"It is a fool's life"

    One of the dozen mundane tasks that made Monday a sort of teeth-gritted, "Thirty-plus-years-of-doing-this-shit-and-here-I-am" kind of day, was tossing out all the brochures, catalogues, business cards—except for the one for the really cool story I'm going to follow up on—from my visit to the Housewares Show Saturday. Been there, done that. 
     Tossing out the samples was a little harder. Even though my wife had spurned the Click & Carry, it was a solid piece of well-poured plastic, a rich aqua, with a rubberized section to be kinder to your fingers. Somebody's dream made tangible. The Puritan father in me thought, "This could come in handy..."
     How? Should I tuck it into the back of the van, to rattle around with the flares we've never used and the mass of cloth bags because we're all so flippin' environmental? 
     It hit the copy of Home Furnishing News with a "whap."
     That felt right.  They should teach classes in throwing stuff out. We should practice, because eventually we're going to have to get good at it. My wife had a master class, in shutting down her parents home after her mother died. We both did, regarding all the material that two marketly unmaterialistic people had acquired. Nine roasters. Or was it 11? Or 13? Anyway, a lot of black enamel roasters with white specks. More than a human should have. 
     As if the hoarder TV shows aren't warning enough. Pitch stuff. I'm going to take time off work to spring clean this year, because I don't think I've done it right for about five years. 
     Henry Thoreau had it right. You don't own stuff, stuff owns you. 
     Standing up with a groan, and over to the bookshelf. Books are different. You need those.
     "The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost," Thoreau writes, in Walden. "By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."
     To which I will add two observations. One, Thoreau's father owned a pencil factory. Thoreau's disdain for possessions was built on possessions, and connected pals like Emerson, who loaned him the axe he needed to build his cabin at Walden Pond which, Two,  was not an organic expression of his desire to live simply, but a book stunt, just like the book stunts today where people read the phone book and date 100 strangers and such.  It was designed to build the Thoreau brand, and it pretty much failed—he had to fall back on those pencils, thought at the time to be the best in America. 
     Not to slag Thoreau. The man could turn a phrase, and it takes the mind of a charlatan welded to the heart of a saint to get through life sometimes. And it helps to throw stuff out when you can. You never miss it.

This "broom" you're selling, tell me more

Matt Schipper, right, demonstrates the humane, Zen-ful Fly Swooper.

     If the violence inherent in fly swatters has always bothered you, rejoice; relief is at hand. The Fly Swooper, a funnel on a stick that, rather than smashing the living, sentient beings that you believe flies to be, nuzzling their young with a human-like affection, instead collects them safely in a small net.
     “And then what?” I asked Matt Schipper, demonstrating the product Saturday, opening day of the 2015 International Home + Housewares Show at McCormick Place, the four-day convention where all the makers of household devices from toasters to toothpick holders hook up with all the vendors who sell them or try to.
     “You release them outside,” he replied. “It’s more of a Zen-ful approach. We’ve done $1 million in sales in Malaysia.”
     That’s why I love the housewares show. You never know what you’re going to find.   

Robert Delaney and his brainchild

    Seven hours of increasingly footsore marching past exhibits barely scratches the surface: countless home care products from the utterly mundane — mops, brooms, sponges, cleaners — to the almost unbelievable, such as Bob’s Butt Wipes.   
     “The polish after the paper!” brand manager Kayla Ward chirped when I hurried over to regard the new product in drop-jawed wonder. 
     “We leave nothing behind, like the Marines,” added Robert Delaney — the “Bob” in “Bob’s Butt Wipes.” He explained that he is a builder in Louisiana, and noticed his contractors taking packs of baby wipes with them when they visit portable toilets...   


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Discuss among yourselves

Display at the 2015 Home + Housewares Show

     Killing time Sunday evening before going downtown to a dinner party at The Kitchen, thumbing through the March edition of Poetry. I checked the table of contents for a writer I recognize; the only one I saw was Tony Hoagland, whose poem, "Jet," is in the book that Sara Bader and I have coming out next year. 
     One line in Hoagland's "Bible Study" jumped out and slapped me around the head and neck:
     "What kind of idiot would even think he had a destiny?"
     That struck me as entirely true. What do you think? 

Sunday Puzzler No. 2

Last week's puzzler was too easy. This one is still kinda easy, but has a certain elegance to it that makes up for the fact. Since the Saturday Fun Activity displays a photograph and asks for a location, in today's Puzzler I offer a location, in the form of this riddle, and to answer correctly you have to name a location (I 'd prefer you post a photograph, but I don't think that can be done in comments, at least nobody ever has). 

As a prize ... hmmm ... tired of coffee, tired of my poster. How about a copy of my 2012 memoir, "You Were Never In Chicago"? Signed. Unless you'd prefer coffee or a poster. One of the three, to the person who solves this less-easy-than-last-week-though-still-kinda-easy conundrum. 

       
                                                 First the first dual integer
                                                 Second the number of seconds
                                                 Not in a day or an hour.
                                                 Third, A Cool Million
                                                 This place doth stand secure
                                                 amidst a falling world.
                   

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This is a really long ramp. I've been down it—but not up it—a lot this past week, heading out to work on a story. I imagine a number of readers have been down it too. But you never know. sometimes the most obvious places can be the hardest to figure out. 
      Anyway, the first person to guess where this is will win one of my high quality collectible 2015 posters, such as this one, which was put up this week at Bookends & Beginnings in Evanston, the store that replaced the beloved Bookman's Alley when Roger Carlson retired. The new store is lovely in its own right, and I'm glad to see the tradition continue, with a modern twist. Co-owner Jeff Garrett put the poster up, and said it looked very fine against the weathered wood, resembling a "Wanted" poster from the Old West. Indeed it does. He has his; good luck winning yours. Place your guesses below.  

Bookends & Beginnings, 1712 Sherman Road, in the alley, Evanston.

Agonizingly slow and only in places

     The police dogs in Ferguson never bit a white person.
     Not once, in a damning Justice Department investigation of the St. Louis suburb released Wednesday. Two years of police dogs biting African-Americans, who comprised 67 percent of the town but just 11 percent in the police force, part of a jaw-dropping pattern of discrimination that isn't as unfamiliar as Americans elsewhere might like to pretend it is.
     The report details how police used the legal system as a cash machine, socking residents, almost exclusively black, with multiple expensive tickets, including for "manner of walking," whatever that might be.
     Over the period the feds examined, 93 percent of the arrests made in Ferguson were of black people; 95 percent of the jaywalking arrests were of blacks; 95 percent of the people who spent two days in jail were black.
     The killing last August of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was the spark that, eventually, illuminated this warped system. People elsewhere wondered — why these days of protest? What's all the fuss about? A single killing?
     Turns out, there was much more than that.
     Not that we should be too smug.
     Chicago can take some cold comfort at regarding a community whose police practices are even worse than our own. Years of lawsuits have nudged the number of African-Americans in the Chicago Police — about 29 percent — to a figure near the black population of the city — 32 percent. Not that black officers guarantee empathy. Cops aren’t black or white, they’re blue; their loyalty invariably is toward their fellow officers as opposed to the citizens they supposedly protect and defend.
     Then there’s Attorney General Eric Holder’s description of Ferguson: “A highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by years of illegal and misguided practices.” Well, that kind of rings a bell, doesn’t it? One reason many Chicagoans so easily swallowed the Guardian’s overblown story on Homan Square was it resonated with past practices.
     The real outrage of Ferguson is that it’s still true in much of urban America. If we look in the suburbs around Chicago, we easily see a number of Fergusons or at least potential Fergusons: Blue Island is 30 percent black, with a police force only 5 percent black. Merrillville, Ind. is 44 percent black, with 4 percent on its police force — a 10th of what it should be. And there’s no reason to limit the focus of concern just to blacks: Cicero is 87 percent Hispanic, with a police force only 28 percent Hispanic.
     In their defense, they’d argue that they have procedures, tests, and if blacks or Hispanics don’t apply, don’t pass the tests, there’s nothing they can do. Gang-bangers drive around in cars shooting people, thus cops have to pull lots of cars over and see what they find.
     But failure to hire minority officers is symptomatic of a culture of exclusion. Too many black kids don’t get enough education to be police officers and, based on their experiences with them, wouldn’t want to become one if they could.
     The report is both shocking and nothing new. Incarceration rates for blacks are seven times what they are for whites in the United States. This is in part because of a legal system stacked against them at every phase. Take drug crime. Blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate. But blacks are arrested more, charged more, convicted more, imprisoned more. The cheaper crack cocaine used in the inner city carries far greater penalties than the more expensive, powdered cocaine that white people use in their suburban homes. Blacks are 13 percent of the American population and 40 percent of the prison population.
     Whites are always eager to blame this on moral failure, to proclaim racism dead. We have a black president, it’s 2015, time for everyone to be responsible for his or own condition. Some people just pick their parents better, that’s all. If blacks are in jail, well, they’re criminals.
     Then shocks like this Justice Department report on Ferguson yank us out of that complacency, showing us how some blacks become criminals: by sitting in their cars. By standing on the street. By merely existing. The criminal justice system grabs them and then won’t let go. They have no high-priced lawyers to skip in and take care of everything.
     This report does, or should, remind us that, in some ways, the 13th Amendment ending slavery, whose 150th anniversary we just marked, was merely a change of tactics. Blacks went from being chattel property to being a powerless, rights-less serf class, a century of Jim Crow bondage.
     That supposedly stopped in the 1960s, when black people snared their supposed right as citizens to vote, plus the opportunity to sit in buses and use restrooms and other basics of human dignity that white people just assumed.
     But it didn’t really end there. We see the right to vote being eroded nationwide. And only a kind of self-admiring white exceptionalism could pretend it ever really ended. We live in a manifestly unfair, racist society. We don’t have to argue; the numbers speak for themselves. Until we recognize it, change will come as it has: agonizingly slow, and only in places.

Radio was scary too

 
    It was 40 minutes past midnight. Al Katz and his Kittens were playing the Moon Lite Gardens at the Chicago Beach Hotel in Kenwood. The crowd called for "Valencia! Valencia!" the dance craze of the moment— July 10, 1926—and as the group swung into the number. "Its exotic rhythms sent gilded heels gliding across the glistening floor," Radio Digest noted later, after the tragedy. "Sparkling lights, gleaming shoulders, jeweled fingers, radiant faces, brilliant costumes, spotless linen and fathomless black revolved in a kaleidoscopic array."
     Twenty miles away, in Homewood, the transmitter of radio station WOK was broadcasting the fun "throughout the Middle West into homes where lonely  hearts were hungry for happiness and joy." Then a fuse blew. The signal went dead and, in his eagerness to get the station back on the air, assistant operator Lester J. Wolf reached for the faulty connection without first cutting the power, received a 6,000 volt shock, and died almost instantly.
    The Radio Digest called him "the first martyr in the field of broadcasting for public entertaining," as if there might be many more. Hard to tell with a new industry based on a proven deadly technology like electricity and something as new and menacing as radio waves.
     I thought of Wolf—whose grave I encountered while wandering the Homewood Memorial Gardens cemetery in 2011—after reading my pal Eric Zorn's plea "We must ban drones before it's too late."  
     "Treat these small, unmanned flying vehicles the way the law treats machine guns and chemical weapons," Zorn wrote, "as devices so inherently fraught with potential peril that whatever positive uses they may have aren't worth the risks they pose."
     Boy, Eric, if you could somehow manage to include handguns—also dangerous, in their own way—in that treatment, I thought, I would be right there with you, eagerly lending my full support.     

     "A drone capable of delivering a package to your door will also be capable of delivering a small bomb," he wrote. Sure, but the same is true for motor scooters and FedEx. Yet tightly controlling explosives seems to do the trick.
     In his defense, Eric clearly understands the pointlessness of the argument.
     "Do I realize the futility of railing against the tide of progress with feverish hypotheticals? I do."
     Good, then no need to point it out. And I would have let his argument go -- we all have slow days,.
     But what he did not touch upon, and I'd like to, moving the ball forward a few yards, is that all new technology is scary and dangerous. Remember, Alexander Graham Bell's first words over the telephone? "Watson, come here, I need you"? Bell needed Watson because he had burned himself on the damn phone, or, rather, on the acid needed to power its batteries. 
     The risk are clear, the benefits, however, remain uncertain. When Bell initially patented the telephone, he thought he was inventing a device to improve telegraphy. It's not that new technology is without harm, but if a device becomes popular enough to cause lots of harm, we accept that as the price you pay. Cars slay 25,000 people a year in the name of getting to the mall faster. We shrug and accept it. Drones could kill 2,500 a year, and if it meant we got our pizza while its still hot, we'd be okay with that. They might ban a particular usage—no texting while you drive! But the phones remain.
     Radio is not seen as particularly dangerous. Heck, it barely counts as technology anymore. But that's not how it seemed in 1926. Now, if an assistant radio engineer, assuming there is still such a thing, were to electrocute himself, it wouldn't end up on his tombstone. The first person to catch a drone in the back of the head will be a martyr to a dangerous new technology. After a few decades, though, not so much.