Flashback 2009: Something about the Super Bowl

    After yesterday's post on Mr. Peanut, cherished reader Chris Wood (he's cherished because he ordered my 2015 poster) remarked on Facebook, "Thanks, I'll have a nice story to tell Super Bowl Sunday morning."  Which was flattering, but the story struck me as thin gruel for a bunch of hardened sports fanatics, which I imagine to be the crowd Chris runs in. (You could be cherished too, if you catch my hint...) "I've got a better one," I said, promising to dig up the nugget below, which originally ran under the a-shade-too-candid subhead, "Something about the Super Bowl." And to show you just how sincere I am in my indifference to these things, I am going to guess which teams are involved in Sunday's game, and leave the guess up, knowing it is probably wrong. The ... New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Raiders.*

     It might come as a surprise to those who have spent time around chickens, but the word "fowl" and the word "foul" do not share a common root. The first comes from an ancient word meaning "to fly," while the second from a word meaning "to stink." That they sound alike and describe something that shares both qualities is coincidence.

     On the other hand, turkey, the bird, and Turkey, the country, do come from the same word because settlers in North America mistakenly believed the birds hailed from that land, probably because turkeys seemed exotic and, at the time, all things Turkish were considered exotic, the way that, later, deep-fried fingers of potato would be dubbed "french fries" because they were considered fancy, and fancy stuff came from France.

TV commercial, 1966

     Which leads us to Sunday's big game. It is called the "Super Bowl," and one might assume that the name came from all the college "bowl" games (which, in turn, owe their names to the stadiums they were played in, the Yale Bowl and the Rose Bowl and such).
     But according to football lore, it was Lamar Hunt who gave the Super Bowl its name after seeing his kids play with a Super Ball, the Wham-O toy that was popular in the summer of 1966, when Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, worked on the committee setting the particulars of the first championship game between the AFL and the NFL.
     "My wife, Norma, had given the kids these Super Balls, and they loved them," Hunt said years later. "If you threw one down hard on the concrete, they would literally bounce over the house. The kids were always playing with them and talking about them, and I guess it was just on my mind."
     Which is why there is a Super Ball on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Enjoy the game.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 1, 2009.

* Close. The San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. Well, I guess not all that close. I got that one team came from California...

Planters’ fake tragedy runs into real thing

     Would any sane person connect the deaths of Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, and seven others in a helicopter crash Sunday — an all-too-real tragedy — with the PR stunt cooked up by Planters Peanuts: the notional death of its fictional mascot, Mr. Peanut, announced last week and set to be solemnized during the Super Bowl?
     Yes, the internet is fueled by outrage. People online are incredibly touchy. But are they that incredibly touchy? The idea seems — pardon the pun — a little nuts.
     But Planters — owned by Kraft Heinz, somehow co-headquartered in Chicago and Pittsburgh — obviously worried the connection would be made. So it suspended the online publicity blitz, while still planning to run a 30-second Super Bowl commercial Sunday featuring Mr. Peanut’s funeral. So toning down the publicity, out of one corner of its mouth, while blasting it to the world out of the other.
     The whole campaign was a mistake. The smart, strategic route would have been to just quietly put Mr. Peanut out to pasture, the way Campbell’s Soup exiled its tomato-cheeked Kids. Ready to return when needed.
     Given the genuine general public grief about this tragedy — Kobe Bryant, not Mr. Peanut — affecting not only basketball fans, but anyone saddened to see a father of four cut down in the act of being a good parent, it seems Planter’s should have shown some spine, trusted consumers, and ignored any online trolls lunging to cast Mr. Peanut’s death as an insult to Bryant’s memory.
     Ironic. Mr. Peanut was designed to address public scorn, not inflate it. Since everything that could be said about Bryant is being said, I wanted to highlight something the media missed in the first days after Mr. Peanut’s demise: how Planters got an anthropomorphic peanut as a mascot in the first place. Top hat, monocle, and white gloves — kind of upscale for a comestible that at the time was considered food for swine and the poor.

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Flashback 2004: Fat and happy Big Boy always stands tall

  

     Grant me this, I am consistent. I was in Nexis, trying to find out what happened to the Campbell's Soup Kids—there's no evidence of them on the Campbell's web site—and I stumbled upon my own story, from 16 years ago, mentioning the chubby siblings. 

     My first thought, reading this below was, "They printed that?" Because it seems so exceedingly trivial, even for me. And those four dashes in the opening sentence; I would never do that today, and it's all I can do not to repair it. But if I start trying to clean up old columns, well, that's all I'd ever do. 

Reader Dave Connell shared this photo taken at the
Classical Gas Museum, Embudo New Mexico.

     If you were to walk into my house—please don't!—but say you did—no, I'm serious, I'll call the police—theoretically walk in, that is, and went to the TV room, which is what we call our repository of toys and junk, there you would find, in addition to two young boys who have been watching Spider-Man cartoons so long their eyeballs are swelling shut, there above the shrinelike TV, another shrine of sorts. A series of five standing figurines, each 10 inches tall, each pot-bellied like a Buddha, each in red- and white-checked coveralls. Two holding hamburgers aloft.
     I refer of course to Big Boy.
     Now I know that the Big Boy restaurant mascot is an object of post-modern irony to many people, who keep a Big Boy or two around as some kind of knowing wink at consumer culture.
     That is not why I have five Big Boys at home. I own them sincerely, because I love Big Boy. I always have. I know this will seem very strange to those who consider Big Boy a mere corporate shill, like Colonel Sanders or Michael Jordan or Mayor McCheese. That's why I'm writing this—not just to reveal yet another embarrassing personal detail. But to try to understand what it is about the homunculus that is so appealing.
     What is it about the Boy?
     This comes in the wake of our story Thursday, about the town fathers of Canton, Mich., attacking a 7-foot Big Boy statue in front of a local restaurant, citing zoning against multiple signs.
     The owner, Tony Matar, defended his Boy—it isn't a sign, he said. "It's an icon."
     He sure is. More than an icon. Big Boy is a god (not the God, capital "G"—put down your pens, please—but a god, sort of a fast-food deity. The Spirit of American Burger Plenty).
     Big Boy is often depicted as running, frozen in mid-stride, lofting his enormous namesake burger high above his head. He is our Hermes, our Mercury, the god of travel and double cheeseburgers.
     There are so many reasons to love Big Boy I don't know where to begin. First, he's so happy—beaming like he's ready to explode with joy, eyes goggling, apple cheeks about to pop. Second, that Reaganesque pompadour. So strange and wonderful. And third, he's fat. How many food brand mascots are fat? Campbell's Soup sent their chunky twins to Jenny Craig years ago, Aunt Jemima lost 40 pounds along with her scarf.
     Fourth, the Boy carries a whiff of 1950s California drive-in culture, with its boomerang architecture and leering mascots, like the Pep Boys, Manny, Moe and Jack. Or Big Boy who, now that I think of it, does have a certain malign look about him, like he should have eight arms: Big Rav Boy, the Destroyer. And that appeals, too.
     The power of Big Boy is such that I am drawn to his chain, despite the fact that I've had some of the worst dining experiences in my life at Big Boy restaurants.
     I should stress that I haven't been to every Big Boy in the country—they are different companies regionally, Bob's Big Boy and Elias' Big Boy and Frisch's Big Boy—and I imagine there must be some that aren't lousy. But I've had not one, but several legendary disasters. Once the food never came at all, and we had to eventually get up and leave, the boys weeping with hunger. Another, with a family we vacation with in Ohio, was such a terrible experience that to this day—years later—all we have to do is raise the question of where to eat lunch, and lips begin to curl into mocking smiles, and eyes dart in my direction as I slump and hide my face with my hands, scoured by the memory that it was I, Big Boy's acolyte, who insisted we go there.
     Strangely, these nightmare visits have not soured me on the Boy himself. Even at that Ohio Big Boy, waiting endlessly for our cold food, I had only good feelings for him.
     "If only Big Boy knew," I said, echoing the kind of faith that abused Russians had in their czar 100 years ago, conjuring the image of Big Boy arriving just in time to save our lunch, rushing into the kitchen, a blur of activity, shouting orders, firing people.
     All hail the true burger king!
     To understand the power of the Boy, look at all those other mid-level restaurant chains— Denny's and Hardee's and such. Sure, their food might be better. But what are they in the hearts of America without a Big Boy? Nothing.
     Ronald McDonald is frightening in that way that only clowns can be. I never see him without expecting him to be holding a bloody ax. Wendy's mascots were worse—first that freckled, pigtailed Wendy creature, who looked like the vile Pippi Longstocking, and then Dave, the CEO, who tried to be lovable but you just knew, when the cameras weren't rolling, was screaming at cringing underlings, white spittle flying off his lips.
     That's it. That's the answer. Big Boy is comfort. He is cheeseburgers and malted milk and smiles and rest and safety. But, like so many minor deities, he is only the promise of these things, the promise of paradise. The graven image of delight without the substance.
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 16, 2004

Illinois can do better on pre-K education

     If Dad brings home a pony on Monday, I’d say when the boys were small, and another pony on Tuesday, by Wednesday his kids will meet him at the door shouting “Where’s the pony?”
     That was meant to illustrate how expectations of children ramp up to meet whatever is done for them, my sympathies automatically siding with fellow beleaguered parents.
     But there’s a harder truth behind that: Children want so much because they need so much. Maybe not ponies, though some reader will no doubt argue that one. But they definitely need food and clothing and shelter and attention and love and vaccinations and storybooks and bedtime kisses and early morning activities and drinks of water in between.
     They’ll take as much as they can get, then put it to good use. They’re sponges, soaking up whatever is poured over them, squirreling it away to fuel their astounding metamorphosis, the magic trick of transforming from squealing, pooping, nonverbal, immobile, lumps of flesh slightly bigger than a meatloaf into fully formed, functioning, aware and decent adults.
     If all goes right. But what if it doesn’t? What if young children don’t get all the stuff they need? We see the results every day. Bad childhoods lead to bad adults, often, which help create the bad situations we must cope with on personal, family, neighborhood, city, county, state, national and world levels.
     Gov. J.B. Pritzker knows this and is expected to push early childhood education in his State of the State address Wednesday.

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Vatican Museum, 2016

Leaning tower of snow

     Yesterday was busy with so many things that weren't this blog, I don't know where to begin and, frankly, don't want to.
     I did walk the dog, leading to the photo above, which seemed to update the snow tower rhapsodized in yesterday's post. Saturday morning's alarming list to starboard, from my perspective, seemed almost a physical impossibility. Pliant stuff, snow. Plastic and malleable.
     I was right. By the afternoon, the top two spheres had toppled, but there was some good news. My wife took Kitty out (one benefit of the hip surgery has been to diffuse dog-walking duties, which used to be my exclusive responsibility. I'm not sure how long that will last, and I don't really mind dog walking—it's both exercise and a bracing blast of normality—but I do like this whole sometimes-somebody-else-does-it business).
     Anyway, my wife encountered the home owner, shoveling his walk and, having read yesterday's post, inquired about the snow spire. He responded, "That's what happens when your nephews visit from Texas."
     He didn't elaborate, and she left the matter there, lacking the journalistic imperative to grill people. So we have to speculate whether the snow pylon represents Lone Star State ignorance of the conventions of snowman construction, or outsized Texan ambitions, or what. Perhaps just as well.
   

Snow menhir

     Well it isn't a snow man, that's for sure, this tower of five snow spheres that I passed on my way to the train Friday morning. Not the familiar three ball, feet/torso/head configuration. No coal eyes, no carrot nose, not battered top hat. Can't call it a man, or I suppose, nowadays, a snow person. Mustn't traffic in gender stereotyping.
     So what is he ... whoops, it. I mean "they." A snow...what? Monolith? Cenotaph? A snow pylon perhaps.
     I could knock on the door and ask. I saw three men building it the day before and have to assume they belong to the house. I mean, who builds a snow whatever in the front yard of a stranger? That would be even weirder. Of course, if I had to write the chapter title for the past few years, I couldn't go wrong with "Under Weirdness More Weirdness."
      Can't knock on the door. That transaction is beyond imagination. Almost. Ding-dong. "Excuse me. I was wondering; your snow edifice, exactly what is it? Representationally speaking."
     Better a mystery. One, I admit, I did not ponder too much. A pleasant day, got work done at the office, a promising lunch at the Little Goat Diner with an editor. Then, returning home, there it was. Only a little reduced. Layering another mystery. How did it stay up? In the rain no less. Is it impaled? Upon a broomstick, say?
      And not built in the center of the yard either. Right by the sidewalk. Is that trust?  Or a challenge? Or oblivious? You'd think some malicious person would have knocked it over at some point during the day. Would have succumbed to the overwhelming desire to knock it over.  The thought crossed my mind, but I squelched it. As did everyone else. A very quiet street.
     On the second visit I finally reflected on the tyranny of snow men. They have a lock on the market of snow creatures. Very seldom anything else. The occasional cave or fort.  That's it. No snow bears. No snow trees. In the realm of amateur efforts I mean. I'm not talking about giant snow dragons at some festival in Finland. Though, to my credit, I do recall building an enormous snow bust of George Washington, years ago, with my brother and our kids. A compelling likeness, if I recall. I used a dollar bill as a model. Though if you want to be critical—and who doesn't nowadays?—you could point out that a snow bust of George Washington is, still, a snow man.
     The house, I should point out, is one of those places that changes residents nearly every year. Backs up against the train tracks. And they all must come and go out the back. I swear, I've had a chance to converse with the occupants no more than three or four times in 20 years, and it's always someone different. So it's not like I can casually inquire about the snow obelisk during our next conversation.
     Thin gruel, I know, even for a Saturday. But it was a long week, my first week back after medical leave, and frankly, it's the snow cairn or nothing. I hope I made the right choice.

It’s Restaurant Week — grab your wallets!

Chef Sangtae Park at Omakase Yume

     Chicago Restaurant Week 2020 begins Friday.
     OK, it’s not a week — it’s 17 days, which perfectly reflects the inflation that creeps into fine dining. Seven can easily become 17 by the time drinks and tax and 20% tip and 3% staff health insurance fee — it’s a thing — are factored in.
     For instance. During winter break, I lured my boys home from law school by promising they could each pick a swank eatery and dad would pay. It worked. Both chose places offering a prix fixe meal which, in my naïveté, I thought meant in return for a set amount of money, we’d get dinner.
     Ah, hahaha. Dewy innocence.
     The older boy chose Omakase Yume. It’s hard not to be charmed just walking into perhaps the smallest restaurant in Chicago: eight seats around a tiny wooden sushi bar.
     “It’s very Japanese,” I said, somewhat idiotically, thinking of Suntory Jigger Bars in Tokyo. It was quiet: light classical music, the octet of customers sitting in rapt expectation, watching Chef Sangtae Park create eight perfect pieces of raw fish—amberjack, yellowjack, three kinds of tuna — on oblongs of rice, then solemnly set down a piece before each guest.
     The highlight was salmon, which Park smoked in a rectangular cedar box. A lovely bit of restaurant theater, the woodsmoke delightful, the sushi exquisite.
     The fish was several derivations of freshness beyond standard sushi, it almost seemed a different substance. We mused over the economics of preparing dinner for eight customers and wondered how this place gets fish so much fresher than anywhere else.
     “It must be a separate supply chain,” I speculated, imagining some hardy Japanese fisherman hooking slabs of bluefin tuna off a pier in Yaezu, packing them in ice and jumping on a plane to Chicago, sitting stolidly in his green rubber boots and orange slicker, his insulated treasure perched on his lap.

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