Meet Tai Shan Wan

Tai Shan Wan

     Given that my job — as best as I understand it — is to comment on the relevant news of the day, I sometimes surprise myself by what I don't write about. Such as former president Donald Trump being arraigned for a third time last week, his desperate plot to retain power despite losing the 2020 election, as laid out in full horrific detail by special counsel Jack Smith.
     I could say that the ground is so thoroughly picked over, there is no need for me to weigh in. I'm not one for piling on, or joining the chorus. There's more than enough material without me and, honestly, I don't have a particular angle beyond the obvious — Donald Trump tried to overthrow a free and fair election, in a criminal fashion. Now the rule of law, which he hasn't destroyed yet, is coming for him, though of course his fans don't give a damn about any of that and never will. He is still trying to subvert American democracy and will continue to do so until utterly defeated. None of this is new or surprising, right? By now, either you understood the situation perfectly long ago. Or you never will.

     Besides, I did turn in a column on the Trump enormity, but it got held so the Powers That Be could think about it. They've given their approval — thank you, PTB — and it's running in the paper Monday.
     In the meantime, allow me to introduce you to Tai Shan Wan, whom I encountered Wednesday at the "Death: Life's Greatest Mystery" show at the Field Museum. I imagine I'll write something about the exhibit in the day to come.
     China's vast bureaucracy goes back thousands of years, and was thought to continue on into the afterworld. Tai Shan Wan, seen above, was a judge in the 7th Court of Hell, "where liars and gossipers had their tongues removed."
     And if you imagine that I learned this, smiled, and thought, "Boy, could we sure use you now," then you are right, I did. I suppose that's an angle you haven't read before. 

Don't mess with Aldi customers

     Readers seem to be getting this, which is a relief. For added perspective, if you have a copy of George Orwell's "1984," you might want to compare its final sentence with the last sentence of this column. 

     On my second visit to Aldi, I paused in the parking lot to admire its lovely logo: twin trios of stylized wavy blue lines, representing the rivers of life and happiness, perhaps.
     My quarter was already in hand. I slid it into a slot and a cart was released. An ingenious system that frees Aldi from having to hire someone to wrangle carts — maybe so they can go to college, study to be a doctor, cure cancer.
     Where to begin? Romaine hearts, $2.69 — I’d bought the exact same trio of lettuce for $4.99 at Sunset several days before and they’d already started to rot. A bag of white cheddar popcorn, $2.19, almost half what I usually pay. But equally delicious.
     Words cannot convey the magic of Aldi. The products. The bargains. My fellow shoppers, spanning the ages of humanity, from the pair of energetic little boys racing around, to the elderly lady being guided by her attentive grandson. They were all so ... beautiful.
     OK, a bit of background, so you don’t think I’ve gone mad. I have a personal blog, everygoddamnday.com. On days when this column doesn’t run, I cook up something else, often conveying moments of staggering banality, of the “Neil discovers ordinary life” variety. A week ago I went to the discount supermarket Aldi, where I’d never been before, accompanying my wife.
     Granted, I wasn’t in the best mood. My report, “Wrangle carts, earn quarters” was, shall we say .... ungenerous. The passage that got me in trouble, I believe, was:

     Aldi was new and kinda empty, not enough products filling the void and what they had were off-brands that I’d never heard of. Millville? I’d have left immediately, but my wife declared the prices low, and wanted to walk every aisle, exploring.

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A brick shy of a load

      Lots of construction in my neighborhood. Fences go up, small humble Monopoly houses come down, equipment arrives, and far larger edifices go up in their place. With two nearby projects, to my amazement, the owners of large, attractive new homes have bought the lot next door to theirs and built secondary additions as large as the original home. I'm tempted to knock on the door and demand, "Why....?" But haven't gathered the courage yet. 

     Anyway, I have an idea as to the answer: because there's a lot of money in the world.
     At least the previous fashion — faux Norman mansion — seems to have fallen from favor. Now the style is American Gothic on steroids — someone's idea of a farmhouse, all vertical clapboard and metal roofs, but grown huge, perhaps due to exposure to radiation, like those ants in 1950s horror movies. How they resisted putting in a symbolic patch of real corn in front yard — I would — is a mystery.  The corn would pull everything together.
    Living in an actual 1905 farmhouse, one built when the surrounding area was an apple orchard, I sometimes envy the owners of these new places. How pristine they must be. How huge. How perfect. Our house has all sorts of idiosyncratic quirks — the bottom of the closet in one bedroom is three feet off the floor.  They bedrooms range from modest in size to small. If I don't duck strategically while walking through the basement, I risk smacking my head into a beam. The garage, which once held horses, is not designed for our modern bloated SUVs. My car just fits. That kind of thing.
      Thus I welcome reminders that the owners of these new homes have troubles of their own. I watched this particular neo-farm house go up a little south of my place. It seems aesthetic enough, if a little soulless. At least they left themselves a little bit of a front porch; a lot of places don't, I'll never understand why — well, actually, I do understand: because they are never going to sit out there, and if they did, there are no people walking by to greet. 

     Not quite. I was walking Kitty by there Tuesday night, and notice that the freshly laid steps had already lost a brick, smack in the middle. The construction couldn't have finished a month ago. Two, tops. And look. 

     This isn't schadenfreude. I hope. I'm not any better or smarter than the owner of this place. Probably a lot less. And when we bought our place, the front steps were also bricks. They also promptly began to fall away, so much that it was dangerous to go in through the front door. We ended up having to put on a new set of wooden steps which, 20 years on, are rotting in all sorts of alarming ways. I'll start to remove a rotten part, so I can patch and paint it, and the next thing I know a section a foot square is gone and I'm making custom molding in the basement. I should probably just rip the entire thing off and put on a new one. But that would be a big job, and if I can patch and delay another year, well, that works for me.

      Anyway, I paused to snap a photo. I intended to blur the address of the place, so as not to cast derision on any specific individual.  But when I took a look at it, I noticed that the pillar had been unintentionally lined up to block the address. As I always say, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. 

Religious zeal keeps demanding more

     Readers sometimes suggest that I am against religion. Which is simply not true.
     Life is a long time, pocked with misfortune and death. Faith in some kind of comforting story seems to help, filling the empty hours, creating the illusion of meaning, and comforting sufferers when reason fails. I’d never dream of trying to yank that blankie away.
     Rather, I believe religion should be voluntary. A radical thought, I know, so let me explain. You review the beliefs and practices dictated by a particular faith — angels, Kashrut, the giant tortoise balancing the universe on his shell, whatever — and freely decide what to embrace and what to reject. Your call. Not mine.
     This liberal lunacy can confuse religious types, who consider forcing their practices upon the unwilling an integral part of their belief system. So much that to oppose their doing so strikes them as attacking their faith, root and branch. If I decide not to celebrate Christmas, I am deliberately offending them.
     And the faithful have a genius for taking offense. The acts of others, if contrary to their religion, are a sort of death ray, effective over huge distances. That baffles me. There’s almost nothing you can do to offend me. Call me awful names? Get in line. Make a big pile of my books and set them on fire? Fine, if you paid for them. I’ll tweet a photo of the flames. That kind of vituperation is a compliment — people sharing hate mail are slyly bragging: “I matter; look at the reaction I inspire!”
     To me, taking offense only draws attention to criticism. By culling books on America’s racist past, the state of Florida didn’t suppress history; it magnified it.
     The ability to absorb criticism is a challenge everywhere. Are you following the problems radiating from Sweden? On June 28, Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee, burned pages torn from a Quran in front of a Stockholm mosque during the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha (while waving Swedish flags and blasting the Swedish national anthem — a dramatic touch). The complication is that in Sweden, you need official approval to hold a protest. He had it.
     The burning turned an isolated act into an international crisis. Iraq expelled its Swedish ambassador and a mob attacked the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad. Some argue that burning Qurans is not free speech, but hate speech, and thus illegal. That makes some sense to me — a burning Quran could be like a burning cross. The whole imbroglio might stall Sweden’s membership in NATO.

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Homophone Smackdown: Flower v. Flour

   Rudbeckia Hirta - Prairie Sun

     Honestly, I just want to share a few photos of gorgeous flowers taken Sunday at the Chicago Botanic Garden. But to do that and call it a day seems a failure of effort on my part. So perhaps we should play "Homophone Smackdown" to give the endeavor a little heft.

     There is "flower," the seed-bearing, reproductive organ of a plant, usually involving petals. And "flour," the ground grain baked into bread. Any connection? And, more importantly, which came first?

     Usually I put my bets on a contestant before diving in. But I was so eager to get at it, I cracked open my Oxford English Dictionary without premeditation and opened right to "flour," defined as "Originally, the 'flower' or finest quality of meal." Well that's it, then; sort of gives away the game at the outset. 

     Or does it? The OED cites this, from 1250: "Kalues fleis, and flures bred. And buttere." 
     It's a near miss. The first cite for "flower" is from 1225, "bringed ford misliche flures."    

     Reading through the various definitions, we reach metaphorical use, "7. The choicest individual or individuals among a number of persons or things; 'the pick'." Which might be even older, the first usage being "c. 1200" ""Moder milde flur of alle."

     Checking in with my main man, Samuel Johnson, I see that while his 1755 dictionary includes "flosculous adj. [flosculus, Latin.] Composed of flowers; having the nature or form of flowers." and "flower" ("the part of the plant that contains the seeds") he does not have an entry for "flour" but tucks its meaning into "flower" — "4. The edible part of corn; the meal." and indeed that is the spelling Shakespeare uses.

     One of the lesser Roman deities was Flora, goddess of spring vegetation. The festival honoring her was the Floralia, at the end of April and into early May, when people dressed in colorful clothes and made offerings of flowers, which sounds delightful.

     To move from the sacred to the profane, Wentworth and Flexner's "Dictionary of American Slang" cite "flower" as a homosexual (including the more common, and specific, "pansy"), and "flour" as face powder, leading to the possibility of a floured flower.

      The flower/flour dynamic makes one of a touching sight gag in the 2006 romantic comedy "Stranger than Fiction" (spoiler alert, so if you haven't seen it — well, first I pity you, because it's utter genius, one of my favorite movies; I've seen it three or four times; but stop reading now and go see the movie. Will Ferrell. Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman. A valuable lesson about life and really, really funny to boot).

     Those who have already seen it will recall the moment when robotic accountant Will Ferrell is trying to woo tattooed hot baker babe Maggie Gyllenhaal, and shows up with a cardboard box of small bags of some kind of powder.

     "What are they?" she demands.

     "Flours," he said. "I brought you flours."

     And thus her heart is won.

Coneflowers

Where’s Ted Lasso when we need him?

     Northwestern went to the Rose Bowl in 1996. My strongest memory of that season is a co-worker, knowing that I’m an NU graduate, naively asking if I would be attending the big game in Pasadena.
     “Well ...” I responded, amused that someone could imagine I might, “given that I never went to a football game in the four years I was a student there, it’s kinda late to start now.”
     Why didn’t I go? The honest answer is: Going never crossed my mind. Campus culture in Evanston had a distinct hierarchy, with Greek life, sports and money at the top, and the rest of us, supernumeraries filling in the background. We were admitted, given a break on tuition and tolerated. But it wasn’t as if the university was about us.
     Part of this might have been my personal outlook. I never went to games, didn’t own a Northwestern T-shirt. The school evoked in me a sort of lip-curled contempt that only got worse, in part thanks to episodes like the current Wildcat hazing scandal.
     Indifference was the school’s business model. During my four years, I saw the president of Northwestern, Robert Strotz, exactly twice. At the opening prayer welcoming freshmen. And at graduation. The rest of the time I assumed he was busy attending to Northwestern’s primary purpose: building the school’s endowment. That was the entire point of the endeavor. The students were just afterthoughts, widgets, products on which the money was made.
     This is a harsh view, and I know classmates who would disagree. Classmates who give money to the school, for instance, which to me is just unfathomable. I did have wonderful teachers, learned German literature from Erich Heller, international relations from Richard W. Leopold, magazine writing from Abe Peck.
     The campus is lovely. I don’t want to tar the place with too broad a brush. I went to NU purely for the Medill School of Journalism; it served me well, and I must laud the reporters at The Daily Northwestern who revealed the “absolutely egregious and vile and inhumane” hazing that NU administrators winked at.

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How did Sinéad O'Connor die?

     Silence speaks volumes.
     Particularly in journalism, which has rituals as strict as any kabuki.
     In obituaries, for instance, when a deceased person is relatively young — say their 50s — and no cause of death is given, that usually means they killed themselves but their family doesn't want to say so. 

     Which is their right, I suppose, if it comforts them in their time of suffering. However, when the person in question is a public figure like Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor, who was found dead in her home Wednesday, July 26, and the family asks for their privacy be respected, the silence curdles. Nature and the media abhor a vacuum.
     O'Connor wasn't just any singer. I don't want to add too much to the geyser of general praise, except to note that like most people I admired her music, bought all her albums when they came out, and never stopped listening. I suppose if I had to pick a favorite song, it would be "Jackie," just for its mythic quality, and her angry defiance in the face of heartbreak. "'You're all wrong,' I said, and they stared at the sand/'That man knows that sea like the back of his hand/He'll be back some time...'"

     The police say the death isn't "suspicious." Which I read as, "we know but we're not telling you." Such matters could be filed under "Curiosity, idle," except O'Connor was hailed as an iconoclast and truth teller, and it would ironic — in a bad way — if she succumbed to her well-publicized demons but nobody wanted to say because they were trying to buff her image in death. Problems that can't be talked about can't be addressed, which is why woes that were once hidden now end up in the media. Sometimes. That's how change happens. When O'Connor ripped up that photo of the pope on "Saturday Night Live" in 1992 to protest the church's sexual abuse of children, it was shocking and shameful to many, particularly in her native Ireland. But eventually the problem was dragged out into the light — due to courageous acts like hers — and by the time she died this week, she was a hero for saying the unsayable.

     There is no shame in suicide, just as there is no shame in cancer or heart disease or anything else. There is shame in refusing to recognize a problem because it embarrasses you, or saddens you, or is awkward. Maybe it doesn't apply, and I hope that is the case. It's a bad end. Maybe O'Connor just spontaneously died — she did have several physical health concerns. Or maybe she took her own life. It could be valuable to know which is true.