Top Ten Reasons McDonald's is Tanking

     These are dark days for McDonald's. Sales are down 11 percent this year, profits down 30 percent. Their Asian market is crumbling. The second September in a row when their financial news was grim. 
     Not that McDonald's isn't desperately trying to arrest its tailspin, tossing out qualities that once made it distinctive, experimenting with radical notions such as letting customers choose what goes on their burgers. Or, starting next month, serving breakfast all day. McDonald's seems to be back-engineering itself into a real restaurant, a version of Woody Allen's joke about Noel Coward buying the rights to "My Fair Lady," removing the songs and lyrics to change it back into "Pygmalion." McDonald's is transforming itself into Denny's with a clown.
     It isn't working, judging by a recent survey of American consumer opinion.
     "Consumers don't think the food is high quality, healthy or even that tasty," began a scorching piece in Crain's by Peter Frost. "The restaurants seem dated and unwelcoming. For a fast-food restaurant, it takes too long for customers to receive their orders. And even accounting for changes that McDonald's is making or considering, nearly half of Americans say they wouldn't increase their visits to restaurants operated by the nation's largest fast-food chain."
     I sure wouldn't. I'm sticking at zero. Why? I could list 50 reasons to despise McDonald's. But, space being limited, we'll limit ourselves to 10:

     Top Ten Reasons McDonald's is Tanking

     1. Ambiance. Ever since the cheery red and white tile drive-ins were replaced by horrible 1970s brown mansard-roofed monstrosities, McDonald's has been lost, decor-wise. Urban restaurants have a vibe that is half psych ward, half homeless shelter. Sometimes they display a few relics of the local culture that was, in part, displaced and destroyed by the arrival of McDonald's, which only makes it worse.
     2. Omnipresence. Rarity creates value and overabundance erodes it. There are just too many McDonald's: 32,000 worldwide. The market is glutted. The corporation seems to realize this, closing 700 McDonald's franchises this year alone, trying to cut their losses.
     3. Ronald. Everyone hates him. He's frightening. A scary clown. That sex toy mouth. Those leering eyes. You never see a child holding a Ronald McDonald doll. And if you did, you'd pity that child. It would be disturbing, like a toddler cuddling a skinned goat's head.
     4. Marketing. Last week, when Burger King challenged McDonald's to join them in creating a McWhopper for the International Day of Peace, I immediately knew McDonald's would pass. The behemoth is slow on its feet. Compare the oafish, witless, nearly hysterical images that McDonald's serves up to, for example, the humor in Geico commercials. Fifty years of watching McDonald's ads and I couldn't cite one specifically. Well, maybe that "Two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun" drone that nobody wanted rattling around in their brains. The marketing is as bad as the food.
     5. Employees. Harried cogs, desperately lunging to serve up the slop. Their "Guh-

morn welkamtuh'm'donal" has the emotional heft of "Order 'n' geh-out!" This is not to besmirch the employees themselves — no doubt decent folk plunged into an impossible nightmare of minimum wage slavery, fighting to keep a shred of humanity intact while endlessly repeating some mechanical functions. Does Amnesty International know about this?
     6. Blandness. Nothing in McDonald's is spicy. Even their attempt at a burrito tasted like a pot of paste. McDonald's idea of acknowledging our nation's rich ethnic diversity in their fare is offering green shakes at St. Patrick's Day.
     7. Happy Meals. Anyone who has ever had kids loathes McDonald's for reaching over our heads and luring our precious children into their trap with cheap trinkets. They're drug dealers, hooking the young on heavily breaded processed chicken.
     8. McRib Sandwiches. No more need be said. Those responsible should stand trial at The Hague.
     9. Competitors. Just as Detroit never got off its fat and satisfied posteriors until Japanese carmakers swept in and ate their lunch, so McDonald's was satisfied with futile half measures — look, we've got muffins! — until Five Guys and Red Robin and all sorts of good-burger-at-a-good-price joints came along. The spell was broken and people suddenly realized, "Wait. I'm eating this garbage when I could be eating actual food?!"
     10. The food. Last and least. The burgers are predigested mash. The fries are sugared. The shakes, frozen gray gruel. Believe me, I ate my share. No more. Now, if I enter a Metra car where someone is eating McDonalds, I have to hold my breath and hurry to the next car.
    Don't get your hopes up. McDonald still took in $27 billion last year, going gangbusters with those who don't know any better.The amazing thing isn't that McDonald's is in trouble; the amazing thing is it has lasted this long, and no doubt will go forward, for years, beccause many people can't stop themselves from eating it. Even I do, when abroad. Once I was in Vilnius, and thought I'd visit the local McDonald's — an ironic tradition of mine. I've eaten at Mickey D's in Tokyo, in Paris, out of anthropological curiosity, perhaps mixed with an unrecognized homesickness. But the one in Lithuania was so jammed I could not get in the door. A mass of frenzied customers. Not that I was disappointed to go elsewhere.

Move over St. Sebastian! Welcome Kim Davis, a new martyr joins the firmament

     So let's see where we stand.
     Rowan County clerk Kim Davis can't issue Kentucky marriage licenses to gays, even though that is her job requires it and a court has ordered her to, because God is against gays getting married, in her estimation, and being party to it would put her soul in peril.
      "This is a heaven and hell issue for me and for every Christian who believes," she said, dragging a whole lot of people unwillingly into her God-made-me-intolerant camp. "I weighed the cost and I'm prepared to go to jail. I sure am."
      So here is my question:
      If God Himself wants her not to issue marriage licenses to gays, and she isn't doing so, to save herself from eternal perdition, then why isn't that something worth quitting your job over?
     People quit their jobs over all sorts of lesser reasons: to get a higher paying job, because they were slighted when it came to raises and promotions, because they clash with a boss.
     Having a duty you are ordered to perform that conflicts with the desires of the Lord God Almighty—in your own narrow, antique, fucked up notion of what religion means, that is—seems like a really good reason to turn in your resignation.
     But she doesn't. Because she isn't really trying to pay respect to her own notions of faith, but to mess with the lives of people she hates. She could have been released by promising, not to issue the licenses herself, but just to refrain from stopping the other clerks, one of whom is her son, from doing so.  Religion inspires many people to selfless acts of kindness, of charity, of good works, even to people different than themselves. 
     While to others, it's just a twist on solipsism, one more reflective surface in the hall of mirrors that is their lives. She isn't hurting innocent Kentuckians who just want to get married. She is the vessel of God, like Joan of Arc.
     Now, like Joan, she is jailed. Making her a martyr for all the halfwit haters who believe right along with her.  Even if she spends one night, it is the equivalent of the pyre in Rouen, at the center of the Place du Vieux-Marche.  The smoke rises, the faithful are put to the test. 
     “Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country," Mike Huckabee, one of the throng of Republican presidential candidates, tweeted. "We must defend #ReligiousLiberty!”
     Madness. We in the fact-based world must keep foremost in mind that religious factionalism is what makes so much of the planet a blood-soaked hell. If every official enforced the law based on his, or her, own perception of divine will, the world would be anarchy.  That GOP leaders are cravenly backing her is near-treason, undermining our nation of laws in favor of faith-fueled anarchy.
     To be a martyr, one needs to suffer. A night in jail, or two, is little cost for the leap in station Kim Davis, hero to the cause, is about to experience. The crowdfunding. The best-selling God is My Co-Pilot ghost-written autobiography recounting her Golgotha, her sufferings for her beliefs. The made-for-Christian-cable TV special. The high-paid speeches. It would seem impossible, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. 

Hell and other feats of religious imagination

     There is no hell.
     No flames. No fiery pit ringed with horned demons using pitchforks to keep sinners' heads under the boiling lead.
     Sorry if I'm the one to tell you. 
     No hell. How could there be? Not only don't I believe in hell. To be honest, I have trouble believing anybody believes in it. How can they?
     Rather hell was a story, obviously, concocted in order to get people to behave in a certain way that they might otherwise not behave. Maybe they'd want to fool around before marriage. Hell kept them in line. Maybe they considered slacking off on their obligations to the church. Hell was what awaited them if they did.
     But the fires of hell cooled, in our modern world. I've never met anyone who sincerely worried about going to hell.

    So new stories had to be crafted, by those who would control the behavior of others.
    For instance, babies.
    Not born babies -- I'm not sure "born babies" is a term, as opposed to a neologism required by where we're going.
    But pre-born babies. What are under all other circumstances called "fetuses." In order to enlist them for their purposes, religious fanatics promote these forming fetuses to full babyhood, and use them as puppets to boss around women.
     Under any other circumstance, nobody believes it.
     Think about ordinary situations, outside the realm of the abortion debate. Outside the confines of the story. 
     Even the most conservative woman, upon learning she is pregnant, does not cry, "I have a baby!" (the confused answer would be "You do? Where?")
    She would say, "I'm going to have a baby." Future tense, not needing to add, "Once this fetus is fully developed and born."
    Until then, it isn't a baby yet. It's a proto baby. A fetus.
     But just as some unseen region underground was converted to hell, so fetuses, hidden out of sight, were backformed into babies, one of many disingenuous tricks to corral and control women, who lately tend to break free.
     You can tell that even the people who insist that fetuses are babies, for purposes of banning abortion, don't really believe it, because if you say, "So should we send women who have abortions to jail? For murdering these babies? Is that what you want?" most will just give you the I-refuse-to-think-about-this look. Because they don't really think it's a baby, they're just telling others that, to get them to conform, the way villagers cowered at the prospect of hell.
     They also keep changing the story, adding new details, trying to keep it fresh and convincing. 
    In Ohio, the Republican legislature is expected to soon pass a law making it illegal to have an abortion in order to avoid giving birth to a baby with Down Syndrome.
     A similar law is on the books in North Dakota, making it illegal to have an abortion due to concern over genetic anomalies, though nobody has been prosecuted under it and there is question whether anybody could be, as it is an unconstitutional intrusion into the mindset of a woman.
     You can't make a legal activity illegal because of the reason you do it. It's a lousy reason, oh, to go to college in order to drink beer. But you can't pass laws trying to stop it. 
    The reason a woman has an abortion is only on the table in the minds of those who want to ban all abortions for all reasons, picking Down syndrome out of the same impulse that caused them to pick abortion in the first place: they see it as a realm where they can push their religion in a way that otherwise would be completely unacceptable and, as it is, is accepted by a narrowing segment of the country.
     The Down syndrome aspect is a compelling detail, in their minds, a way to keep the story fresh, like Dante taking hell and giving it nine rings and winged demons.
     Advocates of the law, who otherwise don't give a damn about Down syndrome, have been focusing on the full personhood of those with Down syndrome, and they are correct. But then the non-Down Syndrome people who would be born would also be full people, or would be, were they not aborted first, just as both people with Down syndrome and without would be born were it not for contraception, which fanatics have given up fighting in order to fall back to a line drawn at abortion. 
     They'd of course like to just ban abortion period, but Roe v. Wade seems to be preventing that, at the moment. So they nibble around the edges, throwing stuff up, seeing what sticks. Maybe the Down syndrome ploy will work. If not, there's always a new gambit, a new tangent to take the narrative down. The only thing not on the table is letting women make their own moral choices for themselves, unhindered by law or outside meddling. The way that religious fanatics came to their beliefs. But that would be impossible. That would be like a Saudi sheik letting his wife drive.
     Ohio governor John Kasich, by the way, who is presenting himself as the voice of moderation, has signed 16 separate abortion restrictions since 2011. Quite a lot really. I grew up in Ohio, and don't remember it being the fundamentalist backwater it seems to be becoming, but I've been gone a long time, and it has been on hard times, and nothing like economic downturns to encourage people to really get their backs into manhandling the lives of others.
    So keep in mind: there is no hell, and no babies involved in an abortion. It's just another lie that gets repeated so much people pretend it's true. I almost said, "no heaven either," but I know lots of people view heaven differently, because it is where they imagine their loved ones dwelling in eternal bliss. A beautiful and a comforting image, and not one I would strenuously contradict. Because life is difficult, and people believe, and do, all sorts of things in order to get by. To throw stumbling blocks in front of others who are in difficulty is wrong. I wouldn't do that to a grief stricken person just to prove a metaphysical point, and I'm an agnostic. You'd think that a religious person, awash in the kindness that religion supposedly imbues, would embrace that. Would not identify women coping with unwanted pregnancies as the moment to to try to spread their faith by hallucinating their rice kernel-sized fetuses into the Gerber baby. But apparently religion as an impulse toward loving kindness only goes so far.  Or at least that story is whispered very quietly, by some people under certain situations, compared to the fantasy that gets thundered by huge choirs of the faithful, trying to force others to follow their religion, not through hell, whose fear has cooled, but through law, this time in the name of imaginary babies.

Jury duty

     "Belts off, jackets off, pockets empty."
     In line at the Daley Center, last Thursday, 8:20 a.m., just another John Q. Citizen arriving early for his 8:30 summons .
     "Belts off, jackets off, pockets empty," a sheriff's deputy cries, to no one in particular, like a 19th century vender selling fruit off a cart.
     Juggling a cup of coffee, a briefcase, jacket and ID, I slide off my belt and coil it in a grey plastic bin, along with the fistful of change the letter told us to bring for vending machines.
     While most people to whom I mentioned my pending jury duty expressed sympathy, even pity, my mood is light. Anything that involves enforced idleness, reading and snacks can't be that bad.
    "Belts off, jackets off, pockets empty."
    Putting my belt back on by a table past security, I try to make small talk with the guy arranging himself next to me.
    "Another indignity of the state," I venture.
    "I got better things to do," he mutters, darkly, and I almost ask, "Like what?"
     But that seemed impolite, perhaps even unwise. I'm at court. This guy might not be a juror, this guy might be here to go on trial for throttling some wisenheimer.
     I say nothing.
     Up to the 17th floor, where we are assigned to groups -- I'm Panel 9, and given a slip of paper saying so. We're invited to sit in a sea of chairs. I pop a green tea mint, crack David Axelrod's "Believer"  (excellent, filled with trenchant insight and telling details). and begin to wait. 
    Forty minutes pass.
     At 9:10, a video. "Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, my name is Timothy C. Evans..."
    See, I know Tim.  I've dealt with him a dozen times. I'm certain they'll never pick me for a jury. A newspaper columnist married to a lawyer. Never. A couple hours of leisure and they'll send me on my way.
    Famous TV newsman Lester Holt pops up. We learn fun facts. "Circuit court is a state court, not a county court." Four hundred judges, eight divisions, with 2.4 million cases a year. Lester Holt appears. "Your name was picked at random. It is impossible to know how long a trial will last."
     Those of us going to trial. My wife agrees with me. Never in a thousand years.
    "If you are excused you must not take it personally.'
     Oh don't worry, Lester, I won't. 
    The music swells.
   "You are now ready to serve as a juror in the Circuit Court of Cook County!" 
    Or be dismissed from serving, as the case may be.
     Another ten minutes pass. Panel 3, is called Panel 5.  Panel 7...
     Just before 10, they call ... Panel 15. "Hey!" I think. "Unfair! Go in order." 
     About 10:15, we're called. Panel 9 escorted to a courtroom, where a judge tells us that the lawyers saw our faces and decided to settle.
       I half expect we'll be dismissed right then. Instead we begin an odyssey, the Wandering Jury.  Led to one courtroom, then another. No one is ready for us. Back to the 17th floor. Finally, about 11 a.m. we are escorted to a third courtroom, then told to take lunch. Come

back in two and a half hours. I Divvy to the office to do a bit of work and show off my JUROR sticker, my red badge of civic duty.
     At 1:30 we reassemble at a courtroom. Judge Jim Ryan welcomes us affably. We take seats in the jury box and he explains the case.
     A young woman driving an Acura was rear-ended by another driver on Grand Avenue. Her insurance company paid $4,400 for repair and a rental car, and now the company wants to collect from the guy who rear-ended her, an unshaven, handsome, vaguely menacing young man in a black v-necked sweater.
     For a moment, I wonder if we've begun the trial. No, this is "voir dire," jury selection. We are asked if any of us have been in accidents. Any lost our license? Any have trouble with the idea of an insurance company recovering damages?
     "Mr. Steinberg..." one lawyer begins, reading from a form, and I sit up straight, smiling, ready for my moment in the spotlight. Time to be recognized, lauded, then dismissed. "...your wife is a lawyer. Will that affect your ability to view the case impartially?"
     "Umm, no," I say.
    There is a break. After five minutes, we are told six have been chosen. I'm among them. The other 12 are given their freedom.
     The case takes two hours, start to finish. It consists of lawyers quizzing two witnesses: the woman whose car was hit, and the man who hit her. Nobody questions the facts. Two photos are introduced into evidence: one of the woman's crushed bumper; the other of the man's car stopped on the grass beside a building. 
     Back in the jury room, I'm elected foreman; I'm not sure why. One woman suggested it, everybody else went along and I accepted. 
     So what do people think? I poll the jury. Five find him negligent. One just can't.  "It could have happened to anyone," she says. For 40 minutes we go back and forth. The guy was obviously inattentive; I point out that he could barely pay attention during the two hour trial. Society demands drivers stop for cars making lefts. If you don't, you're negligent. Case closed.
    We argue with her, but  gently, respectfully. She seems fragile, about to cry, and goes into the bathroom for a long time and doesn't come out. When she does, I ask if there's any chance she'll change her mind. No.  I ask the others if there's any chance we'll come to her way of thinking. No. I have no interest in browbeating the woman, nor in drawing this out pointlessly. While I think he's liable and should pay, I'm not an agent of the insurance company. I send a note to the judge that we're deadlocked. We get certificates and checks for $25 and are out by 5 p.m.
     Two lessons. One, you never know what will happen when you go to law. Here I was certain I'd be dismissed, and end up jury foreman. Second, it's a flawed system—the guy was negligent—but one person can derail the whole thing. Still, it works, sort of. Everyone was exceedingly polite, and thanked us for us doing our civic duty. Compared to the bloody chaos in most of the world, our justice system is a gift.  

Carry a red flag

     As the blog will receive its millionth visitor today, I'm hosting a live chat party in the Party Room— the upper right hand side of the page — at 7 p.m. It's BYOB, but there will be music and conversation.  Dress is casual. 

    When automobiles first appeared on American roads, more than a century ago, they were considered unacceptably dangerous—too loud, too fast, apt to frighten the horses and run down pedestrians. Certain towns, in an attempt to minimize the hazard, enacted ordinances requiring that any horseless carriages traveling within city limits be preceded by a person holding a red flag, to warn of the approaching peril.
    Such laws were soon swept aside in our rush toward the future. But knowing about them left a lingering notion of a red flag, as a safety device, as being quaint and antique, firmly ensconced in what the great James Thurber once called "the halls and parlors of the past." A way to express caution that is rarely found today, perhaps at the occasional construction site, or maybe on a lifeguard stand to convey beach conditions, or planted, probably due to some arcane law, at the end of an extra-wide trailer truck.
     We were heading for the Lakeshore Arts Festival in Evanston's Dawes Park early in August when I was stopped dead in my tracks, while scooting with my family across Sheridan Road at Clark Street, by this singular sign. I told them to go on without me and I'd catch up after I marveled at the wonder.. 
     Under the sign, a cylinder to hold the flags.

     Empty, of course. There were no flags, though there used to be. A web site called "Legal Insurrection" posted this picture from a correspondent claiming they went up in 2012 as "a recent addition in a series of 'improvements' to this crossing where, to my knowledge, there has never been a mishap."
     A little research tells us the flags were featured in the Pedestrian Safety Evaluation Report delivered at a special Evanston City Council meeting on Aug. 6, 2012, recommending the city "Place crossing flags at all of the park crossings to alert the drivers when pedestrians are crossing the street." 
      About half a dozen intersections have them in Evanston, according to residents.
      Claire Zulkey, writing about the flags on the WBEZ blog, pointed out that pilferage by "hooligans" is a drawback to the system, though not the only one.  
     There is also mockery. The Daily Northwestern noted that a budding NU comic ridiculed the flags during his routine though, in amateur journalist fashion, did not detail what was said.  
     There is an exhausted carelessness to the flag idea, almost a kind of paradox: any crossing dangerous enough to require that pedestrians vigorously wave flags over their heads in an attempt to save their lives probably needs a stop sign or a streetlight, if not an overhead pedestrian bridge. The flag strategy smacks of cheapness and intellectual failure. It's something you would expect to see in North Korea, in lieu of expensive traffic lights.
     That said, the flag system is not without charm. I have never strode across a busy intersection madly waving a red flag over my head, but imagine the experience has a certain frisson, assuming you aren't run down by a truck in the process. You really need the aforementioned James Thurber to convey the feeling, which he conveniently has already done, in his 1939 illustration of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's chestnut "Excelsior." 
     I left the intersection with conflicting emotions. One, that I wished I lived in a society where people wouldn't steal the flags—college students are prone to pranks, and a bucket of red flags is an invitation to midnight theft if ever there were. You'd like to think that even sophomores drunk on punch and grain alcohol would pause before undermining even this sadly inadequate, fragile, jury-rigged yet somehow quaint system of pedestrian safety, but obviously they don't.
     Two, Evanston should stock the white cylinders or remove them. I felt positively naked, crossing flagless. If the flags are necessary, keep them supplied. If not, take down the signs. 
     Third, I know Evanston is a different sort of a town. But really, this is daft, a piece of performance art that somehow drifted into serious traffic management. It's something I'd expect to find in Oak Park.

This flower stinks at everything

     The Spike t-shirts are printed and ready, waiting in the Chicago Botanic Garden gift shop.
     Only $19.99.
     But Spike mania hit a serious road bump this weekend.
     The star of the show froze in the wings and refused to go on.
     All August, the Botanic Garden in Glencoe had been ballyhooing its amorphophallus titanum, popularly known as a "corpse flower," an enormous, rare Indonesian plant that was expected to open spectacularly and cast off a nauseating stench that, counterintuitively, always draws crowds of the public, who like nothing better than to see something that isn't often seen, or smell something that isn't often smelled.

     The crowds showed up—57,000 to see it in person since it was unveiled Aug. 6, hundreds of thousands more following online—in anticipation, to ogle a plant that was growing inches a day. Hundreds were there Sunday, waiting in line to see the flower bloom have its outer spath cut off by conservation scientists, in a kind of botanic circumcision, attempting to harvest the pollen.
     Among them was Ava Gaddini, 9, with her parents, Leah Starkman and James Gaddini. She had been checking Spike's live feed every day after school, drawn by the rarity of the occasion.
     "It blooms every 12 years," she said.
     "Or doesn't boom," I couldn't resist adding, then pointed out that the botanic garden has eight other titan arums on-deck in its greenhouse, and one could be blooming by Halloween, though it's hard to imagine they'll be able to recreate the commotion a second time.
     Visitors who managed to pack around the flower gasped and applauded as the huge leaves were cut away, revealing deep maroon interior designed to attract pollinating insects.
     There was no smell.
     The plant had been cultivated for 12 years, and staffers wept Saturday when they realized that Spike lacked the energy to bloom. One compared it to a "stillbirth.".
     While officials at the garden said hopes dimmed only recently, as the days rolled on, I begun to have my suspicions. Could this be a dud? But I was reluctant to start tapping my watch face in public. Friday I could no longer resist, and finally tweeted:
     "Am I the first person to wonder whether the damn corpse flower is ever going to open? @chicagobotanic #openalready"
     I should make it clear that I'm a member of the Botanic Garden, and take no pleasure in Spike's epic fail.
 

   Well, maybe a little pleasure, the kind of small smile of satisfaction I imagine a church lady who faithfully attends mass every single morning might feel when it rains on the annual parish carnival. Because the Tilt-o-Whirl is not what this is all about. Big media splashes are addictive, and I'd hate to see the Botanic Garden stagger from one blockbuster to the next, hyping a titan arum today, showcasing the Whistling Wisteria of Borneo tomorrow.
     And not because I'm selfish, and prefer a depopulated garden to wander through in blissful solitude.. Even on the most crowded Sunday morning, even at the height of Spike Fever, as people dutifully trudged past, gazing goonily at his green erectile majesty, once you stroll beyond the immediate vicinity of the entrance, the crowd thins out--people don't like to walk--and by the time you get to the rolling patch of prairie toward the back, you're mostly alone.
     No, I believe this development, disappointing though it is to those involved, teaches an important lesson:
     While you can't fool Mother Nature, Mother Nature certainly can fool you.
     Yes, there is much clockwork dependability. The swallows return every year. The moon waxes and wanes on schedule.
     And I suppose you can splice genes, and seed clouds, and similarly skew the natural order, now and then.
     But only so much. We have to resist falling into a false sense of certainty, of which the Botanic Garden was guilty, its PR klaxon slipping into a tone of giddy inevitability.
     "The night Spike blooms will thrill us all in the semi-tropical greenhouse, with its breathtaking flower…accompanied by a titanically rotten smell," Tim Pollack, the outdoor floriculturist, wrote on Aug. 16.
      The Botanic Garden folks should take comfort. People did turn out, and I can see those Spike t-shirts getting snapped up anyway. While plants are not always predictable, people are, and they like souvenirs they think will be rare or ironic, such as memorabilia from that big fizzle of a flower, which ended up stinking up the place, though not in the sense that its handlers expected.

Cute and retro doughnut trucks

     Originality is important in writing. If you seize somebody else's creative work, put a slight spin on it and feed it back to the public, well, you really haven't done much, and what you have done is bad.
      In business however, what works for one entrepreneur might work for you, too, and the consumer won't really care. To fans of Pepsi, it doesn't matter that Coca-Cola came first.
      Thus taking the long route from the paper to the train station Friday—I felt like wandering—I swung by Daley Plaza, where there was an odd circle-the-wagons ring of food trucks, including this cute little retro doughnut truck from Firecakes. 
      The moment I saw the 1968 Citroen, I thought how little and cute and retro and graphically  interesting it is. The moment after that I reflected that it is a rip-off of the Doughnut Vault little and cute and retro doughnut truck, which looks like this: 

    Well, it's a big city, and a couple more cute and retro doughnut trucks and it can be become a Chicago Thing, like hot pretzels in Philadelphia or sugared nut stands in Times Square.
    I wrote about the Doughnut Vault's 1957 International Metro (a retro Metro!) at the end of 2013.  
      Firecakes, located at 68 W. Hubbard, rolled its truck out early this year, without of course mentioning anything about swiping the idea from the Doughnut Vault. 
     “This is an exciting next step for Firecakes as we expand our brand," Firecakes founder Jonathan Fox told the Show Me Chicago blog.

Red cat

Blue dog

      The pair of twee vehicles made me think of the George Rodrigue Gallery in New Orleans. Rodrigue made a name for himself painting bright paintings of a blue dog. They were sold out of a gallery in the French Quarter. Then up pops a gallery not too far away selling paintings of a red cat, complete with pompous artist's statement, explaining how he came up with the idea for the red cat. The gall of it lodged under my skin. It's one thing to rip somebody off; it's another to try to pass it off as a genius divination of your own. 

      Not to make too much of the little and cute and retro doughnut trucks.  To be honest, the whole doughnut trend has peaked, in my mind, and is beginning to lose its allure—it's not like they're pies and can be enjoyed forever without any diminishment of pleasure. I first fell in love with Doughnut Vault because of its small gingerbread stack cake doughnuts. But those are harder to find, and the few times I was forced to sample their  yeast doughnuts, I found them the standard oversweet, puffy and kinda gross fried dough you can get at Dunkin's. 
     Still, I went up to the truck and inquired about their doughnut line. My wife has been hankering for a particular kind of doughnut. Something perhaps impossible to find. A plain cake donut, soft in the center, kind of hard, almost crunchy on the outside. She says that Dunkin' Donuts used to make them, they had a little handle on them to hold onto while the doughnut was dipped into coffee. But they phased them out in the general ruination of the chain. So, full service husband that I am, I have been looking around for a basic plain doughnut for my wife. You'd think I'd find one at the profusion of doughnut joints around town. But no. Not yet anyway. Though it is, as I said, a big city, and I haven't given up.