Talk about coincidences!

Anish Kapoor says he was inspired by a blob of mercury. 

Dear China:
     As an official representative of Chicago's Media Elite, let me say this: You may have our Bean.
     Which isn't as generous as it sounds, as China, true to form, has already taken it. Or at least a smaller version of it.
     A reproduction, more or less, of the sculpture that has graced Chicago's Millennium Park since 2006 will be unveiled soon in Karamay, a city of 300,000 in China's northern region.
     The Chinese, with typical brio, pretend to have cooked up the idea themselves, an echo of the old Soviet claims of inventing the telephone. The People's Daily crowed about their new “stainless steel sculpture in the shape of an oil bubble." Karamay is a center of oil production.
 

China says they weren't inspired by our Bean.

   Its name, in English, will be "Big Oil Bubble," but it's only a matter of time until they start calling it "Dou," or Chinese for "Bean."
     Anish Kapoor, the British-Indian artist who created Chicago's "Cloud Gate," as nobody calls it, has expressed outrage at the "blatant plagiarism."
     “The Chinese authorities must act to stop this kind of infringement," he said.
     Now that's funny — the naivete of artists. The Chinese authorities haven't stopped the blatant infringement to the tune of billions of dollars of intellectual theft of CDs, DVDs, computer programs, designer handbags, you name it. The odds of them starting now — "Oh gosh, Comrade, Anish Kapoor is threatening to sue us! Tear Great Oil Bubble down immediately!" — are zero.
     I would encourage Kapoor to chill out regarding both the Chinese homage to his work and the Chicago name. Kapoor has been complaining privately that he is not fond of the Bean nickname.
     Two things to keep in mind.
     First, as the owner of a $3 Rolex, which my older boy bought for me during his school jaunt through China, I would observe that these Chinese knockoffs suffer considerably in quality. The Big Oil Bubble is far smaller than our Bean — you can't walk under it — and is strung with red Christmas lights, a grace note of aesthetic wrongness that reminded me of the dinner I had at the Chinese consulate here where they balanced a single Pringle's potato chip on the salad plate as a garnish.
     I don't imagine that the reflection on the Chinese sculpture is painted on, like the smaller dials of my watch. But I would bet it isn't constructed with the solid American craftsmanship that made the Bean. A few seasons in the polluted air of China's chief petroleum producing district and the Chinese Bean will be as reflective as a coffee bean and approaching the same color.
     Second, even if through some miracle of Communist engineering the Bubble/Bean's reflective qualities don't wash away in the acid rain, remember this: the glory of our Chicago bean is that it's reflecting us here, our people and our visitors and the city surrounding us. I haven't been to Karamay and I hope to never go. But Chicago it ain't.
     We're always aspiring to be a "world-class city," right? Well, part of that is having your glories ripped off by lesser cities. Suck it up. Do you think that Paris loses sleep because they built a mini Eiffel Tower in Vegas? I doubt it. These things happen. We can't condemn the Chinese for something we do ourselves. I have not done the research, but I would be very surprised if Pisa, Italy, registered displeasure when the Leaning Tower of Niles went up in 1934 — a rip-off if ever there were. And heck, consider the Great Oil Bubble of China another Chicago trade representative. Some number of Chinese, having gazed at themselves long enough in their version of the Bean, might decide to spend some of their petrodollars to come here to see the real thing.

So you think YOUR sex life stinks?

 
     Flowers do not typically merit news stories. And the rare times they do, their scientific names are usually only mentioned in passing, if that.
     But this is no usual flower and no usual name.

The titan arum has grown five inches since Thursday.

     A stalk of Amorphophallus titanum went on display in a greenhouse at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe Thursday. And while they are referring to it as a "Corpse Flower," for the awful stench it gives off when it blooms — and one has never bloomed in the Chicago area before — there is a reason to grasp that lengthy moniker, because it speaks to what this whole process is really about.
     Those with a bit of classical education can help deconstruct the name. "Amorpho-"—from the Greek, the word "amorphous" might give you a clue — meaning "shapeless, or deformed." Then "-phallus" we all know, and stop that snickering in back. And finally, "titanum" meaning "giant."

    Put it together and we get the "Giant deformed penis" plant, one of the more apt names in botany.

     A native of the rainforest of Sumatra, in the Indonesian archipelago, the corpse flower — it's also called "titan arum" the more demure name that naturalist Sir David Attenborough coined for use on British television — is often referred to as a rock star of a flower, one that causes a commotion whenever it blooms.

     And like many rock stars, the titan arum has a complicated sex life.

     The flower was discovered by an Italian naturalist in 1878, and 11 years later, the first specimen to bloom in the Western world spewed its stink at London's Kew Gardens. The police had to hold back the crowds who showed up to catch a whiff, and thousands are expected to visit the Botanic Garden when their specimen blooms, sometime in the next week to 10 days.

     The titan arum did not first unleash its distinctive stink in the United States until 1937 at the New York Botanical Garden. Its opening was an event of such importance that it was designated the "Official Flower of the Bronx" (though it was replaced in 2000 with the day lily by city officials suddenly concerned that it sent the message, "The Bronx stinks").

     "SIX-FOOT BLOSSOM ABOUT TO APPEAR" headlined a 1937 story in the New York Times, which perfectly described the plant as resembling "a huge ear of corn, with some of the characteristics of the cucumber."

     The Botanic Garden is calling theirs "Spike." There is a tradition of giving specimens visitor-friendly names. Como Park Conservatory in St. Paul named theirs "Bob" when it bloomed in 2008. About four arums bloom each year in conservatories around the United States.

     But don't let the benign names fool you. This is still all about hot sex, albeit hot plant sex. Plants flower in order to reproduce; a flower's scent attract pollinators, and the titan arum smells bad to humans, a "decaying, rancid, rotten stench," but is perfume to flesh flies and corpse beetles, which in Sumatra would crawl into the flower to lay their eggs, bringing with it pollen from other titan arums (since it can't self-pollinate and none of the others are open, the Botanic Garden is looking to get their titan arum in a family way by importing pollen from another conservatory with a blooming titan arum, perhaps Denver).

     When the big moment arrives, the green outer leaves, called the spathe, will curl down, revealing a maroon yellow interior and the squashlike, to be polite, spadix, jutting straight up. The plant also gets all hot and bothered—its temperature raising 10 to 15 degrees, the better to blast out odor. Though be forewarned; visitors in other cities have reported being underwhelmed, expecting to get an intense draught of rotting flesh and finding something less than that.

     The Botanic Garden spent 12 years carefully growing Spike and his eight brothers and sisters (literally both brothers and sisters, as the plant is monoecious, meaning it has both male and female elements), acquiring part of the brood from Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, North Carolina (if you simply must have one, Plant Delights sells them online for $75 for a 12-to-18 inch plant).  Crowds are expected, as are Spike t-shirts.

     You can check the Chicago Botanic Garden's website for updates. But once it's time, don't dawdle. The flower is only expected to be in bloom for one day, maybe two, and then the whole thing collapses. Though the garden usually closes at 9 p.m., the night the flower blooms it will remain open until 2 a.m., and waive its usual $25 per car parking fee after 9 p.m.  A rare, short-lived, exotic, odorous, plant sex show in Glencoe: how often do you have the chance to see—and smell—that?

Trump surges in the polls, again

     Bullies are cowards. 
     Donald Trump is a classic rich bully as only a guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth can be—for all his talk of his own business genius, his father Fred, a millionaire real estate developer, gave him his start. So as soon as Trump got some pushback for his crude comment about Fox's Megyn Kelly asking him tough questions at last week's Republican presidential debate because she was having her period, he let out a shriek of self-justification and began furiously backpedalling—No, he meant nose. Blood dripping from her nose.
      I hadn't heard a person make a she's-on-the-rag crack since junior high school, and would be aghast, but that would be naive. Then again, naive is the new black. Those not among the Republican faithful figured, "Okay, now he's toast. Now we can get to the real campaign and focus on our country's real problems." They've already forgotten that Trump not only survived castigating John McCain and every American POW who ever lived as non-heroes who blundered into captivity, but he became even more popular. 
     Guess what? It happened again over the weekend. Trump surged even further ahead, one poll giving him 32 percent of potential GOP voters. 
     What is happening here?
     I'm tempted to say we've plunged through a crack in the universe into some kind of parallel political dimension, a nightmare Twilight Zone world of politicians in pig masks spouting utter gibberish on TV while herds of sheep voters bleat in rapture. Why this is hell, as Christopher Marlowe said, nor are we out of it. 
    But that's a cop-out. There are actual real-life reasons why Trump is doing well. And since so much verbiage is being spilled on Trump, and I hate to join the chorus, I'll limit myself to three.
    First, all publicity is good publicity. There is an established phenomena where a bad review helps—people hear about how terrible something is and become intrigued. Or they don't remember the content of the bad news, only the name of the product that was found deficient, and buy it. 
     Second, the poll is being taken among what statisticians call a "self-selected group." We aren't asking all American voters what they think of Donald Trump. We're asking Republicans. And who's a Republican? A Republican is someone who would see the most important source of women's reproductive services in the nation, Planned Parenthood, shut down over some cobbled together video shot by an anti-abortion group. So of course they don't care if a particular woman, and a journalist at that, is humiliated unfairly because of her gender. 
     A Republican is someone who would herd 11 million American residents into cattle cars and ship them back to Mexico because they or their parents entered the country illegally. So what do they care of "fair"?
     A Republican is someone who can look at the overwhelming evidence for global warming, or the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and dismiss it because to do otherwise doesn't serve the commercial interests of their plutocrat overlords, or their personal notions of faith. So who worries over the lack of a factual basis for the things that Donald Trump says? He's rich! Are you? Of course not. 
     How much of a lapse is it to keep  backing Donald Trump compared to backing that? 
     And third, the success of Trump merely reflects our cultural moment of vapid celebrity worship.  We all love this stuff; we're addicts. The reality show, TMZ celebrity pap that we zup up every day has become the only thing we can consume, and so we eagerly consume an endless opera buffo of Don-said-this, Megyn-said that. We might not like what we see in the mirror, but it's still us. Donald Trump is us. 
   Well, the GOP anyway. Not all of us, thankfully, not yet.  There is still plenty of time for Trump to flame out, as front-runners often do. But even if he doesn't — a terrifying thought that has to be ushered into the realm of possibility — there is always the salvation of the general election.
      Up until a few days ago, I viewed Hillary Clinton through latticed fingers. Sure, she's qualified. Sure, she's smart. But God, not the Clinton years again. Not Bill back in the White House, on her arm, a surreal inversion of expected roles.
     Then look at Trump. And his rapturous welcome among GOPers hot to lash out at a modern world they neither understand nor accept. And suddenly Hillary becomes the free safety in the backfield, the lone tackle between Donald Trump and the goal line glory he's speeding toward, legs pumping, toupee flapping in the breeze. 
     That isn't quite true quite yet. A year of campaign, God help us, and plenty of time for Trump to fall apart, though if rhetorically waving Megyn Kelly's bloody tampon over his head — I thought the Fox hosts were fair and pointed, to my vast surprise — doesn't sink him, it's hard to imagine what will. Maybe he'll drown a puppy in a bucket at the next debate.
     Still, there's always Hillary, looking suddenly heroic, our Ulysses, home at last, surveying the hall of arrogant, loutish suitors, drawing her bow. Perhaps fate is inflicting Donald Trump upon our nation now to make her victory in November, 2016 all the more sweet. 
     Nah, the guy will be president. Serves us right.

We forget the wars we don't fight

  

   
     Whenever anyone speaks of "American exceptionalism," the wilted notion that the United States has a special greatness, a divine destiny even, I try to point out that feeling really, really good about yourself and your homeland, and dismissing anything negative about it, is not itself a sign of greatness. Exceptionalism gets trotted out, lately, while attacking Barack Obama, for occasionally suggesting that sometimes our country has stumbled. It has stumbled because every country has, and only tinpot dictatorships insist otherwise. Nations with the most shameful histories of undeniable atrocity, like Japan and China, are also loudest when insisting on their own superiority.
     What America undeniably is, I believe, is lucky. Founded on a vast continent, rich with resources, guarded only by a scattered, indigenous people susceptible to both smallpox and gunpowder, it was located in the right place. Blessed by the right leaders, like George Washington, who could have been king, or at least more kingly than he was. Or Abraham Lincoln, who bound our nation together when it broke apart.
     Franklin D. Roosevelt also saved our country. If you look at the era he was in, the tyrants it spawned—Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini—FDR could have easily led the country down the wrong path. Anyone who read Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," a novel imagining that Lindbergh was elected president instead of FDR, knows how chillingly plausible it is that America could have gone another way in the 1930s.
     But we didn't. We had Roosevelt, and he prodded a nation all too happy to let Lindbergh's friends, the Nazis have Europe to get behind that last bastion of democracy, Great Britain.
     FDR spoke so well--true, in a high pitched voice that would never fly today. But he had the right words. Winston Churchill rightly gets the fame as an orator. But FDR could turn a phrase, one of which has vibrated in the back of my mind while assessing the nuclear deal with Iran.
     "No man can turn a tiger into a kitten by stroking it," Roosevelt said, on his Dec. 29, 1940 "Fireside chat" radio address. He was talking about the need to arm Britain and resist Germnay. "The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis."
     That line alone was almost enough to make me doubt any pact with Iran. You can't pet the problem away. Their nature will not change.
     But a metaphor only goes so far. Are the Iranians the Nazis, an implacable force, bent on domination and death, even when that means its own ultimate destruction? They don't seem to be. The Republicans argue we can't make a deal with Iran because they can't be trusted, though the GOP suddenly trusts them plenty whenever they make a wild threat against Israel. Wild threats against Israel are what its neighboring nations do. It keeps their people distracted. We can't fight them all over it.
     Iran with a bomb would have to be insane to attack Israel, which has nuclear armed submarines for the purpose of turning any nation that nukes it into a sheet of fused glass.
     Far more likely that any bomb the Iranians develop will be passed on to their terrorist pals, put on one of the countless containers that are waved into American ports every day, and be detonated there. We should worry about ourselves more than Israel.
     What to do? Our three options are 1) attack Iran before they finish their bomb; 2) keep applying severe economic sanctions or 3) come to a deal to limit their atomic development. The Israelis itch for Option #1. The US assembled a coalition that implemented #2 which didn't solve the problem. So now, if Congress approves next month, we'll try #3.
     If it fails, well, lots of crazy, anti-American regimes have nuclear weapons, from Russia to North Korea to Pakistan. , They threaten people left and right, just like the Iranians, but never pulls the trigger. A war might stop them, but then in the you-break-it-you-bought-it dynamic in Afghanistan and Iraq, we'll own Iran too, and there just aren't enough U.S. troops or dollars to do that.
     Getting back to the idea of being lucky with leaders, we've had wars dangled at us before over nations getting nukes that shouldn't. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? Remember the war between the Soviets that took place in 1962? Of course you don't. Wars a lot more memorable than peace. Which is why we're still flipping through the dog-eared World War II playbook to guide ourselves, when we should consider John F. Kennedy's walk-away-from-the-war two step, which worked great. His generals were clamping at the bit to attack the Ruskies. Kennedy said no. Its the greatest thing he ever did. We don't remember the wars we didn't fight as clearly as the wars we did, but maybe we should try harder to keep them in mind.

Ketchup: The Condiment of Controversy

     Having written, not even a year ago, about whether Chicagoans are permitted to put ketchup on a hot dog, the subject should be off the table, so to speak. There are more important issues.     
      But the Chicago History Museum is holding its 3rd annual Hot Dog Fest this weekend, and I could not resist sliding by at lunchtime Friday to hear Northwestern literature professor Bill Savage deliver a lecture entitled, "Ketchup: The Condiment of Controversy."
      "Why on earth do we take this seriously?" Savage asked a group of about 25 assembled on folding chairs at the southern tip of Lincoln Park.. "Sausages link—pun intended, by the way—to Chicago history in really profound and important ways." 

Bill Savage

      An expert in Chicago history, baseball, Nelson Algren (and, I should mention, the instigator and editor of my most recent book) Savage said the ketchup conundrum is "representative somehow of identity," tipping his hand in the process.
      "If you say upfront that if you put ketchup on your hot dog you're not a Chicagoan, that's like saying if you have certain beliefs you're not an American," he said, early in his talk. "It's a certain way of defining identity that I think we need to think about."
      And think about it we did, in one of those satisfying freeform thought exercises that start with something small and end knocking on the door of crucial questions. 
      Savage took a quick poll—the audience seemed evenly divided regarding ketchup on hot dogs, though most agreed that those who utilize the condiment lose the right to call themselves Chicagoans. Savage brought up an interesting question: how many felt it was okay, but only for kids? I've long suspected that my own inclination reflects a lingering childhood predilection, like a taste for those big squishy orange circus peanuts. Or maybe it had something to do with growing up a child of Eastern European Jews in Cleveland.
    "Food and food culture are intimately linked to different kinds of identity." said Savage. "Especially ethnic identity."
     He gave a brief history of Chicago's iconic Vienna Beef. "Two immigrant brothers came here and in 1893, at the World's Fair, had the brilliant idea to put a viener, a Viennese sausage, in a bun, and voila, the hot dog is born, or at least the Vienna Beef hot dog is born."
     Ohhh, Vienna. Wiener. of course. I never made the connection before. Learning that felt like finding a $20 bill on the ground.
     Judging who genuinely belongs here by what a person puts on his frank is one strange local custom.
     "The ketchup controversy, it's really anomalous," said Savage. "There's a lot of different Chicago fast foods and street foods where no one cares what condiments you put on it. No one cares what you put on your gyro. No one cares what you put on your Italian beef.  Nobody cares if you like sausage instead of pepperoni on your pizza. Or even deep dish versus thin crust. People may argue about it, but if you like deep dish, it's not like you're 'not a Chicagoan.' If you like thin crust, it's okay, who cares? Only ketchup on a hot dog is something where, if you like it, you're not a Chicagoan."
     He said there were many arguments against ketchup on a hot dog, and some of them "make a certain amount of sense." He cited Bob Schwartz, a Vienna executive who was in the audience, whose book on Chicago hot dog stands is called Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog —"Ketchup is basically sweet," Savage said. "It overwhelms other flavors, you don't want to do that." A philosophy I had heard when I attended Vienna's Hot Dog University. 
    But this isn't about balancing flavors. 
    "Far more often, people make moralistic arguments," he said, reading from a 1991 "Straight Dope" column where Cecil Adams. replies to a question about whether ketchup is proper on a hot dog: "This is like asking why Leonardo didn't paint the Mona Lisa on black velvet. Ketchup is destructive of all that is right and just about a properly assembled hot dog."
      Adams says that condiment tradition must be observed because: "Chicago is one of the hot dog's holy cities."
    "There's this insane religious rhetoric surrounding the no-ketchup-on-hot-dogs conversation," Savage said.  "When I did a hot dog tour for the History Museum a few months ago, I tweeted out, 'What do you people think about ketchup on hot dogs?' People responded [by] saying it was an abomination. It was blasphemy  it was unclean. All the rhetoric of religion and religious identity."     
     It's so over the top, you have to realize that it isn't the condiment being discussed, but the discussion itself that's important. It's self-perpetuating.
     "The reason why we talk about not having ketchup on hot dogs is because we talk about not having ketchup on hot dogs"  Savage said. "The fancy way of putting this, if you've got a PhD, is 'discursive reasoning.'  People keep saying you can't have ketchup on your hot dog so you can't have ketchup on your hot dog because people keep saying that, and that's the only reason." 
     So it isn't avoiding ketchup on hot dogs that's the distinctly Chicago tradition, the tradition is browbeating people for putting ketchup on hot dogs. Enter Mike Royko.
     Savage cited a 1993 column by the great Chicago columnist, quoting a scene in "Sudden Impact" where Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character expresses disgust with ketchup on hot dogs: "Nobody, I mean nobody, puts ketchup on a hot dog," says Inspector Harry Callahan. 
     But where did that idea come from? Here he mentioned a theory I've been developing.
     "Neil Steinberg ....has traced this gag back to '40s- and '50s-era cartoons where the buffoonish American, whether its Yogi Bear or Bugs Bunny, gets a nice steak at a French restaurant and then covers it with ketchup," Savage said. "The irate chef comes out with a cleaver and chases him down the street. Ketchup is a gag. It meant you were unsophisticated, meant all you want to do is cover stuff in red sauce because you don't have a palate. Of course Chicagoans, we all have palates. We all want to have taste."
     So the debate is a symptom of Midwestern cultural insecurity. Like recent immigrants hectoring their fresh-off-the-boat brethren to quiet down, behave, dress properly and stop embarrassing them so much, Chicagoans remind each other not to use ketchup so the swells in New York City won't look down their noses at us more than they already do. Thus the passion, the embarrassed intensity.  
    Savage concluded his talk by remarking on those who view ketchup as "inherently evil." and "using it is inherently bad and marks you as somebody who is not worthy."  This is the thinking behind hot dog stands that either don't offer ketchup, not even for fries, out of fear it might migrate to the hot dog, or warn their customers about using ketchup, a stance Savage called "fast food fascism." 

Fatso's Last Stand lectures its customers. 

     "Are we a free people?" he asked. "For me, the hot dog stand is the ultimate democratic space: Everybody is equal. Everybody gets in line. Everybody orders what they want. You pay. You get it. It's cheap. It's fast. You eat it. You go. When you're in line you're not better or worse than anybody else and nobody is better or worse than you. All men are created equal in the hot dog stand. So when there are hot dog stands where certain kinds of identities are imposed rather than embraced, I get my back up a bit. This is about formation of identity. There are always a negative and a positive way to go about this. The positive way is to emphasize what we share, what we have in common, and in Chicago this is related to neighborhood identity. The other side of that is the negative definition: you're not like us so we push you away. Do we emphasize the things that connect us, or the things that divide us? I wonder sometimes if it's possible for people to create a positive identity without also having a negative identity. But I do think it's possible to emphasize the things that unite us rather than the things that divide us. That's a decision. You decide to do that."
     He didn't quite say it, but, like any good lecturer, Savage led me to a realization based on all that had gone before. During the question and answer session after his talk, I stuck up my hand.
    Could the ketchup question be a parody of the actual animus that Chicagoans have for each other? "It's like a mimicry of the real hatred we have... in a mock way, like kids with toy swords."
     That makes sense to me. It's so hard to condemn your neighbors nowadays. Race, religion, sexuality, all out the window, for the most part. The ketchup eaters are safe villains, however, permitting us to exercise our deep desire to be better than somebody else, in our own estimations, and then to let them know about it in a direct fashion.  Savage allowed that the ketchup kerfuffle might permit us to channel our scorn by "sublimating it into something tamer."
     After more questions and hearty applause, Savage—who leads a hot dog tour for the History Museum at the end of October—and I went off to Frankie's Beef for lunch. And though Bill prefers his hot dogs with mustard and onions, and I almost always opt for the simple, soft purity of just mustard and ketchup, we both, in honor of our surroundings, went for the classic Chicago Hot Dog with all the trimmings: mustard, onions, neon green relish, pickle, tomatoes, celery salt. I even got the sport pepper. It seemed the thing to do, a tribute to the wonderful diversity of this city and its hot dogs, The Frankie's dog was quite good, despite a certain lack of ketchup.

    

Hot Dog University serves up frank secrets

Mark Reitman

     The Chicago History Museum is holding its 3rd Chicago Hot Dog Fest this weekend at Lincoln Park. A gathering of scholarship, music and hot dogs, it's just the thing to spice up a weekend in August. Tomorrow I'll report on Bill Savage's critique of the Ketchup Question. In the meantime, since the Saturday Fun Activity has been solved, I thought I would post this special Saturday extra, recounting my studies at Vienna Beef's famed Hot Dog University. 

     Selling hot dogs.
     Must be the easiest job in the world, right?
     You take a hot dog, you slap it in a bun. If the customer wants mustard, you squirt on mustard. You hand the hot dog in wax paper to the customer. You take the money.
     Bing bang boom. What's the big deal? What's there to learn?
     That was my thinking when I heard that Vienna Beef runs "Hot Dog University" out of its plant at 2501 N. Damen—a two-day, $695 course to teach people how to sell hot dogs.
     What does it teach? How to boil water?
     I sign up, dubious, telling myself, I don't have to stay for the whole two days; if it gets dull, I can bail out after a few hours. Slip away to use the restroom and never come back.
     It doesn't get dull; I pay close attention, the entire two days, get my diploma, and only wish this article could be long enough to convey the freewheeling mix of streetwise economics, consumer psychology, ethnic sociology, food service history that Mark Reitman—his business card reads "PHD (Professor of Hot Dogs)"—serves steaming out of his hot dog cart of wisdom over two eight-hour days.
     All delivered in a manner of utter seriousness, part Army colonel briefing his troops on what to expect after they hit the beach, part junior high school health teacher walking his seventh-grade boys through the facts of life.
     Take a matter as simple as potato chips.
     Not so simple.
     "All I sold off my cart were hot dogs and drinks — I didn't sell chips. But I'm going to talk about chips, potato chips with hot dog carts," Reitman tells his six students, minutes after class has begun, while he is still outlining his "philosophy of hot dogs."
     "See here in Chicago, chips don't go with hot dogs. If you go into a hot dog stand, you get fries with a hot dog. If you grew up in Chicago the only time you had chips with a hot dog were if you are outside at a picnic on a white paper plate, OK?"
     Those words "picnic" and "white paper plate" are infused with a bewildered disgust.
 

Mark Reitman lectures to a Hot Dog U class.

   "Hot dogs and chips are something that you serve at home. But now, chips are very, very important on a hot dog cart, because you want to use those putting together what some of the fast food places have called a 'Value Meal.' You're not going to make money on the chips, but by putting chips with a drink and the dog you get them to buy a drink, which they normally wouldn't buy, so you make a couple cents on the chips, you make 75 on the drink, you make your money on your hot dogs."
     In other words, sell a hot dog for $3, a drink for $1.60, and chips for .50 and you'll sell a lot of $3 hot dogs. But offer a $5 lunch special of the three, and people will clamor for that and you'll make more money, and making money is what selling hot dogs is about.
     To that end, we learn about hot dogs, both skinless and natural casing. We slip into white lab coats and hair nets and tour the steamy, chilly, clangorous Vienna Beef plant, with whining power saws and chirping forklifts, starting where workers use hooks to turn big sides of beef as they trim off strips of fat.
     "These trimmings are going into hot dogs immediately," says Reitman.
     Extra fat is essential because, contrary to expectations, these hot dogs aren't made from cows — they're made from bull meat, a leaner flesh that requires extra fat.
     By the time we repair to a test kitchen mid-morning to sample hot dogs and Polish slices on toothpicks, we all know each other and our stories. A pair of brothers-in-law planning a cart across from the entrance to the Milwaukee Zoo. A former Allstate executive, let go after 25 years, opening a stand in Kenosha. A cop from Greenville, South Carolina, an engineer from West Virginia.
     After lunch at Vienna Beef's substantial public cafeteria, patronized by everyone from truck drivers making deliveries to company owner Jim Bodman, we talk condiments.
     "If you plan on making money, it's got to be busy, and you can't dress a hot dog," Reitman says. "It just doesn't work. Let people dress their own dogs."
     Not that this is without risk, particularly if you are offering a Chicago-style hot dog, with mustard, onions, relish, celery salt, sport peppers, and that profit killer, tomatoes.
     "I never served tomatoes," Reitman says. "You get somebody who loves them, they can use $2 worth. They're there making a salad out of my hot dog."
     Reitman of course analyzes the eternal ketchup conundrum.
     "Two out of three people" in Wisconsin put ketchup on hot dogs, says Reitman, who ran a stand in our neighbor to the North before beginning Hot Dog U. in 2006.
     As opposed to Chicago, "where it was blasphemous if you put ketchup on a hot dog."
      "I'll give you my feeling on that," he says. "Always put yourself in your customers' shoes. It's not what you want. It's what your customers want. People here at Vienna Beef would probably rip out my tongue if I said it's OK to put ketchup on your hot dog stand."
     Because, he says, ketchup throws off the subtle zeitgeist of the Chicago-style dog.
     "We add corn syrup to the hot dog, it's a sweetener," he said. "So it begins by getting the sweetness from corn syrup. Then that neon green relish, one of the first ingredients on that neon green relish is sugar. Then your tomato which is not a vegetable, it's a fruit, so you have that sugar in there. The addition of ketchup to Chicago-style hot dog exacerbates the amount of sugar and sweetness in it.
     "My philosophy is this: Whatever a customer wants he should be able to dress his dog. We have Hispanic customers, they request mayonnaise. You ever have mayonnaise on a hot dog?"
     And off we go on mayonnaise, spiced with lime and used in Tijuana Bacon Dogs and Sonoran Mexican Dogs. You need to know what your customers want and have it there— Grape Crush if you're on the West Side, mandarin orange Jarritos soda in Kenosha. You won't make money selling it, he says, because it's expensive, but some people will like you just seeing it on top of your cart.
     The next day it gets really interesting.

At the Restaurant Depot.

      
     We meet at 8 a.m. in the cavernous expanse of Restaurant Depot on Division, an enormous facility— merchandise is packed in pallets going up 40 feet—where you can buy anything from a mammoth industrial range to an oven mitt to tongs, which are complex.
     "In the world of tongs, there are good tongs and bad tongs," says Reitman. He brandishes a $1.91 spring loaded tong. "This over here is a very bad tong. It's like a razor blade—very easy to nip your finger."
     He picks up an $8 pair of tongs. "Spend the extra money. And buy two, because you're going to drop it in the hot water, eventually, and how are going to get it out?"
     Aisle by aisle we go through the depot, talking cups — offer one size ("Give people less choice," he says) — talking straws, onions, ice cream. Styrofoam hot dog containers are not Chicago — wax paper is, because one costs up to a nickel, and one costs a fraction of a cent and both "end up in the garbage."

Working the line at Vienna's cafeteria. 

   Back at Vienna Beef, we roll out Reitman's hot dog cart, fire up the burners, fill the water trays, and practice making ourselves hot dogs for lunch in a steady snow. Then we're behind the counter at the Vienna Beef cafeteria, taking orders from real customers as they reel off what they want on their dogs.
     "Are you ready to open a hot dog stand now?" a classmate asks me.
     "I'm ready to go back to the office and kiss the floor," I answer. "This is work."
     But work that pays off, or can. A few weeks later, I'm sitting in what could be considered the opposite of a hot dog stand — the plush, white-table cloth elegance of Petterino's, having lunch with Leo Melamed, the man who invented financial futures trading, the multi-millionaire chairman emeritus of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. We discuss politics, poetry, Poland, but the subject that really animates him is hot dogs.
     "Freddy's Hot Dogs!" he enthuses. "I was a hot dog man!" And we're off on tales of after-hours pinochle and how the grease smell lingers on your clothes. A titan of Chicago business. You gotta start somewhere.
                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 13, 2011

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Chicago is a city, and cities are known for their buildings and crowds. But the above is also in Chicago, and there are neither buildings nor crowds. In fact, when I took the photo, it was just me. 
      Where is this solitary, verdant place? The winner will receive one of my store of fine Chicago Mailing Tube cardboard tubes, complete with end caps. And since it would seem chintzy if I sent an empty tube, well-constructed though it may be, I'll include one of my bottomless supply of 2015 blog posters—which I intend to greatly attrit of next week by wheat pasting them to walls in parts of the city a bit more built up.
      Place your guesses below. Good luck.