Help isn't coming

     Controversies boil up, cool down, and are promptly forgotten.
     But sometimes they offer a little clarity that lingers.
     Our ace police reporter popped his head in my office late last week. The Chi-Raq flag—a red and green banner from Spike Lee's movie—is flying above the American flag in front of St. Sabina Church. Cops are upset; one sent him this photo. He couldn't look into it—people are being scythed down in the city. Maybe I was interested in looking into this flag business?
     Well... that would interrupt my musing about opera. But okay.
     I phoned Father Michael Pfleger, the priest at St. Sabina, in Auburn-Gresham, known for his fiery, not always politic activism. It's a miracle he's still there. For years, he clashed with the archdiocese, and it seemed inevitable that he would be cashiered to some obscure parish. But plans to banish him always seemed to get scuttled. Pfleger's a thorn in the side of authority, sure, but so was Jesus.

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Facebook: your life's unseen audience

   
     When I was 25, I got my first cell phone—we called them "car phones" at the time, since they weighed 50 pounds and were bolted in the trunk of your car—which means I've had a cell phone for a greater portion of my life than I've spent without one. 
     Thirty years, off and on. 
     Still, there is an aroma of the new to cell phones, and always will be, the way my grandparents called a refrigerator an "ice box." 
      When some algorithm in the Facebook servers sent me the above notice, of my Facebook birthday, I was shocked but not surprised. If you had asked me when I joined, I'd have said 2009—I remember taking photos on the epic 7,000 mile road trip the boys and I took that summer, and realizing that I wasn't snapping these for albums back home, certainly not to project them as slides to squirming guests. I was taking pictures to post on Facebook. My orientation had changed. My life had an unseen audience.
     Facebook. We share our lives with our "followers"—a slightly creepy word—and they share their lives in return. If you read Dave Eggers' "The Circle" as augury, then we'll have a lot more of that, and not posting something on Facebook will be seen as strange, selfish.  The little birthday card they generated certainly screamed "me me ME!" Though Edie did manage to sneak in too, including a wedding picture that predates Facebook by a decade and a half. 
     I don't quite believe our future will be constant sharing. It already has begun to even out. In the past few years, Facebook has lost some of its mojo, become less a cool place to visit, and more a daily obligation, like flossing.  Certain sharing habits—take a look at my lunch!—have fallen from favor. Twitter is where the action is, a digital freefire zone where people draw their rhetorical broadswords and have at each other, and where news lives. 
     Eight years, Ah, the memories. Bored in Salt Lake City in 2009 before a reader told us to go to Ruth's Diner. Gry Haukland arriving from Norway to marry a guy she met on my Facebook page.  Meeting Jane Turbov at the Northbrook Public Library to play a game of Scrabble.
     For a while, high school friends were always popping up. Now Facebook's central purpose is to post my blog.  People expect to find it there. Facebook allows for a manageable comments section after columns, since I can instantly show jerks the gate, and don't have to count on the newspaper to eject the undesirables for me. That's fairly rare, since I've vetted everybody at the party—I look at the page of each new person I friend, all 4,822 of them, and simply reject anybody who seems as if they won't be happy drinking my flavor of Kool-Aid. Or because they live in the Philippines and have posted a bunch of sad, semi-cheesecakes of themselves and nothing else. I hope that doesn't seem bigoted of me to say, but it happens often. If I get a direct message from a Nordic beauty who supposedly lives in Indiana—"Hi, how are you?" I reply, "Fine, how's life in the Philippines?" and never hear from them ever again.
     Lately, more and more, there's also  Facebook messenger, which shows up on my phone. I don't know how that's better than regular texting, but some people seem to like it. 
     I still remember that first 2008 meeting at a Sun-Times conference room where some tech kid used a powerpoint presentation and instructed us how to sign up for Facebook. I was in equal measure baffled and miffed: so we were supposed to take time away from writing for a mass-market audience so we could hang around this electronic cracker barrel and chat with whoever happens to be hanging around? One-on-one? Toward what end? 
     But I am good at taking instructions, joined up, and got hooked. We all did. And the thing is not without value. That's what the doomsayers miss. People use Facebook because they like it. It adds something valuable to their lives. When I joined in 2008, Facebook had 100 million users. Now it has 1.5 billion. "Community" is the word Facebook uses to describe itself, and there is a sort of truth to that, though I prefer the line of Luna Lovegood's from "Harry Potter," which underscores the not-quite-real, not-quite-personal nature of the thing: "It's like having friends."
  

"Bit early"

     I was a bit early.
     Not by a lot: 15 minutes maybe.
     I had given myself time for an errand, take some hiking boots back at REI, but the transaction was over in seconds. 
     Now I was driving east on Golf Road Thursday, heading to Evanston to meet my youngest son, to drive him to an appointment, then meet my wife for dinner. I was supposed to pick him up at 4 p.m..
     He wouldn't like my being early; my sons, sticklers for, well, everything.  I knew that.
     And I understood it, sort of. Hard enough to have parents at all, when you're 18 and at college, never mind them showing up when they're not supposed to be there.
     So I was thinking of what I could do to kill time. Not enough time to pop into Amaranth Books on Davis. Love that place. By the time I got down there I'd need to turn around and leave. Can't be late either.
     I could just sit in front of his dorm, answering e-mails. 
     The sun was setting, nearly the Golden Hour, as it's called.
     I noticed this little restaurant.
     I almost called the Charcoal Oven "iconic", but it's not. It's obscure. Except for passing it a thousand times over the past 30 years — my in-laws, may they rest in peace, lived a block away, on Lowell—I never heard or read about it. Nobody I know has ever gone there. When I pass it at night, it's open but empty, sitting by itself on the block. Something of a mystery really. 
     Impulsively, I made a right on Lowell, glanced at my in-law's old house, cut through the alley behind the synagogue, and parked the car. On foot, I approached the restaurant. 
     My wife and I ate there exactly once. Being a block from her mother's house, it's not the location we'd seek out for dinner—not when a good free dinner served with love was a few yards away. But circumstances were such that we had dinner there, maybe 25 years ago.
     Very nice, what I remember. An apricot sour—it was that long ago, back when there were cocktails. Steak, probably. The owner had tomatoes scattered across the bar—from his garden, and gave us a brown bag of tomatoes when we left. Friendly. A pleasant meal. But we still never went back.
     Someone must go. The place has a web site, and is open for dinner every night. Its history traces back 90 years, when it was a speakeasy called The Oasis.  The sign seems to be a product of the early 1960s.
     You have to love that sign. A masterpiece of mid-century American graphics. It building wasn't always orange, but the orange shows off the sign to best effect, as does the mural painted on the side. 
     The parking lot is always empty. But it still is in business.  And strangers live in her parents' house on Lowell. So my wife and I will have to pop in for dinner some time soon. A building that quirky and, yes, beautiful should be supported.
    Snapping a few photos took three or four minutes. Soon I was parked outside my son's dorm in Evanston. I puttered around with email for a minute or two.
    "I'm out front," I reluctantly messaged him, at 3:47.
    "Bit early," he replied.

     

"It can hit you like a bus"

Susanna Phillips

     Opera is about love, or should be.
     The love that characters have for each other — or, tragically, don't have for each other — in tales unfolding in splendor on stage, awash in gorgeous music.
     And the love audiences have for the productions.
     Or, less tragically, don't have. I must admit, earlier this season, after 91 deeply felt minutes enduring Alban Berg's cacophony "Wozzeck" — "deeply felt" as in a sleepless night spent on a bed of broken brick — "love" was not the concept that sprang to mind, other than love of it ending.
     But as with following professional sports, sometimes you are left exasperated. Your team doesn't win every game, you don't enjoy every opera. That's an aspect of love too.
     Not that this will be an issue with "Romeo and Juliet," which premieres Feb. 22, when I'll be bringing 100 readers along in the 8th (!) annual Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Contest. (I couldn't bring 100 readers to "Wozzeck" without worrying about being brought up on charges at the Hague.)

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"You'll be here forever"

     I've been to a lot of newspaper staff meetings over the past 29 years, but today's was extraordinary.
     In the wake of Sun-Times' owner Michael Ferro purchasing the largest single share of the Chicago Tribune's parent company for $44.4 million, the Sun-Times' staff gathered in the lunchroom and met the new chairman of our board, Bruce Sagan, who explained what the purchase means for us.
    "The people involved in the last Sun-Times purchase believe in two newspapers," he said. "There it is, a second voice."
     He said heading the Tribune removes Ferro from managing our paper's affairs.
     "We don't talk to him except to complain about the quality of printing," he said—the Tribune prints and delivers the Sun-Times.
     Ferro will now have a major role in running the Tribune.
    "You made a mistake," Sagan said. "You educated him. He came here a rich guy who didn't know anything about journalism. The rich dabbler got the message from you."
     The Tribune is $400 million in debt, Sagan said. The Sun-Times has no debt. 
    "They took the deal because they needed the money," said Sagan, the longtime publisher of the Hyde Park Herald, who used the money he made there to invest in the Financial Times, the New York Times, where he started the Chicago News Cooperative, and the Sun-Times. "If you are going to bet on something, better bet on us. They're in disarray. He left us a growing institution."
    He said that this development gives us a renewed sense of mission.
    "We now have a focus," he said. "The other guy's still the enemy. Our job is to create the other voice in town. We want to remain a brand that people trust."
     Someone asked about our web site. Sagan said it was terrible. Publisher Jim Kirk said it would be fixed soon. Someone asked about the Sun-Times' future.
     "If I have my way you'll be here forever," Sagan said.
     Maybe you had to live under the sword of Damocles for a decade, watching the thread fray, to really understand the impact of those words. While optimism is typically misplaced in the newspaper business, I found Sagan's appearance somewhere between encouraging and stunning, like the Officer in White showing up at the end of Lord of the Flies, representing civilization and order returned. I was sitting nearby, and when the meeting ended, I couldn't resist shaking his hand.
     "Where the hell have they been hiding you?" I said.


     
   

It won't make you fat if you can't eat it

     You just don't see products with "Fat" in their brand names. Everything is "Lean" or "Diet" or "Organic" or "Healthy." I suppose there are lots of products, if you include "Non-Fat," but that seems cheating. So I was intrigued by this line of FatBoy ice cream novelties, on sale at the new Mariano's at Dundee and Skokie.

      Can you think of another example? I tried. There's Fatburger, in Los Angeles, but that's a restaurant chain. Chicago has a Fat Rice on Diversey—Chinese culture seems to still get away more with glorifying fatness; maybe it's all those buddhas or, more likely, a symptom of rampant hunger.  Given the profusion of wacky beer names, it shouldn't surprise there is a Fat Tire Amber Ale, though with its retro bicycle on the bottle. 

  Even products with chubby mascots put them on a diet—the Campbell's kids come to mind.  And with good reason: a study published by the Journal of Consumer Psychology last summer suggested that children eat twice as much cookies and candy at a sitting after viewing lumpy characters than children who are shown thin characters. 

     You know where the affection for fat children comes from? Back in days when people struggled to get enough to eat, and unchecked infectious diseases scythed children down, you wanted those apple dumpling cheeks as further evidence your child didn't have cholera. Everyone was going to die at 45 anyway, so the raft of chronic illnesses brought on by obesity, cardiac disease and such, were rarely a concern. 

    Childhood obesity had been growing for years, but now it has leveled off, according to the Centers for Disease Control, at about 17 percent, with a direct corollary to parental education. Among parents with a college education, the prevalence of obese children is half that of children of parents who didn't go to college.   

     When I first snapped the above picture, I didn't actually buy the FatBoy ice cream sandwiches. I don't eat that kind of thing. In fact, I go to Mariano's for their low-prices on Yasso bars—frozen yogurt on a stick and only 80 or 100 calories, depending on whether they are pure flavors, like chocolate and vanilla, or have 20 calories worth of chocolate chips and cookie dough pebbles tossed in. I go through one or two a day.

      But that seemed a failure of imagination and, with this post in mind, I picked up a box of FatBoy bars when I was there loading up on Yasso. 

      FatBoy is made by Caspers Ice Cream of Richmond, Utah. The company began in 1925 when Casper Merrill started selling ice cream nut sundaes on a stick made from milk from the family's cows. The FatBoy came soon after, so named because of its square shape and unusual thickness.  The company is run by Merrill's grandson, and the two original products seem to be the only items Caspers sells, though the FatBoy sandwiches come in 11 varieties and flavors, including key lime. For a 90 year old product, it doesn't seem to have had much impact on American cultural life, but that might be a factor of it being slow to get out of Utah.  

     I headed into the basement Wednesday after dinner, thinking to grab a Yasso bar, and noticed the FatBoy box, sighed, and brought one upstairs: 210 calories, which I cut by 50 calories by enticing Edie into eating a quarter. We both took a tentative taste. 

      "Buttery," I said. 

       "The wafer part doesn't taste chocolatey," she said. "It doesn't taste like anything."

      She tossed the quarter she had nibbled into the trash. I finished my FatBoy, hoping that my own boys, neither of whom is anywhere near fat, would handle the other five FatBoy sandwiches when they come home from college this spring. You want local foodstuff with unusual names to taste splendid, and I guess buttery ice cream might be splendid to some folks. But not to me. Neat retro name, though.

Autism spins kid, mom

     Jasan is 6 years old. He loves printers, elevators, and anything that rotates. With that in mind, his mother, Heidi, and grandmother Sherry are spending the morning with him at the TLC Laundromat in Crystal Lake.
     "He's always loved washers and dryers, for some reason," Heidi says."Number one, it's mechanical. It spins. He's always loved spinning things, even when he was a little baby. I have a picture of him at his 1st birthday party, sitting in front of a fan. I didn't know he was autistic then."
     Autism is a complicated brain disorder affecting about one in 68 children, according for the Centers for Disease Control. The cause is unknown, though genetics are definitely a factor. So is being male, like Jasan: five times more boys than girls develop autism.
     Autism presents itself as a spectrum, ranging from severe, life-limiting disabilities — a quarter of people with autism are non-verbal — to those who display unusual-but-manageable quirks and mannerisms. Forty percent of people with autism have elevated intelligence...

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