One bad ass wasp

    Nearly a million known species of insects in the world, and many more yet unknown, despite biologists fanning out everywhere, cataloguing them hand over fist.
     So we shouldn't be a surprise to be confronted with any bug not seen before.
     And yet ... you just don't expect to bump into a new one. 

     Such as Sunday, when my wife and I were strolling in bliss around the Chicago Botanic Garden, I was drawn to an outcropping of a familiar white flower.
     "Queen Anne's lace!" I exclaimed, rejoicing in a particularly bright white array. "I haven't seen much of it this year."
     Three steps away, my wife announced that I'd better be careful; there were bugs on them. A lot of bugs. Sure enough, small black insects that shone iridescent blue when the light angled a certain way. 

     I could pretend I knew them on sight. But in truth, identification had to wait until I got back to the office and could ask my Uncle Google. The blue mud dauber wasp, or chalybion californium, which the U.S. Forest Service dubs "The Black Widow Killer" because it is "most famous for its predation of black widows." 

     Not round these parts, I hasten to add. As far as I'm concerned, the blue mud dauber wasp isn't famous at all. On the other hand, who am I to quibble with the United States Forest Service? 

     The wasps snatch spiders right off their webs, sting them to death (don't worry; they aren't physically able to sting humans, which is a relief). Then they take them home to feed to the kiddies. (The main biological difference between bees and wasps, which both belong to the order hymenoptera, is that bees feed their young with pollen mixed with honey, while wasps provide them with captured insects).

    And those homes might be, ah, borrowed from other wasps. The blue mud dauber will  taking over the nests of other species of wasp, booting out their larvae and replacing them with their own.

    All told, one bad ass wasp. As a rule, I'm not fond of wasps — based mostly on an unfortunate encounter with more mundane yellowjackets almost a decade ago. More of a bee man, myself.

     However. It must be that iridescent blue. A great blue will cover many sins, such as being a wasp. Anyway, it was news to me, and I figure I'd share it.

Chicago needs every busload

Maria Caripa, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, holds her daughter, Maria Caripa, 1, outside             the District 18 police station (Photo for the Sun-Times by Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere).

     Help me here.
     Chicago is a city famous for ... what, exactly?
     Burning to the ground in 1871? Prompting residents to emit a shriek of dismay and give up?
     No. Chicago boosters fanned out across the country, raising money in a flurry of civic pride. Chicago rapidly rebuilt itself, better than before.
     Maybe Chicago is known for volunteering to host an enormous exposition in 1893, then realizing it had bitten off more than it could chew, tossing up its hands and hiding behind the sofa when the world started rattling the doorknob?
     No. The city tapped Daniel Burnham to oversee the quick construction of an enormous, ornate White City. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition boosted Chicago into the modern age.
     So how come in 2023 Chicago is in agony over a daily busload of immigrants? Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s quotidian middle finger to tolerance and decency, a jeer of Texan regret that they didn’t die tangled in the miles of razor wire Texas has strung across the Rio Grande.
     Their arrival is a logistical nightmare. It has to be, for the city to house refugees in police stations, as if they were public facilities designed to help communities deal with crisis — oh wait, that’s what they are, right? Still, it must be hellish for some cops to be daily confronted with objects of their scorn.
     At least judging from FOP head John Catanzara, who last Thursday snidely suggested immigrants be housed at City Hall. (Hmmm ... not a bad idea. Have you been to City Hall? Mostly dead space, particularly in the upper floors. You could house 300 immigrants there and never see them).
     Both police stations and City Hall are desperate choices. We must do better than this. We have the track record. Assimilating immigrants is Chicago’s brand. No need to trust me. “Immigration from abroad ...” The Encyclopedia of Chicago notes, “has been the city’s hallmark characteristic in the public mind.”
     We’ve got it light, relatively. In 1890, 68% of people living in Chicago were born abroad, a situation so chaotic that three years later, Chicago threw a fair for 25 million visitors.
     Today, 20% of Chicagoans were born outside the United States. We need every one. Chicago’s population in 2023 is 2.7 million. In 2000, Chicago’s population was 2.9 million. In 1980, it was 3 million. Between 2020 and 2022, Chicago lost 3% of its population.

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Coveting thy brother's tomatoes

  

     It's tomato season. As readers well know, every year I plant a tomato garden and ... well, just look at these beauties, above, on display in a bowl in my kitchen.
     Am I proud? Why, sure! I'm so proud that ...

     Geez.

     How does Trump do it? Lie continually, I mean. I can't even lie about tomatoes.
     Okay. To be honest, which I seem doomed to being, not so proud. Not proud at all. Because I didn't grow them. My sister-in-law did.

     There, I said it. Are you happy?
     The tomatoes were a bolt from the blue. My brother and I were having a belated birthday lunch — 10 weeks late, in fact. We're both busy guys.
     I arrived at the restaurant — Blufish on Willow Road, excellent sushi, great prices, first-rate service, and a lux room like some trendy Manhattan eatery — and he was already sitting there.
     "I brought you a present," he said, pointing to a shopping bag on the floor. I seized the handles. Heavy. Lifting it to the table with both hands, wondering, What could this be? I look inside. Tomatoes. A lot of tomatoes. Big, beefy, red. Perfectly ripe.
     I felt a surge of complicated emotion that, in a movie, would involve flashing to the stunted tomato plants in my garden, and their pathetic output — mostly green, a few quivering on turning red — with this bounty. Game, set, match for my brother. Or, rather, his wife, since she had grown them.
     "What's Japanese for 'tomato shame'?" I asked. My sister-in-law is from Osaka. 
     "Tomato no haji," he said.

My tomatoes are just sad.

     I am shamed, tomato-wise. Plunged into tomato shame hell. It wasn't always like this. I remember those years, of carrying bags of tomatoes to the neighbors. Share the bounty. My bounty, the bounty of tomatoes grown by me. 

     But in recent years, not so much. Okay, not at all. I have an idea what's been stunting them — my apple tree, planted unwisely next to the garden 20 years ago, must hog enough sun. Switching out the soil for fresh compost hasn't done the trick.
     Don't get me wrong. I'm not completely lame in the garden. The cucumbers have been fabulous this year. Massive. Each one bigger than the next, monsters the size of my forearm. As soon as we polish off one there's another on deck. Which is good because, as you know, a cucumber goes bad in about three days, so it's great to have a steady, fresh, free supply.

One of the first paintings of tomatoes in
Japan, by Kanō Tan’yū (1602-1674)

     Being a word guy, I distracted myself by focusing on the Japanese word for tomato — tomato — which seemed odd, since the fruit came to that country in the Edo period — the 1600s — by Portuguese traders. At first they were considered merely decorative; it took several hundred years for people there to start eating them.  

     Europeans, too, were slow to eat tomatoes, which remember are part of the nightshade family, along with deadly nightshade and belladonna. (The leaves and roots of tomato plants are indeed poisonous). 

      The Oxford English dictionary offers some interesting historical takes: Grimstone's 1604 D'Acosta's History of the Indies, mentions "...Tomates, which is a great sappy and savourie graine." Then there is an evocative 1753 citation from Chambers Cyclopedia Supplement, "Tomato, the Portuguese name for the fruit of the lycopersicon, or love-apple; a fruit eaten either stewed or raw by the Spaniards and Italians and by the Jew families in England."

      The "love apple" term was due to its supposed aphrodisiac properties Noah Webster mentions it in his 1828 dictionary, though Samuel Johnson omits any hint of tomatoes in his 1755 dictionary, despite the word being in use. My Wentworth & Flexner Dictionary of American Slang cites the "a very attractive girl or young woman" meaning back to 1951, and R.S. Prather's Bodies in Bedlam: "The idea that such a luscious tomato might be mixed up in a murder went square against the grain."

"Karaage-kun Tomato BBQ Sauce Flavor"
is a mixture of BBQ sauce and ketchup.

    Circling back to Japan, which originally called tomatoes togaki, which means, "Chinese persimmons;" they made up for lost time becoming fans of both tomatoes and ketchup, which they call tomato kechappu. Southwestern Japan is Japan's tomato growing center — I've been there, to Kumamoto, for its regional mascot's birthday party, and remember that tomatoes are mentioned in Kumamon's calisthenics song. Japan also holds the Guinness world record for largest tomato plant. 

      So how did Japanese tomatoes end up with tagged to an English loan word name? The short answer is: they didn't. Both Japan and the United States borrowed the word from the same original source. Tomatoes are thought to have originated in South America, probably Ecuador or Peru, then found their way to the future Mexico, where the Aztecs named them tomatl. English has a number of foodstuffs that echo Nahuatl, the Aztec language: avocado (ahuakatl); chocolate (xocolatl); and chili (cilli).
     It's sorta cool to think that the ingredients you're assembling for dinner were called for, using basically the same name, by someone hungry after a long afternoon watching ritual victims having their hearts torn out atop a pyramid to the greater glory of Quetzalcoatl 500 years ago.

     I've been eating my bounty at almost every meal. On fresh bread, with goat cheese and butter. In peaches and tomato salad. Or cucumber and tomato salad. Or just sliced, eaten with a knife and fork and a spritz of fig vinegar. I've even experienced the joy of sharing. A neighbor stopped to chat, with his beautiful Doberman. We talked politics for a long time, then I had an epiphany.

    "Say," I said. "Would you like some tomatoes?" He nodded happily yes, he would. I ran in the house and selected four big beauties. 

     "Here you go!" I said, handing them over. I meant to tell him that I had not in fact grown them myself, but was regifting the tomatoes. Before I could, however the conversation wound up and he went on his way. Maybe not so honest after all.

Big Trump is Watching You

     Yes, toward 7:30 EST time Thursday, I slid over to Twitter, whoops, X, and waited, monitoring the chatter. Waited for Donald Trump's mugshot to ... I almost said "hit the wires," but that would be dating myself. Waiting for it to drop. Be flung into the aether.

     The atmosphere was festive. Everyone seemed to be there. Sex columnist Dan Savage, who 20 years ago transformed former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's last name into the term for a frothy byproduct of anal sex, offered a new, amusing definition for "mugshot" that might be useful when describing certain pornographic tableaux. 

     A fake Trump mugshot was shared as real, then rapidly withdrawn. 
     Why the huge interest? Aren't we all tired of him? Yet there we were. I suppose I could carry on about fascination with the physical body of the tyrant, his image, hewn into limestone in Egypt 4,000 years ago. I've already compared the Former Guy's curled lip to Ozymandias, the pharaoh Shelley's imagination saw peeking from the shifting sand: Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command (that post running in June, 2014, when his name defaced Trump Tower, a full year before he announced his vanity run for the presidency)
    Of course, lately Trump's command, hot or cold, sets only a dwindling band of flunkies into motion. The Washington Post reports that "scores" of supporters turned out around the Fulton County Jail for the arrival of their Orange Lord, then looked at their own photos and changed that to "a few dozen." (I would have be satisfied with "a few.")
    I don't think paying attention to Trump needs to be defended at this point. The man is the front runner for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nominee. His four-year misrule of our country is still a fresh memory, an open wound. Justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection has not reached him. Yet. Those saying ignore Trump and he'll go away have seriously misunderstood the situation, and are as detached from our unfortunate reality as his fans are. We can't ignore him. He's never going away, not until he finally occupies his hole in hell — upside down, I hope, the way Dante envisioned the resting place for Boniface VIII, his flaming feet kicking in protest.
    Frankly, now the interest is more pathological than practical. There isn't much choice in the matter on either side. It's an obsession. Forty percent of the country looks at him with the head-cocked adoration of a dog awaiting a treat. And 40 percent look at him with the focused anxiety of a beaten dog tracking a stick. Either way, the result is the same. 

     Not to forget 20 percent — and this is just nuts — who can't seem to make up their minds.  They seem worst of all. Really? Scratching your head and trying to puzzle this mystery out, are ya?

     Maybe they're just awaiting more information. That lone bit of new data to push them over the edge.
     Like his stated height and weight, which broke before the picture was revealed. 6'3 and 215 pounds. Much glee over that — the man weighs 260 pounds if he weighs an ounce. And last time he was arraigned, in April, he was 6'2 and 240 pounds. So gained an inch while losing 25 pounds. 

    Why not? To me it was barely worth an eye roll. You mean to suggest that Donald Trump is lying?!? Oh my! 
    The mugshot was finally released, and passed along immediately. "He looks broken," Scott Dworkin suggested. "He looks like Satan," my wife said. In between those extremes, a crushed loser and the slick Prince of Darkness (can he be both? I'd vote for both) every possible opinion poured forth. 

     "Trumps mugshot where he looks like a pissed off and angry badass is an iconic historic photo," tweeted Ted Cruz, whose entire reputation now consists of salaaming at Trump's feet, degrading himself like a zonked out meth addict on Lower Wacker Drive, wearing a strap t-shirt as a dress. To me, that is the saddest, most tragic aspect of the entire Trump tragedy. He can't help himself — that's who he is. But people like Ted Cruz knew better. And look at the choices they made, the choices they make. It boggles the mind.

     Of course Trump immediately fundraised with it — "O yet defend me friends, I am but hurt!" — using it as his first Tweet, whoops, message on X, in more than two years.
     The dimwit media noted the historic nature — a president's mugshot — as if history weren't made daily with each new Trump twist. He didn't look any more awful than normal, and indeed had a certain airbrushed Big Brother is Watching You quality. 

     That was my takeaway. If he's reelected — and he might be — I could see him vindictively putting that photo on postage stamps and American currency. That is the photo that will be rendered enormous, 50 feet hall, in the newly renamed Trump Square at 42nd Street in New York, and will gaze from posters affixed to every wall in every town, along with some apt slogan. "HAVE YOU GIVEN TODAY?" I suppose we'll get used to it. Look what we've adjusted ourselves to already.

Driverless cars racing toward us

A Waymo driverless taxi on the street in Phoenix last week.

   At the Clark gas station in Berea, Ohio, the attendant, Jack, would check the oil in our Ford station wagon, squeegee the windows, pump the gas, then thank my mother for stopping by while handing each of us kids in the back seat a stick of gum.
     As nice as that was, turns out that customers like my mother would happily fire Jack to save 5 cents a gallon. Not that we were ever asked. He just vanished. Too bad; I kinda liked Jack.
     Then again, I liked telephone operators, department store clerks — my grandmother was one, at the May Co. — elevator operators and bank tellers. That last group lingers past their sell-by date — my bank typically has one teller on duty, and I will stride past open ATMs to wait in line for the brief pleasant human interaction, trying to forestall the unavoidable day when I walk over to the window and it’ll be shuttered.
     People are expensive, and getting the heave-ho everywhere possible. When I went through the huge Amazon fulfillment center in Monee, my heart didn’t break for the human workers, eyes locked on video screens, arms flying like demented octopi to grab items from seven-foot-tall revolving robot pods to toss into passing cardboard boxes. Rather, I nodded grimly, watched the clockwork efficiency of those pods, and wondered whether the humans would be utterly gone from Amazon warehouses in 10 years — or five.
     Or, about the same time an A.I. program will spit out newspaper columns finely calibrated to the ideal comfort/outrage ratio to keep readers coming back — or would, if anyone wanted such a thing, if they weren’t all staring transfixed at an endless algorithm loop of car crashes, seductive dances and clips from “The Sopranos.”
     Until then, each new step into our brave new world feels significant. It was last Friday, visiting my son in Phoenix that, at 7th and Van Buren, I noticed a passing white car, drawn by the round apparatus on its roof topped with some kind of spinning device. I looked inside, and was not surprised by what I saw — or, rather, didn’t see: no driver.
     “That’s so weird!” I said.

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Thirteen takeaways from the first Republican Presidential Debate

     Yeah, I sat in front of the television for two hours Wednesday night and watched eight GOP hopefuls talk over each other. Because ... well ... I was curious. I wanted to see what transpired. In case you were lucky enough to have had something better to do, and missed it, here are a baker's dozen worth of bullet points:

     1. It wasn't the utter crazy clown show that Democrats expected, or perhaps just hoped for. No low point of utter cringing horror, at least not one that stood out against a background of standard Republican ideological bilge. The absence of one Donald J. Trump no doubt was a factor there.
     2. Unless you count the moment no hands going up when the group was asked if anybody believed climate change is real, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis demanded they "debate" the matter instead. That moment might linger in history.
     3. Thirty eight year old wackjob/businessman Vivek Ramaswamy promptly pronounced "climate change is a hoax,” and claimed, vis a vis nothing, that "more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.” In general, Ramaswamy was an incandescent spotlight of batshittery, confidently airing a variety of specious theories and crazed policy proposals, and was probably the big winner of the night, if drawing attention to yourself, your destructive hopes and fierce, misplaced self-regard can be considered winning.         4. Mike Pence was the other winner. Yes, he invoked his personal lord and savior, Jesus Christ, and promised to put Him in the driver's seat of the White House, without ever explaining where the Prince of Peace was when Pence was curled in the lap of Donald Trump, nodding along with his every enormity. But Pence did radiate a certain strength, perhaps just a lack of shrillness that was a welcome change of pace. He also said he was "incredibly proud of the Trump-Pence administration" except, one assumes, the part trying to overthrow the American democratic system.
     5. "Our country is in decline" were the first words out of DeSantis' twisted mouth — now there's a winning political strategy — and in general the creepy Florida governor further buffed his brand as a man so awkward and uncomfortable in his own skin he can't even execute a smile. Not to mention being an idiot who promised to send the military to invade Mexico "on Day One."And blowing the anti-Semite dog whistle, "George Soros." Twice. In closing, each candidate was asked to explain, in 45 seconds, how he would inspire a weary nation, and when it was DeSantis' turn he just stood there, staring into the camera, until prompted a second time to speak. The other candidates had to actually say something to make sentient viewers cringe. DeSantis just had to be on camera, blinking and smirking and bobbing his head.
     6.  Pence said, "Joe Biden has weakened this country at home and abroad," which is rich coming from Donald Trump's second banana.
     7. Fox moderators Martha Maccallum and Bret Baier barely kept control over the night. They made Megyn Kelly seem like Walter Cronkite. 
     8. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said, "Is climate change real? Yes it is," but failed to weigh in on the question of whether the sky is blue.

     9. Someone should tell these Republicans that the reason a woman needs the right to an abortion up to the time of birth is if the baby she is carrying is dead, or has such massive deformities that it will die shortly after birth. Nobody has an abortion in the eighth month because they're afraid their child will grow up to be Ron DeSantis, though that seems a valid reason.
     10. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was the only one to speak forcefully about Donald Trump. "Someone's got to stop normalizing this conduct," he said. The crowd booed.
     11. While the candidates railed against China as the central enemy of the United States, one of the sponsors of the broadcast was TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform. 
     12. Other than China, public school teachers' unions are the central dark force undermining life in the United States. South Carolina Tim Scott promised to "break the backs of the teachers' unions," echoing Ramaswamy. Christie called them "the biggest threat to our country."
     13. Donald Trump will crush them all.

 

Unlike hell, you can return from Phoenix

    Chicagoans, nestled in the bosom of the greatest city on earth, have limited interest in the bland nowheres beyond its borders. Therefore, as a columnist for Chicago’s preeminent daily newspaper, I try not to bore Chicago readers with places that aren’t Chicago and therefore don’t really matter.
     However. With temperatures in Chicago predicted to hit 100 degrees Wednesday, I feel obligated to share my recent experience in a certain sun-blasted city, despite it not being Chicago.
     Specifically, Phoenix.
     If you know one thing about Phoenix — and who doesn’t? — you know it is very, very hot. Surpassing 110 degrees for 31 consecutive days this summer. Fate dictated I fly there last week.
     Going to Phoenix in August must seem mad. In my defense, it was one of those duties parents sometimes find themselves shouldering, in this case delivering a cat to its owner, a young man associated with the federal judiciary there.
     While I did consider simply landing, handing over the beloved pet, then catching the next fight home — it is Phoenix, after all — that seemed a failure of imagination. Besides, there was a single aspect of Phoenician life I was curious about: the temperature. What must that be like? The hottest I’ve endured as a resident of Chicago was 105 on July 13, 1995. I still remember walking one block to the dry cleaners, then returning to our apartment on Pine Grove Avenue and lying down, utterly drained. 

     But 111 degrees is ... not bad, particularly if you are lounging by a pool. Yes, the concrete is too hot to step upon with bare feet, the metal rail leading into the water too hot to touch. But once you are submerged up to your chin, 111 degrees is just fine. It is, as they say, a dry heat.
     Beyond the heat, I couldn’t imagine what else Phoenix might offer. An art museum of some sort, no doubt. But so vastly inferior to the Art Institute that going would just be sad. Third-rate works by familiar names, larded with forgettable local efforts. I never considered going.
     As my host drove me around, showing off the Sandra Day O’Connor United States Courthouse — quite beautiful — Phoenix unfolded, a rather uninspiring hodgepodge of junior colleges and welding supply yards, interspersed with occasional streets of high-rises of the most anodyne architecture imaginable. Occasional silhouettes of mountains in the background, trying to add interest. It was as if someone shuffled together Franklin Park and Central Station and began dealing cards.

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