Give Wayne a raise already!

     Everyone should have a lousy job in the food industry. At least once: good for the soul. I had two. My very first job — well, not counting the seven years delivering newspapers, starting at age 9 — was the summer I turned 16. At Barnhill's, an 1890s-themed ice cream parlor in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. Pay was $2.30 an hour and I was a soda jerk/janitor since I worked a split shift. I showed up at 5:30 p.m., scooped ice cream for a few hours, shut down the restaurant and returned at 5:30 a.m. to open it back up.
     Grueling. I still remember solitary frustration of mopping the floor, hearing a "pop" above me, being showered by broken glass, and realizing that I had jammed the mop handle into one of the large glass globes around a light fixture.
     That was one summer.
     A few bad jobs later — junior counselor at a summer camp, moving cardboard boxes in a warehouse for J.C. Penney — I became a baker at Bob Evans, a restaurant that prided itself in its biscuits. I would stand at a table in the middle of the kitchen and whip up biscuits. One busy Sunday I baked 250 pounds worth.
     The guy at the dish tank was named Wayne. I can still see him — the back of his head anyway. Crew cut, black plastic glasses held on by an elastic band. He'd stand at the long stainless steel sink, throw the dirty dishes into a big square rack, hose them down with a sprayer dangling on a metal hose. Pull up the metal door, steam billowing out, push the dirty rack in, the glistening clean rack sliding out the other side

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"What wounds are these?"

     It looks like my 20-year-old is going to spend the summer interning in Washington, D.C.. Concerned parent that I am, on Sunday night, learning the address of the apartment he'll likely share with a pal, I plugged it into Google map and ascertained that, yes, there is a Washington Metro station a convenient five minute walk away. 
     On Monday morning, the New York Times ran a front page story thoroughly describing what a godawful mess the Washington Metro has become, after years of managerial bungling and deferred maintenance. Original cars from when the system opened in 1976 are still in use. The only recourse might be to shut down stretches of the system for months at a time, paralyzing the city. 
    The article recounted fatal crashes and shirked safety standards. My first thought was, "We'll have to get him a car." Though cars have accidents too, far more than transit systems do, and, thinking of Washington traffic, decided it is probably better to take our chances with the Metro. 
     Toward the end, the story, written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, there is a description of a 2009 collision that woke up dozing legislators, noting that "eight riders and a train operator were killed and dozens were wounded." Later, of another collision: "No one was wounded, but the track defect that caused the derailment had been detected a month earlier."
     Does anything pop out at you from those two sentences? For me, it was the word "wounded." I always thought of wounds as something that happen to soldiers in battle. Riders hurt by mishaps on crumbling transit system are "injured."
    I wanted to shake it off—everybody hates a fusspot—but being a writer is nothing if not about sweating the details. Though I realize that the Times can commit howling errors, like any other newspaper—I once saw a front page where they dropped the dateline--it still seemed something worth pointing out.
     Trudging upstairs, coffee in hand, I started to compose my polite note. Not to the public editor, that would seem like ratting out the reporters for a minor lapse. We're all cooking in the same pot. Write to the reporters themselves. First, praise for the interesting story. Then, a reluctant mention of the topic at hand...
    But first, I plugged "wound" into my online dictionary. I have a personal rule that most people who point out errors are themselves wrong, leaping to draw attention to the perceived flaw without ever checking to determine that they are correct. The nameless iMac dictionary defined the verb "wound" as: "inflict an injury on." Period. And while their examples are both military, "the sergeant was seriously wounded," for the verb, and the adjective, "a wounded soldier," there is nothing to exclude the word from being used to describe victims of a wheezing train system soon to be ferrying my beloved child.
    Language changes. Perhaps we're seeing a word in transition. Daniel Webster's 1828 dictionary endorses my meaning, "To hurt by violence." 
    But the full 1933 Oxford English Dictionary definition begins, "A hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument, a bullet, etc.; an external injury." and traces it back more than a thousand years, to Beowulf, "da sio wund ongon,"
    That could in theory mean flying glass in a train accident caused by bungling bureaucrats. Seeking something more current than the 1930s, I went on-line and found confirmation from an impressive grammar blog called Daily Writing Tips: 

     "In modern usage, the noun wound [WOOND] refers to any injury that tears the flesh.
     The verb to wound [WOOND], however, retains its earliest meaning: “to inflict a deliberate injury that tears the flesh.”

     Underline "deliberate." So the Times story is indeed on shaky ground, at least using this authority. People have a tendency to stop collecting evidence once they've validated what they already believe, and I'm no different, particularly since I have my own work to get to this morning. 
     I wasn't going to bother writing to the reporters—who'd welcome that email? I tried to proceed with my day, but felt like I was being timid. "The secret wound lives on within the breast," as Virgil writes. So I dashed off notes to the reporters and, to my surprise, heard back almost immediately from Stolberg, who said that the mistake wasn't theirs—they did use "injure"—but the harm to the article was inflicted by some spinning gear elsewhere in the vast New York Times mechanism. She had already made inquiries, and it was quickly fixed in the on-line version. So I'm not the only person sensitive to these nuances. Now if we could only get The New Yorker to stop saying "insure" when they should say "ensure."
     Enough. Having made my share of blunders in print, I hope I haven't belabored this small point too tediously. As Shakespeare writes: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

The Left can be as looney as the Right

Untitled, silkscreen by Barbara Kruger (1989, The Broad collection).

     I've seen some strange weather in Chicago — a day when it was 105 degrees, another, 26 below zero, green skies, monsoon rains and massive snows. But I've never seen a day like Saturday, beginning at dawn with flurries in April, then alternating from blue-skied sunshine to white-out blizzard, and back. Sun, then snowstorm. Clear skies. London fog. All. Day. Long.
     "BI-POLAR VORTEX" a Facebook friends labeled a video of the maelstrom, resurrecting a twitter tag from two years back.
     My poor saucer magnolia blossoms. Open for one day and then, boom, snow and freeze.
     "Where's your global warming now?!" I snarled at the sky.
     "That's not what it means," my wife informed me, perhaps forgetting whom she married.
     Yes dear, I know. A feeble attempt at humor, based on conservatives who, trumpeting their ignorance of all things scientific, declare that really cold days are a refutation of climate change: "How could the world be warmer if it's cold now?" That's like standing in a house engulfed in flame, pulling open the freezer and announcing, "Look! How can there be a fire? The popsicles are fine!"
     But I don't want to rag on the Right. It's too easy. I've started to notice that while the Right's irrationalities get frequent denunciation in the press, the Left has its own irrationalities that receive gentler handling....

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Hoosierland women! Send you little visitor to Gov. Pence.

     It’s a shame that so much attention is going to North Carolina’s new law cruelly scrapping all of their state’s local local anti-discrimination ordinances and raising the specter of police bursting into bathrooms to check on the birth genders of the people using them.
     The latest development there is that not only are major businesses like the NBA, PayPal and IBM lining up to condemn the law and question whether they want to do business with the state, but now the Obama administration is saying that the Tar Heels bigotry-empowerment act could endanger billions of dollars in federal aid, which can be withheld from backwaters that choose to indulge in un-American discrimination.
     As satisfying as all that is, it shouldn’t distract us from the aftershocks rolling across our own little bit of the Southland in the Midwest, Indiana.

       There Governor Mike Pence signed a truly medieval law demanding, among other things, that aborted fetuses be given formal funerals or cremations, and if you think Indiana woman just shrugged and sighed and went back to their washboards and their sad irons, well, think again. 
     Rebellious Indiana women, waking up to this attempt to shove them back into the early 20th century, have created a “Periods for Pence” Facebook page, sharing the governor’s public comment phone number and urging women to keep the Pence informed about their menstrual cycle, since he seems so concerned, including some (apparently) real life exchanges such as...

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My name is Neil Steinberg and I'll be your teacher

     Yesterday was April 1, and so, before we begin, apologies to those loyal readers who were fooled, even upset by my post announcing the end of the blog. I tried to drop enough giveaway clues in it, and succeeded too well, for those who thought the gag was obvious, and not well enough for those who were genuinely deceived. But in general it seemed to be enjoyed by most, and certainly caused some discussion, which is the point of these.
     I almost forgot that I also had a column in the paper Friday, also tied to a certain day — April 1 was the day the Chicago Teachers Union went on their one-day, ill-advised strike. This column also caused a bit of fuss, of a more serious nature, and I thought today being Saturday, I'd slip it in for those who missed it in the paper (and you know who you are!)


     Good morning class.
     Settle down, please. There's room for a few hundred of you in the front: the little kids, please.
     I know there's a lot of us here — 330,000 Chicago Public Schools students, shut out of school Friday due to the one-day teachers union strike.
     Which means the teachers will be walking picket lines, and you'll be, well, somewhere. Hundreds of schools and churches will open their doors, and you might go there to get out of harm's way. Though I'd imagine a good number of you are parked on the sofa at home, killing time as only kids can.
     So forgive me for intruding. I thought I'd try to shoehorn a little education into your day. You can play Call of Duty: Black Ops III all afternoon.
     So, hello, I'm Mr. Steinberg.
     I did pause to ask myself whether this makes me a scab — “scab” is a historic labor term for someone who undermines a strike. The Chicago Teachers Union announced it is monitoring school entrances, threatening to fine any teacher who goes to work today. This was necessary, as opposed to the choir of solidarity that greeted the 2012 strike because, well, times have changed. In four years the economies of Illinois and Chicago have gone from menacing to calamitous, and the union pushing to the front of the line, well, it sparks mixed feelings.
     So flexibility being a survival skill in unions nowadays, I can be a proud member of the Communications Workers of America and still instruct what few students actually drop their eyes upon this today. I’m not on strike.

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The end

     Well, we all saw this day coming, didn't we? 
     At least in recent months.
     Last summer, true, when the blog was clicking along at up to 5,000 hits a day, with some months nearing 100,000 hits, I told myself it would just go up and up, on and on, forever.
     But then, well, it seems people got tired of reading this every goddamn day. To be honest, I got tired of writing it. And while it was amusing to write for thousands of readers, a growing swarm, with praiseful write-ups in Robert Feder's column and the Beachwood Reporter, not to mention the good $10,000 a month or more I was pulling in on blog advertisements, it is something else entirely to write for a couple hundred people a day, with the only income a couple bucks from those pesky pop-up erectile dysfunction ads.
     Frankly, it's just pathetic.  So I'm done.
     Not that it hasn't been a good run. I was proud when Ubilabs named this blog one of "100 Things to Watch in 2011." And excited to have commentators who ranged from John Kass's cousin to Carol Mosley-Braun. Not to mention to create a written legacy of first rate, or at least very good second rate, literary journalism that will glow online like a beautiful radioactive flower until the end of time, or until Google shuts down its servers, whichever comes first. 
    I want to go out on top. Or near the top. Or at least when the top is still a memory, sort of.
    This is goodbye, but not farewell.  You can still read me five days a week in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Me (far right) playing with Eric Zorn's Good Time
  Bluegrass Ramblers.

   In closing, I want to thank you all, you readers, or what readers remain anyway, for sticking with me through the thick and the thin. Thank you for the comments, and for the baked goods. To be honest, I'm looking forward to putting the time that was devoted to writing this blog to more productive pursuits. As you may know, I've taken up the four-string folk mountain harmonium—it's like a banjo—and have been rehearsing with Eric Zorn's Good Time Bluegrass Ramblers, exploring the rich heritage of 1930s Appalachian music. We'll be performing regularly at the Thursday clog dance recitals at the Old Town School of Folk Music—you can check out the schedule here.
     Such farewells should be short. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope to see all of you at our Old Town gigs. Bring your dancing clogs! 

    Best,

    Neil Steinberg

Donald Trump does backflips on abortion

     So Donald Trump, the, ah, front-running Republican presidential candidate, er, now, in the year 2016, said Wednesday ... that would be March 30, again of 2016, that ... ah ... women, who have abortions, after he is elected president of course, illegal abortions, since he, Donald Trump, once elected president, will make abortions illegal through some alchemy that somehow eluded the lesser talents of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford,  Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. 
     That those women, who still have an abortion, despite their no longer being legal, under the presidency of Donald Trump, will certainly be punished, in some way, for having that illegal procedure, though whether that punishment is through a fine, or prison or, heck, this is Donald Trump we're talking about here, whether by stripping the woman naked and drawing and quartering her in DuPont Circle, well, he didn't quite say. 
     "There has to be some form of punishment," Trump told Chris Matthews on MSNBC. 
     Moot now anyway. It took him only hours to backpedal away from his call for punishment — being Donald Trump means that nothing that comes out of your mouth carries such weight that it can't be retracted, contradicted or amended as need be. No, it is the doctors who should be punished. The women, being women, are not responsible for their actions, are the victims of abortion, along with their murdered babies....
    Don't trust me on this. His campaign statement said:
     "The doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb."
     A reminder of two key points. First, that pro-lifers, or anti-abortionists, or whatever they call themselves, are really about controlling women. They say abortion is "murder"—that's the the word they use over and over and over—but hesitate at the well-then-put-the-murderer-in-jail-then part of their argument, because they really don't mean it. It's just words they say trying to get you to bend to their religion.
     And two, Donald Trump is so never going to be president. Not in a world where people are paying attention. At least I hope not. You do have to wonder, with states from Indiana to Texas hacking away big chunks of reproductive rights, whether women actually are paying attention. They should be, because they sure as hell have been warned. We all have been.