Driverless cars are coming while Balbo Drive is going

     “It’s like shooting a duck in a bucket,” I told my wife, making a pistol with my thumb and forefinger and taking bead on the imaginary fowl placidly paddling at my feet, looking up at me with anatine puzzlement.
     I was referring to commenting on the stupidities of the Chicago City Council. Their various edicts and pronouncements hardly matter. Besides, I have my professional pride to think about. We do not traffic in the obvious.
    No need to highlight the City Council’s follies for readers. They know.
     But there is futurity to think about. And someday, maybe even someday soon, when the bean-shaped, electric, self-driving cars that we summon with our iPhones, if not simply by tugging an earlobe and wishing it, are gliding silently to our doors, some grinning wit will disinter thecomments made this week by Finance Committee Chairman Edward Burke(14th):

“Let’s say a child is playing soccer or basketball in a park and then loses control of the ball and it rolls out into the street,” Burke fretted. “Would the [driverless] vehicle recognize the presence of the ball or toy and promptly brake?”

     No Ed, the car would just run over the ball and the child chasing it; that’s what makes this new technology so exciting.

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No poem as lovely as...

     Had I been thinking, I'd have grabbed a leaf from this tree so I could later figure out what sort of tree it is. 
    Not that it matters. Besides, I already know what sort of tree it is. It's a beautiful tree, or at least it seemed beautiful to me as I was hurrying with my family out of Schneider Tower Sunday into Carbondale to grab breakfast. I paused, my family disappearing into the distance, and snapped this shot, and the one that tops the blog today.
     What about the tree stuck me? The shape, I suppose, oddly dense, and then the color, that dark green, set against the blue sky, highlighted by wisps of white clouds. Maybe the composition, standing by itself, in splendor, while the knot of lesser, anonymous trees clustered in the distance, whispering amongst themselves, jealous.
     Maybe it was the early morning light. In that light, a rusty dumpster might look beautiful.
     Maybe it was the good mood caused by leaving my routine and traveling 350 miles south to witness an astronomical event. I noticed that someone tabulated the hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity that was supposedly being lost by Americans stepping away from work and ogling the eclipse, though I was not among them, because I was working.
    It was a futile calculation, the meanest sort of concept of productivity, because looking at a marvelous natural phenomenon is about the most productive thing you can do. Even more than work productivity, because it goes directly to your bottom line, not your boss's. It swells your heart, and puts the rest of life into some kind of perspective. Think of the desperate flailing quality of ... certain public figures, whose name I don't want to sully the post with today, and compare it with the serenity of this tree. And how good it is, to be distracted, even for a minute, from the grim if necessary task of explaining Exactly What is Wrong. To pause and say, "Wow, look at that tree." And not much more. How could it ever be a waste? Just the opposite; it is a necessity. 
    

You CAN go home again, and there's fried chicken

Giant City State Park Lodge

     CARBONDALE — Stouffer’s is a line of frozen foods, now. But when I was a little boy it was a fancy restaurant — actually several fancy restaurants — in Cleveland, where my mother would take me in the regal years before my little brother was born. It was where I ate my first Parker House roll, a dense, yeasty cube with a sweet glazed brown dome top. I never forgot it nor the wicker basket with a red napkin in which it arrived. My mother, for her part, still tells the story of the time at Stouffer’s when her little boy announced she should change her hairstyle, one of those moments when a mom first realizes that she has her hands full.

   Hearing that story, I would not imagine any reader would muse, “Maybe I’ll stop by Stouffer’s next time I’m in Cleveland and try one of those rolls.” Even successful restaurants are short-lived: 70 percent that make it through the perilous first year are out of business by year five. Stouffer’s began freezing popular meals for customers in the 1940s and its frozen meals went to the moon with the Apollo 11 astronauts. As the business took off, Vernon Stouffer — who owned the Cleveland Indians in the 1960s — gave up on running restaurants.
     Which came to mind when my wife, realizing we would be in Carbondale for the eclipse, announced that we should swing by the Giant City State Park Lodge restaurant. She had gone as a very young girl, visiting her downstate cousins. They had eaten family style, big plates of fried chicken. She never forgot that chicken.
     Odd. She never mentioned it before. And after the both of us talking nonstop to each other for — jiminy — 35 years, I thought I had heard everything.
     My heart broke a little. I wanted to say, “Oh honey, that restaurant won’t be there anymore. It’s been half a century. And if it is, they won’t serve fried chicken family style.” She jumped on the internet. It was still there, and we hurried over our first night.

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Clouds intrude but Carbondale eclipse still thrills

Ed Hill, an engineer from Barrington, with his girlfriend June Mannion, a pediatrician, viewing the eclipse. “It’s bucket list,” said Hill

     CARBONDALE — As if a total eclipse of the sun weren't dramatic enough.
     Or, maybe, as if a meteorological phenomenon as common as a solitary cloud could be jealous of all the attention being lavished on a rare astronomical wonder, and might try to crash the party and spoil the fun.
     Or, maybe, because a struggling small town just can't catch a break in this sagging economy, and fate just couldn't wait for the eclipse to even be over before it started dampening Carbondale's sincere hopes that all this national exposure will spark lingering interest in their beautiful community, with its surrounding forests and trails.
     But as the point of totality approached Tuesday, clouds gathered in to what had been sunny skies for days and threatened to wreck the Great American Eclipse, here in an area that was so proud of the length of "totality"—the time the moon would completely cover the sun so it could be looked at safely without special glasses—that it was ballyhooed on the eclipse-viewing glasses being handed out by Southern Illinois University: "2 minutes 38 seconds of darkness."
     Talk about hubris. People came here and not other places in the country so they could view totality a few seconds longer. And now it looked like they wouldn't be able to see it at all.
     At about 12:30 the waning sun, an ever-larger bite being taken out of its right side, was obscured by a rogue cloud, with an even bigger gray barge of a cumulus-nimbus waiting in the wings. There wasn't wind enough to hope.
     Across town, a little after 1 p.m., Curtis Conley, the manager of PK's, a bar on Illinois Avenue, closed up, and sent everybody into the street, more as a favor to his employees than to his customers.
     "Everybody wants to see it," said Conley. "I don't want to make 'em stay inside."
     Conley reported "a record week," but other area businesses were less enthusiastic. "You want to take home a case of chicken?" said the manager at the Giant City State Park Lodge restaurant, in nearby Makanda, Sunday night, saying they had 1,400 guests but had expected a thousand more, which would have put them on par with Mother's Day, their busiest day of the year.
     At Saluki Stadium, along with 14,000 others who paid $25 to hear the SIU band play "Thriller" and see three weather balloons sent up with scientific equipment and listen to cable TV hosts fill time, Ed Hill and his girlfriend June Mannion explained why they came down from Barrington.
     "It's bucket list," said Hill, 69.
     All seemed fated to end in disappointment. Poor Carbondale. They plan for years, spruce up, beautify their downtown, install new cell towers so everyone can Snapchat the astronomical wonder, and the guest of honor hides in a closet of clouds. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. I felt disappointed, sorry to miss the spectacle, almost personally responsible, wondering if I had dragged a few dark clouds of bad luck along with me. As if the botched eclipse were somehow a cosmic referendum that I had just been measured by and found wanting.
     Then, amazingly—miraculously, if you prefer, for those uncomfortable with all this emphasis on science and its clockwork predictability—at 1:15 p.m. the sun peeked into view through a hole in the otherwise thick cloud, an extreme crescent. Hope dawned. A cheer went up.
     "The sun!" people at Saluki Stadium cried. "The sun!" Fingers pointed heavenward.
     Then murk again, and the appointed moment arrived—1:21 p.m. Seconds ticked past. There were no confused birds that I noticed, no insects calling, but an unnatural gloom fell over the stadium, yellowish at the horizon. It was very quiet.
     "Oh no, it's not going to happen," thought Tyler Hong, 18, who had driven here with his friend Jason Leung, also 18, from San Mateo, California.
     Then it did happen. The long-anticipated total solar eclipse, a deep blue disk of the moon with the whitish ring of the corona around it, appeared briefly through the clouds. Loud cheers erupted. "Look! Look! Look!" people cried.
     "We got five seconds of totality," said Hill, afterward. "I wanted more, but it was definitely worth coming." At other locations around campus viewers reported 10 or 20 seconds.
     Not much. But enough.
     "Awesome, amazing," said Dan Ruffo, who came from Rochester, New York. His wife Martha, though aware of the scientific nature of the struggle between astronomical and atmospheric titans transpiring above her, had found herself indulging in some magical thinking.
     "We came all this way ... it can't be covered by clouds," she recalled thinking. "It can't be covered up."
     And was the flash she saw enough to make the journey worthwhile?
     "You'd have to be dead not to think it's pretty cool," she said.
     "We got lucky," said Jason Leung, one of the teens who drove in from California.
     "It was definitely worth it," said his friend, Tyler Hong.

An eerie darkness fell during totality.

Carbondale celebrates eclipse, if clouds don't spoil the party

Overcast skies above Carbondale Sunday

    CARBONDALE — “Happy eclipse, guys!” a young woman on a bicycle called out to complete strangers on a busy Saturday night in the heart of this bustling downstate college town. Happiness seemed a central theme — alongside science, commerce and partying — as tens of thousands of visitors converged for what has been dubbed the Great American Eclipse, the intercession of the clockwork cosmos into our disordered daily doings.

     Happy, that is, if the weather holds, an increasingly dicey proposition as clouds moved in Sunday afternoon.
     “There are more ways we can get clouds here than not,” said Jim Cantore, a meteorologist and host for The Weather Channel, arriving on the Southern Illinois University campus to do a broadcast, fretting about nearby storm systems. “I’m worried about a few clouds. That would be a disaster.”

   Rain or shine, clear or cloudy, on Monday the moon will move between the earth and the sun. The 70-mile-wide shadow the moon casts will sweep across the length of the continental United States, starting at Salem, Oregon, at 9:06 a.m., Pacific time, moving southeastward at about 1,500 miles an hour, passing directly over Caspar, Wyoming, where amateur astronomers are having their annual meeting, brushing Kansas City and St. Louis, then reaching Carbondale at 1:21 p.m., plunging the area into darkness for 2 minutes and 39 seconds — 2 seconds shy of the longest period of “totality” in the country, before hurrying onward, reaching Charleston, South Carolina an hour later and passing on to the Atlantic ocean.
     Being in the path of “totality,” the moon will completely cover the sun — the two discs are approximately the same size, by a fluke of nature; the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, but also 400 times farther away. With the sun's blinding photosphere obscured, the sky will turn dark, the stars will come out, insects will grow quiet, and the 60,000 or so who have gathered in Carbondale will see a black disc where the sun should be.
     Unless it's cloudy.
     Because Chicago—where forecasters also predict clouds at eclipse time—is 350 miles north, the moon will only cover 87 percent of the sun, a lot, but not enough to make it safe to look at without proper eyewear. Residents cannot look at the partially eclipsed sun without wearing special eclipse glasses. Otherwise, they risk burning their retinas and causing permanent damage that might take weeks or months to appear.
     SIU started thinking about this eclipse three years ago, when it received an email from an eclipse watcher in England wondering about their plans, of which there were none. They got busy, along with the town of Carbondale, which was flying a special yellow eclipse flag beside Old Glory. The city of 26,000 has gone through difficult economic times, and, expecting 50,000 free-spending visitors, suspended its open container laws in the downtown district, temporarily, to encourage a carnival mood.
     The school realized that its first day of classes this year was to have taken place on the same day as the first total eclipse above Illinois since the Grant administration. So classes got bumped to Tuesday, though the school cannily had its 15,000 students move in last week, so hundreds were available to work everywhere as yellow-shirted volunteers, manning booths and giving directions
      "I just think the eclipse is a great event, bringing lots of people to campus and showing them that SIU is a great place to be," said Bridget Moroney, 19, a sophomore from Downers Grove studying communications.
     Eclipses were among the first natural phenomena that humanity began to understand. The Babylonians could predict eclipses, which appear in the Bible and are helpful to archeologists in dating ancient texts that refer to them.

     Eclipses have also proven valuable tools for advancing scientific knowledge.
     On Aug. 18, 1868, French astronomer Pierre J.C. Janssen, who traveled to India to study the total eclipse, saw an unexpected band of color in a spectroscopic analysis of the sun's corona and realized he had discovered a heretofore unknown element. A few months later, British astronomer Norman Lockyer confirmed the discovery and, assuming it had to be a metal, named the new element "helium," from the Greek helios, for sun. It would be 13 years before the element was detected on Earth.
     In 1919, an element of Albert Einstein's new theory of general relativity was proven when scientists used an eclipse to show that the immense gravity of the sun bends light from stars behind it.
     Using the eclipse to improve our understanding of the cosmos is to continue, weather permitting, with Monday's eclipse, which will be tracked across the country by volunteers participating in CATE—or the Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse Experiment.
     Sixty-eight teams will use identical 80 mm refractory telescopes to take high definition images of the total eclipse, which will be gathered by NASA into a 90 minute video of the sun's corona, the analysis of which is hoped will be helpful in understanding the sun's temperature fluctuations and magnetic qualities. Group 41 of the CATE Experiment is manned by SIU students at a special "dark site" on SIU's University Farms, one of four CATE locations in Illinois.
     "There's this gap in our knowledge," Christopher Mandrell, a graduate student involved in the project told the Daily Egyptian. "We'll see what it looks like in the outer corona. We don't know what happens in this zone when we can't look at it."
     How much science will get done if it's cloudy?
     "Not much," said Mike Kentrianakis, who has viewed 20 eclipses, in Carbondale representing the American Astronomical Society.
     Clouds or no, there is still money to be made. SIU charged $25 a ticket to fill Saluki Stadium with 14,000 people for the eclipse, and $848 for three nights in a spartan dorm suite with four beds in Schneider Hall - available because the student population is 40 percent lower than it was in the 1980s, when the university had a national reputation as a party school. The Carbondale Holiday Inn was asking $550 a night.
     Local artists created eclipse T-shirts, jewelry, posters and paintings, bakeries made eclipse cookie, and bars offered eclipse drinks. Denny's dubbed its pancakes "Mooncakes" and offered all you can eat for $4 with a free pair of eclipse glasses thrown in.
     There was an art fair, and "Eclipse Comic Con," which drew participants dressed as comic characters to campus. Blending right in were about 80 members of the media, including the BBC, Swedish television and the Old Farmer's Almanac. Visitors came from 40 different states.
     John Mannion flew in from New York with his wife, Janice Wiesman.
     "This is my third try," said Mannion, who traveled with his family as a youth to see eclipses in Nova Scotia and Georgia, only to be disappointed by the weather. "Now I'm trying again."
     A "computer guy" with the Bank of New York, he studied weather patterns and came to Carbondale because of "good odds for a sunny day."
     His wife added that "given what happened in Charlottesville" and all the unrest in the country, she hopes the eclipse is visible, because we could benefit from an experience often described as an awesome, spiritual, life-changing, something to remind squabbling Americans that we are only part of an enormous natural system.
     "It's really just physics; it's astronomy," she said. "It would be nice if people could get together for something meaningful, if this is a turning point, reminding everybody we are just a tiny little planet in a tiny little galaxy.
     Unless of course it rains. If that happens, the Carbondale area can take comfort in the fact that, through another fluke in the cosmos, the next total eclipse here will occur seven years from now, in 2024.
     "This is just a dry run," said Lou Mayo, an astronomer with NASA's Goddard Space Center.

  

Astronomy buffs attended lectures before the eclipse. 

That pesticide must be stronger than they thought

     Look at this sign, spied last week along Chicago Avenue, just east of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Take your time. Study the photo. See if you notice what I noticed immediately, stopping in my tracks and snapping this photo.
     No? It was a bit of a misleading request. Notice, not the sign, but the ground.  Anything missing? How about grass? These large, stark, yellow and black signs are warning about pesticide that isn't applied to a lawn that isn't there. Almost a koan.
    I can only imagine that there was once grass, and the sign either warned of regular though ultimately ineffectual pesticide treatment or—my guess—they were just put there cynically, to keep pets from being allowed to relieve themselves on the grass. That's a theory of mine. I always pull my dog off lawns—when there are actual lawns— marked with these sort of signs.
     I can't be sure they're sincere—some part of me says that there is no danger. I even have doubts such pesticides are used in residential areas. I mean, have you ever heard of a dog being sickened by pesticide that was put on a lawn? 
     Me neither. Heck, I don't even hear the word "pesticide" anymore. I don't know what they call it nowadays. Organic-Earth Insect Discourager. Or some such thing. "Pest" is like "problem," one of those words that got banished when we decided to use euphemisms for everything.  Now it's "otherwise-valued creature" and, of course, "issue."
    Not the biggest observation. But the sun is supposed to go out tomorrow. And while we're fairly confident it'll click back on, well, you never know, and I'd hate to spend my last hours beavering away here.

Why should we sit at home?

      It's an attractive fantasy.
      I've heard it time and time again from readers.
      Why not, they write, stay home when the Nazis protest? Wouldn't that be something. Let them stand around with their homemade swastika shields and their slack whitebread faces, sieg-heiling each other while the country coughs into its fist and looks away, ashamed. Nobody would be there to see them, hear them. Crickets and litter blowing through the empty streets.
      Even Tina Fey suggested it, jokingly. Stay home and eat sheet cake. It was funny, sort of.
      There was a logic. Deny them the attention they seek. Register your scorn by shunning them. Why not try that?
      But the answer is both simple and complicated. 
      First, it's human nature to want to witness a wonder yourself. To slip under the tent flap and go see the human oddity. To clap eyes on someone so out-of-fucking-touch with reality that they'd say to themselves, "Yeah, the Nazis! That's an ideology I want to embrace. Because it worked so well for the Germans. I'm sure it would be great in a nation as varied and diverse as the United States. That's a good idea!"
    It's hard to believe such people exist until you see them with your own eyes.
      Second, why should such marvels march unopposed? They feel comfortable showing up in public, airing their psycho-fucking bullshit worldview, of violence against people whose skin they don't like, whose hair scares them. They feel entitled to work themselves up into a knot over the shape of people's noses. Because they think it matters. 
      Why shouldn't the non-crazy, those free of hatred, of self-assigned and wrong-as-can-be superiority, not show up? To register their belief in our country, its freedoms, not just freedom of speech, or to—apparently—tote the guns you need to feel less terrified around in public. But the freedom to lives our lives unmolested by shitheads like these guys. To not sign on to the same old tired racist garbage that we spent centuries trying to pry off ourselves. The dead hand of hatred.
    Why shouldn't we shout that from the square? We who, unlike them, have nothing to be ashamed of.
      We who, unlike them, understand consequences. We who can also plan ahead, long term. Haters stress their freedom to speak their minds, to stretch the term, and they do have that. 
      But they are not free from consequences. That's why they strut around talking violence, then weep for their public shame the next day when the people back home realize its Dwayne, good old Dwayne from the Dairy Queen, wearing a brownshirt and talking about the need to push Jews into ovens. 
     What a surprise it is, for them. From being fired from the hot dog stands where they work because their bosses just don't want to be stained by association. From having their neighbors shun and condemn them. The First Amendment says government won't bar you from expressing the poisoned little sphincter in the middle of your chest where your heart should be. It doesn't guarantee your neighbors won't turn and spit in the street as you pass.
     As I write this, the forces are assembling in Boston. The tiny poisoned fragment that wants to goose-step in public, that thinks they're worth something if they can only pretend that others are less than them.
     And everybody else, patriotic Americans, moms and dads, brothers and sisters, who don't want to see the American flag shat on without raising their voices in righteous indignation.
     It's a beautiful thing.