A year is a long time.

     A year is a long time. Sucking my front teeth, trying to think of something to say about the Jewish New Year, I called up last year's post, and read with fresh interest, as if someone else had both lived and written it.  The War in Gaza had just ended, and Jews were jumpy, nervous at being cast as the International Bad Guys, a familiar role, once forced upon us when our only crimes were holding jobs and occupying space and living in a particular place while claiming to belong where we were born, offenses that grew even more severe when it was our own homeland we were trying to hold onto, against the claims of whoever else decided they wanted it instead.
     Now the spectrum of international horrors eclipse the woes of the Palestinians. It's kind of hard to paint Israel as the Source of All Evil when ISIS is raping and beheading people and blowing up archeological treasures, while the Syrian chaos is sending millions fleeing around the world.  Must be frustrating for them.
     Not the highest standard to hold Israel to—better than ISIS—but also a reminder that, on the scale of Actual Horrors, the plight of Gaza and the West Bank are way down there, and millions of Syrians would no doubt be happy to swap places with them.
      When I contemplated the upcoming year — 5776, for those keeping track — my first thought was a dismissive, "What's so happy about it? What's there to look forward to?" Nationwide, a farce campaign trail trod by a parade of idiots. A world gone mad — or, to be more accurate, continuing to manifest its inherent madness in fresh and alarming ways. On the home front: boys gone, leaving an echoing void that I never anticipated until I found myself in it and started running my disbelieving fingers over its dark, cold, damp confines. The newspaper hurtling forward through dense fog toward its rendezvous with an uncertain future that some days looks very much like a mountainside. The whole growing old thing, which you're not even allowed to complain about, because bitching about growing old is one of its worst qualities.
     Good to bear in mind: few woes get any better by grousing about them. Complaint is not a success strategy, though it can take an act of will to shake it off, peer into the murk and ascertain something positive to look forward to, in this new year they're forcing on us, again, like a large and marginal appliance that you can't take back and have to make room for. 
     Well, what then?
     There's got to be something ... we have a week's vacation in October, a bar mitzvah in Boston and a wedding in Philadelphia, with new towns to explore and parks to hike in between. That could be fun. The following month is Thanksgiving, with stuffing to make and family to welcome and news to share. Then in February, Pomona for Parents Weekend. The frequent pleasures of writing stuff, which may bite and become dreary at certain times, like right fucking now, but usually is pleasurable. The book creeping toward publication. By April we'll have galleys, with hard copies in July and it'll be published in the fall—the tail end of 5776, the same year that began last night. And while as my eighth book, I can't scrape together much sincere conviction this'll be the one that shakes the earth, I do harbor irrational hopes of success, and will rouse in my stall as I always do when the firebell rings, and go charging out into the night, snorting smoke in the cold air, chasing after the will-o-the-wisp, as I always do. 
     Quite a lot really. Or enough. Or it'll have to be enough, and who knows what else might develop. A reminder not to gloss over all the good just because a few challenges crowd the stage at the moment, doing their dance macabre. You have to be patient. Even a day is a long time, and if you only had one -- and you never know which one is your last, so it could be today — you could pack a lot into it, and nobody would hand back the most troublesome day in favor of the icy dark void that awaits.
    A day is a long time, and when you realize the weeks and months and, if you're lucky, and we tend to be, years you have on top of that, well, it is a considerable bounty, a treasure trove.
     Sure, not all is enjoyable. A lot of routine, of work. Stuff to clean, to fix, in this 110-year-old tottering ruin we call home. Plus I seem to have boxed myself into a life where I have to write continuously—all together now: "Every goddamn day!" — and while that is, in the main, enjoyable, as the great James Thurber said, "Even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the R.C.A. Building, would pall a little as the days ran on." 
    The key, I believe, is to realize that the weariness will pass, and energy and hope will flare to life again. Just keep blowing on the embers because, really, what choice is there? There will be room for all sorts of good, and little bad to make you appreciate the good more. A year is a long time, but still, we only get so many of them, and you don't want to waste one, or even part of one, not even a day, not if you can avoid it. Happy New Year, where applicable.

Wildcats beat Panthers

     In my four years as a student at Northwestern, I never went to a football game, and attending one Saturday afternoon, I tried to cast my memory back more than three decades and figure out why. 
     The best I can come up with is I had no inclination to go, and nobody asked me.  I can't recall what I did on Saturday afternoons instead; studied, I suppose. 
     It probably helped that the NU football team in the late 1970s and early 1980s was particularly lousy—they only won one game during my undergraduate years there, and students had to satisfy themselves with tearing down the goalposts after they set some kind of collegiate record for losing.  I also vaguely recall that, coming from an Ohio high school with a powerhouse football team, it was something of a relief to not have to think about football.
     The Wildcats certainly did well Saturday, crushing the Eastern Illinois Panthers 41 to 0 by the end of the third quarter, at which point my wife and I decided, after two and a half hours of football, we could go to dinner knowing the game was safely in the bag.
     We were there because our kid was there. All the incoming freshmen were, running onto the field before the game in one of the many ceremonies cooked up since I've left. Clever, in that it gets the new student to at least one game, and puts 1,000 additional spectators in the stands, though the game seemed well-attended. He waved to us as he passed by, which we took as a triumph.
     This weekend is Parents and Family Orientation at Northwestern, crammed with receptions and seminars and events, that my wife and I have been gamely attending. I've found that, in general, I am infected with more school spirit as a parent than I possessed as a student.  I am not, by nature, a joiner, and as a young man, the idea of being part of something as vast and old as a university struck me as a dubious honor, something I should hold at arm's length. I never bought a college ring, or a yearbook, or a piece of purple clothing. I wanted to shine on my own, not reflect glory by association. Besides, they let me in, so really, how exclusive a place could it be?
     Watching the game, we shouted and cheered and, I noticed with a mingling of amusement and horror, I sang faintly along when the band played "Alma Mater."
     "Hail to purple... hail to white ... hail to thee, Northwestern."
     So what changed? Some mellowing with age, I suppose. I've had my life to achieve ... well, not a whole lot, not compared to my classmate Ben Slivka, who donated a dorm. Though I did raise a kid who got into Northwestern, which is certainly something. He picked this school, and the school was kind enough to return his embrace. To feel anything short of at least appreciation, if not affection, would stink of ingratitude.   
     I tried to squint, and see the campus as it might be to someone viewing it with new eyes, and not somebody who has been visiting off and on for the past 37 years, mostly to use the library for the past 33.  A big, beautiful place.
    And the game was fun. The weather was perfect, the predicted rain did not come, a slight autumnal chill in the air. The announcer, perhaps in deference to Northwestern's storied academic rigor, kept inserting a few fancy words into his play-by-play patter.
     "He is met by a plethora of Northwestern tacklers..." he said at one point.
     "Brought down by a deluge of Northwestern tacklers," at another.
      On our way to our car, we stopped at a shop on Sherman and bought a decal that reads "NORTHWESTERN" in big block letters for the back window of the van. I never had one as an alumni, would have been horrified at the thought of displaying that kind of thing. But Saturday it was my idea to buy it. When it was merely my school I couldn't take pride in the place. But now that it's his, satisfaction comes easily, a natural part of the pride I feel for him. 

Racing toward his future.

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