Flashback 1998: TV's latest 'British invasion' is putting children in a trance

     My older son Ross graduates from college in a couple days. I haven't seen him in ... more than five months, as he used the past two school breaks to study in London and travel in Israel. There was a time when I worried about not seeing him for five minutes, as this column, almost exactly 20 years old, is a reminder. 
     The Teletubbies show began in England in 1997 and came here the next year. There doesn't seem much to be thankful for in our media world, but we can thank providence that the Teletubbies came and went—production ended in 2001— without leaving much of a lasting impact, though they did have their uses. As it is, having not seen a show in nearly 20 years, sometimes when I notice a couple rabbits on a green lawn I'll flinch, remembering.

     "Bye-bye Ross. Bye. Daddy's going to work now. Bye. See ya."
     Nothing. My 2-year-old son's head doesn't turn. His face doesn't deviate a degree from staring directly at the object of his affection: "Teletubbies."
     I walk over to his chair, lean down low, and whisper in his ear: "Bye-bye. See you. Have a good day!" Nothing. Eyelock. He doesn't even blink. The Teletubbies dance and sing.
     And here's the horrible part. I glance up from the slack, inert face of my mesmerized son to see what he is watching. Then I start watching the Teletubbies. Tinky Winky. Dipsy. Po. La-La. They bump their pear-shaped bodies together. They tumble. A baby face smiles down from the yellow sun. Periscope-like speakers rise up from the lawn and make ringing, Orwellian pronouncements.
     That was the week before last. Day One, their debut in Chicago, on Channel 11, Baby-sitter to the World. I linger for a minute or two, compelled by the bright colors, the endless repetition. It is all . . . so . . . weird. I almost sit down, my mouth hanging open, and take in the entire show.
     Instead, grabbing myself by the nose, I manage to jerk my head away. My gaze torn from the set. I flee the house, stumbling toward work, another concerned parent confronting the Teletubby menace, the most ominous development out of England since bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
     Yes, children aren't supposed to watch TV. Never watch TV. Never eat sugar. Never a minute unobserved. Instead they should spend their days capering creatively with their devoted caretakers: a full-time mother, two white-haired grandmothers, a few doting aunts, and a groom to look after the pony.
     But whose life is like that? I feel lucky that my wife is a stay-at-home mother. If occasionally (OK, habitually) Ross ends up parked in front of Channel 11 for an hour or three during the mad morning rush to care for him and his younger brother, to get me out of the house and do 1,000 other things, well, it's better than leaving the boys to scrabble for themselves in some Lord of the Flies day care center or subject them to the questionable mercies of an unemployed teenager plucked off the street.
     A little "Theodore the Tugboat," a little "Arthur" and the day is well under way. Why shouldn't Teletubbies join our pharmacopeia of TV Tot Narcotics?
     Yes, I find their blinking eyes and gaping mouths off-putting. But the show isn't designed for me, is it? If it were, there would be dancing girls. (Now there's an idea: a show for kids where the alphabet, counting and colors are taught by a cast of scantily clad models from Victoria's Secret and Chippendales. Something for everybody.)
     Like anything new, the Teletubbies offer the agonizing question of whether this is an unacceptable invasion that must be resisted, or just something new that we will eventually come to love.
     Perhaps I'm influenced by all the commotion that preceded Teletubbies. It was the biggest deal in Britain since Diana went for a drive in Paris. There were controversies -- one actor was fired for not being sufficiently Teletubby-like. There was the issue of whether the Teletubby with the purse is gay. (It was an echo of when a minister here demanded to know just what the heck is going on between Bert and Ernie on "Sesame Street." Stupidity knows no borders.)
     Day Two. Ross actually complains when "Barney" comes on— "Teletubbies! Teletubbies!" he says, demanding that I conjure them up "Right now!" I actually feel a sympathetic pang for the now-scorned purple dinosaur, whom I certainly hated as much as anybody when he first debuted.
     But enough viewings can adjust you to anything. I suppose I'm sympathizing with my captors, the TV version of the "Stockholm Syndrome." Having seen every single "Barney," by now I can actually sit through a show without having to entertain myself by imagining I am part of the gang of "Clockwork Orange" thugs who corner Michael in a gritty high school breezeway on his way home from the Barney set.
     Day Three. My worries that the Teletubbies are Video Heroin are replaced by a sort of Bad Parent Epiphany. With my wife having bolted for the supermarket—supposedly—an hour before, and the time of my departure for work drawing near, I prop Ross before the shrine of the Teletubbies, set a bowl of oatmeal in his lap, and tiptoe off to take a shower.
     I would never have done this before, but my confidence in the hypnotic power of the Teletubbies is that great. I trust them with his life.
     As quick as the shower is, I have plenty of time to imagine my beloved boy snapping out of his trance the moment the bathroom door shuts. I see him hopping to his feet and racing directly to the nearby, tragically available a) lye; b) sharp kitchen knives; c) dry-cleaning bag; d) open window.
     I return to find him in the same position I had left him. His hand is on the tablespoon, but he hasn't raised it to his lips. A Teletrance. I look at the set. Hmmm, what a pleasant little band of happy fellows!
     It is too late for me and my family. But you, who haven't yet seen the show, can still save yourselves. The Teletubbies are coming! They're here! On the air now! The toys will soon be in stores! Do something before it's too . . .
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 19, 1998

Today in Trumpland

     Notice how ineptly Donald Trump paints himself into a corner by assuming the success of his negotiations with North Korea. Putting himself—and the country he leads, unfortunately—in a position of weakness before talks, scheduled for mid-June, even begin.
     Trump says he'll walk away if it doesn't go well. But how can he do that when he is already taking a victory lap for something he hasn't yet done and might never do? As is his habit.
    One of the many problems with living in a fact-free world: you can pretend you've already done what you will never actually do.
    And people believe him. 
    A reminder that to focus on Trump and his flaws are wrong. There will always be another Trump in the wings, and if we continue susceptible to people like that, there will be no salvation of us.

    In the meantime, Trump has to make whatever concessions he will make, elevate the North Korean pariah to an international respect he doesn't deserve—Trump's already done that—and declare the whole thing part of his unbroken, if imaginary, chain of triumph.
     Freeing three American hostages is all well and good. But that shouldn't overshadow his alienating our closest allies while embracing the strongman dictators he yearns to become. Did you notice how Trump mentioned that the men he had just freed supported him? That's how hungry for any shred of validation. Look! These guys I just sprang from a North Korean prison approve of me!
     You can see by how Trump made a spectacle of the hostages' arrival—being personally on-hand at 3 a.m. and genuflecting before the dictator who finally released them.
     “We want to thank Kim Jong Un, who was really excellent," Trump gushed.

     It is Kim Jong Un who should be thanking Trump, for all the favors and benefits bestowed. I suppose that's coming.

Autocrat of Time

     Few notions regarding history are more mistaken than the idea that we are on a descending spiral of laxity, where more and more is permitted, and standard after standard of taste and decency are abandoned. 
      I think this is because we assume that certain trends in some areas apply to all manifestations of expression. Yes, obscenity spreads and becomes more common. Moviemakers fretted over Rhett Butler saying "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," at the end of "Gone With the Wind," in 1939, while now all TV channels except the big three broadcast networks relish whatever dirty words they see fit. 
   But there are sub-currents. For instance, nudity was more acceptable in general media in eras gone by than it is now. I remember seeing microfilm of the Sun-Times original coverage of the 1955 Schuessler-Peterson killings, where the paper published photos of the naked bodies of the boys in a ditch, lightly airbrushed. Something we would never do today, out of consideration for the families of the victims and the knowledge that the paper would be torn down brick by brick by outraged readers if we did. 
    On the other hand, clothed corpses are another matter. I noticed that the CBS Evening News, once the platinum bar of excellence, didn't hesitate last month to flash a photograph of Prince's body, sprawled in his Paisley Park mansion, to illustrate a minor story about how no one was being charged for providing the drugs that lead to his death. I don't believe that would have happened a decade ago. I'm not pleased it happened now, but I am of an earlier age.

    Turn your attention to this watch advertisement, which I glimpsed on the back cover of the July, 1927 issue of American Magazine, a popular, mainstream general interest publication at the time similar to The Saturday Evening Post. Notice anything unusual? Try to imagine Timex or Hamilton running it now, and the outcry it would evoke, as much for the sexism as the nudity.
     Although I should point out a detail about this ad, if you can tear your eyes away from the windblown flapper: the watches are for both sexes, men and women. The ad is designed to appeal to both and, indeed, advertising studies show that women look longer on a photo of a naked woman than men do. Gloria Steinem said it's because the women are automatically comparing themselves to the picture.
     So are we better now, having shelved this kind of thing? I tend to disapprove of anything that reins in creativity. Rules are generally made to be broken. And standards change quickly. When this blog started, almost five years ago, I would encounter people who were troubled by its slightly risque title. Now I never do. Which means either tastes are changing; or my circle is narrowing. Or both. 

     
     

‘O nation miserable!’ — ‘Macbeth,’ prophecy and the Chicago mayor’s race

Ian Merrill Peakes as Macbeth

     You don't have to be Harold Bloom to analyze Shakespeare. Anyone can do it. For instance, I believe the entire character of Othello and the root of the play's tragedy can be comprehensively summed up in two words: he's stupid.
     His subordinate Iago, envious and bitter at being passed over for promotion, lays a crude trap and Othello falls in, eyes open.
     A critique which Bloom, famed literary critic and scholar, agrees with, in more ornate terms: "He so readily seems to become Iago's dupe...Othello is a great soul hopelessly outclassed in intellect."
     In other words, he's stupid.
     The details can be parsed in any play, which is also part of the fun. With "Macbeth," for instance, now on stage to great effect at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, we can argue whether Macbeth is undone by the witches' prophecy; fresh from victory, noble Macbeth encounters the Weird Sisters, who tell him he'll be king of Scotland.
     Are the crones predicting Macbeth's certain future or merely goading him toward it?
     Bloom considers Macbeth a pig trussed for slaughter, forced along the chute that fate and his scheming wife have set for him. I'm not so sure. Maybe I just don't like predestination. But any resistance Macbeth might have felt is undercut by that fatal prediction, "All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king!"
     The prediction dooms Macbeth as much as his wife does. He's supposed to be king, so naturally goes about the bloody business. I flashed on that augury while reading the Sun-Times front page Tuesday: "LIGHTFOOT'S BIG STEP" it trumpeted, with Fran Spielman's careful analysis of why the former police board president seems to be joining the pack baying after Rahm Emanuel's job.
     First I felt the tickle of hope. Is Lightfoot the chosen one to deliver Chicago from the clutches of Rahm Emanuel, that charmless man, who can be easily imagined wandering the fifth floor of City Hall, trying to rub Laquan McDonald's blood from his hands. "Out, damned spot! ... What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?" (Since vagueness allows anyone to interpret wildly and then criticize the product of their imaginings, let me be plain: Emanuel didn't kill McDonald, just sat on the evidence of his killing for a year, either through willful ignorance or desperate complicity).
     But we cannot wish Emanuel's opponents into having a chance against him. I'm not sure whether media attention doesn't magnify them to a stature they don't deserve and, like the witches' augury, drive lambs toward the cash buzzsaw slaughter that Rahm Emanuel has for them. If a high school squad challenged the Bulls to a game, would we treat them as serious contenders and put them on the front page? Are we not confusing intention with result?
     Fran's story is illustrated by seven tiny photos of dabblers already running, and a more apt graphic could not be imagined. Dorothy Brown? Really? She can't run the clerk's office, never mind the city. Garry McCarthy? (McCarthy, McDonald, it's like we have our own set of shabby minor characters cut from "Macbeth.") A true villain out of Shakespeare, slouching back to Chicago to avenge his lost manhood, Falstaff-like Mike Ditka, in fool's motley, jingling after him, goading him on to higher folly. Willie Wilson? The man needs an expensive hobby—he should buy a boat—so as to keep him from these expensive forays into politics. Paul Vallas? We've already got one rebarbative figure-spouting white insider murmuring in the mayor's office; why go through all this only to swap for another?
     The rest aren't worth the breath to ridicule. Let's exit today's stage with the bard, as we entered it. The paper ran a lukewarm review of Chicago Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Tuesday. I won't contradict expertise, but my wife has been raving about it for a week. The powerful performances of Macbeth and his lady, played by Ian Merrill Peakes and Chaon Cross, are reason enough to see the play, forget the special effects. I thought it magnificent.
     Than again, I viewed "Macbeth" as perfect for these Trumpian times, particularly when Macduff scoffs:

Fit to govern! No, not to live. O nation miserable,With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd, When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again?

     Not this year, not next. Maybe 2021. Maybe not.

Flashback 2007: Delightful and unexpected; Family vacation to Tennessee -- yes, Tennessee

     I was puzzling over what to write in the paper Wednesday and, through some random brain circuitry quirk, got to wondering what Eddie Montgomery is up to.
       Montgomery is the surviving half the Montgomery Gentry country music duo—his partner Troy Gentry died in a helicopter crash last September. I saw them on stage twice, and admired their powerful performance and honest, intelligent music. 

     Turns out that in February, Montgomery issued an album they had finished just before Gentry died, and not only has been touring, solo, but as chance would have it is coming to Bloomington, a mere 140 miles from Chicago, this Saturday night, playing at the Grossinger Motors Arena. Tickets are available.

     That seemed reason enough to dig deeper. So much of concert music is canned bologna  nowadays, I thought the Kentuckian's performances in the wake of Gentry's death might be more genuine and heartfelt than the standard fare.
    "I know I'm supposed to be a big badass outlaw or whatever," Montgomery told Rolling Stone in March. "But when we hit the stage a couple weeks ago without him, I was so nervous. I was like 'Oh my God' – I thought I was gonna get sick. But finally I felt him in there, and I started smiling."  
     Monday I contacted Montgomery's management and asked to talk to him for a few minutes about how he's holding up without the man he's been harmonizing with for so long—the duo officially formed in 1999, but they played together for decades before that. Maybe I'll hear from him Tuesday, most likely I won't on such short notice, but as I tell the boys, "It's called "trying.'"
     There aren't many groups that I like, but Montgomery Gentry songs are a few cuts above, and I quote them from time to time in the column. Now that I think of it, I would have included the recovery anthem "Some People Change" in my recent book, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," but after going through the time and expense of tracking down Beth Nielsen Chapman and paying her a fortune for "Save Yourself," I didn't have the heart.
     No matter, in checking what I wrote when I first encountered the group, I came upon this travelogue to Tennessee, and thought it merits posting.

     The day before we left, I walked a cigar down Wacker Drive.
     Why go on vacation at all, I wondered, when it is so very pleasant right here? What sights could be possibly better than these? Especially in Tennessee, of all places?
     Ah, well, I concluded, with a melancholy puff. People do these things. The boys and the wife are looking forward to it -- she has her heart set on climbing some mountain and staying at a lodge there. Might as well go without complaint and see what happens.

                                                                  - - -

     Nashville has its own Parthenon. Who knew? A full-scale replica, not of marble like the one in Athens, but concrete-studded with pebbles, smack dab in the center of a city park. It's huge.  

     Inside, a 42-foot-tall statue of Athena, facing a pair of 24-foot-tall, 7.5-ton bronze doors so skillfully hung you can move one with your pinkie.
     Delightful and unexpected — here, in the Bible Belt, where people put Ten Commandments magnets on their SUVs, they erected an enormous pagan temple with a gilt Greek goddess in the center.
     And this was just the first morning of the first day. 

                                                      - - -

     My experience with country music began and ended 20 years ago with "Coal Miner's Daughter." But we were here, so why not go to the Grand Ole Opry?
     A great show. Impressive how they draw the audience into their 80-year tradition with a short film and a Minnie Pearl imitator revving up the crowd. They welcomed us to their 4,252nd consecutive performance, then got down to business with a blast of fiddle and a brace of blur-legged dancers.
     Acts came and went. White-haired pros with half a century at the Opry mixed with ingenues making their debuts.
     "This song is going to be on my new album, and I'd like to do it for you," said Jennifer Hanson, a leggy lass, touchingly sincere, introducing a tune called "73" that outlines the fracture of her family, its title referring, courageously, to the year she was born.
     Then a duet called Montgomery Gentry burst onstage. A driving beat, great lyrics — especially "Lucky Man" — sharp showmanship and twangy music. I had never heard of them before but instantly could tell that these guys were good. We bought their new CD and couldn't stop listening to it as we drove across the state.

                                                              - - -

     Homemade biscuits. Moon Pies. Sweet tea. Goo-Goo Clusters. Fried strawberry pie. Fried banana pudding. Turnip greens.
     Carthage. Alexandria. Tennessee's ancient world motif isn't limited to the Parthenon — 170-year-old wallpaper at Andrew Jackson's home shows scenes from mythology. No doubt an attempt back then to lend classical luster to a frontier nowhere.
     Fishing barefoot in a river. Riding horses through dense woods. We spent three days hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, whose beauty defies words — trees covered with delicate lichen and moss, banks of wildflowers, 10-mile-wide mountain vistas. The boys, whom I expected to drag their feet and pine for TV, instead surged ahead, particularly the older kid, as if he had been waiting his whole life for this. We went from worrying he'd refuse to climb to worrying he'd skip off a cliff.
     We stayed at the place my wife dreamed about — LeConte Lodge. No electricity, no roads, it's supplied by pack llamas. Toward evening, we watched the mist roll eerily up the mountainside, just like smoke.

                                                                   - - -

     After the park, Pigeon Forge, a godawful, endless strip of chain restaurants and go-kart tracks that makes Wisconsin Dells seem like the Garden of Eden. One could easily juxtapose it to the Smokies and make a compelling argument for the extinction of the human race.
     Too easily, and just as Tiger Woods doesn't practice two-inch putts, so I don't traffic in the obvious. I made the best of it and taught Kent how to shoot pool.
     Besides, that's where we saw the Dixieland Stampede, Dolly Parton's revival of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Any experience that includes live thundering bisons and a piglet race supposedly redeciding the outcome of the Civil War cannot be all bad.

                                                                       - - -

     "Martin Luther King stayed in a motel?!" marveled Ross, as I tucked him into bed in our room at the Peabody. Ironic — to him, King is a famous person, so of course he would stay somewhere fancy, like the Peabody, with its famous lobby-dwelling ducks and its duckmaster with his red jacket and gold-headed duck cane.
     I was explaining that tomorrow we'd visit the National Civil Rights Museum, cleverly carved out of the shell of the Lorraine Motel, where King was murdered in 1968.
     Like the whole state of Tennessee, the museum far exceeded expectations — a vivid, throat-clenching, eye-misting experience. We spent three hours there — the boys learning the saga for the first time, me picking up information I didn't know: For instance, King was stabbed by a deranged black woman in 1956. He later laughed off the incident, which seems the right approach to such situations.

                                                                       - - -

     Much of the country is still woods, and driving across its vastness was supremely reassuring. During the trip, the London terror plot unfurled, and the standard crew of flag-waving cowards took to the airwaves to announce that the only way to combat terrorism is to preemptively renounce the freedoms that terrorists oppose.
     Fools. It's a great country, and while we certainly can be harmed, we'll win in the end, if we keep faith in ourselves.

                                                                     - - -

      Memphis has a pyramid. Who knew? And of course Graceland. I went; how can you not? And since the place has been picked clean, culturally, there didn't seem any point to criticize. So I just went and enjoyed. It actually was interesting, and I learned stuff. His life, despite all the buffing, seemed hollow. By the time Elvis was my age, he had been dead for five years, and I decided that, all things being equal, I would rather be me than be Elvis, a revelation worth driving 1,900 miles to receive.

                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 15, 2007

'Don't give advice' and other useless, unheeded commencement suggestions

     Welcome friends, family members, residents of Chicago and environs.
     This is the commencement season.
     They have already begun, these solemn ceremonies, grand processions and groaning brass overtures, at institutions great and small, and will continue for a month and a half, from Loyola University Chicago, all this week, until ... Northwestern University, bringing up the rear, Friday, June 22.
     I'll be at NU, seeing the younger boy off into the world. But first, I'll be at Pomona College in California. Two boys, two commencements, boom-boom, one after another. Because the younger lad flashed through college in three years, itself a lesson on the value of paternal advice, since, when he raised the idea, I urged him to linger and enjoy college. You'll have a lifetime to work.
     He shrugged and did what he wanted. That's what kids do.
     Leading to my first piece of advice for commencement goers: don't give advice. Really, don't. The grads don't want to hear it, probably won't hear it, and you're giving it anyway, not based on their lives, but yours. We pretend we're trying to spare them our mistakes, but what we're really doing is trying to pick the music for a party we're not invited to.
     No matter. Advice will be given. Speakers famous and obscure will don black robes and puffy velvet hats, and share wisdom. Dream dreams. Live life.
     But what about the audience? Who speaks of our hopes?
     Nobody. Maybe we don't need it; our hopes are right in front of us, a snaking line of black-robed almost-graduates, taking selfies.
     To be honest, the person needing advice is me: fashion advice, first. Pack a sport coat? I consulted the video of the 2017 Pomona commencement to assess what the audience was wearing. A few old coots in jackets, but mostly men in their shirtsleeves.
     "Wear what you're comfortable in," my wife suggested. "It's California."
     Everywhere is California now. So my next bit of advice is: wear clothing. For an audience member to even ponder fashion inflates yourself to a significance you don't enjoy. You're a speck of color in the crowd.
     Bring mints. They help the time go by.
     Try not to cheer your graduate. Because every single graduate has family, and a brief delay after each makes the ceremony even longer than it already is. However, for some families, this graduation represents not the latest step on a perpetual victory lap but a revolution, a stirring breakthrough. They have to cheer, to scream out the names of their babies.
     I always thought the stern warnings against cheering reflect white privilege. What do they expect? Everyone in the audience to pat fingertips against palms and whisper, "Oh look, Muffy, junior is reaching another summit ..." So don't cheer unless you have to. If you do, go crazy. You earned it. Well, technically, your kid earned it, but that kid would have been selling drugs on a street corner if you didn't ride herd over him 24/7, and you know it and I know it even if the kid doesn't know it. So you earned it, too.
     I already know what I'm going to do, and I didn't realize this until I started to watch the Pomona video. I'm going to cry, and I'm not even sure why.
     Relief? No. If I could close my eyes, call out "One more time!" and open them to find myself standing at Evanston Hospital, awkwardly clutching a red-faced bundle wrapped in a soft blankie, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant once more having to squeegee up all that vomit in the white-tiled restroom at Zephyr ice cream parlor. It was on the ceiling.
     Pride? Maybe that. The boys turned out far better than I ever imagined, so far ahead of what I was at their age I can't even take credit. I was present, said stuff that nobody listened to, paid for things, but in the end, I feel like a rooster crowing at the sunrise, marking an occasion that I did not actually bring about.
     Maybe confused amazement. That sounds right. Really, it's as baffling as if I stepped out of pre-school orientation and returned to find my sons magically grown, grinning adults in neat beards, patting me once on the shoulder as they hurry off. Huh? What? How did that happen?

"Furst things furst."

     The ability to tell if something is sincere or a joke is vital for a reporter. 
     So it was with some unease that, researching Friday's column about LimeBike, the company introducing self-locking, electric-assisted bikes to the South Side, I watched this safety video introducing the system. And found myself ... confused.
      It's some kind of arch parody of an in-flight safety film, correct? I mean, it has to be. With those silly uniforms, the lime green ties and neck scarves, not to mention buttons, badges, belts and shoes.  The unplaceable European accent.  "When biking with company" isn't even American English. The simpering smiles. The vogueing hand gestures. The confetti at the end.
     So definitely a joke, of some sort. But why? LimeBike is an American company that operates within the United States. No Dutch parent to have inherited the creators of this video from. What then? Some marketing company's idea of fun? I hate to be the person who takes stupid things seriously, but something about this left me puzzled, and it isn't the sort of question you could ask the company—what's with the video? They could barely muster a comprehensible response to my wondering why they never actually come out and tell riders to always wear helmets, but merely show helmets being handed to bikers, who then immediately discard the helmets, apparently, and go riding without them. They emphasize the need to comply with vague regulations, as if wearing a helmet were a legal nicety and not a vital stratagem to keep your brains from being smeared over the curb.
     Maybe I'm getting old.
     Back in the '80s, when David Letterman was king of late night TV, sincerity was considered toxic, and every young person went about life wrapped in a cocoon of protective irony. That got tiresome, eventually, and was seen as a kind of emotional cowardice. I hope this video is just an example of marketing gone horribly wrong, and not evidence that fey sniggering is back. I can be as ironic as the next guy, but in its place. 
      Looking for edification, I poked around the LimeBike site, and watched a second video, a Matrix homage browbeating riders to park their LimeBikes responsibly. That one is less distressing, and gives me hope that the safety video is simply singing in a key I can't quite comprehend. 

"Furniture zone"? 

     And yet. Some of the safety tips seemed translated from another language. What the hell is a "furniture zone"? Is that intentional? A mistake? How did that happen? 
      The LimeBikes weren't bad—although that electric motor has a worrisome quality I didn't have room to elaborate upon in Friday's article. When a rider tries to move forward slowly, say edging into an intersection, it wants to project the rider forcibly forward, to get the bike going, and I can see it thrusting bicycles into harm's way when the rider is trying to approach a hazardous situation slowly. 
      Come to think of it, there isn't a word in the safety video about getting adjusted to the electric motor either.  I understand not all of their bikes have them, and the video has a one-size-fits-all, "we're happy to be in your city" generic quality. But still. It's irresponsible. You don't want to find out about the electric motor when it pushes your bike in front of a speeding truck.
      I hope I don't seem safety-obsessed. But it seems you should be able to avail yourself to a new bike system without first passing through a gantlet of smirking sardonicism. They're going to feel pretty stupid when under-informed and poorly-cautioned riders start suing them, and those goofy videos are shown to granite-faced jurors in courtrooms across the country.