Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This is one of those cases where you've got the name already. But can you match it to the face? Or, in this case, the shore?
     I would wager that every last one of you has heard of this body of water, read about it, thought about it. But have you ever seen it? Well now you have. 
     So what is this? Because I know it's a toughie, I'll post a clue at 12 noon. But my gut says somebody will put two-and-two together. It's not within 500 miles of Chicago. 
     The winner gets .... something different this time ... how about a cup of coffee at the Chicago Sun-Times, and an official Sun-Times cup to take home? Or if you can't make it, I'll just mail you the coffee cup. 

Rejoice! The Olympics begin tonight ... in Rio and not Chicago

     A rare two columns in the paper today, the brick piece below in the front section, and this, in sports. The Olympics leave me cold, obviously and, given all the hired hype, I thought a little pushback is in order.  

     The opening ceremony for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro takes place Friday.
     A reason to celebrate because, as you know, they might have been taking place in Chicago, a kind of surreal mockery added to our usual set of grim urban woes such as holding a child’s birthday party with balloons in the middle of a blood-soaked battlefield. Dodged that bullet, for once.
     You’re not watching, are you? Whatever for?
     You do know about this internet machine, correct? That anything halfway interesting immediately will be tweeted and Facebooked and ballyhooed around the world. Why park yourself for five hours in front of the TV when you can just hoover up the highlights, should there be highlights, the next morning?
     Me, I plan to be at Millennium Park on Friday night. Some kind of concert.
     Yes, to be candid, had my wife not come up with that outing, I might have sprawled on the sofa to check out the opening festivities with all the minor countries you forgot existed marching in with all sorts of fashion nightmares: “Look, the team from Kyrgyzstan seems to be wearing green oven mitts on their hands.”
     I would indulge the dull, might-as-well-see-the-spectacle curiosity. I would flash back to the 2008 opening ceremony in Beijing, a chilling demonstration of totalitarian power, this $100 million, four-hour show of old Red Army-style coordination with 15,000 slaves in mechanized synchronization all designed to overawe viewers into submission. You couldn’t watch it and not think, “Surrender is our only option.”
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"Come, let us make bricks"

     I've decided to create the tradition of "Trumpless Friday," between now and the election. 

Scott Miracale at Glen-Gery

    "Please excuse any mess," says Scott Miracle as we step into the Glen-Gery brickworks, "but understand we make brick out of dirt."
     With that in mind, it's surprisingly clean.
     We are in Marseilles, Illinois, 75 miles southwest of Chicago. I'm here due to one of those delightful connections that are made in a great city. Last April, I toured the Inner-City Muslim Action Network on West 63rd Street. IMAN runs a health center, transitional residences, social halls and an art studio. There I met a sculptor preparing the monument to honor the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 1966 march in Marquette Park, to be unveiled at 67th and Kedzie Friday.
     The  bas-relief sculpture was being carved from fresh bricks, appropriately enough — King was hit in the head by one of the bricks, stones and bottles thrown by white protesters, opposed to his notion that Americans of any race should be able to live wherever they please.
     Most know about King. But bricks? I wondered where they planned to fire the monument's bricks. They pointed me toward Marseilles (pronounced "Mar-sells") to Glen-Gery Brick, the biggest brickworks in the state, last of what used to be a busy hub for brick-making in and around Chicago.
     Brick-making goes way back; it's discussed in the Bible.

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Not a politician in sight

     Suddenly, late Wednesday, I just couldn't process another syllable about Donald Trump, his latest jaw-dropping statement, the reaction to that statement, the election, or anything political. I thought about leaving you high and dry on Thursday. But I have made a commitment (every....goddamn.,..day) so I went through my camera roll, and found these shots taken last May, hiking in Eldorado State Park, outside of Boulder, Colorado.

     They'll serve, as a springboard for the situation at this particular moment. 
     The great thing about nature — one of the many great things about nature — is how it rolls along on its own, existing outside our petty daily concerns. It was here long, long before we showed up, sits patiently our entire lives, waiting to be noticed, and it'll be here, more or less unchanged, when we're gone. Whether Trump endorses Paul Ryan or not, the certainty that his shocking misstatement of this hour and the echoes and turbulence rolling off it will be replaced by one just as bad or worse the next, none of it matters. The sun and stars wheel around the heavens, the seasons cycle by, the rains fall and dry up and fall again. The scratch we make in the earth with our boots, well, "The mountains don't care," to quote my favorite park service sign, encouraging hikers to keep their wits about them, be responsible for their actions and their safety, and not to bumble oblivious into a bad situation.
     We in the United States have bumbled oblivious into a bad situation, with half the country so warped by marinating for 20 years in a pool of right wing bile that they just can't process information anymore, and so have embraced a madman as their champion who, surprise surprise, is behaving as you would expect a madman to behave....
     Oh wait, I'm back again, aren't I? It's very hard to tear your eyes from the ongoing disaster, a train wreck that somehow manages to wreck itself anew each day, seemingly each hour. It's like that M.C. Escher staircase that goes down and down yet somehow never reaches bottom. It...
     Trees, rock, blue skies, white clouds. Colorado. I see now how people flee there and stay. It was a lovely day, hiking up the Continental Divide Trail, with our cold water and our sandwiches for lunch. After a couple hours, we found a lovely bench, with this tremendous vista, miles and miles. Not a politician in sight. I think I have to get myself back there, right away, in mind if not in body.  The rest is just a passing shadow.
  

Must our leaders be smarter than us?

     

After today's column, posted below, an anonymous reader wrote this:

     What I willn't believe is that you gave George Bush credit for anything. You wrote a column (not sure how to look up) at the end of his Presidency saying exactly that there was nothing good from it. You would not even give him credit for addressing AIDS in Africa.  This is standard oppositional crap. The new guy is terrible (fascist, communist, child beater) the previous standard bearer was much better and believable. You can's stand Trump I get it. But don't pretend to make yourself better by pretending 8 years later you ever gave Bush credit.     

     Sigh. Part of what makes dumb people dumb is they don't get the whole past-is-accessible-to-us-today-and-can-be-checked thing. Normally, I tell people I'm busy enough reacting to what I actually write without also addressing whatever you imagine I wrote. But since this wanker is so completely wrong, I couldn't resist illustrating one of the many examples of how I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt that his ilk always denied Obama. People just assume others are as unfair and doctrinaire as they are. We're not. At least I'm not. This ran before Bush even took office.

     Those Jay Leno jokes practically write themselves.
     I was reading a news account of how scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have just produced the highest density matter ever created experimentally.
     "Scientists," begins my imaginary Leno, expectantly rubbing his hands together, bouncing on the balls of his feet and surveying the audience, "at the Brookhaven National Laboratory . . . have smashed the nuclei of gold atoms together . . . creating the densest material known to man . . . outside of George Bush's brain."
     OK, I didn't say it was a good Jay Leno joke.
     But the fact is, Bush will be president in a few days, and we can expect a constant stream of ridicule based on the perception that the 43rd president is not the sharpest tack in the box.
Even NBC's hushed, reverent, presidential, image-building interview with Tom Brokaw had to include Bush's reaction to a snippet of Leno bashing Bush (a better joke than mine: basically that the president-elect and his dog have begun playing catch with a Frisbee since Bush "was tired of losing at Scrabble.") Bush replied, quite cleverly, that he goes to bed at 9:45, though first-lady-to-be Laura, who seems to suffer from candor, said that, yes, indeed it does hurt.
     The perception of Bush as dumb persists, despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, he has not uttered anything particularly stupid. Unlike with Dan Quayle, there is no enormous body of gaffes and spoonerisms supporting this perception. Bush hasn't said anything famously dumb.
Oh, there was that pop quiz of 1999, when a Boston TV reporter (TV reporters being famous for their vast sweep of knowledge) asked Bush to name the leaders of Chechnya, India, Taiwan and Pakistan.
     Bush punted all four, and while the story lingered, it did not particularly damage him among the electorate, perhaps because Americans are famously self-absorbed, and not one in a hundred could name any of those leaders, never mind all four. I certainly couldn't and neither could you.
     What has damaged Bush's reputation, I believe, is not his calling Kosovars "Kosovarians" or his C average at Yale, but his facial expression. He just looks dumb, paradoxically, because of a certain intensity, as if he is listening hard, trying to decipher a language he only barely understands. It was that lost, cross-eyed expression, punctuated by his hey-I-got-that-one-right smirk, that almost handed the election to Al Gore, whose robotic, facts-on-file demeanor has practically made being smart into a liability.
     Frankly, being smart is a liability, in the sense that being smart often blinds you to factors that frequently trump intelligence (why do you think they call it "dumb luck"?)
     Being smart certainly was Bill Clinton's undoing — it emboldened him into striding toward the mistakes and misdeeds of his presidency, under the false impression that a bright boy like himself could always bluff his way out, as he had in the past. (He did, in a way, but at what greater cost?)
     When I polled my colleagues over exactly why George Bush is seen as dumb, one blurted out: "I don't want a drinking buddy, I want a leader who is smarter than me."
     I don't. God save us from smart people. I am never so optimistic about Bush's prospects as when people are calling him an idiot. I still freshly remember an earlier president whom the chattering classes — myself among them — worked themselves into a sweat dismissing as a simpleton and a fool, filling little gift books with his mistaken statements about trees causing pollution and such. That president was Ronald Reagan, and history has been kind to him. Maybe George Bush will surprise us.      
     I mean, how dumb could he really be? He got himself elected president.
                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 11, 2001

For once, Donald Trump and I agree about something...

Display, Smithsonian Museum of American History

     One of the many benefits of not being, ahem, crazy, is that you can find value in those who oppose you.
     Had the sane path been available to Donald Trump, he might have shrugged off Khazr Khan’s scathing, Constitution-waving takedown at the Democratic National Convention, saved his silver bullets for a target more worthy than grieving Gold Star parents, even those who criticize a certain reality TV star. He could have defied expectations by saying something gracious.
     Instead, Trump leaped with a snarl into the spiked pit the Democrats had dug for him, then wriggled there for days, howling.
     The rational gambit isn’t available to Trump. One of the top hundred reasons he should never be president is he can’t restraint himself, can’t prioritize and is deaf to both grace and nuance.
     Four reasons, I guess.
     I, on the other hand, like to give credit where due, just because I can. All part of being a fair and decent guy. As much as I disliked George W. Bush, he was certainly strong on ....
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Nekkid photos of the (would-be) First Lady!

     Nekkid pictures of the would-be First Lady!
     Well, why not?
     From the day Donald Trump descended down the escalator at Trump Tower, declared Mexicans rapists, more or less, and launched a presidential campaign like no other, the idea of having sunk below all usual standards of taste, restraint or expectation has gotten a lot of use, if not been completely worn to a nubbin.
     Each day brings some fresh shock to raise a tingle in our blown-out senses.
    On Sunday, it was the New York Post, splashing nude photographs of Melania Trump, taken from a 1995 photo shoot, across the front page, complete with stars to obscure the naughty bits.
     Then Monday, a second front page, with nude lesbian photos of Melania Trump (which makes one shudder to think what Tuesday might bring).
     This raises so many issues I hope you will forgive me if I just number and list them, in reverse significance.
     1. In a world measured by clicks, does taste really matter? You don't read the New York Post every day—it's tawdry, though not typically this tawdry. But you'll look at it now, to check out the goods on Melania Trump. Which is what journalism has become, apparently.
     2. The whole thing could be a ploy by the Trump campaign. The New York Post, remember, is his ally, prone to splashing unflattering shots of Hillary Clinton with her ...

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