law cuts the other way -- say voters, and courts, and public officials, and basic human decency conspire to let gays out of their own second class cellar, at least when it comes to matrimony, suddenly the rule of law is a mere vapor, a frost of nothing, a hint to be accepted or rejected on an individual whim. Suddenly heroic government clerks and wedding cake bakers are applauded when they take it upon themselves to decide what laws to enforce and what laws to ignore. Individual morals matter, not the law. 
    That's their argument and they're sticking to it. I would suggest it's hard to have it both ways. Though I imagine that being a hypocrite with the self-awareness of a toaster must ease the process.
     Robert L. Hinkle, federal judge in Florida, issued a ruling Thursday—and good for him, or his staff anyway, for working New Year's Day —that addresses the situation in Florida, a state whose ban on gay marriages was found unconstitutional, but where clerks were nevertheless balking at actually issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples. Hinkle's ruling, which you can read in full here, has a passage worth repeating:
    "History records no shortage of instances where state officials defied federal court orders on issues of federal constitutional law," the judge writes. "Happily, there are many more instances when responsible officials followed the law, like it or not. Reasonable people can debate whether the ruling in this case was correct and who it binds. There should be no debate, however, on the question whether a clerk of courts may follow the ruling. ... the Constitution requires the Clerk to issue such licenses." The judge ordered clerks statewide to do their jobs.
    The Florida ACLU called the order "a New Year's Day present from federal Judge Robert Hinkle."
    It's a present for everyone—maybe this is a contributing factor to those clerks dragging their feet.  Because any American citizen (or alien resident, for that matter) can get married in Florida. In fact, it's quicker for out-of-stater. In-state residents have a three-day waiting period and a funky training course they are encouraged to take. Out-of-staters can breeze right in without either. No residency requirement to get a marriage license in Florida, just a photo ID. The license will set you back $93.50. (If you want the full Florida marriage experience, go for the four-hour Florida Premarital Preparation Course designed to "increase your chances of creating a fulfilling, lasting marriage." I'm sure it's priceless and educational: traffic school meets Nathaniel West). The course costs $30, you can take it online, and they'll knock $32.50 off the cost of your license. Plus, if you're a Florida resident, taking the course entitles you to skip the three day waiting period to give residents a chance to decide if they really, really want to tie the knot. 
     The ceremony will set you back another $30. Plus they charge a buck for a copy of your marriage certificate, and you have to provide a stamped, self-addressed envelope to mail it to you.  
     Something to think about. The temperature in Miami was 84 degrees Thursday.
   

You need to do the gun math

 

Kent firing a Thompson submachine gun at the FBI range

    You don't want to rush to make hay from a tragedy, dipping your fingers into the fresh blood to underscore your political points.
      Besides, the poor woman who was shot to death by her 2-year-old in a Walmart in Idaho this week, well, really, do you really have to comment? It's clear, isn't it?
      Then I read that the mother was a nuclear researcher. Which just shows how this is not a matter of intelligence, but emotion. 
      Frankly, I view the argument about guns as purely a question of math.  If she had weighed the probability of a felon assaulting her in a way that let her get to the gun in her purse—in slow motion perhaps—versus the odds that her 2-year-old might dig into her purse when she wasn't looking, well, that isn't much of a puzzler either.
     I wrote this column nearly 20 years ago. It lays out my views on the subject in a way which even the staunchest gun rights advocate couldn't debate. Not that anybody's really debating this anymore.
     I've decided to include a few photos of myself and the boys when we were guests of the FBI at its training range in North Chicago, just to show that we're not anti-gun fanatics. We shot guns, we had fun, though we also left the guns with the FBI. where they belong and didn't start toting them around with us. Because guns are dangerous—that's seems really obvious, stated plainly. But look how many people miss this, to their sorrow.
     As a coda, after this column was published, there were two unexpected reactions. First, a top manager at the newspaper called me into his office and yelled at me. See if you can guess what he yelled at me for. And second, I received more complaints about this column than any other I've ever written in my entire career—thousands of angry emails—but not from gun rights advocates, or anything having to do with guns. Can you guess what set people off? I'll tell you after the story.

     The goal was to buy some aspirin. Nothing expensive — aspirin is aspirin. So I went for the generic store brand. But Walgreens has two types: "Extra Strength" 500 mg tablets, and regular, 325 mg tablets. I reached for the 500 mg size. I like to think of myself as an Extra Strength kind of guy.

A liberal takes aim.

     Then I stopped. The Extra Strength were $4.99 for 100 tablets. The regular, $3.99 for 300 tablets. I realized, to my horror, that I would have to do the math. I squinted hard. I held my breath. I let out a loud "Nnnnnnnn" sound that, I'm sure, attracted the attention of store clerks.
     One hundred tablets of 500 mg meant 50 two-pill doses of 1000 mg each; 300 regular tablets meant 100 three-pill doses at 975 mg each. I was about to pay a dollar more for approximately half the amount of aspirin. I grabbed the regular.
     In a world where people stopped to do the math, Walgreens wouldn't sell many bottles of Extra Strength at that price.
     But people don't do the math, as a rule, instead basing their decisions on a sexy label, such as "Extra Strength."
     The problem is not limited to cost-comparison shopping. I was reminded of this while reading Michael O'Neill's letter to the Sun-Times this week. O'Neill says that he wants the legal right to carry a gun to protect himself. He points out that 38 states already allow residents to carry firearms, and reassures us that he has "no criminal intentions."
     There is sound math behind O'Neill's reasoning. A gun's usefulness is directly proportional to how available it is. If my handgun is locked in an attic safe, the range of instances where it could do me any good is severely limited. Should polite felons remember to phone first and say they're on their way over to get me, then I'd be ready.
      Otherwise, the gun is almost useless. If, however, that gun is loaded and on my hip, the set of circumstances when it might come in handy is greatly expanded -- unarmed felons who demand their money before hitting me over the head with a brick are in trouble, for instance.
     So at first glance, the answer is simple: O'Neill is right. We should all carry guns. There is, however, more math to do. Like usefulness, the danger of a handgun is also directly tied to its availability. Carrying a gun around increases the chances that I will shoot myself in the foot while drawing it to scare off the newspaper boy, or that I may decide to rakishly thrust the gun into my belt — the way they do in the movies! — and accidentally unman myself.
     Conversely, locking the gun in a safe in the attic lessens the chance that your little Timmy, whom you carefully trained in firearms safety, is going to have his head blown off by little Billy, the dim neighbor child who discovers your chrome plated .38 Special in the bureau drawer.

Ross tries the Glock.

     To me, the decision is a no-brainer, not based on the Constitution, but on probability. Police carry guns because they can reasonably expect to encounter crime during an average day. I am not a policeman. Even if I thought I'd be attacked once a year, I wouldn't carry a gun. Because the slim chance it would help me during the few seconds of the attack wouldn't balance out against the risk the gun would pose to me and my family every moment of the rest of the year.
     I'm not anti-gun. Like any little boy, I love guns. I have fired handguns at target ranges and enjoyed doing so. But I wouldn't own one, for the same reason I wouldn't own a Bengal tiger. The pleasure of having a big cat padding around the apartment just doesn't outweigh the risk that — no matter how tame — the tiger would one day decide it wants to taste the baby.
     Maybe that makes me a coward.
     I wouldn't ride a motorcycle either. I understand that they are a lot of fun, that there is a close-knit community of motorcyclists, that a Harley-Davidson is a work of art whose engine sounds like God Almighty clearing his throat.

     But I also know that the nurses at Presbyterian-St. Luke's call them "donorcycles" and the answer to my favorite party trivia question — "Why are there more heart transplants in summer than in winter?" — is, "Because people ride motorcycles in summer, and that's where donated hearts come from."     
     In life, people put their chips down on the odds they like. I've placed my bets on a boring, work-a-daddy four-door sedan with an airbag and a shoulder belt. And any felon who asks for my wallet can have it -- to tell you the truth, even if I had a gun, I like to think I wouldn't shoot somebody over $17 and a few credit cards anyway.    

     But a lot of people would. A lot of people are so eager to shoot somebody that they want to carry around loaded weapons. Balancing the hazy, hard-to-figure risk of popping some mischievous teen or hapless motorist or themselves against the crystal-clear, ingrained movie fantasy of Clint Eastwood gunning down bad guys, they chose the fantasy.

     Math is tough, after all, and not that much fun.

     —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 14, 1996.

     What upset Larry Green about the above was that it mentioned Walgreens, a big advertiser, even in a neutral, discussing-the-price-of-aspirin fashion. They hadn't even complained; he was just terrified they might and, if I recall, the head of advertising had complained. I tried to explain my philosophy that specificity leads to more interesting writing. Didn't get me very far, but I'm still here, and he's long gone.
     And the line about the donorcycles enraged the top flack at the American Motorcyclist Association, the group that lobbies to allow motorcycle riders to not wear helmets, who wrote a deceptive post fingering me as the enemy of freedom and directing their membership to deluge me with hate emails, which they did. For years afterward, if I got an email saying simply, "You're an asshole," I would write back, "Don't believe everything your motorcycle masters tell you." 

An encounter at the cookie counter

      There must be something cruel about what I do, I realized, standing in the parking lot of Joe Caputo and Son's Fruit Market on Dundee Wednesday afternoon, wondering if I should hurry back inside and take a picture of the lady I had just met. She'd make a good photo: her brightly rouged cheeks, her deeply lined face, that festive red bow on her hat. I would use it to illustrate the piece I'm about to write. 
      But ... I thought, pausing. She'd also be identified, and maybe that would be a bad thing. I'd have to stay my hand, a little, in describing what had just happened, and maybe the sense of it would be lost. 
      Not that I thought poorly of her. Just the opposite.  I liked her, almost immediately, after she sidled up to me at the cookie counter at Caputo's—have you had Caputo's cookies? Italian. The best. We were going to a party, and my wife had instructed me. Go to Caputo's and get a box of cookies. Not that I needed persuading. I'm always looking for something to do at parties, and now I had something to do: eat the cookies we brought.
     So now I was picking them out, carefully, with my tastes in mind, and this lady bubbles up, and expressed interest in the cookies. Which ones were good?  Could I help her?
      I told her I was partial to the amoretti—almond. But there was the chocolate Nutella. Oh no, too heavy, she said. Then the sesame. 
     "They have a purity, " I explained. 
      She was so friendly, I introduced myself—"I'm Neil Steinberg!"—and she introduced herself, and I told her I had gone out with a girl in college with that exact name; not her of course, because she was 10 years older than me, if not 20. She also lives in Northbrook, and taught Sunday school, and told me some details of her life, then we turned and looked at the case and talked about cookies some more, her shoulder just touching mine. She said how she is alone at New Year's, but was going to have a spree anyway, gesturing back to the bottle of white wine in her cart, and now these special cookies. She started to make her selections.
     "I'll leave her in your hands," I said to the clerk, as I made my farewell. At the line, I thought, "I wonder...?" I waited, and paid for my items, and decided that, if I had understood things correctly, she'd be in the line next to mine. I looked, and there she was.
     "How are you!?" she said brightly.
     "Same as five minutes ago!" I answered, perhaps a little abruptly, and looked at her. All that make-up. The red circles on her cheeks. A bright red bow. How hard it is, I realized, to face the world alone, to spend New Year's alone. And how brave to make yourself up anyway, at 65 or 70, and go out, and chat up young men, well, younger men anyway, at the cookie counter at Caputo's. 
    I reached the parking lot, and put the groceries in the back seat, except for the separate little white bag of auxiliary cookies that were never going to make it to the party. Maybe I should have gone back and gotten her picture. Maybe she would have loved that. She seemed the sort, ready for anything. But one must tread lightly on the lives of others, and I made a judgment call, and got into the car, and snaked my hand into the bag, and drove away, thinking that I was going to try to hold onto a little of what that lady was projecting, the joyousness, in the face of what must be a lonely reality. 
      Have a happy New Year. Whatever situation you are in, put your best face forward, embrace those you've got, and if you haven't anybody, reach out to others until you do, make conversation and be friendly. It'll all work out, and if it doesn't well, you tried your very best, and that's a kind of success too. 
   

USA's 2014 Report Card: Good work, could do better

     The United States leads the world in production of websites, prisoners, sunflower seeds and pricy health care.

     Chicago, I was surprised to learn, is the third largest urban area in the world, with a population of 6.8 million, right behind New York and Tokyo. Not a conventional way of viewing the city, but well, we’ll get to that.

     All of this learned from pawing through a fascinating thin volume, “Pocket World in Figures: 2015 Edition” which The Economist magazine sent as Christmas thanks for ponying up the big bucks and subscribing (worse, I bought two subscriptions, one for me, one for my son at college in California. He insisted).

     New Year’s Eve being upon us, rather than rehash stories that weren’t that interesting to begin with, but did occur during the past 12 months, I thought we could join hands and graze through this little book. So let’s take a moment to see our city and nation as they appear, not close up to our jaundiced eyes but from afar, to those taking in the whole big blue marble at one glance.

     The news, statistically, is surprisingly good. The United States is the biggest economy in the world by far: $16 trillion, almost exactly twice that of second-place China. We export 20 percent more than China, second only to the European Union. But we do have to borrow a lot to keep going: $440 billion deficit, more than the next six nations: the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Canada, France and Brazil — combined. Though it could be worse: Our government debt is equal to our nation’s gross domestic product for 2013; in Japan, it’s more than twice the GDP...

     To continue reading, click here.

WOW! You'll be SHOCKED at how gullible people are....

   

     That was fast. 
     2014, as I'm sure you know, runs out tomorrow, and ....
     I mean, I hope you know. 
     It would be scary if you didn't know, if you were just learning it now. "What? The year is OVER? But I was just starting to get used to it..." 
     Sorry.
     There are only three things a journalist is supposed to do during the week between Christmas and New Year's: 1) Remember all the celebrities who died in the past 12 months. 2) Review all the news stories during the same period; 3) Talk about parties and bars and resolutions and weight loss. 
     I've done all those things, in years past.
     I'm kinda tired of them.
     Maybe you are too. The frenzy over Robin Williams' suicide was excessive last August. "The Full Diana" as I call such media swoons. Not to take anything away from the man, but I can't see revisiting it again in honor of the calendar clicking. He's still dead. We get it. Ditto for the news, much of which wasn't worth noting once, while it was happening, never mind being reguritated months later. As for parties and bars and weight loss, well, you're on your own. 
     I could give you the State of the Blog report. That's what I did exactly one year ago, on Dec. 30, 2013. The blog has a history! Cool. Last year's summary had a certain tone of weary resolve that I'd be hard pressed to duplicate. What's the line from Bruce Springsteen's "Straight Time?" "Sooner or later it just becomes your life."
     In the last six months of 2013. the blog was averaging 918 hits a day; the high month was 32,000 visits. 
     We're doing much better now, averaging about 1200 hits a day, and our high was 43,000 in October, nosing toward my goal of 50,000 visits a month, which I've abitrarily determined represents Success of Some Kind. An advance of about a third, not to go all numerical on you, but the Internet has made us measure our value in clicks.
     Though candor demands I point out that, based on my spam filter, a certain number of those clicks—5 percent, 10 percent?—must be robot spiders, which search the web for, well, whatever robot spiders are looking for. 
     There's other good news. Some of my posts have done very well. "Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery" posted Feb. 16 got nearly 10,000 hits, which I fancy is due to its being a sharp piece of satire. I sold enough of the blog's poster to break even. The new blog poster is designed and being produced at Hatch Show Print in Nashville, and will be sold here soon. (The old one is going to be taken off sale, so if you want one, order it now or wait to buy it at a premium Leslie Hindman's in 20 years).  
    2014 was the first full calendar year where I wrote this blog, every goddamn day, without fail. Most days are pretty smooth. I've felt a little, umm, spent a few times, but not so much that I'd contemplate quitting the thing, at least not yet. Even if half of the audience is random clicks in China and automatic spambots looking to post their Viagra come-ons, that's still 600 people a day reading. Not mass market, but not bad. Enough to keep plodding forward, and hoping for some miracle.
     The title of this post is a nod at the way the Internet has become crowded with the journalistic equivalent of carnival come-ons, meaningless lists, cheap tricks to get you to click on something, providing very little content. Some recycled racy photos, a half-witted caption of some sort. It must work because there's enough of it. I'm hoping there is an audience for something else, something a bit more human and considered. I might be wrong here. We'll see. 
      The advertising is certainly encouraging. Thanks again to Marc Schulman of Eli's Cheesecake, and Mike Pilkington at Bridgeport Coffee. Thanks as well to past advertisers, Lise Schleicher, at BasketWorks, and the folks at the University of Chicago Press. And welcome to Chicago Mailing Tube, which will be advertising as soon as they get the art to me. 
     And of course thanks to you. It means a lot to me that you take the time to read. That's something. More. That's everything.
   

"The purest of human pleasures"

     Saturday it hit 50 degrees, and there was only one thing I really wanted to do: go walking in the Chicago Botanic Garden. Because really, when will we have another 50 degree day to be outside in? Next March? Could be.
    My wife and have been members of the Botanic Garden for years. We go every week or two and never get tired of visiting. It's always different, always new and interesting, as you don't see it all during any one visit, and the seasons are always cycling through, and the staff is always planting new things. I've never been bored there, or sorry I came. Not once. Even in February, when its cold, and snow-covered, the place has an empty, white, severe beauty.
    Plus there's exercise, people-watching, exhibits, a lovely little shop, and of course conversation. On Sunday, we got to talking, as we do, and my wife mentioned that, once the boys are both away at school, we'll have more time to travel more, and should think about visiting other botanic gardens. 
     I had the exact same thought, over the summer, when we visited Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, on Kent's college tour, and spent an hour or two in Sarah P. Duke Gardens, 55 acres of plants and lakes and flower beds, right on campus, which was also gorgeous, but in different ways: being Southern, there were unfamiliar or unexpected plants: a field of bamboo, for instance (which, for some reason, visitors had scrawled over. Nowhere else in the garden; just the bamboo grove. A puzzlement).
     Exploring Duke, I had thought, "I love the Chicago Botanic Garden, but it's a nice change of pace to poke around somewhere else. We should probably seek them out." Then I pulled back from that thought, almost frightened. There seemed something terribly defeated and aged about that. Some men travel the world, creating art, making fortunes, conducting matters of great importance and urgency. Me, I'll be traveling to parks, gawping at plants.
     Or, even worse, hoping to. 
     Well, too late for regret now. Nothing to be guilty about—it isn't just me. "God Almighty first planted a garden," wrote Francis Bacon in 1625. "It is the purest of human pleasures." 
    So with both the Divine and Francis Bacon on my side, if wandering gardens is what I like, then wander gardens and the hell with how it looks. If people can put on furry animal suits and attend conventions, then what shame can there be in going to collected nature? You have to accept things as they are. I could never figure out how to become an International Man of Mystery, and it's a little late now. To be honest, I'm not even sure how to go about finding other worthwhile botanic gardens around the country. I plugged "Most Beautiful Gardens in North America" into Google and got a top 10 list from USA Today. Duke wasn't even on it (but the Chicago Botanic Garden was!)  It's kind of hard to tell from the photos on that list. The garden in Vancouver seemed exceptional but that's about it. 
     What do you say, Hive? Any insights? What are your favorite places, garden-wise? Or am I the first person to consider such a fool's errand, to travel places just to go to their noted gardens? There's a fresh new year, only a few days away, and we need to come up with plans to help make the idea of a whole entire year to get through at least a little palatable.  

"Perhaps it would be wise/ Not to carp or criticize"

     Talk about lucky.
     My older boy came home from college humming Gilbert & Sullivan tunes. His circle, it seems, passes the lugubrious California evenings by singing patter songs. 
     Yes, I know. 
     About the exact moment I was processing this development, I read Hedy Weiss' rapturous review of The Hypocrites joyful twist on Gilbert & Sullivan at the Den Theater Mainstage, 1329 N. Milwaukee in Wicker Park. 
     "A campy romp," she writes. "Some magic is at work."
     Not my normal fare—my tastes run more toward "Medea" than campy magic. But I am nothing if not an indulgent dad.  
     "It seems a little unconventional," I warned my boy, who, despite his youth or, rather, because of it, can be very conventional. He nevertheless agreed.
     The Hypocrites are doing three G & S productions in repertory, "H.M.S. Pinafore," which Hedy called "a loony pajama party," "The Mikado," and the "Pirates of Penzance," which we caught Saturday night.  

     Entering the small theater, tucked behind a hip coffee shop/bar, the audience is given two choices: conventional seating, in rows, for older people, fuddy duddies, and the timid, and "The Promenade," meaning you can sit anywhere you like: on stage, a long rectangular dock, or any of the substages, consisting of a pair of picnic tables with wading pools atop them, and a sort of a lifeguard tower. Most adults, I noticed, went for the chairs, while the children scattered about, sitting on coolers, tossing the beach balls rolling everywhere.  I sat by one of the wading pools—empty, some audience members sat in the pools, and cast members eventually performed there.  My older boy gamely joined me, my wife and younger son stayed in the seats.
      I loved being in the midst of the action, with singers sweeping past, performing a profusion of instruments, seemingly chosen for their oddness: an accordion, a banjo, a musical saw, a washboard, a snare drum, a flute, a ukulele, a mandolin, a fiddle. It was half English dance hall, half Jimmy Buffett beach party.
     The subtitle of the 1879 Gilbert & Sullivan operetta is "The Slave of Duty" and what better way to enhance the Victorian duo's piercing of English conventional notions of place and obligation than turn their operetta into a freeform carnival with a constantly shifting audience.
     We were instructed to "travel where and when you want during the show," and the actors would shoo us away with a tap or a point if they needed to be where we were sitting. It was part of the fun to watch everybody moving around, getting out of their way, taking up new positions. Some kids must have been in a dozen different places during the 80 minutes, including perched on a cooler positioned smack center of the stage.  

     Despite the near chaos, the songs were well-sung, the instruments skillfully played: it wouldn't have worked if certain standards hadn't been maintained.
     "The Pirates of Penzance" is not exactly "Mousetrap" — following the plot is not particularly important. All you need is to gather the rough outlines of a typically daft tale involving good-hearted pirates led by a Pirate King, and their good-hearted young indentured shipmate who might, or might not, be bound to them until he's 83. There is a crone to avoid,  maidens to marry, or not marry, and the famous "I am the very model of a modern Major-General" patter song. 
     As regular readers know, I am not a person given to happiness, and am used to what musical theater I partake being performed on the grand stage of the Lyric, often in German. But the Hypocrites' "Pirates of Penzance" is just delightful: well-sung by a nimble cast that manages to be energetic and improvisational without seeming amateurish.
     Afterward, the family repaired to Antique Taco up the street (fabulous; go) for an early dinner. The boys—a pair of laid-back teens, remember—were cool to the Hypocrites' production, put off by the boisterous fun and lack of D'Oyly Carte Opera Company polish which they mistake for quality. But my wife and I loved it: what's the point of theater if you don't break the rules? We promised ourselves to go back, sans fils. Though I would suggest that if you have any pre-teen kids you need to introduce to the joys of live theater, you can't go wrong here. You could almost see the gears turning in the youngsters' heads: finally, finally they were in a space where the rules could be tested and broken, which is what Gilbert and Sullivan were all about. 
     The rep productions run until Feb. 7. Tickets for the promenade (do it!) are $28, for a seat, $36. You can find the schedule and buy tickets by clicking here.