Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     Okay, enough already. I've been waaaay to sympathetic when it comes to picking out Saturday fun activity photos. It isn't really that the Hive is so good, it's that I'm just a big old softie. No more! It's time to just stump people, and to do that, I need something really hard, like this single jeering face tile I noticed downtown. It might be difficult to make him out in the photo above, so I'll give you a close-up. 
     There. Take a good look.
     So where is this guy, who seems to be roaring in derision over your inability to place his location? I imagine to have any chance of success, you'd have to not only have noticed him, the way I did, but also remember the location, which seems a near-impossibility. 
    To show my confidence in the difficulty of this week's activity, I should offer something good as a prize? How about a signed, hardback copy of my last book, "You Were Never in Chicago," a $25 value, at least, assuming that it being defaced by the author doesn't reduce its worth. Place your guesses below. And good luck. 

Google in the driver's seat

     A man wants to drive.
     Sexist? Sure. But we live in a sexist society. I didn't invent it, I'm just trying to live in it. Scanning 25 years of marriage, I'd say I drive 95 percent of the time. Maybe more.
     I like to drive. It feels strange to sit in the passenger seat watching the scenery go by. Powerless.
     Which is why I've been following the advent of Google's self-driving cars.
     They're curiosities, now. Only four states allow them even to be road tested—California,

Nevada, Michigan and Florida, though this month the tech giant is scooting vehicles around Austin, Texas, through a special arrangement with the government there. They always have a human driver, in case something goes wrong.
     But that will change. You'll eventually see one, then a few , then they'll be everywhere.
     The artificial intelligence required -- perceiving conditions in real time and reacting to them -- is incredible, and it's amazing that in the 2 million miles driven, there have been a handful of minor accidents, and all of them are the fault of other, human drivers; mostly rear-end collisions when the Google car is stopped at a light.
     But what interests me most is not the hardware or the software, but the wetware: how Americans will accept the the cars when they're introduced. Right now Google is talking about 2020, which is just around the corner. We'll do so grudgingly, I assume, given our worship of freedom, the open road. Born to Run, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in their '49 Hudson. "The road is life." How will we sit passively and let a silicon chip do the driving?
     The same way we gave up galloping horses for sputtering black Model Ts. There will be psychological hurdles. I noticed in the official Google video of the first civilians to ride in the car, the 12 are mostly senior citizens, with one middle-aged woman and one child. There isn't a male between the ages of 12 and 60, with the possible exception of one grey-haired guy who's blind. While that might be coincidence, it also might be because we expect Daniel Craig to be working the gear shift of his Aston Martin Vanquish, not puffing out his cheeks with his hands on his knees and watching the world go by.
     But it will happen, just because the cars are so much safer. Let's say you spend $1500 a year on your car insurance, and the insurance on a self-driving car is $150. Suddenly you can save half the cost of your car over its life expectancy. Most people will do it.
     About 32,000 Americans died on the road last year, in accidents that were caused by excessive speed, drunkenness, stupidity, texting, aggression, lack of care and general obliviousness. Not problems that will be associated with the Google self-driving car, though it will take us a while for us to see that clearly, to recover from what we can call Myth Hangover—the tendency to react to technology based, not on actual reality, but on stories.
     Look at security cameras. For decades, the idea of being recorded in public places was filtered through George Orwell's 1984, where a repressive government uses cameras to spy on citizens. That such cameras are actually used to catch criminals and -- for you fans of irony -- hold excessive and racist police forces to account, has been very slow to register. We're still scared of Big Brother.

     One person run down by a Google car will cause more fuss than 1,000 killed by careless drivers. The tolerance for harm from technology is all out of scale. We're still afraid the machines will get us. The Google self-driving car will play out as the latest installment of the John Henry saga. For those not up on your folk songs, John Henry is a steel driving man, pitted against a steam drill, vowing to "die with a hammer in his hand" before he lets the steam drill beat him down.
     And—spoiler alert!—die he does. The steam drill wins. The steam drill always wins. Paul Bunyan notwithstanding, loggers use chain saws instead of axes. The century when people drove their cars will be a misty romantic memory, like the era when they rode horses and dipped candles. Not that there won't be all sorts of blustery macho pushback from a culture that spawned the Fast & Furious movie franchise The self-driving cars will be portrayed as weak and tepid, like clip on ties and package vacation tours. But we'll accept them, just as no city worker breaking up an old patch of concrete with a jackhammer frets, "You know, it would be so much more spiritually satisfying to use a sledge hammer and a spike to do this." Get used to those Google bean cars, because you'll be seeing a lot of them.

"Jigglypuff, I choose YOUUUU!"

     Today is a milestone in the Steinberg household. Since we took Ross, our oldest, home from the hospital the day after he was born, at the end of October, 1995, to now, we've been a house with kids. 

     That holds true for a few more hours. Tomorrow we cart his younger brother off to college, leave him with an awkward hug, and return to a house devoid of children for the first time in almost 20 years.

     I'm not complaining. Too many parents have too many true heartbreaks for me to bitch about sticking our landing and seeing them off to their next stage in life. I'm not sad (not sad not sad not sad!!!) so much as reflective: I never thought of parenthood as a phase, a period, a span of time with a beginning and an end, but it obviously is. Of course they always remain your boys. Just not boys sleeping in the bedroom up the stairs. 

     This column floated to the surface a few weeks back because I was followed on Twitter by some Japanese Pokemon fans, for some unfathomable reason. "Didn't I write something once...?" I asked myself, and dredged this up. It's reflects the whole boy dynamic in its prime, and holds up well, I think, and makes for a better read than whatever more timely navel-gazing I'd scrape together from a head that, at the moment, feels full of cotton, rags and the dust of old memories. I'm sure someday I'll reflect and come up with something pithy and interesting on the transition. But today is not the day. I'd rather think about Jigglypuff.

     God, this is so embarrassing.
     Before my boys ever knew what a Pokemon was, before they had ever expressed their deep undying love for Pikachu and pals, their father would, on occasion, let out a squeal of "Jigglypuff!"
     He did this so often that they, too, took to squealing "Jigglypuff!" even though they didn't know what a Jigglypuff was, did not know that he (she? it?) is a pink, spheroid, vaguely feline creature in the extended Pokemon family, not to be confused with the similarly round and pink Wigglytuff, whose ears are more rabbitlike.
     What happened is this. My brother Sam, who has spent years in Tokyo, invited me over to drink a few beers and compare the wreckage of our lives. On the second beer, he asked me if I wanted to play something called "Pokemon" on the enormous television set dominating his living room. This was maybe five months ago.
     We each took little consoles to twiddle with, and had to select characters, which we then set to attacking each other in a dramatic city in the sky. I ended up with Jigglypuff, the aforementioned pink sphere that sang and floated and, at times, shouted "Jigglypuff!"
     I had never played a console game like that before. I have not since. We went at it for a few rounds. His creatures kicked the tar out of my Jigglypuff, and we eventually tired of it and stepped out to the porch.
     I did not sense that this was a phenomenon poised to sweep the land — Pokemon is (are?) on the cover of Time magazine this week, and the Sun-Times has joined the universal clamor.
     And why not? There is certainly something infectious about it. At home that night, during our customary pillow war, I took to emitting triumphant shouts of "Jigglypuff!" whenever I'd bop one of the boys with a big pillow. It was just a funny word.
     Then my wife, perhaps responding to the radio beams broadcast from Burger King, controlling our thoughts, dutifully rented a Pokemon video. I upbraided her — why would she let the boys watch a street gang of cutesy Asiatic marshmallows have at each other? We agreed not to show the boys the tape.
     But one night she went out. I was left alone, caring for the boys, who promptly began tearing down the walls. The video was right there. I slipped it into the VCR.
     Their reaction was incredible. They froze, in front of the television. Ross, my oldest, just stood there, petrified, his mouth hanging open. Kent sat so still, so unblinking, I was afraid he had stopped breathing. They were like statues, the shifting light from the television dancing off their faces. The pose was so extraordinary — bug-eyed, drop-jawed — that I went to get the camera. When I returned a few minutes later, they were in the exact same positions. Ross hadn't even sat down.
     "Video heroin," I told my wife. "Buy the entire series. Our long nightmare is over." She shot me that look, and returned the tape.
     Yet that half-hour of Pokemon was enough. They were hooked. When a few figurines washed up at work, and I brought them home, it was like tossing chunks of raw meat into a tank of piranhas. The boys shrieked and thrashed and battled over the things, over Gengar with his glowing eyes, and Shellder, who squirts water.
     "What it is?" my wife asked. "What is the attraction?"
     "Are you kidding?" I said. "Scores of cute tiny creature toy things beating the crap out of each other? It's a little boy's dream."
     Rather, what amazes me is the response by supposed adults. "For many kids it's now an addiction," Time intones.
     The movie just came out. Burger King just stirred the pot with its giveaway last week. "Addiction"? Aren't we jumping the gun a bit? It's a fad that could end Tuesday. Were yo-yos an addiction? Trolls? Those little dolls girls wore in plastic lockets around their necks?
     Then again, perhaps I'm biased. I was a GI Joe addict (recovering, I should say. A recovering GI Joe-aholic, since I find myself still yearning toward the astronaut GI Joe in his Mercury Redstone capsule. Sam had one; I didn't. One day at a time, Lord, one day at a time).
     "Is it bad for them?" Time ponders, in apparent seriousness. (Time used to be known for its ridiculous, Henry Luce-inspired gravitas, and it seems to be going back to those terrible days).
     Worse than Power Rangers? Worse than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Fantastic Four, Mighty Mouse, Tom & Jerry, Popeye, and every other childhood hero who made a point of pelting those in the general vicinity, stretching back to Hercules? I don't think so.
     The important thing to remember is that children would not embrace this sort of thing unless they needed it somehow. We could take away all the toy weapons, all the violent characters, and kids would have their Sally Empathy dolls kick their Carole King figurines to death. That's how kids are. If we take the toy guns away from our boys, as punishment, they shoot each other with plastic fruit.
     Don't worry about kids. They'll be fine. But what does it say about the adult world where a major news magazine spends 13 unreadable pages parsing the latest childhood fad? I have only one word for that: "Jigglypuff!"

         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 21, 1999

Keep your phone until it breaks

  

    Gary Shteyngart's novel, "Super Sad True Love Story,"  takes place in a dystopian future, where we all hang "apparats"—souped up cell phones—around our necks on cords, like security passes. The devices share information with each other, and notify us of the credit rating of the people nearby. Are they Low Net Worth individuals or, better, High Net Worth individuals?
     The specs for the new Apple iPhone 6S are released Wednesday with great ceremony in San Francisco. The 6S will not include a function evaluating the financial solvency of those around us — something to look forward to — and indeed, the general insider view is that the incremental improvements will not charm and thrill the phone-buying public in the way that they expect, almost demand, to be charmed and thrilled.
     A better camera, a faster processor, and that's about it.
     Though lack of electronic marvels will not stop people from lining up to buy the new phones when they become available in a month or two.
     Which makes this an apt moment to whisper, under the roar of unmerited Apple hoopla, a few words in support of my own philosophy toward phones: Use them until they break.
     That sounds practically Amish, and I hope I'm not tarring myself as a Luddite. But that attitude has guided me from my first cell phone, a 50-pound Motorola behemoth bolted in the trunk of my Chevy Citation in 1984 to today. If something works well enough, keep it.
     My own phone is an Apple 4S, introduced in the hazy yesteryear of 2011. And why did I choose that particular phone? I didn't. The paper issued it to me, and in my world, that consideration dwarfs all others. If Apple introduced a new phone—let's call it the Apple 7—that allows you to communicate with your dead relatives, I would not buy one over a lesser but free, to me, company model, not if it involved my personally entering into one of those hellish phone agreements, which the paper shields me from, a perk I consider on par with health care.
     I know, because earlier this summer my younger boy needed a new phone after his broke when he was about to go on a trip overseas and immediately required an operative phone to constantly reassure his mother he wasn't being held captive in a cave. I accompanied him to the T-Mobile store to get one, a transaction at least as complicated as buying our house and involving as many forms. Later, my wife studied the bill — she does that kind of thing — and informed me that T-Mobile had socked us $50 for a phone case that we were told was free, a point I remembered clearly because my heart had swelled in gratitude at the gift. And as much as I wanted to take the pile of paperwork and march right back to the T-Mobile store and demand satisfaction, I had, in the sign-here-and-here-and-here whirl of getting the phone, initialed a page buying the case, and I decided it was worth fifty bucks not to ever return to their pink-tinged perdition.
     I know I'll sound like Andy Rooney passing a kidney stone, but I'll say it anyway: I don't want a new phone; I don't want new features. I have a hard enough time grasping the features on current phones. I'll give you an example.  The aforementioned younger boy and his spanking new, expensively-cased phone leave for college Friday. My wife has been busy equipping him with necessities. During one recent trip to Target, I was given the simple task of picking out a flashlight, because she imagines the lad will need one, both to guide him through the smokey halls to safety and to shine menacingly under his chin while he tells The Hook to his wide-eyed classmates at the wiener roasts we imagine these college kids are fond of holding.
     So I'm standing in Target, looking at my flashlight options, and my first thought is: Thirty bucks for a flashlight?  Sure, it's titanium. But he'll never use it. I decided to look for a cheaper flashlight that would still be adequate for sticking in a drawer.
     An hour later, this thought came to me, like a bubble rising in warm honey: ....you know... his phone.... which he always keeps on him ... already has  a flashlight ... built in.
      I was tempted to tell my wife, "No flashlight necessary, honey, but what about a camera?"
      I resisted. All this is stressful enough as it is.

Chicago needs more tweets!

     A Canadian motivational speaker listed the "September Top 100 Twitter Users in Chicago, Illinois" and tweeted congratulations to me for making the list,. I'm No. 78.
     Which surprises me. I don't feel like I tweet all that much: the column on the days it runs, the blog on the other days, a few times in the morning, plus posts from exactly one and two years ago, to pump the numbers up, not to forget the occasional bon mot. 

     In the roughly 1575 days since I joined Twitter in April, 2011, I have issued some 9,300 tweets, or about six a day. That doesn't seem like it should get me on the Top 100 list. It makes me wonder if their count is flawed—this wasn't produced by the Bureau of Standards, but some guy in Toronto. Or perhaps it is correct, suggesting that Chicago might really be the small time backwater we all passionately hope it is not. 

    Anyway, it reminded me of this 2011 column I wrote welcoming myself to Twitter, and given that it will be new to many, I thought it worthy of revisiting. And to the rest of you, get tweeting. I should not be on that list.

     Friday after work, instead of bolting for the train, as is my custom, I strolled to Tribune Tower, pausing to pop my head in the Billy Goat Tavern, where I was rewarded with a hearty hello from Bouch Khribech, a wiry busboy when I met him 20 years ago and now a burly bartender, and from his brother Marco, who called over Rick Kogan.
     If you don't know Kogan—and if you don't, you might be the only Chicagoan who doesn't—he's a veteran, shoe-leather reporter, with a gruff, nicotine-and-bourbon voice, the only man I've ever met who not only calls other men "honey," but makes it seem a macho trait, like carrying a Buck knife clipped to your belt.
     It was the last day of Social Media Week, a global conclave welcoming our shiny communications future. Normally I avoid these somber wakes for journalism, since after the mourners depart the profession always gets out of the coffin and goes back to work.
     But this one had an intriguing title — "Reinventing a Media Career on Alternative Platforms" — plus an all-pro lineup: the Sun-Times' own Richard Roeper, a columnist and radio star; Robert Feder, fearsome online media critic; Steve Dahl, the radio legend, and a TV news reporter named Nancy Loo.
     Kogan was going, too, so we headed off together into the Tower, through its Gothic horror show of an entrance, with the enormous map of North America, mute testimony to the terrified isolationism that once gripped the place. In the seventh floor meeting room I found friends I hadn't seen in years, so more hugs and handshakes, smiles and updates.
     The 90 minutes of discussion can be boiled down to this: Twitter is important. The service, which allows you to shoot 140-character messages to others and in turn read the haikus they write, is the barge that will carry our society wherever it is drifting to, and if you are laboring away at some outdated mode of communication—say, slowly writing stuff that will be printed on paper and flung at people's front steps—you are a brontosaurus in a tar bit, bellowing your indignation, unheard, as you slowly sink into the bubbling mire.
     Still, the session was a lot of fun—primarily because Kogan and I, like two seventh-grade boys in the back of health class, kept up a running banter of highly uncharitable thoughts regarding the proceedings.
     Leaving, I felt reassured that I could safely skip Twitter, just as I never owned a CB radio or watched "The Sopranos."
     But the next day uncertainty set in. I should see what Twitter's about. So I dropped onto Roger Ebert's website—somehow I knew this is a topic the tech-savvy Ebert would comment on, and sure enough, there it was, upper right corner, an essay on "some observations about successful tweeting."
     Ebert has 532,782 Twitter followers, and while he mercifully offered me an out—"You may well have better ways to spend your time"—he also clearly explains Twitter's appeal: "The stream, the flow, the chatter, the sudden bursts of news, the snark, the gossip, time itself tweet-tweet-tweeting away."
     That last part makes it sound like opium. But I signed on, figuring, "Why not? I can always quit," went to create @NeilSteinberg, but found I had already done it, apparently, long ago. A whopping 16 people were following me, even though I hadn't tweeted a thing. Well, mustn't keep my public waiting . . .
     Hmmm, for my first tweet . . . something pithy, Oscar Wilde-like—that's what Twitter seems to be: millions of would-be Wildes, Shaws and Whistlers, furiously flinging bon mots into the ether, hoping for a good ripple.
     The first thing that came to mind was "What hath God wrought," the message Samuel F. B. Morse sent to inaugurate the Washington-Baltimore telegraph line on May 24, 1844. Not Wildean, but certainly very me. So I sent it and signed up for various feeds—the Sun-Times, of course, the Associated Press, Rich Roeper, Sarah Silverman, who shares thoughts like "Don't forget to play catch with your kid" and "Quiet moment with my dog." She's supposed to be funny, right?
     The ironic thing is, while social media might indeed be the future, someone still felt obligated to gather people in a room on a Friday to tell them the good news. Which means, in my mind, the future ain't quite here yet. To be honest, after Kogan, I liked the gathering-in-a-room part best. It didn't matter what for—we could have been swapping meatloaf recipes. I would have preferred that, frankly, because I like meatloaf, and while a new recipe might come in handy someday, I wouldn't also feel obligated to bake a meatloaf every three hours for the rest of my life, which is what Twitter seems like right now.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 26, 2011

Maybe the mail stopped at a bar

     Running a restaurant is more than just cooking up good food and getting it to the table.
     Though many fall short even on that basic task.
     There is also service to get right. And decor.
     Beyond that, there is filling the role of being a business in a community, with teams to sponsor and charities to support.
     All of which Harry Caray's, the landmark steakhouse and Italian restaurant on Kinzie, not to forget its various satellite locations, does exceedingly well.
     Or rather, does well when the United States Postal Service manages to deliver their mail.
     Pull up a chair.
     Tales of the ineptitude of the local branch of the post office are such a Chicago tradition, you hesitate before offering up a new one.
     You ask, does it meet the classic standards? The piles of letters found burning under a viaduct? The sacks of undelivered mail discovered in a disturbed postal carrier's home? The bar is very high.
     But heck, it's Labor Day weekend. I shouldn't even be working. And while Harry Caray's CEO Grant DePorter certainly plays the media like a conductor directing a well-trained orchestra, and could generate press for a stoplight changing, there is sincere interest here.
     I hope.
     A stack of letters that Harry Caray's sent exactly 10 years ago was delivered last week, the moldy envelopes arriving to their startled recipients, in some cases, with others returning to the restaurant office.
     "People are getting mail all over town, 10 years ago to the date," said DePorter, marveling at a particular return-to-sender letter from Children's Memorial Hospital.
     "They said they couldn't locate it," he said. "You would think the post office would know Children's Memorial has moved."
     In 2012, from Lincoln Park to Chicago Avenue, changing its name to Lurie Children's Hospital.
     Mark V. Reynolds, spokesman for the USPS' Chicago office, said that forwarding instructions are only good for one year, then mail is returned to sender.
     From how Grant was talking, I envisioned a burlap sack stuffed with mail moldering in a forgotten corner of some vast postal facility. It turned out we're talking about six letters—one delivered to the Cubs, one delivered to Chris Chelios' charity, and four returned to Harry's.
     So far. DePorter worries there are many others he has yet to hear about.
     "This is like the Nielsen ratings," he said. "Where one person represents 100 more."
     He first learned of the problem last week at Wrigley Field, fittingly.
     "Andrea Burke, who works with the Cubs, ran up to us and said, 'You will never believe what I got in the mail,'" said DePorter, "an envelope that was mailed 10 years ago that contained gift certificates for Fan Appreciation Day in 2005,"
     At first he thought it was funny.
     "Like a time capsule. Then I got the letter from the Restaurant Association."
     A letter contained gift certificates for a silent auction.
     "They never got my charity stuff and I was the chairman," said DePorter. "I was guy calling people to say, will you donate? You never know the ripple effect. Ernst and Young never got my thank you letter for their event. The letter to Children's Memorial Hospital had a certificate for dinner with Cubs manage Dusty Baker. They could have gotten a lot of money for that, but it never happened because the certificate for the dinner never arrived. There's probably a lot more. This is only the tip of the iceberg."
     DePorter speculated the mail was "probably under a table for 10 years."
     The post office couldn't offer much light.
     "This is a mystery," said Reynolds, vowing to investigate. "We need to know what happened."
     Don't hold your breath, though.
     "The only person who could tell us what happened to the mail is the mail itself, if it could talk." Reynolds said."This is highly unusually, an anomaly. Mail may be found in equipment we thought was empty. It does happen, unfortunately."
     I've known Grant for years, and he is devoted—perhaps even obsessed—with the image of the restaurant. The idea that people were promised something from Harry's and didn't get it horrifies and torments him.
     "I think people were too embarrassed to call us out on it," he said. "I didn't know they were mad at us."
     So look within. If you harbor any lingering, decade-old resentment against Harry Caray's for not sending that gift certificate they promised, well, maybe they did and it just didn't arrive, for reasons that will probably never be known.
     In 2005, the Postal Service handled 211.7 billion pieces of mail. Last year it was 155.4 billion pieces, a 25 percent drop.
     "This is why FedEx is doing so well," DePorter said.

Religious bigots aim at gays and harm themselves

     Black people can be bigots. Some deny this, but then, bigots always deny their irrational prejudices are motivated by baseless prejudice, preferring instead to pretend they are based on practical experience, solid science, or, when all else fails, religion.
     I know this because when the civil rights struggle of our time, the growing acceptance of gay, lesbian, transgender and other assorted folk into the realm of accepted humanity, is called that, sometimes African Americans will complain to me, and vigorously point out that while race is naturally assigned—by God, if they are so inclined—and unchanging either way, that sexuality is a choice, sometime a sinful choice.  
     That isn't in any way true, but a good try.
     The struggles of the civil rights era are evoked in the push for gay rights because they're so relevant. For instance, today, the New York Times ran a story about Kentucky clerk Kim Davis going to jail rather than issue her gay fellow citizens marriage licenses, as the law compels and a court has ordered her to do. It explained how her defiance has rallied American mullahs to press their lost cause of intolerance anew, It mentioned how 13 of the 67 counties in Alabama, like Davis, stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether rather than comply with the law and end discrimination against gay people. 
     This is called, in the vernacular, "cutting off your nose to spite your face," and evoked a similar practice in the 1960s and 1970s, where small towns in the steamy Deep South would fill in their swimming pools with dirt rather than integrate them. They'd rather no one swim at all then let those black kids in with their white sons and daughters.
    They no doubt could quote scripture and science. 
     I remember that because it was a particular horrible and telling detail, and showed the ultimate self-destructive quality of being a bigot. While prejudice certainly hurts the object of irrational scorn, it also blows back on the prejudiced. Your worldview is skewed and nobody gets to swim. Or gets issued a marriage license. 
    The more particular hatreds fall into disrepute, the easier it is to see the damage that bigotry causes the bigoted. Regarding race, a person who openly expresses a contemptuous racial prejudice will now suffer more than the minority being condemned. Regarding sexuality, the backwoods religions making a last ditch stand against gay rights are undercutting whatever fig leaf of moral authority they might have had, much more than they are stopping the rapid progress of human rights in this country. Sad that they don't see it, but then if they did, they wouldn't behave the way they do.