A visit from the Dog Police

     "Where's Kitty from?" a dinner guest asked, moments after she walked in the door and, by necessity, met our dog. 
      Silly me. I assumed she meant the name. Where's the name "Kitty" from. 
     "There's actually an interesting story," I began. "'Kitty' is short for 'Katerina.' She's a character in Anna Karenina. See, we had two cats, Anna and Vronsky, and they..."
    "No, no," our guest continued. "The dog. Where did you get the dog from?"
     Ah.
     The great moral question of our day.
     Now that religion is no longer a handy way of quickly establishing your superiority over others, pets have assumed that role. "Where did you get your dog?" isn't an idle question; it's an insinuation, an accusation, fired from the safety of the moral high ground. At the top of the pecking order are PETA zealots, who of course wouldn't have a pet at all -- mere slavery, in their eyes, and demeaning to the animal to suggest that something as foul as a human can exert dominion over it just because the human feeds it and cares for it and provides for all its needs. 
     On the next lower rung are those who, compelled to share their quarters with animals, adopt pets from shelters, with the sense of moral purity tossed in free.  These people seem constantly on the hunt for inferiors to educate. Puppy mills are horrible, yes, but not every breeder is an abusive puppy mill. Nor do other social wrongs get the same treatment. Nobody ever asks, "Where did you get those khakis from? You didn't get them from a sweatshop in China, did you?" 
     I've had the question put to me a dozen times, with a cocked head and an arched eyebrow. They see our cute little dog, obviously not a mutt, and their suspicions, well, they just can't control themselves. Blood in the water. 
     "We rescued her from a breeder," I've taken to answer, hoping to sow confusion.  I haven't yet said, "We got her from None of Your Fucking Business Farm." But that's coming. 
     Anna and Vronsky, I rush to say—maybe it'll cut down the death threats—were adopted from the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society which I referred to them for years after as "The Cruelty Society" for their demeaning, you-aren't-going-to-eat-these-cats-are-you? interview. Cruelty to people is fine. For a moment we were worried they'd decide to put the cats down, just to spare them the indignity of falling under our control. 
     Our dog was found online, by our younger son, adopted as a small puppy, from a woman in Evanston who, well, I'm not exactly sure where she got her puppies from. Maybe she  grew them from seeds. But if the puppy was abused, then all dogs should be so abused, because she's the sweetest, happiest dog I've ever met. We're delighted to have her.
     Back to our pre-dinner conversation, which devolved from there. Let's say my hosting duties trumped my pride, and I did not tell her to take her superior stray-rescuing ass back out the door. But it was touch-and-go for a moment.
   This exchange came to mind this week when the GoDaddy domain name giant pulled "Journey Home," their Super Bowl commercial, after howls of protest because how it depicts puppies. An adorable pup, "Buddy," bounces out of the back of a pickup truck, laboriously finds his way home, crossing railroad tracks and hiding out from a rainstorm under a bridge.
   "Look it's Buddy! I'm so glad you're home," the joyous owner exults, sweeping the pup into her arms. Then her voice drops, menacingly. "Because I just sold you on this web site I built with GoDaddy—ship him out!" 
    Funny, right? The sweet moment punctured.
     Wrong. Not funny. Not funny at all.
     "If you can buy a puppy online and have it shipped to you the next day, it's likely you're supporting inhumane breeding," the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tweeted, apparently having no actual animals to save. Tens of thousands of people, similarly situated, signed online petitions.
      GoDaddy, no doubt happily enjoying this spasm of publicity without actually having to lay out the millions to run the commercial, promptly announced they'd instead run one of their buxom GoDaddy girl commercials, causing all sorts of additional on-line gripping about that—though not so much this time that the commercials won't air. 

     Why is that? Why is mildly alluding to the fact that dogs are bred and sold—they are, and glad we are of it—unacceptable in 2015, but giggling jiggle-jugged spokesmodels are just fine?
     "Why outraged over GoDaddy Puppy and not GoDaddy girls?" one tweet asked.
     I'll take that one.
     Twas always so.
     People have more sympathy for animals than they have for other people. This is nothing to be proud of, and nothing new. New York City passed its first anti-cruelty to animals law in 1867. Seven years later, when religious missionary Etta Wheeler wanted to save a 9-year-old girl, Mary Ellen Wilson, from being beaten and abused, she found there were no laws being violated, and the police shrugged. So she turned to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, arguing that Mary Ellen, as a child, was sort of an honorary animal, almost as good as a horse or a cow or a turtle or any of the creatures who were protected under the law. The SPCA was convinced, and went to bat for little Mary Ellen. 

     Our hearts go out to animals, because they're so cute and because they don't have any of those qualities we so despise in human beings. All the better if we can stand up for the animals we claim to love while simultaneously running down the people we obviously hate.  Nobody is protesting the men slamming each other into ground beef on live TV Sunday. But one Hollywood pup play acts getting sold, and our hearts bleed. It's not about helping animals so much as it's about puffing ourselves up.
     Or to put it another way, nobody ever says, "Hey, lots of kids in orphanages--why didn't you adopt?" But then again, that's people, and they don't count as much. 

Ernie Banks one of a vanishing breed: us

     Journalism is a kabuki, a ritualized form, polished over the years.
     We have our traditions. Some subjects we avoid. You’ll never see the “Lotto: Sucker’s game or stupid tax?” headline.
     On the other hand, every snowfall is covered like a fresh shock, like an unexpected occurrence. Snow in January in Chicago; who’d have imagined?
     Our rituals are particularly strong when a celebrity passes away. Scribes automatically share a personal vignette, supposedly to offer illumination into the fallen star, but actually thinly disguised braggartry. Yup, knew him, hung with him.
     Though my one encounter with Ernie Banks says nothing about me, other than I can give directions, and a lot about why the city is honoring him today.
     Banks walked up to me, about 15 years ago, because I was the guy at the desk by the door on the fourth floor of the old Sun-Times newsroom. He introduced himself and asked where the picture desk was.
     Not that I believed it was him immediately. Back then, all sorts of people would show up at the paper. Delegates from distant planets. A pair of men in full braided gaucho outfits, brandishing guitars, wearing enormous sombreros. You never knew who you’d bump into. I once turned the corner and almost smacked into Ben & Jerry, the ice cream makers (“Ben!” I cried, almost falling to me knees. “Jerry! I love you guys!”)
 

Banks, me, Tom McNamee, Don Hayner

   But he looked like Banks. And he had on this expensive-looking leather Cubs jacket. I figured, if he were a street person, he probably wouldn’t have that jacket. So I walked him back to the photography department.
     “Ernie just wandered upstairs,” remembers Rich Cahan, who was a photo editor. “I do recall him saying that he just didn’t remember what it looked like — the game that is. That he remembered the sounds, the cheers, but couldn’t remember what it looked like.”
     The photographers gathered around, started pulling out photo files.
     “Keith Hale, who was working in the lab during those years, offered to make copies of Ernie’s favorite pictures, or all of the pictures,” said Cahan. “Ernie was thrilled, and Keith went right to work as soon as he left. They were ready for Ernie the next day.
     But Banks never came back for his photos, which was also in keeping with him. Childlike innocence and follow-through do not go together — if they did, Banks might have spent his career on the Cleveland Indians or the Chicago White Sox: both teams wrote him letters, while he was in the Army in Germany, inviting him to try out. But in his excitement returning home, he forgot. He rushed back to the Kansas City Monarchs, where the Cubs snapped him up, for a song.
     Which relates to why Banks came by the paper himself. Derek Jeter would send a go-fer. When you have money up the ying-yang, you have go-fers, and you send them.
     Banks did not have money up the ying-yang. When the Cubs signed him in 1953 to play for their Cedar Rapids farm team, he did not dicker. He did not negotiate. He did not use a lawyer or an agent. He had forgotten about the Indians and White Sox.
     “I was so nervous I had to hold my right hand with my left as I scribbled Ernest Banks … on a document that seemed to be a mile long,” Banks wrote in his autobiography, “Mr. Cub.”
     He did not even notice how much he was being paid. Banks found out later, from the Monarchs manager, Buck O’Neill.
     “On the way back to the South Side, Buck kiddingly grabbed hold of my right arm so I wouldn’t jump out of the automobile as he asked, ‘Do you realize that you signed for $800 a month? After your first full year in the majors, I want you to write me with news that your salary has been doubled. It’s all up to you now.”
     Even in 1954, $800 a month wasn’t much for a professional athlete. Banks earned just $6,000 in 1954; an average American salary was $4.500. It’s the equivalent of earning $60,000 a year today.
     It’s easy to rhapsodize the simple past, when you’re not the one who got shafted. “Show me the money” is never going to tug at your heart strings the way, “Let’s play two” does. But someone was making big money from baseball in 1954. It just wasn’t players like Ernie Banks. Our affection is cold comfort, a booby prize. People still love Derek Jeter, despite his millions..
     When Jeter retired from the Yankees last year, Gatorade produced a rhapsodic video where Jeter, the grateful star, instructs his driver to pull over and he walks the last few blocks to Yankee Stadium, a god among mortals, as the camera records the stunned and grateful reaction of the delighted proles and Sinatra sings "My Way."
     Derek Jeter earned $12 million in 2014, about 300 times the median household salary.
     Ernie Banks earned $85,000 in 1971, his last year in baseball, about 10 times the median household salary.
     That’s how America has been going. The top floats away, and the the lower classes scrabble for crumbs. We don’t even get the same quality hero anymore. Ernie Banks was a great guy, but there was something tragic about him, about all those players, because they got screwed. Which is also why we love them so much, because we’re getting screwed too.

The clocks are stupid, not me. Really. They are.

     A smart person can do some pretty stupid things.
     Whether the doing of those stupid things crosses some stupidity threshold and transforms the heretofore smart person into a newly minted stupid person depends on a) the number and magnitude of the stupid thing or things this supposed smart person has done and b) the charitable or non-charitable way in which those stupid things are viewed.
    You'll have to decide...
   Last Wednesday evening, Dan Savage, syndicated sex columnist, author of best-selling memoirs, MTV star, perhaps the most significant journalist in America, asks if I'll be on his top-rated podcast. 
    I reply, "yes." 

Dan Savage

    Actually, I reply, "YES!!!!!" with the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl accepting her first date, because this represents the kind of outside validation which, laboring behind the plow, digging furrow after furrow in the hard earth, I crave.
     He tells me his producer—a producer is a person who handles the fine details such as scheduling, someone I don't have, but could sorely use, as will become evident—will contact me and schedule our chat. Ten minutes later I hear from producer Nancy. 
    "We will call you most likely around 11 Pacific time," she writes.
     Well, even I know the West Coast is two hours behind us, so that's 9 a.m. my time, I think. About the time I arrive at work. But if the train is late, as it sometimes is, I'll be huffing along Wacker Drive at 9 a.m. instead of poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee, ready to wax with the kind of wit and intelligence that will project me into the world of syndicated columns, best-selling books and top podcasts. I decide it would make more sense to stay home to do the podcast. I prepare by listening to Dan's podcast, then get to bed early.
     At 8:45 a.m. Thursday, I set aside my work, pour a hot cup of coffee, and am poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee, ready to wax with kind of wit and intelligence that will project me into the world of syndicated columns, best-selling books and top podcasts 
     Waiting. 
     9:05 a.m., poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee... aw heck, you get the idea.
       At 9:06, worrying I'm seeming over-eager, I shoot Nancy an email. "Standing by." 
      Hmmm, must be a delay. I picture an electronic control center, crackling with activity. 9:10. 9:15, I use my cell to call my own phone. It rings. That's a good sign.
       At 9:17 I send Dan an email. "Running late?" 9:20 a.m. I think to check the time in Seattle. It's 7:26 a.m. there. Ohhh. Two hours before. I send the producer an apologetic note beginning "Whoops..." and reset my mental clock for 11 a.m. Go back to work or try to. 
     10:50 a.m. I'm ready, hot coffee, turning bon mots over in my head. Are they bon motty enough? 11 a.m. Poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee, etc. etc. Right on the nose, 11 a.m..     
     11:05. 11:10. 11:20, my composure wilting like a ... heck, I should be able to come up with a sexual metaphor, in honor of Dan's line of work ... wilting like a ... ah ... like an, umm, thingie...  umm....that ... how does he write that sex stuff anyway? It's a lot harder than it looks.
    Well, wilting anyway, flagging like an, err... I figure, I'd better call his producer.  I get voicemail. "That was today, right?" A few minutes later I get an email. 
     "We were thinking 11:00 Pacific time. That's 1:00 your time," she says. "Can you still do it?"
      You'll notice the lack of sarcasm in her reply. Professionalism. 
     I look at the original email. 11 PST. 1 p.m. my time. So two mistakes. First, I read that as 9 a.m. Central time instead of 1 p.m. And second, when I realized the difference, I transmuted the original time from 11 to 9 a.m.. Error upon error. This is why I work in a medium where I can go over and over things, to make sure they're not screwed up. I don't function well in real time.
      We finally do the interview, but I must have been so wound up that I muffed it, because Dan—pretending like the mistake was all his, which is true professionalism—asked me to do it over again. Which I did. By the time we were done, it was about 2:30 p.m. The results, well, you can judge for yourself, once the podcast is posted at 5 a.m. Central Standard Time.
    I think. 
      

No stars in Chicago, and a good thing too

Tatiana Serjan sings "Tosca" (above and atop blog, courtesy Todd Rosenberg)

     "Mirotic is here," my 17-year-old son said, as we settled into our seats at the Civic Opera House Saturday night before the debut of Lyric Opera's production of Puccini's "Tosca."
     I pulled out my iPhone. News!
     "Are you tweeting that?" he said, slightly aghast. "I mean, I think it was Mirotic. It looked like him."
     I adjusted my tweet accordingly—"Bulls power forward Mirotic spied at opening of 'Tosca.' Or tall guy who looked like him"—and showed the phone to my boy. He nodded. I hit "Tweet."
     Famous people are by definition interesting. If Bulls players are now hanging out at the Lyric—Pao Gasol took teammate Nazr Mohammed to "Anna Bolena" last month—I want everyone to know. Maybe my co-workers won't have that look of befuddled pity mixed with fear when the subject comes up.
     Of course fame is relative. Renee Fleming was also there Saturday. The star soprano's acclaim dwarfs Nikola Mirotic's, not only in the opera world but in the world in general. She did sing the National Anthem at last year's Super Bowl.
     She was also harder to spot in the sell-out crowd ("Tosca," by the way, is fantastic. Tatian Serjan. Vissi d'arte. Tears in my eyes—for a full review by the great Wynne Delacoma, a star in her own right, click here). I only heard that Fleming was there (From a very reliable source; otherwise I'd leave the door ajar that it might have just been some lucky woman who merely looks like Renee Fleming). At the first intermission I scanned the crowd, easily found the one guy 6'10 with a full beard. Yup, Mirotic.
     He stood a dozen feet away. "You want to meet him?" I asked my kid. I've used my good offices to introduce him to Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah and the best player on the team, Jimmy Butler. You meet celebrities, a bit of their fame rubs off on you and you feel better about yourself.
     "He's with his wife," my boy observed. "We should leave him alone." I admired that. The greatest favor you can do celebrities is to not molest them in public. And as we gazed in his direction, the opera patrons indeed seemed to ignore the athlete, though given this crowd, they might have also ignored the full Bulls squad, in uniform, playing a scrimmage.
     Some of our restraint might reflect his position far down the greased pole of fame. Having met Nikola Mirotic will be of limited utility in the years to come, unlike my story about interviewing Michael Jordan in the Bulls locker room and having no idea who he was. I've been telling that over and over, often to the same person, for more than 25 years.
     I haven't yet had someone reply, "Michael who?" But that's coming. Fame is not only relative, it's fleeting. The biggest stars never quite devolve into nobodies, but the circus of public attention does pack up and move on. Madonna once transfixed the world; now glimpses of her flash here and there, though whether that is intentional, a Garbo-like seclusion, or she's got six publicists puffing madly on her flickering flame, well, I can't say I care much, and neither do you.
     My colleague over at the Tribune, Pulitzer-Prize winner Mary Schmich, wrote an interesting column last week pointing out "There are no celebrities in Chicago." Oprah? Gone. Jordan? Gone. "Hugh Hefner?" she writes. "Moved to LA. Barack Obama? Moved to D.C."
     She concludes her column with, I believe, a misstep, suggesting reluctantly that the city's one true celebrity is Rahm Emanuel. It might seem like that, and he does have solid connections in the stratosphere of money and power. But if celebrity means that regular folk care about you, that ain't Rahm. My agent just spent six months trying to sell a book about Rahm, and the publishing world's reaction fell into two camps: a) Nobody cares about Rahm Emanuel, and b) his brother's book sold just 4,000 copies for Random House.
     I'm not criticizing Mary. I just want to draw a different conclusion from her premise, maybe move the ball forward a few yards from where she left it. She is correct, Chicago does not have any real celebrities now. But, as she notes, we did: Oprah and Jordan and Al Capone and such. And will again, as Obama is a reminder. Maybe he'll move back here. If not, someone else will arrive, or arise. Chicago will never have the galaxy of stars found around Los Angeles, because they have the movies. Nor can we match New York's density. But we will have a few. Making us lucky, because seeing them come and go teaches us: fame fleets.
     It fleets for individuals. When I taught journalism at Loyola, I asked the 21 students in my class if the name "Mike Royko" meant anything to them. One hand went up.
     And it fleets for cities. Chicago won't be a lesser place if the Obamas settle in Hawaii. It'll be better. We'll all be spared the stress of bumping into the former president, of having him blow past us in line at Starbucks. The glitter that celebrities bring is more than offset by the hassle of having to put up with them. Lack of celebrities is just another reason Chicago excels as a place to live. Don't tell them.

And when it gets to earth...

     

     Much interesting feedback on Friday's UFO column, as you can imagine.
     The UFO enthusiasts seemed abrupt, as if tired of defending themselves. They basically said, "Investigate the topic," as if that will be sufficient to engender belief. None of them addressed my basic question: "Sure, you're seeing strange stuff—but what makes you leap from smudge (or light, or spinning cigar, or whatever) to interplanetary visitors? Why dismiss the dozen more ordinary explanations?"
     Some added plausible explanations of their own:
     "I think the UFO reason is that we are social creatures," writes Mike R. "We don't even like the idea of being alone in the universe! I love the. Moody Blues' 'Eternity Road' song, but it makes me a bit nervous when I hear the lyrics describing the subject being alone, traveling through the cosmos .. and that first Twilight Zone episode, as well..."
     One reader did point out a 20-year-old error on my part. I wrote about the person who set off the modern era mania, private pilot Kenneth Arnold claiming to spot nine mysterious objects in Washington State in June, 1947, and originally said that he had penned an article for FATE the year before. But that impossible, one reader pointed out; FATE didn't debut until the spring of 1948, with Arnold's article in it. 
     I took that from "U is for UFO," my study of the subject that appeared in my 1996 rumination on the irksome The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances.  So either I got the magazine name wrong, or made some other kind error; it's been so long I can't figure out what the trouble was.
     Not that it undercuts my case. If one mistake were enough to indict a point of view, we wouldn't have to tolerate the endless bleat of credulity that reigns supreme on this topic. 
     I'd have let the matter drop, but there was one  email I want to share, almost beautiful in its simplicity, from reader Charles Yates. It struck me because it conveys a thought I've never seen expressed before.
    Here it is, in its entirety: 

I'm very skeptical when I heard about Roswell years ago. This ufo traveled from distant galaxies, and then when it gets to Earth it......crashes??

Saturday fun activity: Who IS this?

     Not everything becomes a story.
     At least not right away.
     A mutual friend suggested that I should get together with this gentleman.
     So I did.
     And we had a cup of coffee downtown, talked for maybe an hour, a thoroughly interesting conversation, about a variety of topics, from our children, to natural food, to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Then we went our separate ways, though we're hoping to have dinner in February, if our schedules permit.
      His brother is quite famous, though he's becoming well known in his own right. 
      Not the best photo—my apologies, the light was odd, and I only had a moment to snap a picture.
      But it should be good enough to do the job.
      Who is this fellow, and where is he standing?
      The winner will receive a bag of fine Bridgeport coffee, roasted right here on the near Southwest side of Chicago.  
       Please remember to post your guesses below. Good luck. 
      

UFOs: The evidence is out there

     Do you believe in UFOs?

     That is, do you believe that Unidentified Flying Objects are not the result of mirages, misidentifications and mendacity, but tangible evidence of intelligent life from distant planets traveling huge distances to gaze mutely upon us because, well, we’re so interesting and important?

     You are not alone. Between a third and two-thirds of Americans — numbers vary depending on how the poll is worded — believe reports of UFOs reflect their extraterrestrial origins.

     And now you can plow through those reports yourself, at least 10,000 of them, from 1947 to 1969, gathered by the Air Force in its Project Blue Book, posted online this week by an organization calling itself The Black Vault.

     Rather than even try to read all 129,491 pages, I began looking at reports from Illinois, starting with one filed June 28, 1947 — four days after private pilot Kenneth Arnold started all this by reporting nine strange objects flying “like a saucer skipping over water” near Mount Rainier in Washington State. The Illinois report is less descriptive, consisting of the single sentence: “Only info given was that saucers were seen over Illinois,” on a faint, microfilmed page where some Air Force functionary had concluded, in the all-caps so popular when dealing with this subject: “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR EVALUATION.”

     The cover-up begins!

     To continue reading, click here.