Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

        When I was in junior high school, I was a member of the Roehm Junior High School fossil club, that had wonderful golden yellow sweatshirts emblazoned with one of these friendly fellows and the slogan, "Friends of the Trilobite." We would go fossil hunting at the shale fields in Sylvania, Ohio. I never found one—I remember digging up a pathetic fragment, that's it. As an adult, I broke down and bought one, which seemed a kind of surrender.
    I'm not sure of the allure. I imagine I thought they looked cool. I certainly was very proud of my Estwing fossil hammer.
    Trilobites—the great, great, great-great-great (add a few hundred more "greats" here and you'll still fall short) grandfather of horseshoe crabs.  They scooted around the bottom of the sea starting about 500 million years ago, in the Pre-Cambrian era, and not petering out until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian. So humanity is going to have to do a lot better if we hope to touch their record. 
     What was their secret? Difficult to say. I'd guess at no religion or weapons, but can't be certain. There are without question 17,000 known species of trilobites, so they were working the diversity thing, big time. Something we might want to think about. Organisms with only a single variety tend not to endure, and I don't mean that as a slam at ginkgo biloba trees, which as you know is alone in its own division, class, genus, order and species, yes somehow managed to hang around for the past 270 million years (going back coincidentally, to the time of the trilobites).
     But enough paleontology. I'll draw your attention to the tableau below. 
     Where is this singular place? A bit off the beaten track, but maybe you've been there.  I'll give you a hint: it's not in a museum, meaning those of you who guess, "Field Museum" will out yourselves for not reading thoroughly (or out me for having bored you with all this trilobite crap).
     Place your guesses below. The winner, as always, gets one of my blog posters—I'll let you chose the year. Please don't guess if you're already been successful before, Tate. Good luck.

Dallas

Brent Thompson, one of the officers slain in Dallas.

     In the 1980s, when such things were still possible, I spent a Christmas Eve riding along with two Chicago cops in the 2nd District—the area around 51st and Wentworth. The central memory of that night is that I was scared—particularly charging up the darkened stairway of a six-flat—and I was with two cops.
     Police have hard jobs—that doesn't get said enough, because it's obvious, and because it's beside the point in the steady drip-drip-drip of abuse-of-authority cases we see in Chicago and across the country. When innocent black people are being murdered on camera by police, the fact that most officers are doing their duty somewhere else isn't particularly relevant.
     The difficulties police face is a fact we only only acknowledge when something like Dallas happens, when officers are killed in the line of duty and suddenly their perspective snaps into view—it's a job that can get you killed if you're not careful and sometimes even when you are careful.
     It is a truly shocking crime, because it cuts at a basic assumption in American life: respect for the police. The officers themselves decry criticisms that are leveled them, with increasing volume and frequency, thanks to the undeniable evidence of cell phone video technology. They consider themselves misunderstood, victims. What they don't realize is that these criticisms stem from disappointment: we expect the police to be heroes, we want them to be heroes, to do the right thing. And they usually are. But they are also human, and mistakes happen. Even those police who are caught on camera shooting people without justification are not, I believe, acting out of racism so much as out of fear. They're trying to get home at the end of their shift, and they know—unlike the public, they don't have the luxury of being able to forget—that not everyone does. Or they're hopped up from whatever chase or scuffle happened before the camera was trained in their direction, and they do the wrong thing.
     Or, sometimes, they're poorly trained or aggressive jerks. There's that too. This tragedy does not erase the dire situation we have with police and minorities in this country. It only adds a new chapter.
     The situation is still the same. Police have more power and authority than other people—they enforce the law. More so, they embody it, and if they feel they are being held to a higher standard, they are. That's what they signed up for. What we need to understand is that we are all, cops and civilians, facing the same problem here: how to combat crime without hurting either innocent people or police officers. Right now, decency requires we honor these fallen officers and their grieving families—look at Brent Thompson's face. A father and grandfather, he just looks like a good guy, and deserved to go home Thursday night, not to the morgue. Think of him, and his four other slain brothers in blue, and remember the debt that society owes to its heroes. They died trying to keep their city safe. Our thorny law and order problems will be right where we left them, waiting for us, when we're through.   Already, the various factions are trying to twist this horror to their benefit, with union officials claiming, incorrectly, that this is an outgrowth of disrespect for police, while critics observe that the shoe is on the other foot. That helps no one. What would help, if we could muster the strength to do it, is if we could only realize that, police and civilians, black and white, are all in this together, bound by a common humanity and citizenship in this great country of ours. We will all succeed or fail, live or die, together. When will we understand that? Not anytime soon.

Now covering knitting and yarn crafts

     So the year is half over, and like me, you're wondering how the knitting vogues that were ballyhooed at the start of 2016 are faring. You remember when Skeinoblog laid out its "Knitting Trends 2016: What's Hot This Year"? Just how popular were these new "super-bulky yarns" anyway?
      "Hand-knitting follows the fashion industry," said Cindy Cooper, owner of Elemental Yarns in Plainfield. "Yeah, we have some super-bulkies. But a lot of the influence comes from television shows, like 'Game of Thrones.'"
     Then there's the issue of sustainability, which...
     Okay, so I can't really devote my entire column to knitting. Believe me, I was tempted. At least I had the thought: I could be the knitting reporter, covering the yarn arts beat. As the presidential campaign veers deeper into farce, a bone deep revulsion sets in at the prospect of reaching my hands into the mess and trying to arrange its gloppy, putrid contents into some kind of order. Knitting seems so pleasant by comparison.
     On Saturday, Donald Trump retweeted a white supremacist graphic that shows Hillary Clinton against a sea of money and a Jewish Star. He does that a lot—tweets neo-Nazi tropes to his 9.5 million followers. That's why they love him. Well that, and his slurs against racial and religious groups.

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Storm coming

Storm approaching O'Fallon, Illinois, by Evie Levine

   
     Years ago, when my column took up a full page and I ran a jokes at the end, sent in by readers, I received a chuckle from someone who identified himself as a "nephrologist." 
     I quickly checked the dictionary, and was charmed to discover, I thought, that this meant he makes his living studying clouds. I was compelled to ask him about it, and he set me straight. A nephrologist is a kidney specialist.  
     Oh. Not "nephologist"—one who studies clouds.
     That's life. You think you've got someone dreamily gazing at the heavens but, on second glance, it's another wage slave poking into somebody's lower back.
     Yet there are a few of us who make our living thanks to clouds. In May, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a charming article on the wonderfully-named Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the equally-delightful Cloud Appreciation Society.  I haven't joined yet only because I can't decide if membership is quaint or strange.
     What is it with clouds? In the photograph above, snapped Wednesday morning by my cousin, Evie Levine, there are the appealingly weathered farm buildings. And the windblown, bright green mid-summer corn, with its yellow tops. But it's the cumulonimbus clouds, low, grey, louring, that make the picture sing, that adds the drama. 
     Maybe the allure is that clouds can alternate between being so placid and puffy, white, motionless, floating above us, then suddenly turn turbulent and roiling, dark, threatening. Maybe that's why they're so fascinating. Or maybe because while they look like they're floating, they're actually falling, at a rate of about eight feet a minute, according to my 1926 copy of "Fogs and Clouds" by W.J. Humphreys, which has been sitting on the shelf for years, just waiting for this moment.
    Maybe that's it—placid and turbulent, both aloft and descending. They're just like people. 
   

Does this beard make me look like Steven Spielberg?

     If you are curious as to how the process works—and no one has asked, so maybe you're not, but I'm telling you anyway—I wake up, and write something, either for the paper or here or both. It goes online, and in print, and people react to it. 
    My subject is basically what's on my mind. Tuesday it was the you-look-like-Steven-Spielberg trope. I started writing something, then Abner Mikva died, so I wrote his obit—he seemed so hale when I had lunch with him in January, I thought there was no rush. Then I returned to this column. 
     Which seemed fine .... until an editor had the idea of taking my picture, and running it next to Spielberg's. I looked at the two, and had this thought, for the very first time: "Shit. They're RIGHT. I DO look like Steven Spielberg. Fuck. I look WORSE!" 
     Which sort of put me in a quandary. I thought of yanking the column back. But that seemed panicky. If I did that every time I had second thoughts, nothing would ever get printed. The higher road seemed to be, heck, show some spine, leave it out there. Probably be ignored, like most everything online, but if it provokes a geyser of derision, well, so what else is new? 

     My wife sleeps later than I do — beauty’s privilege. At home, I use the time to write stuff. On vacation, I go to the hotel gym.
     But the oil light went on during our drive East, so I figured an early-morning trip to the Jiffy Lube was in order.
     In the waiting room with coffee and the Post, a Jiffy Lube employee, Louis, called my name and began a canned pitch: we should also rotate your tires and change your transmission fluid and . . . .
     No, no, no. Just the oil.
     That bit of robotic business out of the way, Louis blinked, and seemed to notice me for the first time.
     “Did anyone ever tell you you look like Steven Spielberg?” he said.
     People tell me that all the time, so much that I have a canned reply.
     “I don’t look like Steven Spielberg,” I said. “I’m just a Jewish guy in a baseball cap and a beard....”

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Clinton lead shrinks, widens

     In general, I tend to defend the media—a vibrant part of democracy, it's part of what keeps us from being Russia. 
     
     But sometimes I do feel a flash of the loathing that such a big hunk of the public seems to feel.

     Such as Tuesday, when I read this headline, from The Hill:

     Clinton lead shrinks to five points in national poll. 

    And then, a few hours later, this one, on Twitter: 

    Clinton expands lead over Trump to 13 points: Reuters poll.

    So a lead that shrinks and widens, to either 5 percent or more than twice that, depending on who's being polled and who's doing the poll and who's doing the reporting, apparently. 

    Leaving us totally unenlightened. 
   
    All together now, repeat after me, the classic words of Christopher Marlowe:

    "Why this is hell; nor am I out of it."
    

Abner Mikva: 1926-2016

     The Mikva Challenge people tell me I had one of the last interviews the revered jurist and legal mind gave. When I took him to lunch for his 90th birthday in January, he was so full of pep that I never thought of writing his obituary, a melancholy duty that I performed this morning. What popped out, to me, from his long and extraordinary life is how he faced the same fanatical opposition we are facing now, with success and grace—the NRA spent six months and $1 million trying to block his federal bench Senate confirmation. And failed. Something we liberals need to bear in mind. Our cause is right, and we should not weaken just because are opponents are brutal and relentless. If those who would undermine and destroy the country are strong, we just need to be stronger.

     Abner Mikva brought his sharp legal advice and principled worldview to all three branches of government — he was a congressman, federal judge and presidential adviser. He stood up to Richard J. Daley, for years, and managed to survive hizzoner's efforts to destroy him.
     And if that weren't enough, if giving legal advice to Bill Clinton and encouraging Barack Obama to try for the White House weren't enough, Mr. Mikva, who died of cancer at age 90 on Monday, was also the young man who tried to volunteer to help the Democrats in 1948 and was told by a ward heeler: "We don't want nobody nobody sent," coining the immortal distillation of political cronyism.
     "That's Chicago for you," said Obama, remembering the phrase when he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mr. Mikva in 2014. The president called Mr. Mikva “one of the greatest jurists of his time,” someone who “helped shape the national debate on some of the most challenging issues of the day.”
     Obama on Tuesday issued a statement saying Mr. Mikva "believed in empowering the next generation of young people to shape our country. Ab’s life was a testament to that truth. ... Like so many admirers, I’ve lost a mentor and a friend."

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