Flashback 2005: Liberty overrated, and one proud chef

Cherry Pit grub

    Chicago Restaurant Week begins Monday. Regular readers know that I'm a restaurant guy — restaurants help create the illusion of meaning in life — from dining at three Michelin Star Alinea, to lauding a favorite hot dog joint owner. I think I'm going to weigh in this week about it, in the paper. But in the meantime, here's a moment from 2005 worth remembering. I left in the section that ran above it, just in case you've got time to kill. Alas it's as current now as it was 19 years ago, and the last paragraph explains Trump about as well as he can be explained. The original headline was, "Liberty seems pretty far down on world's to-do list."

Opening shot

     Is liberty really "the universal longing of every soul," as Condoleezza Rice told an audience in Egypt this week? Or is that belief merely our gosh-darn American presumption leading us astray again?
     Because, frankly, when I look over the wide swoop of human history, I don't see much pining after liberty. I see a whole lot of "let's go kill those guys and take their stuff." I see quite a bit of "let's roll at the feet of that king." But not much "let's promote liberty so that each of us can breathe free."
     Surveying our world today, people seem to leap to put on the chains of some religion or drug or cause. Even in America, the supposed land of liberty, a big chunk of the population is eager to yank the leash the moment somebody tries to use that liberty to do something they don't like.
     Which liberty, supposedly, allows you to do. The error Rice makes is to assume that, if only Egypt had democracy, why, it would elect a bunch of swarthy Jeffersons. More likely that, given their choice, Egyptians would opt for radical Islamic theocracy, via popular election. We wouldn't like that.
     Rice's mistake is a common one. Those free of oppression have a very difficult time understanding the taste that so many develop for it. I'll never forget, when I finally got the old family boot off my neck and fled to college, the shock I felt that any sane man would join a fraternity.
     "They spend 18 years being told what to do," I said at the time. "Then they go out on their own, finally, and what's the first choice they make? To join a group that forces them to roll an egg with their nose across the quad at midnight, blindfolded."
     Oppression, like drugs, brings some measure of pleasure to those under the yoke. Why else do you think all those Russians are still mooning after Stalin, a half century after his death?

Because good food isn't enough

     I've eaten at a lot of fancy Chicago restaurants over the years, and I thought I knew what good service is. A little bit of theater -- the spinning salad bowl at the old Blackhawk. Some personal service -- Chef Louis Szathmary going from table to table at the Bakery to make sure everybody was happy. The brisk snap of the waiters at Charlie Trotter's. The knowledgeable, I-grew-this-lettuce-from-a-seed-and-now-I'm-gonna-tell-you-all-about-it authority of the staff at Tru.
     But I never grasped what the heart of dining-out hospitality really is, didn't look for, never mind touch, its essence, not until a fry cook named Carmen Vargas turned away from his grill at the Cherry Pit Cafe in Deerfield this past Sunday.
     It was Father's Day and the place — a narrow front with a lunch counter and a big square room in back — was packed. My family had to wait. Four seats opened up at the counter, and we slid on in, picked up our menus, and had that chin-stroking, what-shall-we-have-today moment.
     The special was buttermilk oatmeal pancakes. "I make my own oatmeal pancakes at home," my wife said out loud, to no one in particular, perhaps with a touch of loftiness, the way Queen Elizabeth, offered a $50 gift certificate at Zales, might murmur, "I have jewels back in London."
     We ordered. A few minutes went by while we watched eggs sizzling on the grill and customers bustling in and out behind us. Then Vargas, tall, with an elegant mustache, turned and set a small plate in front of my wife. On it was a single pancake.
     "You mentioned that you make these at home," he said. "But do they taste like this?"
     My wife cut the pancake into four pieces, and we each tried one. Fluffy, oatmeal-infused, slightly sweet — during the comparison of ingredients that followed, Vargas said he puts sugar in the batter.
     "You don't need syrup," he said. My wife pronounced them lighter than her own, my older son decreed they were better, too, which seemed to satisfy him.
     Maybe I wouldn't have noticed if he wasn't a fry cook — usually they stand stolidly before the grills, never turning, pushing out the orders, which were flying fast and furious at the Cherry Pit.
      But his impulse resonated in me. Isn't that the essence of hospitality? The open generosity of sharing, seasoned with a bit of here-try-this-I-made-it-you'll-like-it pride? I thought it exceptional.
                 — Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 22, 2005

Sports Illustrated is dead and I'm not feeling so hot myself

   

     Whenever I try to convey the bounty that the Chicago Sun-Times offers its readers every weekend with the Sports Saturday wrapper, I say, "It's like Sports Illustrated." Meaning that it is packed with long, complex, interesting articles and dramatic photos. When I stumble across the rare sports story I want to cover, like an older couple hosting three rising hockey players, or a blind radio color commentator, I try to run it on a Saturday, because sports will both package it beautifully and give me room to tell a tale.
     Sports Illustrated was such high quality that you didn't even need to particularly appreciate professional athletics to enjoy it — I remember the raw envy I felt, as a writer, reading an in-depth SI piece on the enormous challenge of washing the laundry for the National Football League. What a great idea, perfectly executed.
    While I wrote my share of sports stories back in the day — golfing in Montego Bay with Arnold Palmer, sitting down to talk football with Tom Landry before a Dallas Cowboys game — I only wrote one piece for Sports Illustrated: a quirky take on how TV cowboy star Roy Rogers invented sports marketing and taught the NFL to license its logos. 

     I was proud of that notch on my belt, and would have loved to show it off, had anybody cared. But they absolutely did not. Not a soul. 

     Why would anyone? Magazines have pretty much washed away in the howling media wordstorm. Time, Life, Newsweek, once-mighty gold-plated brand names that formed the apex of the profession. Now tiny mockeries of their mighty pasts, recognized by a narrowing sliver of the consumer world, like the threadbare names of those defunct products revived in the Lillian Vernon catalogue: Lemon-Up. Prell. Necco Wafers. A familiar logo to slap on a pale imitation slightly resembling its former self.

     But I took comfort knowing SI was there, hanging on. Though battered by the same faltering economic model clubbing down all journalism — the Washington Post is also about to jettison a chunk of its reporters — it still existed.
     Until Friday, when Sports Illustrated fired its entire staff. About 80 journalists, over the side, into the icy chop that awaits the unemployed. From now on, it'll be a nostalgia act, an aggregator. A hook to bait with repackaged material jamming the racks at Walgreens. 
     The temptation is to mourn. But I'm tired of mourning. It's boring. I thought I'd like to talk about what happened, and called my friend, Rick Telander, the dean of American sports columnists, who wrote for Sports Illustrated for 25 years. He knew. He'd make sure that whatever I said at least carried a whiff of veracity.
     "I shouldn't say Sports Illustrated just died because it's already long dead, right?" I said, beginning the conversation. This is just the utter end, the ritual abusing of the corpse. 

     What happened? 

     "Fans know more than we do," said Rick. "And everybody's a photographer."
     Nothing to be done?
     "You're protesting the world," he said. "You're protesting modernity."
     Well, I'm not protesting anything. Just noticing it. I've long said, "Technology wins." No matter how much you liked human telephone operators, they're still gone.
     "To fight it is tilting at windmills," Rick continued. "To bitch about it too much is to bitch about getting old."
     Getting old does bite, particularly the part where ...  no. There's too much of that already. Rick isn't interested in shaking his fist at the young social media stars tramping all over our once exclusive lawn, and neither am I.
     "Time for journalists to figure this out, and stop worrying about the way it used to be," he said. "It's never going back, ever. Taylor Swift has 550 million followers. She has more power than all the newspapers in the United States."
     See, that's what journalists bring to the table. We see what's going on, and we say it. Even if we don't like it. Even if the truth is in no way optimistic — for us. Our houses are on fire; the least we can do is describe the flames, a final act of fealty to our fading vocation.
     "It's the end of what I've chosen as my profession," Rick said. "I never took a vow of irrelevance. That was never part of the deal. Nobody cares. Writing has become a commodity. Everyone can do it."
     I could argue that — actually, everyone can't do it. Obviously. What everyone can do is read, and watch videos, and the time once spent reading a revealing, in-depth profile of a player is now spent watching his girlfriend watch him. There is only so much time in a day.

     "Nobody under 30 reads a newspaper," said Rick. "Do you see them reading long magazine pieces? They get the stuff on Facebook. Go on their phone. Check out the news, go on TikTok and that's it. Who looks at the byline?"
     He said that there was a time when he knew the top sports columnist in every city in the country. He and Rick Morrissey were discussing this recently.
     "We used to know them all," he said. "We couldn't name a sports columnist in Detroit. I can't name a columnist in the entire United States. None."

     I told Rick that I do what I do, not for the benefit of whatever remnants of an audience might yet remain. But for myself. To satisfy my own curiosity, meet my own standards and, not incidentally, make a living.
     "I still care a lot," said Rick. "I never had a job I've been prouder of. Never dreamed I'd be blindsided like this. Didn't expect technology to make it irrelevant. The whole world is changing. I hate the feeling that the thing I chose to do is irrelevant. But it just is."
     I can't tell you if Telander is right, or I simply find myself in the same place and agree with him completely.  Sometimes it seems what I do is dig a hole in the morning, go to sleep, wake up to find it filled, then dig another one. Rinse. Repeat.
     "Every year we have a job is astounding," he said. "This is what I do. I'll do it until it's over."

     That's two of us then. Playing in an orchestra on an antique bandstand set on a cliff at the edge of the sea. Sawing away at our instruments while, every now and then, with increasing frequency, another chunk of cliff gives way, and a cello, or a couple of bassoons go whistling into the abyss. The symphony falters, the music grows thinner, fainter. But the tempo is resumed, until the next crash, a strangled cry and a pair of cymbals go clanging down the sheer rock face followed by a splash.

      If this all sounds depressing, it shouldn't. Some days fun is had, still, and a shimmer of significance forms far away, a mirage deforming the air for a moment before vanishing. The way I see it, no matter how big music streaming services get, there are still a few artisans left making violins. You don't need to sell them to everybody; you just need to sell them to a few customers whose ears can detect the difference between a tune played on a fine instrument and one buzzed out on a comb wrapped in wax paper. 

     When I went into writing, and was warned about how difficult this line of work was as a career, even then, I liked to quote Daniel Webster. Told that the legal profession was an impossibly crowded field, he replied, "There's always room at the top." I believe that still holds true as the journalistic world empties out. If this is the end, well, then, we will endeavor to shine brightly at the end, just as we did at our beginning.

Swirling in the vortex

 

   
     As someone fascinated by the 1912 sinking of the Titanic — who isn't? — you'd think the 1997 blockbuster movie "Titanic" would be right up my alley. But it wasn't, and a quarter century since I last viewed the film, I can still point to the moment when director James Cameron lost me: the chase with a handgun, a bit of business added to goose the story further. I remember thinking, "The ship sinking isn't drama enough? They need a gunfight?" It seemed gilding the lily. 

     That moment flashed back when I was standing in the Coconino National Forest Red Rock Ranger Station, going over potential hikes with Rhett, a helpful volunteer. He was pointing out trails on the map, when I noticed a spot labeled "Airport vortex." 

     "Airport vortex?" I asked.

      It turns out that being set in an absolutely stunning physical vista — really, the place makes Boulder look like Kansas — isn't enough. The paranormal powers of the universe have to be summoned like a pack of performing dogs and ordered to do tricks upon command. 

     "They say there are seven natural vortexes in the world, and Sedona has nine of them," Rhett said, neatly summarizing the local attitude toward the New Age hooha forming here like moss on a stone..

     Not that this spiritual claptrap bothered me, per se. Life is hard, the night is long, people need to conjure up all sorts of rococo nonsense to comfort themselves. I get it. So long as they don't use the laws of the country to force their particular brand of gauzy flimflam upon others, it's a free world. It's when you use your personal fairy tale, hardened by the passage of time, to vet the books at the school library, that I feel the need to disagree.

     I wish upon a star, sometimes. I do not, however, insist you get your medical care by appealing to the indifferent cosmos. It is, I believe, an important distinction.

     I never thought about any of this at all while we were hiking. Heads on swivels, trying not to blunder over a cliff while gawping at a mesa, butte or range. But one evening, we decided to go explore the town of Sedona, and found — at least in the Uptown section — an Estes Park-caliber hellscape of carny come-ons. Crystal shops and palmists, vortex vendors. It being offseason and late in the day, we were about the only tourists, and owners stood in the doorways of their establishments, trying to ballyhoo us in. 

     A man in a knit cap and a swami-length beard urged us inside for a "sound bath," and interpretive reading, an offer so strange I was tempted to inquire about what that might be. But I knew if I made eye contact with them man he'd wrap his arms around my knees and we'd never get away.

      We have friends ... treading carefully here ...  whose broad-minded approach to life allows them explore realms that I'm too narrow to consider. So we hit a few of the shops, looking for presents. Again, the patient work of a thousand millennia, the intense physical forces that formed these quartzes and gemstones, doesn't do the trick, apparently, for some. It isn't enough. These materials also have to heal you if you, oh I don't know, rub them on your afflicted parts — your head, I imagine. Merely being malachite won't satisfy some folks; it has to cure you too. I very much wanted to challenge one of the employees, to say, "If this stuff works, if you're so centered and purified and healed and enriched, spiritually, then why are you hawking wildly overpriced pebbles in a strip mall in Arizona?" But I'm a kind soul, we all struggle. Besides, then I'd be harassing clerks in tourist trap curio shops, and what good is moral clarity if you use it to browbeat people? An insight I wish I could magically impart to my friends on the left.

      The place depressed us. But fortunately I heard music coming out of a restaurant — Agave 89 — a pair of guitarists and a drummer doing Latino-tinged tunes. We slipped in and sat down. The music perked us right the hell up — it so strange that people would feel the need to conjure up all these wild and imaginary claims for inert stones. When a spiritual force that really does refresh and redeem your spirit is always available to anyone who can whistle. Maybe the problem is, music is free. Or at least quite reasonable ready to be rented for the price of an NA beer and a really quite good mushroom quesadilla.

Room with a view

  

View from Room 237, Sky View Lodge, Sedona Arizona.

     My wife and I don't usually pop for a room with a view. The idea being that we aren't planning to spend time in the hotel room, gazing out the window. Instead we'll be outside, experiencing whatever place we are visiting. Stow the luggage, grab a map and get out of there. By the time we get back, it's dark. So why waste the money?

      But something told us to pony up — and it wasn't much; an extra $50 a night, maybe — for a room at the Sky Ranch Lodge in Sedona, Arizona facing Red Rock State Park and, well, just look at it. Our first morning here we took our coffee on the porch and, honestly, for a moment I thought of suggesting we not go anywhere. Spend the day sitting here. Because really, what could be better than this?

     That was a dumb idea, as we found out when we tore ourselves away and spend a delightful three hours exploring the trails off the Sugar Loaf trail head.  We pretty much had the place to ourselves — it's off season here in Arizona, meaning the temperature is in the 40s — balmy compared to Chicago — and we passed other hikers about once every 20 minutes. If that.

     I've been hankering for such a place. The old familiar rooms and vistas are nice. But after a while, you just want to see something incredible. At least I do. The restorative thing about nature, besides the sheer physical beauty, and the physical exertion it takes to clomp through it, is its utter timelessness. The view of Castle Rock is the same now as it was 5,000 years ago, or 5,000 years from now, for that matter, and our petty worries of the moment are reduced to frost on a stone. Thanks nature, I needed that.

    I should add that the people at Sky Ranch Lodge were exceptionally nice — from Larry, who drove the shuttle van, to the kids behind the desk, suggesting hikes and restaurants. I've been to too many places where the staff are so busy daydreaming about whatever they imagine their calling may be when they finally find a way to escape the hospitality business that they forget their job right now is to make you feel welcome. Not here. Our comings and goings were marked by a fanfare of friendliness. 

The same red buttes provided background
for George Herriman's classic comic.

     I brought up the subject to one of the managers, and he suggested it is because the Sky Ranch has been family-owned since 1982. That makes sense to me. When it's y0ur own business, you tend to run it better. With the possible exception of this one here, which certainly has been phoned in the past week while I've been having some R & R out West (in Coconino County. "Krazy Kat country!" I enthused when we passed a sign). So thank you for indulging me, and not complaining too much, and I'll be back in Chicago soon, doing what I do best. Or at least do well enough to get by.

Won't it just get stolen again?

  

      So ... in case you missed it. Two-thirds of Republicans in Iowa told pollsters they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from them. 
     Returning to a question that sits in the back of the rooms, waving its hand and going "Oh! Oh! Oh!" as the years click by.
     If they believe that ... if they really believe that ... then why are they voting at all? Give their claim that their previous ballot was stolen from them in some ineffable way their supreme leader, Losey L. McLoser can't even explain, never mind prove, then why even go through the motions of voting? Why waste their precious time? When all the Democrats — the same people who stole the last election and got away clean, remember — have to do is flip a switch or spin a dial or whatever they were supposed to have done last time. And wham-o. The election will be stolen again. Why vote? Why campaign? Why buy ads?
     Maybe they don't really believe it? Because they don't really believe anything, anymore. The entire bedrock of factuality having finally eroded away, in the torrent that is Trumpism. Nothing is true, or, rather, anything is true, if it serves the needs of the moment, reality being a paper napkin used to blot the spittle off your lips, then be tossed aside. There is always another one, a whole stack of momentary beliefs, waiting to serve.
     Maybe their fearless leader hasn't addressed this conundrum and so they have no opinions on the matter, the only way a thought enters their head is because someone inserted it there via Fox News. That sounds like a possibility as well. 
     Maybe the problem is mine. This whole applying reason business, this charade of slathering thought over the general confabulation of Republican madness an exercise in futility, like trying to measure a cloud with a calipers; the thing is too far away, moving too fast and dissolving at the same time. The election being stolen is just a bit of faux history, like the Jews killing Christ, used to rationalize whatever it is you want to do. They don't care if it's true or not; the important thing is, it's a story that serves, a means justifying the end.
    Enough. I'm still on vacation — having fun, thank you very much — but I didn't have the heart to dig up another old chestnut or scoop out spoonful of unpublished mash that was better left supperating in a jar in the back of the refrigerator. So I thought I'd try my hand at assembling my inchoate thoughts about Monday's election kabuki into some kind of cogent order. Honestly, I didn't find the news that grim. Almost half of the Republicans caucusing in Iowa didn't vote for Trump. Maybe the spell is lifting a little. Heck, any Republican who would vote for Ron DeSantis might also not vote at all. Or vote for Joe Biden. Anything is possible. In the worst sense of the term. We should all agree on that by now. 

Mentor is a city in Ohio

    Too much of my stuff is cringingly confessional. TMI, as the kids say. But believe it or not, there are actually pieces that I write, then decide are too personal to share. Such as this one, written half a year ago. But then time passes, I need something, and I figure, "Oh fuck it, why not?"

     "I'm sure the young people at the paper must look up to you," my mother said. "And you mentor them."
     I paused. And smiled. A weary kind of smile. Then immediately became lost in a memory from high school. Sophomore year, I hope. So say I was 16, which makes your mother picking out your clothes for you less bad. But I was wearing what she would refer to as "an outfit." Bluejeans. A matching jeans vest. And some kind of western shirt a color I can still see. Sort of a burnt orange. I wore it, and came home, and my mother said, in 1977.
     "Did the kids at school like your outfit?"
     And I remember pausing, struck, 46 years ago. Then smiling, slowly, I imagine that same weary kind of smile. Marveling, really, that my mother imagined I lived in a world where that could conceivable happen, and not my actual high school, where students got into brawls and one threw a teacher through a window. Perhaps some version of Archie comics, with Reggie and Jughead waving as I pull up in my converted Model T with a raccoon's tail on the aerial and school cheer slogans soaped on the doors.
     "Hey Neil, those are some rad threads!"
     "Why thank you Bettie, my mother picked them out for me."
     I don't know how I answered. Probably something terse, "No ma, of course not. People don't even lift up their heads so I can say hello." This was back when employees still went into the office on a regular basis. Though I realize that quality, that expectation, must live in me as well, which is unfortunate, because it has been an engine of disappointment.
     As for the young people at the paper, there is nothing knowledge-based I can say.  Years ago, when people would ask me what the mood at the paper is, I'd say, "There aren't enough people to maintain a mood." Now there are more staffers, enough for a frisson if not a mood. But scattered, and I'd never presume to imagine what they think about anything. You'd have to ask them. I sure wouldn't. My confidence isn't high. I  remember how it was when I was a young reporter, and how I viewed the old fogeys with lip curling contempt. Larry Weintraub, getting a tattoo of a quill pen and ink bottle on his bicep — because he's a writer, see? — and wearing short-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up, a la Bob Fosse, to show it off. Cringe. The "Weintraub's World" columns where he worked for a day as a dishwasher, or a circus clown, or was dipped in pudding. It seemed the worst trivialization of the lives of working people. At least it kept me from ever doing that sort of thing myself. Long gone.
     I did admire some of my elders — Roger Ebert and M.W. Newman, and Irv Kupcinet. I remember arguing with people who didn't extend to the latter what I considered the proper respect. "Don't you understand? He once got in a brawl with Dizzy Dean and the starting lineup of the St. Louis Cardinals in the lobby of a Florida hotel in 1935? Harry Truman would call him on the phone and ask him to keep an eye on his daughter when she was in town. Clark Gable would go to parties at his apartment in East Lake View."
     But I saw how the rest viewed him, with a "Why is he still here?" smirk. In my heart I agreed with them. He had reached his sell-by date, but there he was, still the shelf, covered in mold. Nobody was buying it anymore.
     Why am I still here? Not mold-covered, I hope. But picking off bits of brown growing here and there, a losing battle. Why? A good question. I suppose for the same reason anybody is anywhere. I got hired once, and here I am, trying to do the best I can with what I've got until somebody or something makes me stop.

     

           

Flashback 2007: He can't Trump us — It's hard to believe Chicagoans could really fall for The Donald's nonsense

     Roseanne Barr is an alarmingly stupid person. She hasn't always been that way — I remember her original appearance on Johnny Carson, when she was a rare blue collar female voice cracking wise about her life. Her first show was pretty good too.
    But obviously the years have not been kind to Roseanne Barr. She managed a comeback, and was starring in ABC's No. 1 show in 2018 when she sent a tweet suggesting that Michelle Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was the progeny of an ape. ABC canned her faster than soup. At the time, I saw it as a cautionary tale about the importance of professional public relations.
    She doesn't have a career to ruin anymore, but is still saying astoundingly stupid things ... her latest gaffe, well, it's too idiotic to describe. Google "Roseanne Barr" and "holocaust" if you want the details. It made me wonder what I've written about her in the past and I noticed this — ANOTHER column mocking Donald Trump YEARS before he decided to inflict himself upon our nation as its president. It doesn't predate my first jab, in 2000, but being from 2007, it's worth sharing, as a reminder that I understood 16 years ago what too many people STILL can't figure out. I've kept the column's subheadings.

Opening Shot

     That Donald Trump sure has gall. After he voided the contracts of those unfortunates who bought early in his condo tower project at Wabash and Wacker, pointing at a hidden line of legalese to yank back the units he sold them and snatch their profit, I assumed it would be a long time before he'd dare set foot in this town again.
     Yet, there he was, in the flesh, trying to lure more dupes to buy, hoping they'll ignore his reneging on sales to the first group.
     Does the Trump name really confer status? In New York, maybe, where they're trained to wait behind red velvet ropes and gawp at minor celebrities. But it's hard to believe that Chicagoans fall for that nonsense. Living in a Trump Building is like driving a Hummer — a lunge at status that indicts more than it elevates.

But they are home...

     Certain subjects rarely get in this column — divorces, for instance. They are inevitably what I call "a dog's breakfast" — a complex jumble of messed-up stuff that would take an enormous amount of effort and energy to make sense of.

     The immigration bill is the same way. At first, I thought, aha, at last, a bipartisan agreement! But the more you look at it, the more it seems a hodgepodge that really doesn't accomplish anything.
     Instead of worrying about the bill itself — which probably will go nowhere, at least in its current form — let's take a moment to glance at the two main alternatives.
     First, there is the "send-'em-back" fantasy. No responsible person actually believes that all 12 million illegal immigrants should be rounded up — held in concentration camps, perhaps — and then shipped back to Mexico.
     But that dream underlies much public opinion. It lurks behind those lashing out at "amnesty." They were wounded somehow, in their past — maybe someone once peed in their alley, maybe they were awakened by a loud car stereo, maybe someone once tried to speak Spanish to them, and they were frightened, and the fear stuck.
     Sending illegals home being impossible, those who find the idea appealing instead tacitly endorse a second route: doing nothing:
     Forget that we've already been doing nothing, for years. Forget that doing nothing leaves us with an enormous underclass of noncitizens who can't vote and have only limited legal rights.
     Which leads us back to the bill. Maybe it'll work, maybe we'll find a new compromise. But we need to do something. Because we've tried nothing and it doesn't work.

Today's chuckle:

     In time for Memorial Day, a tribute to vets, from Roseanne Barr: 

     Vietnam vets, I have a lot of empathy for them. They had to go to a horrible place and perform a hideous job for people who didn't even appreciate it.

     I know what that's like; I used to be a waitress at Denny's.

             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 27, 2007