Hey! We have one of these back home!

    The stuff in the Louvre museum is original. That's sort of the point.
     That lady smiling enigmatically? The actual Mona Lisa, not a photocopy, but really painted with actual paint by Leonardo Da Vinci. The Winged Victory of Samothrace? A bona fide 2200-year-old white marble Hellenistic sculpture discovered on the island of Samothrace. If it were white styrofoam from Cleveland, well, it just wouldn't be the same. 

     Which is why I was a little flabbergasted, during my recent visit to Paris, to turn a corner and see the 20-foot wide, 16-foot tall Assyrian winged bull of Sargon II. Which, to my knowledge was still at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Excavated in what is now Iraq by University of Chicago archeologists in 1929, it had been shipped back to Chicago and been on display there since 1931. What was the beast doing here? Had it flown the coop?

    A little on-the-scene sleuthing uncovered this clue: 

     Even my junior high school French could make sense of "Reproduction." 

     Though still a mystery. Why place, among all those actually treasures, a copy of this particular piece?  I mean, it's nice, in a brawny, blanked-eyed way. But couldn't they do without it? They had lots of other fabulous ancient stuff—the Code of Hammurabi, for instance. 

     After a few seconds of on-line sleuthing, I learned that the "M. Bourbon" on the plaque was Michel Bourbon, a Parisian artist who came to Chicago in 1991 and led a team of craftsmen to create a mold around the 40-ton, 2600-year-old sculpture. It was a difficult job. To keep the limestone from absorbing the silicon used to make the mold, they had to rub it first with a special conservation soap.

    The Louvre wanted the model because, before the Maroons plucked away the 40-ton winged bull, the French had excavated the site, Dur-Sharrukin at what is now called Khorsabad, in northern Iraq and carted off Sargon II's throne room, with the exeption of the bull. Now they wanted the whole room displayed en suite. The odds of the Oriental Institute parting with its treasure were nil, so a copy of the big guy seemed in order. Four pounds of raw potatoes were rubbled inside the mold to smooth out the silicone. 

    They also used 8,000 pounds of plaster of Paris shipped from France. Not because the French plaster was considered superior to Midwestern plaster, though I suppose it was. But rather the work was sponsored by Lafarge Copee, a large French concrete and plaster company, and part of the deal was they fronted the cash, but the conservators were required to use their stuff. The potatoes, I assume, were local. (It was a good investment, if you notice the mention of "avec le concours de Lafarge"—24 years of subtle product placement at one of the landmarks of global culture; not bad for four tons of plaster).

    The moral of the story. Whenever we talk about antiquities being removed from the ancient world, the default attitude is that it's plunder. However it was acquired, we swiped their patrimony and ought to give it back one of these days. But the truth is more complicated. This giant winged bull was found at a site not far from Mosul, where ISIS just blew up an ancient mosque. If European nations hadn't spirited it to safety, a lot of this stuff would not have survived to this day. Then all we would have are copies.

State of the Blog: Year Four

     Year four, in the bag? As of midnight Friday. A little unsettling. When I started the blog, one of those glib little packets of online advice observed that most people abandon their blogs too soon, before they have a chance to succeed. Give it at least three years, they counseled. 

    And now I've given it four.
    Has it succeeded? Numerically, hell yeah. Year One brought 385,679 hits. Year Two, 499,423. Year three, 577,617. And this year added ... 730,955.

     An increase of 153,338
    Or 26 percent.
    Hey...that's pretty good. Not only is it growing, but the growth is growing. The year before it grew 13.5 percent. This year growth almost doubled. (The fiscal year, so to speak, begins July 1 because it was in June, 2013 that I ... well, let's save that story. Let's just say the work situation had darkened).
    Last year we averaged 48,134 viewers a month; this year it's 60,812. Last April was my highest month ever, 65,893, buoyed by my most read post of all time this year, the April 1 Russian postal stamp April Fool's prank, though I'm even more proud that I successfully dragooned Tim O'Brien, a talented New York illustrator to help. That a highly paid professional would donate his work to my effort seemed a kind of validation.
    Speaking of validation, there was money. Eli's Cheesecake once again sponsored the blog during the Christmas holidays, and I thank Marc Schulman for his support. I've been meaning to approach small companies to run ads for a month or two, but haven't got around to it. I like the thought of bringing in companies I like—Lou Malnati's is a natural. A solid Northbrook-based company. They could pay me in pizza, and we could offer some as prizes in the Saturday contest, which I brought back briefly this year. Something to try for next year.
     Creatively, I feel pretty good about it. I've begun re-reading and sometimes reposting whatever was written on a certain day one, two, three (and now, I guess, four) years ago. And while sometimes it's something so topical or slight it doesn't merit a second look, usually it does, and I don't cringe for having written it.
     This past year was of course the Year of Trump, and while I can't even pretend that my contribution to the howl of protest has had any significance—the entire national media shining a klieg light on his flaws couldn't do that—I'm glad to have been doing my patriotic duty, manning my station, blazing away. There's a Norman Rockwell liberty bonds poster that comes to mind—I'll stick it atop the blog. Rockwell was a stickler for detail, and you might want to notice the long cloth ribbon trailing out of the water-cooled machine gun—he's about out of bullets, a nice touch.
     I don't feel like I am. The Internet rewards extremity—I heard the term "outrage porn" for the first time on Friday. So given what succeeds, and the generally contemplative tone that I try to maintain here, I believe my success, gradual though it is, should be encouraging, and I am duly encouraged.
     Thanks to you, needless to say. I'm pleased that the blog has a group of steady followers, Tate and Bitter Scribe and Bernie, Nikki and Wendy and Sandy, Thomas Evans and Paul Fedrick and Dennis Fisher, and all the rest. I generally am able to leave the comments section open and not monitored too closely, though occasionally some nest of malice will stir, acting under the impression that I maintain my blog so unbalanced individuals can post lengthy tirades against me and my family. I don't. The internet has no lack of opportunities to be petty and hateful, and I wouldn't tolerate it directed toward any anonymous commentator who is part of the every goddamn day family, if I may, I certainly won't tolerate it toward the hard-working proprietor. The trolls don't like it, but that's tough. 
     What else? A warm thank you to the Sun-Times, for allowing me to post my work here, albeit demanding that I link back to its godawful web site. Readers often ask me why it can't be improved, and I tell them, in perfect candor, that I have no idea whatsoever and I've never encountered anyone who did, or at least anyone who would admit to knowing. When I make a typo, as I do often (thank you John for your valiant and ceaseless work to birddog my mistakes; I owe you another cheesecake) I leap online to fix it, and I can't understand leaving something unrepaired that so irks loyal readers. (My hunch is that it makes a ton of money being that way). I would normally cringe from criticizing my beloved newspaper home but, really, fix the damn thing already. You said you would.
     But with the sale looming, I suppose that'll be addressed soon enough.
     Let's end on a positive note. Going into Year Five, I sometimes think of the blog as a vast iceberg of my writing. Floating placidly in the enormous electronic sea, buffeted by winds, but with no particular direction except to reflect the weather around it. An iceberg that, unlike regular icebergs, diminishing in the warming winds and relentless sun, will only grow. That the thing will remain, year in and year out, even after I stop. That should I step in front of a bus and the additions abruptly end, the blog will still be here as long as Google runs blogger, safe within the vault of some windowless server farm somewhere. That people might continue to find it, and be glad they did. I like that thought; it's reason enough to keep going.
     

   

News flash! Clinton Street wasn't named for Hillary Clinton

      July 1 is an important date in American history.
     And no, not because, barring a miracle, that date will mark the beginning of the third year Illinois has gone without a budget.
     As if that grim anniversary were not bad enough, this July 1 history taps us on the shoulder and reminds us who we used to be.
     Two hundred years ago Saturday, DeWitt Clinton was inaugurated as governor of New York.
     Who was DeWitt Clinton?  He was a politician who wanted to dig a canal across New York State. That way, Atlantic Ocean commerce could pass through the port of New York, move 150 miles down the Hudson River, meet the proposed canal at Albany, float west 350 miles, then enter Lake Erie at Buffalo.
     A project of this magnitude seemed to demand national effort. Clinton first tried to get the budding federal government to foot the bill. Thomas Jefferson dismissed the canal as  "little short of madness."
     But just as states now are picking up balls dropped by our paralyzed federal government, so Clinton brought the battle home. He ran for governor vowing to build the canal if elected.
     Clinton won, and was inaugurated July 1, 1817. Construction of the canal began ... wait for it ... three days later, on July 4, just outside Rome, New York. The heart breaks.
     The canal — 40 feet wide, four feet deep and 363 miles long — was dug by hand, with shovels and picks, with the occasional black powder explosion. It required 83 locks to surmount 675 feet of elevation. and aqueducts to cross streams. Before the canal, it cost $100 to move a ton of freight from New York City to Buffalo. After the canal opened in 1825, the same shipment cost $10 and got there in a third of the time. Tolls repaid the cost to dig the canal within a decade.

To continue reading, click here.

Cotton Candy Grapes

     Occasionally, I will write about some less-than-urgent subject — walking the dog, a pair of gloves I like, an obscure book that caught my interest — and someone will shout that the state is in financial crisis, or Trump is president, or some other dire situation unfolding at the moment. The implication, or direct assertation, being: "How can you write about this trivial crap while ignoring important matters of extreme urgency?"
     And usually I don't reply, because the person asking has long established themselves as hating what I do anyway; they are just seizing on what they consider an example of my inadequacy to make their opinion known, again. As to why they hang around the blog of someone they hate and find inadequate, well, I can't answer that for them. Chronically unhappy people, I suppose, keeping their furnaces of displeasure well stoked, mistaking the compulsion to abuse others for rational conversation.
     Were I to bother answering, I would point out that I reject the notion that the world benefits by cathectic focus on our woes to the exclusion of everything else. That only by continual ventilating of our myriad of troubles can we ever hope to resolve them. That's zealotry, and mistaken. 
     I am not the only medium for expression, God knows. If a subject is deftly handled a dozen other places, I don't feel the need to pile on with something identical or even similar. If readers come here not knowing if they'll find some oblique approach to a familiar issue, or something about Cotton Candy Grapes, that is my intention.
    They're relatively new.  Created in 1992 by horitculturist David Cain of International Fruit Genetic in Bakersfield, California, not through gene modification, but by breeding together two strains of grapes, making the Cotton Candy Hybrid. They've also created strawberry, mango and pineapple flavors, and are hoping to train consumers to expect grapes in a range of tastes and textures.
     "When you go to the supermarket, there's like 15 kinds of apples — Fuji, Pink Lady, Gala, Braeburn. The list goes on," Cain told The Salt website. "We want to give consumers the same array of flavors for grapes."

    My wife noticed them at Sunset Foods as we were shopping together one evening. As much as I'm against nibbling on food you haven't paid for, she—in good Eve fashion—prevailed on me to sample a grape. It tasted exactly like cotton candy. So we plunked down $3.99 for a one-pound bag. 

    And here's the strange part. When we got them home, most didn't taste like cotton candy. Maybe chilling them was the problem. Or some dynamic of the store. I'd eat 10, and only one would have a vague cotton candy-like taste. Maybe the effect is psychological, or I got a bad batch. I can't explain it, and the online literature seems to be full of praise, so I'm sure it's me. Though when I tried one in the store, it was like eating cotton candy at the circus. At home, not so much. I can't explain it.

     Not the weightiest question to raise, but you can't walk into a bakery expecting to buy oil for your car. Every establishment is entitled to stock his shelves as he pleases, and I don't see why I should be castigated for not being what I've never  been, wanted to be, or had any intention of becoming. 

Ignoring one baby is immoral, ignoring millions is policy

Sculpture by Damien Hirst

     Let's talk about morality.
     No, not other people's morality; your morality. Parsing the morality of others is too easy. It comes to some as naturally as breathing and almost as often.
     Examining what you think is right for you? A little harder.
     Here's the scenario.
     It's morning. You stroll to the sidewalk to collect your Sun-Times — you subscribe, thank you very much, a good sign, though not the ethics test I have in mind.
     You bend to pick up the plastic-clad cylinder and hear a cry. You stand up. There, on the tree lawn, is a baby. About 6 months old. Chubby arms and legs waving. Gurgling baby noises.
     What do you do?
     Well, first you look around. Hoping to see a parent quick-stepping over to claim their darling. That's natural. Someone take this cup from me.
     There is nobody on the street. You blink a few times. You look down at the baby.
     Still there.

     To continue reading, click here.

Going to law against birds and their enablers

     For a number of years I wrote a column in the Reader called True Books. It was the continuation of something I wrote in the True Facts section of the old National Lampoon. What True Books did was present actual books in a deadpan way. Just the title, a dry synopsis, a "Representative Quote" and a then the final "Noteworthy Flaw" acting as a kind of punchline.
    The books were all unexpected, off-kilter, odd. The one lodged is memory is a book of nutritional hoo-ha titled "Sharks Don't Get Cancer," where the noteworthy flaw was, "Sharks do get cancer."
    The premise for the ongoing joke was that creating a book is a considerable effort, involving not only a writer but an editor and a publisher, maybe an agent, printers, proofreaders, a publicist, various friends, and thus the bar for a book being mere idiocy or folly was a little higher. There were certain expectations.
    The same is true for lawsuits. Because you need not only a litigant, but a lawyer to draft and file the suit and a judge to accept it. Oh, individuals can file pro se lawsuits, without an attorney, but those are immediately viewed as suspect. Otherwise, a lawsuit carries a certain gravitas, and are viewed, particularly by the media, as Significant Acts.
    Though they really shouldn't be. Anyone can file a lawsuit about anything. If there is a body of lawsuits so trivial and baseless that attorneys cannot be paid to submit them to a court, I've never heard of them. 
    So news last week of Judy Graves suing Elmhurst Hospital was treated as significant. Two years ago Graves, a woman in her 60s, was menaced by a red-winged blackbird, a particularly aggressive and territorial bird, and fell, injuring herself, according to the lawsuit. 
    She sued — when I first heard the report, on the radio, before they revealed who, and for one delicious moment I wondered if she might not be suing the birds. No, she is suing the hospital, for harboring them. She seeks $50,000 plus legal costs.
    While "bird law" was a running joke in "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," there is a long tradition of going to law to seek redress against animals. To refresh my recollection I turned to one of my favorite books, E.P. Evans essential "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals," 1906 summation of centuries worth of trials, the majority involving livestock—pigs, mostly, since they were in closest contact with humans.
    Just the summary lines in the Contents are enough to send you leaping for the book. "Animals regarded by the law as lay persons" and "Criminal prosecution of rats" and "Bull sent to the gallows for killing a lad."
    There was, as I remembered (I wrote about it in the "Noise" chapter of "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances") a parson in Dresden placing a ban upon sparrows "on account of their unceasing and extremely vexatious chatterings and unchastity during the sermon, to the hinderance of God's word and Christian devotion" and the Bishop of Trier anathematizing swallows because they "disturbed the devotions of the faithful by their chirping and chattering, and sacrilegiously defiled his head and vestments with their droppings, when he was officiating at the altar."
    Evans points out, rather reasonably that the Saxon parson "did not expect that his ban would cause the offending birds to avoid the church or to fall dead on entering it." Rather, "by his proscription he puts the culprits out of the pale of public sympathy and protection."
     Which is sort of where the plaintiff puts herself in filing her suit. While the lure of a make-her-go-away settlement is always there, one can't help but imagine that the public—those that think of it at all beyond a smile and a shake of the head—hold little sympathy for someone lashing out at birds and the hospital that harbors them.  (Graves' argument, to the degree she has one, is in that landscaping in an attractive manner Elmhurst Hospital "encouraged nesting and other habitation by wildlife, specifically including birds," which would be sufficient to indict just about any building anywhere beyond a warehouse in an asphalt lot. The lawsuit seems to suggest a certain peevishness.
     But as the person in question is obviously litigious, I should rush to point out that I have no idea about her actual level of peevishness. She could be sweetness incarnate, sadly injured by her fall, caused entirely by flocks of red-winged blackbirds cruelly and deliberately encouraged by the heedless ornithophiles at Elmhurst Hospital. Perhaps a jury will rush to deliver to her the compensation she deserves. 
     These things happen, though rarely. One assumes the lawsuit will be thrown out on a variety of grounds — say, Elmhurst Hospital not being responsible for the criminal acts of third parties who trespass on its grounds, and as the blackbirds were not employees (another possibility marvelous to contemplate) they can no more be held liable than Henkels could be held liable if someone robs you with a kitchen knife. Land owners are not typically held liable to damage caused by wild animals.
    Before we let "The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals" go, we need to mention one more tidbit, not related to birds, but too delightful to keep to myself. That is:

 "a faded and somewhat droll survival of ecclesiastical excommunication and exorcism is the custom, still prevailing in European countries and some portions of the United States, of serving a writ of ejectment on rats or simply sending them a friendly letter of advice in order to induce them to quit any house, in which their presence is deemed undesirable. Lest the rats should overlook and thus fail to read the epistle, it is rubbed with grease, so as to attract their attention, rolled up and thrust into their holes. Mr. William Wells Newell, in a paper on 'Conjuring Rats,' printed in The Journal of American Folk-Lore (Jan-March, 1892), gives a specimen of such a letter, dated, 'Maine, Oct. 31, 1888,' and addressed in business style to 'Messrs. Rats and Co.' The writer begins by expressing his deep interest in the welfare of said rats as well as his fears lest they should find their winter quarters in No. 1, Seaview Street, uncomfortable and poorly supplied with suitable food, since it is only a summer residence and is also about to undergo repairs. He then suggests that they migrate to No. 6, Incubator Street, where they 'can live snug and happy' in a splendid cellar well stored with vegetables of all kinds and can pass easily through a shed leading to a barn containing much grain. He concludes by stating that he will do them no harm if they heed his advice, otherwise he shall be forced to use, "Rough on Rats." 

     Whether or not the occupants of No. 6 Incubator Street responded by lawyering up against the rats is not mentioned. 




     

Gagged by caution, Obama choked when the moment called for action

     Donald Trump is right.
     Or at least he raised the right question Friday when he tweeted: "Just out: The Obama Administration knew far in advance of November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about it. WHY?"
     He was referring to the newly published Washington Post expose, "Obama's secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin election assault."
     Underline the word "secret." Because last August, when a CIA courier delivered an "eyes only" envelope to the Oval Office, detailing how Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence to "disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential election race" in order to "defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump" Obama sprang into inaction, riding out of office on the same skittish horse of deliberation and restraint he had ridden in on.
     Or, as one administration official put it: "We sort of choked."
     Big time.
     Even the goal — punish Russia for cyber meddling in the election — ignored the fact that it was still going on, a concerted campaign of disinformation and targeted leaks. It was a like a fire department pulling up in front of a burning building and busying itself investigating the cause of the fire and trying to punish the arsonist without bothering to first put out the flames raging in front of them.
     There was a reason for this.... 

     To continue reading, click here.