Going (Russian) postal

     Ohhh, I'm a bad person. I am going to hell.  
     Not really. I'm not saying that in a sincere, "my soul is consigned to flames!" sense. I not only never believed in such rococo nonsense, but have trouble believing anyone in the world can believe such a thing, though obviously they do.
    If you read the "ohhh" as more of a groan, you'll get a sense of my sincere, sinking feeling when I realized what I had done, entirely by accident.
     Readers of this blog know that I have a fidelity for truth, for directness, for candor.
     And now I have gone and contributed to the smokescreen of deceit and obfuscation that is the web.
     Quite unintentionally, I hasten to say. Hell, if there were one, is paved with good intentions. 
     And the timing is awkward; just as the truth about Russians posing as Americans and creating anti-Hillary lies during the election is dribbling out ...  well, maybe I had better just tell the story.
     So I'm clicking over the Washington Post, and for some reason I'm told that the cookies on my computer are keeping me from seeing a certain story, and I might want to clean my cookies off my computer. So I figure out how to do that, and wipe out all cookies—bits of information that web sites place on your computer to recognize you and smooth surfing— from the computer. Boxes and boxes of cookies are trashed.
    Of course then I have to sign back in, into Blogger, into Facebook.    
     Into Twitter. Twitter asks me to log onto, not my standard @NeilSteinberg but @RussianPostal, the fake site I set up in March to create an air of reality around the non-launch of my parody Russian postage stamp honoring Donald Trump, created by a New York illustrator and actual postage stamp designer who agreed to help me with the ruse.
    I would never do such a thing in the newspaper, where satire is too often taken seriously accustomed to believing what they're told. But on the freewheeling web, it seemed a good idea. During the last week in March, I started tweeting anodyne announcements about new Russian postal stamps. I figured that would enhance the effect when my Trump stamp was announced.
    Reaction to the Twitter feed was tepid, but it perhaps helped, a little, I think, though the prank was quite successful—my most popular post ever, in fact. April 2 came around. I went about my business, forgetting about Russian Postal.
    Until, prodding by my cookie cleanse, I signed back on. And found that dozens of people had been sending tweets to Russian Postal. Russian people. Sharing their various real-life gripes with the actual Russian post office.
    They complained about lost packages:
   

    They complained about long lines, and send documentary photos:

 

   And bad conditions:

   My site became included in the loop from what looked like actual Russian Post Office trying to help people.

Some defied belief, like the driver who used a package to brace his truck:

     To be honest, if it weren't for the existence of that actual Russian postal service assistance feed, I might leave this up, to give these disappointed Slavic postal customers somewhere to complain, to let them vent off steam, and create the illusion of concern. But such a place actually exists, and might even do some good, and so I've merely created a place where feedback is misdirected. So, not wanting to gum up the system more than it already is, I'll leave Russian Postal up on Twitter for the weekend, in case you can take a look, then pull the thing off-line.  There's enough falsity on the web without my adding to it. Because people are credulous and will believe what they read, as our country is discovering, to our continuing misfortune. 


 

Can Samoas-flavored pina colada mix be far behind?

     Boys Scouts have an oath. Girl Scouts have a promise. As both organizations were forged more than a century ago—Boy Scouts in 1910, Girl Scouts, two years later—it is not surprising that a fine mist of Victorian notions about youth clings to both groups, despite their sometimes frantic efforts to stay current. 
     The Boy Scouts, for instance, vow to stay "morally straight" and obey a law demanding they remain "clean."  The girls' morality, meanwhile, is assumed, as is their cleanliness. No vows necessary. The boys are, in a subtle way, being warned away from traps that boys are expected to be tempted by, if not fall into.  The girls, well, not so much an issue. Rude to even mention, really. They're girls. The "good" is implied.
     That's why the Boy Scouts' gradual transformation into a hate group was so jarring. They were supposed to be moral, while being blinded to what morality now meant, thanks to the shrinking in significance of what you do with other people and an increase in what you do to them. 
     Girl Scouts, well, they sold cookies. Who doesn't love cookies?
    Yet, despite this chasm in pretensions to morality, one still has high moral expectations for Girl Scouts, perhaps even more than the Boy Scouts, since they didn't have to struggle for decades deciding which kind of kid to bar at the door. Girls who liked girls, well ... let's just say, years before the military initiated "Don't Ask/ Don't Tell" the Girl Scouts were already there. You're a girl? Great, start making potholders.
     So I was a little disappointed to see this box of Girl Scouts Thin Mints breakfast cereal at the Evanston Jewel Thursday night. Really? Everyone has a bottom line, and brand extension is all the thing, but cookies for breakfast?  The Girl Scouts of America is not only endorsing cookies for breakfast, but making a buck in the process? Does that "make the world a better place," to quote one of the imperatives from the Girl Scout Law. Does that help the girls who snarf it back be "strong"? Is the girl who breakfasts on Thin Mints really, truly, "Doing her best?" 
     I imagine General Mills didn't steal the Thin Mints brand, but are sharing their cut with the Girl Scouts. So the organization gets paid something. But what are the Girl Scouts giving up in return? I have to wonder whether they thought this through. I'm all for marijuana legalization, but somehow, when the Girl Scouts offer a merit badge in cannabis cultivation, it will still be a sad day. If the Girl Scouts don't take their own program seriously, who will? 

Saving birds from the wilds of the city

  

   Facebook has this feature where it tosses up what you were doing on this date in the past, and I noticed this story from five years ago today. I love birds though, like opera, birds are a subject I have more enthusiasm for than knowledge about. My fondness for them  manifests itself mostly in going through 20-pound bag after 20-pound bag of birdseed at my backyard bird feeder, usually thick with half a dozen birds at a time, or more. 

   For this story, I found myself on the 6:01 a.m. Metra downtown, to rendezvous with folks whose love is even stronger, who get up even earlier, and who manifest their passion for birds in a surprising and selfless way.

     The early bird catches the worm, but how early must you wake to catch the early bird? In Annette Prince's case, it's 4:30 a.m. Thursday to head downtown to collect birds, both living and dead, whose journey from the wilds of Canada to the rainforests of South America have been interrupted by the brightly lit trap of Chicago.
     "We have about 10 people out today," says Prince, director of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, a group of volunteers who fan out over downtown every day during migration season—mid-August to early November, and again in the spring—to gather birds that collide with buildings during the night.
     Small birds generally fly at night to avoid predators. "They're going all night down the lakefront, they're looking for a place to stop, they unfortunately stop here," says Prince. "They're looking for green areas, or are confused, and come down to these buildings. They don't see there's glass."
     The birds stun themselves against windows, trying to get to trees and fountains inside lobbies, or are fooled by reflections of nearby trees and fall to the sidewalk, where the birds are either rescued or trod upon.
     Down an alley, Prince finds a Swaison's thrush, stunned, eyes squeezed shut, wings drooping, and transfers it to a paper bag.
     She's found everything from owls to hawks in the eight years she's been doing this; the group has collected 150 species, mostly songbirds, warblers, hummingbirds, tanagers. As with people, it is usually out-of-towners unfamiliar with the territory who get into trouble. "City birds like sparrows, pigeons and starlings never hit windows," Prince says.
     Prince, 54, moves fast, eyes scanning the sidewalk along the building, a jittery alertness that itself is almost birdlike. She cuts a singular figure, in bright green Chicago Bird Collision Monitors T-shirt and gym shoes, carrying a green net on a pole and a black bag. She stops to scrutinize an alley with her binoculars and a FedEx delivery man notices her and breaks into a benevolent smile.
     Prince picks up a small piece of wood and puts it in a nearby trash can. More out of regard for her fellow monitors than environmentalism. "Every time you see a piece of debris, you think, 'Is that a bird?'" she says. "I'm not trying to be Streets and San."
     When she sees an actual bird, such as the one in front of a revolving door on North LaSalle, she breaks into a run to get to it.
     She has a job, as a speech therapist. Why bother doing this in her spare time?
     "These birds have been migrating for thousands and thousands of years," she says. "It's just in the past hundred that these barriers, these skyscrapers, have been in the way. . . . Birds incur a huge amount of death in migration, it's the leading cause of death; storms, running out of food, dying of exhaustion, they're pushed to their physical limits. All those things are natural things. This is something added on top of it. An added hazard. A billion birds a year are killed by collisions in North America alone."
     Prince rendezvouses with two other volunteers, John Kaiser and his wife, Suzanne Checchia, who has a Whole Foods shopping bag holding two dozen dead birds. "A lot of ovenbirds," she says, handing over a baggie containing a colorful Magnolia Warbler.
     "Oh man," says Prince, examining the half-ounce bird. "Look at this guy, just gorgeous."
     By days' end they'll find 75 birds, 35 alive. There's a forensic birding quality to the effort; they always try to identify dead ones.
     Checchia opens the door to her red Jetta and there, in a box, are 14 living birds, each in its own brown lunch bag, some bags rattling slightly. They'll be rushed to the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn where 80 percent will survive to be banded and released into the wild. The dead birds go to the Field Museum, which keeps them for study.
     The group started in 2003. In addition to collecting birds, they work with building owners to encourage them to dim lighting at night and treat windows to reduce their allure to birds. They have 100 volunteers, but are always looking for more, who must take a two-hour training session to learn how to spot and handle birds. The next one is Sept. 10 at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. There's more info at birdmonitors.net.
     "It can be hard getting up in the morning," Prince says. "But it's very rewarding. Our volunteers are not only there to save the individual birds, but to raise awareness."
     Prince is on the way back to her car when she spies a warbler on the ground by the small park at Franklin Street. In a flash she's beside it, on her knees, carefully placing her net over it. "I want to call this a Northern Parula," she says, delicately holding the bird. "He's tangled," she says. "His wings are bound to his body by spider webbing, which is really very strong." With tremendous care, she unwraps the bird, then gently sets it in a paper bag for a brief detour to Glen Ellyn on its way to South America for the winter.

          —Originally published in the Sun-Times Sept. 7, 2012

Trump does the wrong thing, again, but cleverly

     When Donald Trump does something stupid, it’s usually spontaneous, some from-the-hip salvo, an ill-considered suggestion, like his tweet Sunday musing that unless North Korea starts behaving we might have to suspend trade with China, which would gut the American economy more thoroughly than a Korean nuke to Sacramento.
     But the six-month fuse Trump lit Tuesday spiking the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival act is a sort of calculated genius. I’m not saying his executive order is the right thing to do; it isn’t. Tugging away the legal status of hundreds of thousands of young people who are trying to carry on with their daily lives is bad policy, bad economics and morally wrong.
     The president is doing the wrong thing in a clever fashion, for a change, or at least more clever than Trump usually does things, which is setting the bar low.
     Let’s unpack Trump’s latest jaw-dropper. First, by issuing an executive order nullifying Barack Obama’s 2012 edict providing immigrants who were brought to this country as children, dubbed “Dreamers,” relief from deportation, he blows a big kiss to his alt-right base. The “Make America Great Again” crowd, who, if not all haters, do their own dreaming about a return to a legendary time when white Protestants ran everything.
     Plus they love reversing anything that Obama ever did in office, even if it means losing their own health insurance.

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Port of Chicago: woebegone but still a role to play

     Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed House Bill 1797 on Aug. 25. Unlike most bills the governor has been flinging away, this bill received no public notice whatsoever beyond an obligatory line on the Illinois General Assembly website.

     This is because the bill involves financial relief for a place little known despite its enormous size: the Port of Chicago.
     The Port of Chicago is actually two places: the Lake Calumet Terminal, a 1,600-acre shipping facility, with wharves and silos, transit sheds and warehouses. And Iroquois Landing, a 190-acre parcel at the mouth of Calumet River acquired in 1978. The Port contains the Confined Disposal Facility, a lakeside area where the Army Corps of Engineers dumped contaminated muck dredged from the bottom of rivers and, not unrelatedly, a 36-hole golf course, Harborside International, on a former waste dump.
     Consumers tend to think of shipping as something done quickly. Order a flannel shirt from Land’s End and within days it arrives on your doorstep. The rare time we give shipping a thought, we are often entertaining images of drone delivery, of sushi winging its way to diners in Iceland. That’s our future.

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Some laborers have jobs machines just can't do

    
    Happy Labor Day! Typically I'd post my Monday column from the Sun-Times here. But scheduling interceded. Wanting to have a columnist in the paper every blessed day—see, it's not just me—my boss asked if they could nudge me to Tuesday this week, and, accommodating chap that I am, I heartily agreed.
    So what to run today? I could write something, but Tuesday's story is rather complicated—it involves shipping—and as this is a holiday, I hope you don't mind something out of the vault. Deep from the vault; almost a quarter century. This leapt to mind, for the range of workers it shows—and no, the photographs don't go with it, but rather illustrate various working folks I've encountered over the years.
     But only one guy like the man deboning whitefish in this story. He made a deep impression on me, because he was happy, grateful for his job. At least he said he was. Many times, I've told myself, if that guy deboning whitefish in a cold room can do it for 13 years, you can do this.
     The Fish House, by the way, is long gone — there's a Lexus dealer there now. So is Alfred Dunhill. And Brach's, which took a thousand jobs with it to Mexico, victim of our daft sugar tariffs. Something to keep in mind now that we've got an unfit, unhinged president with his erratic hand on our trade policy tiller.

     One hundred pounds an hour, the whitefish fillets are set before Christ Kostakis. One hundred pounds an hour, Kostakis runs his naked left hand gently over the chilly fish, caressing it, feeling it, probing for tiny pin bones as thick as a blade of grass.
     One hundred pounds an hour, he takes a needle nose pliers and removes the 32 or so bones in an average fish fillet.   

     "You don't see the bones, you feel them," says Kostakis, who has done this at the Chicago Fish House, 1250 W. Division, for 13 years, explaining why he cannot wear a glove to protect himself from the 40 degree temperature.
     "The whitefish has soft meat," adds Carl Mitsakopoulos, treasurer of the Fish House. "A machine would tear up the meat. If you do it by hand, the meat comes out whole instead of ragged - better eye appeal and better quality."
     In this technical age, with the robots of mass production clicking away, it is useful to remember that in reality this is not always the case.
     Just as a machine hasn't been made that can pick pin bones without destroying a whitefish fillet, so there are a surprising range of jobs that are still filled by humans because no machine can do them properly.
     The best cigars, for instance, are still hand-rolled, because machines just cannot handle the variation of natural tobacco leaves.
     "The handmade cigar has to be all tobacco leaf, typically top quality leaf," says Hal Ross, humidor manager at Alfred Dunhill, which sells tobacco at Water Tower Place. "And it makes a huge difference."
     Likewise, the Brach's candy complex on Kinzie Avenue, the largest candy factory in the world, at first seems a wonder of automation. Computers control the big vats that feed into automated ovens, and dozens of varieties are made at the same time in one hygienic maze of production and automation, the armies of cherry cordials and chocolate stars untouched by human hands.
     Except for one thing: those hard peppermints, with the pictures in the center. Sometimes a Christmas tree, sometimes a flag, sometimes a heart. It seems that no machine can make those little mint pictures without making them look all messy.
     So the images are created by hand: each of the myriad mints that leave the factory each year, bearing a tiny original image.
     When the corn syrup candy used to make the mints comes out of huge pressure cookers, it's the color and consistency of petroleum jelly. Workers refer to the substance as "glass."
     Strong men then take the warm blobs and carry them over to stone tables, where they are worked by hand, pressed with metal bars, kneaded and folded while colorings are added, turning them electric greens and hot pinks, deep roses and searing blues.
     The colored "glass" is tugged into long shapes, which a candy artist then works into a picture. Using his hands, powdered in sugar, each man forms what is basically a giant mint - a disc that's more than two feet in diameter, weighing about 100 pounds, with an image surrounded by white peppermint. Each one is slightly different.
     Then the big aromatic blob is hefted into an extruder, a machine that begins slowly turning the disc until it is transformed into a long rope of candy. The rope, when sliced into segments, reveals hundreds and hundreds of quarter-sized mints, each containing a perfect, tiny, handmade rose.
     Food manufacturing is often so labor intensive because machines frequently just can't make the kind of subtle distinctions that a human can.
    "You have to detect sours, ferments, medicinal tastes and off-aromas from a quick sampling," says Wayne Thomas who, along with a staff of three, spends his days "continuously" tasting coffee brewed from the semitrailers of beans arriving at Richheimer Coffee on North Halsted—150 cups a day, by his estimate.
     Asked whether a machine could do what he does, Thomas seemed to savor the challenge of constructing an imaginary one.
     "They could run a sample of coffee through high-pressure, liquid chromotography and determine what compounds are present," he says. "Then go through a statistical analysis of how many people say this is a good cup of coffee versus the spectral analysis of the product. Then they might be able to correlate the information and submit the sample to the instrument, which might then identify an ideal coffee taste profile because of the presence of certain components in coffee . . . "
     But is there any chance of anybody going to that trouble and expense anytime soon?
     "Nah," says Thomas, who, amazingly, sometimes drinks coffee on his off hours. "Coffee is really a strange animal. It is somewhat subtle. It's an individual thing."

                  —Originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 27, 1992

Life is moving on

John Ashbery

   I was sorry to hear that John Ashbery died today. Though not terribly sorry: 90 is an age we can all hope for and, anyway, a poet of worth never really dies, not in the way that you or I will.

   Sara Bader and I included excerpts of three of Ashbery's distinctive, enigmatic poems in Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery—"The Skaters," "The Ecclesiast," and, my favorite, "The Bunaglows," whose lines bear repeating on this day:

For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar
The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,
Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way.
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful
As architecture, because planted and then abandoned when completed,
To live afterward, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.
Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back.
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on toward death. But sometimes standing still is also life.