The Illinois State Fair is deep-fried fun

Twilight parade, 2012

    The Illinois State Fair opened Friday, and runs until Aug. 23. While I  can't say that I felt an urgent yearning in my heart to hurry down to Springfield and attend, three years ago my family did go, and it was more fun than we expected. 

Deep-fried dill pickles

     Fried dill pickles from the 17th Street Barbecue. Soft-serve vanilla ice cream in the Dairy Building. Fried walleye from the Walleye Stop. Coconut-flavored watermelon. Fried key lime pie on a stick. Fried cheesecake. Bananas wrapped in rice and fried. A rib-eye beef sandwich, unfried. Shepherd's pie. Greek salad in the Ethnic Village. A fried brownie.
     That does sound like a lot, doesn't it? That was the menu of what I ate, in the order I ate it, during the first four hours of wandering around the Illinois State Fair on Thursday, the evening it opened.
 

Have to try the red velvet funnel cake

   Granted, I didn't eat all of it. I had my family to help. Sometimes I only sampled a forkful. I had only three fried dill pickle slices. The first to try it, to register its hot dill pickleness. The second to confirm what the first had tasted like—not good, not awful, just weird. The third quarter-sized slice because my older son, who had been inspired to buy them, begged me to help.
     "Please have some more," he said, holding the cardboard trough that contained most of the pound or so they gave him for his seven bucks. "I can't finish them all."
     I delivered a little speech about how not finishing everything is a survival skill at the fair, and we pitched the rest.
     So why, having never gone to the Illinois State Fair in my entire life, did I decide to drive the 200 miles to attend now? Several reasons. First, I was in town, not on one of the epic transcontinental vacations we've been taking for, gee, the previous four years.
     Second, I was curious. I went to the fair for the same reason Mallory climbed Mt. Everest: because it's there.
     And third, I heard you could milk a cow. That piqued my interest. I've witnessed a variety of food chain activities—pigs slaughtered, goats fed, turkeys exercised, even watched bloater chubs pulled from Lake Michigan. But I've never been up close and personal with a cow. That seemed a thing to do.
     What I wasn't interested in was snarky urban sneering. Some targets are too wide—I have my pride. Just as I sheathed my dagger when I went to Graceland and Disney World, so I sensed, somehow, driving through the lovely Illinois farmland framed by white expanses of billowy cumulus clouds, that there would be no icon-bashing this trip.

     And indeed, my immediate impressions of the crowds flowing into the fair included none of the standard anthropological clucking. My fellow visitors weren't particularly fatter than anybody you'd see shopping on Michigan Avenue. They weren't rustic in obvious, laughable ways. Just here to enjoy good old-fashioned—if hypercaloric—American fun.
     Maybe it helped that the temperature was in the low 80s, so it wasn't the hell­scape it might be if it were in the upper 90s. There was even a cool breeze.
     The fair opened its 10-day run—until Aug. 19—with a Twilight Parade, led by fire trucks representing entities such as the Illiopolis Fire Protection District. Gov. Pat Quinn led a phalanx of green-shirted supporters. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan seemed surprised to spot me in the crowd.
     "What are you doing here?" she shouted as the parade rolled by.
     "Working!" I yelled back.
     The family shared a table in the Ethnic Village with Kris Theilen, alderman of Springfield's 8th Ward, and supporter Patrick O'Ravis.
     "A lot of people who come to the fair are locals," said O'Ravis. "You get a chance to see people you haven't seen. And it's a great children's atmosphere."
      "For 10 days your routine is different," said Theilen. "I saw people I haven't seen for years. We buy the Mega-Pass. My children ride the rides like you wouldn't believe."

      My boys, while too cool for the Zipper or the Ferris wheel, were placated by the vista of bizarre fried foods — candy bars, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, anything that could be dropped into a fryer — and seemed to be having a good time, or at least as good a time as teens are capable of having with their parents. I had fun, finding the kind of whimsy I admire. One of the food stands is called, "Mom 'n' Pop Corn."
     "My oldest daughter came up with the name," said Mike Paine, who travels the country selling candied popcorn with his wife, Bonnie. "I'm pop and this is mom and the little kernels are back in Minnesota."
     He said business is good. At that moment it began to rain, lightly. I worried it might be bad for the fair, but Paine unexpectedly called to the heavens for more.
     "Quit teasing us with rain!" he commanded the skies, explaining that the drought is affecting his business.
     "My popcorn is not popping like normal," he said—the moisture in popcorn is what causes it to pop, and dry popcorn doesn't pop right. "There's a definite difference. If it's hurting me, imagine what it's doing with the farmers."
     Monday: Cows, both butter and living.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 12, 20012

Enigma in an alley

     If you look down enough alleys in Chicago, you will eventually see a cellist in a bowler hat. 
     I know this is true, based on personal experience. Friday evening at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival, going on this weekend in Rogers Park, I was doing something utterly mundane: trying to help my younger son find a bathroom. We were proceeding up Glenwood Avenue, when I heard the distinctive sound of cello, turned my head to the left, and saw this tableau.
     When you are confronted with something enigmatic, you can do one of two things. You can either keep going about your business, accepting the gift of its mystery. Or you can investigate, plunge into the thicket, push aside the leaves of the puzzle and try to find the truth within. The former is probably the better path for a life imbued with tantalizing possibility and, even, magic. Had I kept walking, i would forever wonder, and never know when I might glance inside a parking garage and see someone juggling, or hear the flute coming from within a ComEd service vault.  

     But given my personality, and the demands of my trade, I usually take the latter route. My thinking at the moment is, if I don't find out now, I'll never know. I wordlessly handed my glass of watermelon lemonade to my son and went over and approached the man in the derby hat.
     Ryan P. Carney. From St. Charles. Indiana University grad. Plays bass with the folk group, Antony and the Tramps. Opened for Spoon at Taste of Chicago last year, carried by WXRT. Was playing in the alley at that moment for the very prosaic reason that he needed to warm up before Antony and the Tramps went onstage. 
     Of course. Thank you. It all made perfect sense. Which is why, afterward, I was a little sorry I asked. Not to take anything away from Ryan Carney: he was politeness itself. But the truth can be overrated. It's a human desire to want to know the story behind a situation. The explanation falls short of the delightful possibility. You break open a seashell, looking for the source of the swooshing sea, and all you find in your palm are shards of broken shell. 

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     August is half over. Which means that school is beginning soon. Here are some young men at ... well, I shouldn't say where they are. You'll have to guess. And "a school gym" doesn't count. Which school? I think it's knowable. There are subtle clues. I cropped the photo a bit to make it a harder challenge, but if nobody gets it by 12 noon, I'll put up a wider cropped version. Alas, someone will no doubt crack it by then. I could say that I'm batting .000 when it comes to stumping the Hive, but I prefer to view it as you're batting 1.000. 
     Anyway, where are these young men? And bonus credit if you know what it is they're doing. The winner gets ... wait for it ... a 2015 blog poster, complete in its sturdy Chicago Mailing Tube tube. Place your guesses below. Good luck. 

FDA hero reminds us of the need for government meddling

     One evil is so clear to Republicans that it didn't need to be discussed at all during their presidential debate in Cleveland last week: government regulation.
     The 10 candidates jostled to condemn government meddling.
     "We cut regulation by one-third of what my predecessor put in place," bragged New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
     "You get in and change every aspect of regulations that are job killers," said Jeb Bush.
     "We need to have a regulatory budget in America that limits the amount of regulations on our economy," said Marco Rubio.
    By an odd coincidence, one of the better known of those demonized regulators, Dr. Frances Kelsey, died the next day, at age 101.

Frances Kelsey at the FDA

     In 1960, Kelsey, University of Chicago Medical School class of 1950, was a new hire at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C. One day in September a trio of three ring binders, each the size of a phone book, landed on her desk.
     It was an application from William S. Merrell, an Ohio drug company, that wanted to sell a drug it called Kevadon in the United States. Kevadon was a sedative, effective against nausea in pregnant women. Approval was expected to be routine: the drug was already being sold under various names all over the world.
     But as she read the Merrell application, Kelsey had qualms. "There was something a little different about this one," she later remembered thinking.
     According to law, the FDA had just 60 days to register an objection. Otherwise, Merrell could go ahead and sell the drug in the United States—it was already giving samples to U.S. doctors; eventually 1200 doctors would get them, and starting handing out free pills without telling patients they were unapproved, a field test by the unaware, all completely legal.
     But before the 6o day limit ran out, Kelsey wrote to Merrell saying despite their findings' bulk, they were "incomplete." She had questions about methodology.
     Merrell howled. Executives came to Washington in droves to complain about the "stubborn bureaucrat." They sent letters to her superiors, made phone calls, placed editorials in medical publications denouncing "dilatory tactics which certainly cause a loss to the industry of millions of dollars ... and even loss of life." Kelsey was being "unreasonable and irresponsible." Language any Republican presidential candidate knows by heart.
     While Kelsey was engaged in what Scott Walker would call "out-of-control regulation," a letter was published in the February, 1961 issue of the British Medical Journal noting reports of "a possible toxic hazard" with the drug. After the letter, Merrell wondered if they could perhaps sell their drug with a warning label. As 1961 dragged on, the company expressed concerns it would "miss the Christmas market."
     But by Christmas the struggle was over. In West Germany, where the sedative had gone on sale in 1957, a report linked an epidemic of malformed children to the drug, which was sold under 50 brand names, but generically known as thalidomide. Tens of thousands of children around the world were born with severely malformed limbs resembling flippers, or no limbs at all.

Dr. Kelsey received the President's Award for
Distinguished Federal Service from JFK.

     But not in the United States, except for a few whose mothers got those free samples. President Kennedy gave Kelsey a medal. Laws were tightened. She worked for the FDA for nearly 45 years. Long enough for the thalidomide story to fade from the public mind.
     I don't want to let one dramatic story goad me into extremism. The flip side of the "Frances Kesley ethic" is that valuable drugs are sometimes needlessly delayed. There can be too much government interference in business, as the advent of Uber demonstrates. Certain trades—hair braiding—are licensed that shouldn't be licensed at all.
     That's called "nuance." It might not play well in a sound bite, but in real life there is a balance, or should be, between caution and expediency. We need the government to rein in business because otherwise it'll sell thalidomide and put 12-year-olds to work in thread factories. We know they will because they've done it before. Government regulators make mistakes, but they also do enormous good, and don't deserve the sneering, blanket contempt Republican candidates heap upon it. Nor does the public.
     Among those watching the GOP presidential debate were countless 54-year-old businessmen and Tea Party grandmothers, jaws clenched in righteous anger at the foolishness of government meddling, who owe the presence of their arms and legs, hands and feet, to one stubborn FDA bureaucrat, Frances Kelsey, who understood the need for government regulation. These lucky men and women have no idea of the truth underlying their entire lives. There's a lot of that going around.

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.