Well, THIS was an oversight.
After the state of Rio de Janeiro declared a "state of public calamity," its governor warning of the risk of "a total collapse in public security, health, education, mobility and environmental management,” I couldn't resist re-tweeting a 2013 column on the mayor, Eduardo Paes, chiding me for lampooning the International Olympic Committee selection of his city for the 2016 Olympics. I thought I'd toss in a link to the original column but, to my surprise, in the first flush of doing this blog, I didn't post it here in July, 2013. Time to correct that. This is the piece that got Brazilians in a knot. Turned out, they should have spent less energy being indignant, more getting ready to host the world.
Dear International Olympic Committee:
Howdy! Long time no talk to. Four years. Where does the time go?
I know you've probably forgotten about Chicago, ever since you gave us the backhand in fall 2009, and in the first round no less.
But we remember. Yes, we do. What Chicagoan who stood in those crowds—dressed in our civic best, as it were, holding a hand-picked bouquet, gussied up to the tune of $50 million in city-buffing money, waiting, eager for the good news—can remember the deflating letdown, the shocking dismissal, the confetti trickling out of our slack fingers into the street, watching benumbed as Madrid, Rio and Tokyo skipped onward without us.
Ouch.
And in case you are tempted to ascribe this to bitterness, we'll happily note that the Olympic games are three years away, so everything could still work well. Hard to imagine, but it's possible. The protests rocking Brazil—hundreds of thousands of people, in 100 cities last month, the streets of Rio in flames this week—could ebb, and everything could somehow be fine in 2016. We add our sincere hopes and prayers that it will be so to those of the world.
Although one little question keeps waving its hand over its head, going "oh oh oh!" and begging to be asked. So I'm just going to call upon that question and be done with it. Ready?
Here's our question:
Sorry yet?
Because you could have had Chicago. Which isn't a city without problems. Lots of problems. Streets in certain neighborhoods raked with deadly gunfire every weekend. Pension giveaways one straw away from cracking the government's back. School teachers laid off by the thousands. And I'm sure, had we gotten the 2016 Olympics, as we should have, there would have been grumbling aplenty about hosting a big quadrennial party for the world's athletic elites in the midst of all our concerns.
But I bet we could have done it without firebombs. Without the military breaking out the tear gas and the rubber bullets. I bet our population wouldn't rise up against the Olympics, the way they're doing in Brazil, which is also upset about hosting the World Cup in 2014.
Chicago hosted the World Cup, along with eight other cities, in 1994, which was such a non-crisis to us that I bet a lot of people who were around then don't even remember it. I do—it was hot. That's it. A city like ours knows how to do this kind of thing. We planned a victory party for several million Blackhawks fans in, what, three days? Tear gas proved unnecessary.
No hard feelings, IOC. Maybe next time, assuming we feel like going through all the bother to try to win your silly Olympics. But I don't expect that. Most Chicagoans, rather than yearn toward our lost Olympics, are glad. We got off light, and now can get to sit back and watch Brazil try to manage the task, which might be more fun than hosting would have been. You can't say you didn't have your chance. And you blew it. You could have had gold, but settled for bronze.
Best,
Neil Steinberg
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 24, 2013
I don't know if today's fun activity is easy or hard and, honestly, I don't care.
I just wanted to post a photo of this large, sulking, naked gentleman.
If you've seen him before, you might recognize him right away.
If you haven't, well, good luck.
He is really, really big — that's a clue.
In fact, I'll provide a second photograph at bottom to give you a hint just how big.
Pretty cool, huh? I thought so.
The winner gets — should he or she want it which they probably don't — one of my 2015 blog posters, which I need to get rid of because, goddamnit, I'm making a 2017 poster, whether anybody wants it or not. I want it.
Place your guesses below. Good luck.
Just a reminder. It's Saturday. If you're wondering where my blog post is, that posts at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, so people who aren't insomniacs can have a chance to solve it. The above photo is NOT the puzzle. It's Coe Lake, in my lovely hometown of Berea, Ohio, photographed on a post dinner stroll. Go to bed.
"Out of the Wreck I Rise" is being published in a little more than two months, and while I'll try not to let the book completely hijack the blog, it is a big deal, at least to me, and I couldn't resist sharing our first review, from the Library Journal.
If it seems rather low-key to be excited about, that's their way. I've had them bend me over their knee before—being underwhelmed at what I write is kind of what they do—so this is close to a rave, particularly because it is starred: many libraries automatically buy books that are starred. Anyway, if this is like sharing my kid's report card, apologies. But I had to crow.
Library Journal
★ 07/01/2016Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steinberg and book editor Bader have compiled this collection of prose and poetry on the subject of addiction to help those who are still struggling or who are in recovery to find solace in the lives of great people who have also battled the disease. The writings are organized along the lines of an addict's journey—when the good times sour, the importance of time, and the power of embracing a new life. The experiences of well-known figures such as Etta James, Sid Caesar, and John Cheever are relayed in their own words, with feeling and lack of pretense. VERDICT Anyone affected by addiction will surely identify with the accounts included here, and thus, not feel alone in times of difficulty.
This column suffered for space. I normally get 650 words; I asked for more and got 900, so I shouldn't complain. Still, I lost Earl Sensenig talking about coming to Bedford from Lancaster to help build the new Mennonite community, and Charles Crumb talking about starting Bits of Time because of his love of antiques, and Rev. Reed quoting Chronicles. And I wasn't able to quite explain why I was doing it, how this country seems so divided, and the problem seems to be that it's easy to demonize each other and hard to try to understand. But I set out to withhold my own opinion and just listen to everyone on the placemat, and to their credit, everyone who picked up the phone spoke with me, candidly and at length. Despite being the dreaded mainstream media, they trusted me. And despite having a very different view of the world than they do, I liked them, and felt like we respected each other. It's a start.
Paper place mats are not a celebrated form of communication, with neither the romance of messages in bottles nor the eager audience for fortune cookies.
In fact, I didn’t glance at the place mat in front of me as we settled in at the Bedford Diner in Bedford, Pennsylvania, on our way home from vacation Monday. But my sharp-eyed wife drew attention to it, pointing out the services offered: Excavation. Well drilling. Hydraulic cylinder repair.
“A lot of industrial,” she said, knowing I like industrial.
A dozen ads, plus one for the diner and a word search. Here, I thought, are people who want to get a message out, who paid RAK Advertising, trying to be heard. I should listen. So I phoned them all.
“Business is tough right now,” said Joe Ryan, 50, who runs Ryan Services, a general contractor. “It is somewhat slow. The natural gas business affected the area. We had the Marcellus (shale formation) right beside us in the Allegheny Mountains. A lot of drilling for natural gas. In ’07, ’08, companies out of Texas moved up, started drilling. They drilled so much, there was such an abundant supply, prices fell and a lot of people lost their jobs. We have work but not as much as we should.”
To continue reading, click here.
"Sooner or later, it just becomes your life," sings Bruce Springsteen.
Not to compare this blog to prison, which is what the song "Hard Time" is about.
Though both do have certain daily routines. Jail has head counts and mealtimes and cell inspections; the blog has click counts and post times and reader comments.
With the end of the blog's third full year today—1095 consecutive days—it's now a bona fide ingrained daily part of my life, and maybe yours too. But just a part, a small part for you, and a larger-yet-still-not-all-that-big part for me. More of a regular duty, like flossing, only I don't floss with equal diligence.
Enough throat-clearing. To the all-important stats. Year One brought 385,679 hits. Year Two, 499,423. This year ... drumroll please ... 577,617, as of Wednesday morning, or 48,134 a month, for an increase over the previous year of about 13.5 percent.
Thirteen point five percent.
Not the sort of skyrocketing leap the internet is famous for.
Roughly half the increase of Year Two.
I'm not going to smear ash on my head and squat at the virtual city gates in mourning over my rate of readership increase slowing. I shouldn't care at all, and I suppose I really don't, not much, since I'm soldiering onward anyway. It gets more readers a month than "Moby-Dick" got in its first 30 years of publication, not to compare the two.
The news is generally goodish. June, and seven of the past 12 months, scored above 50,000 hits, which I decided is some kind of threshold of significance. Last August topped out at a record, 59,998. Nobody seemed to miss the 2016 poster, so not doing one was a good call. Though I do have an idea for a swell 2017 poster, so I might create one anyway, just for the fun of it. There was a flash of real media recognition: every goddamn day was the only news organization to cover the arrival speech of the Sun-Times new publisher, Bruce Sagan, and Crain's Chicago Business used a photograph of mine, crediting the blog, so that was fun.
Still, the value of the blog seems greatest to myself. When I reached into the buzz saw of gun nuttery earlier this month, I could carefully explain what happened right here, without worrying about getting the thing into the newspaper. The process was medicinal, and helped me squeegee the right wing spittle off my body.
The blog made a little money, thank you Marc Schulman and Eli's Cheesecake, which for the third years ran advertisements at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The ads led to at least one order, I am certain, because I ordered a cheesecake and sent it to Tate—or, more accurately, his kid, at his request—as thanks for his scrupulous volunteer copyediting of the blog. Which reminds me, I should write a post on the idea of Gratitude Sweets...
Another day. At moments when there is not a lot to say I've been trying not to say a lot. So in closing out Year Three, thank you for reading, and for commenting, and for caring about this almost as much as I do. This blog strikes me as significant, and while that must be an error on my part, driven by the vanity and myopia that inspires so much error, it is my error, and I am sticking with it. Everyone else clings to their folly, why should I be any different?
On the road, my wife and I try to avoid fast food restaurants because they serve not just crap, but boring, familiar, unhealthful, unappetizing crap.
Which means picnic lunches, if we've prepared them. If not, then venturing away from the tollway, looking for the ever-more-elusive local restaurant. At the back of my mind is "Mom's Diner," with Mom—curly haired, fat cheeks, powerful forearms, rolling out the pie crust, gazing out the window, somehow knowing we're about to arrive. ("Howdy. Take a seat anywhere. Leave room for pie—they should just be cool by the time you're done with supper.")
Yes, I know. There is something of the connoisseur's delusion to the idea—Mom's Diner can be lousy too; worse than McDonald's (at least once a trip I point out that local roadside eateries were so famously slow and consistently horrible that nationwide chains were embraced particularly for being quick and clean).
But part of our vacation fun is searching out a bit of local color, and seeking homemade pie.
And sometimes learning something.
Heading home Tuesday, I pulled off the road at the exit we were passing about 12 noon and we found ourselves in Michigan, heading north on 131. There was a commercial traffic bypass, and a "Historic" downtown local route. We went historic, ending up on Washington Street, the main drag of the village of Constantine, on the St. Joseph River.
One glimpse of the downtown and the restaurant almost became moot. It was a once prosperous, small red brick storefronts with turrets and trim, now empty and forlorn. A town on hard times, which was mystifying, because there were several enormous agricultural companies—Pioneer Seeds, Monsanto corn—on the outskirts. Maybe they were completely mechanized, because whatever profits they generate obviously aren't being spent in downtown Constantine. The ice cream parlor had gone out of business. Most of the windows were empty, or covered with plywood painted black. The several amateur efforts at retail, craft stores and such, had died on the vine.
To be fair, several buildings had their moldings brightly painted and seemed to have thriving businesses: a cafe, an art galley. But fully 80 percent of the downtown strip was shuttered.
We ate at the Harvey Restaurant, which the waitress told us had been in business since 1908 (actually, 1903) making it the oldest restaurant I had ever been in that retained not a whiff of whatever charm it might have once possessed over the decades. It was 70 percent empty at lunchtime on Taco Tuesday. A grilled cheese sandwich cost $2.
After lunch we explored downtown. Maybe I have election on the brain, but I kept thinking this is why people are willing to support Donald Trump, in spite of all reason and the demands of patriotism and humanity. They'll follow anybody who promises to deliver the country from this sort of dismal descent in to ruin. If you saw your town turn into this, it would be heartbreaking. It was sort of heartbreaking when it wasn't your town, just to come upon it for the first time.
Later, I tried to find out what had happened to Constantine: named for the Roman Emperor, for you fans of irony. The population didn't vanish—the village is as big as it ever was, 2,000 people, the same for the past 25 years. There was a bypass put in three years ago, the idea being get commercial traffic off Washington Street. Maybe it worked too well and siphoned all traffic out of Constantine's downtown.
So maybe the injury was self-inflicted. Maybe there's some other factor I haven't considered. A big Walmart in nearby White Pigeon, perhaps, that sucked all the business away. And this isn't to suggest it isn't a nice place to live: we saw children playing on swings, an elderly man on an enormous John Deere mower cutting grass. So no insult intended. I liked the place, tipped well, and was glad to have left money there.
But the general sinking feeling we felt, walking around, lingered with us. I felt zero big city hauteur. The presidential election has killed that in me, for good I hope. If the populist revolt that gave us Donald Trump's candidacy is indeed thwarted, then Agenda No. 1 needs to be to figure out how to get these buildings in Constantine unboarded and back into business. They had a purpose when they were built. They need a purpose again.
