Fresh-squeezed orange juice

   

     Few sounds are as welcome as a juicer. That pulpy grinding noise, and liquid whir. I'm not awash in golden childhood memories, but one of them is lying in bed in the morning in the summertime  and hearing that sound wafting in from the kitchen and knowing my mother is making fresh-squeezed orange juice to go with breakfast.
     Fresh-squeezed is the only kind worth drinking. There was a cylinder of frozen concentrate, you'd plop into a pitcher and add water then mash it into a semblance of orange juice. But even as a child I could sense it was hardly worth drinking and, frankly, I haven't had it in so many years it came as a surprise to discover it's still sold in stores.

      And Tang, the powdered orange juice-like drink — also still sold, amazingly, though it seems mostly sold in foreign countries, where they don't know any better. The stuff was festooned with space age pretensions, fooling no one. I haven't drunk it in 50 years and still can't think of Tang without a visceral shiver. 

    The lure of freshly squeezed orange juice is what sends John McPhee on the journey that becomes his classic book of reportage, "Oranges." The book opens by commenting on the supposed rarity of the predilection: 

     "The custom of drinking orange juice with breakfast is not very widespread, taking the world as a whole, and is thought by many peoples to be a distinctly American habit."

    McPhee later contradicts that notion by pointing out that oranges show up four times in Shakespeare, and frank English diarist Samuel Pepys had his first glass on March 9, 1669, noting, "I drank a glass, of a pint, I believe, of the juice of oranges, of whose peel they make confits, and here they drink the juice as wine, with sugar, and it is a very fine drink; but, it being new, I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt." (You might remember Pepys from the relapse chapter of "Out of the Wreck I Rise," where he too often had no such reluctance in quaffing far more than a glass of wine, though it was definitely doing him hurt). 

    In the book, McPhee heads to Florida. He assumes, once he gets there, that the sun-washed Floridians will be partaking in the orange abundance all around them. They don't. As soon as he checks into his Winter Haven motel, he goes in search of fresh orange juice: 

     "Next door was a restaurant, with orange trees, full of fruit, spreading over its parking lot. I went in for dinner, and, since I would be staying for some time and this was the only restaurant in the neighborhood, I checked on the possibility of fresh juice for breakfast. There were never any requests for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained, apparently unmindful of the one that had just been made. 'Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something,' she said. 'Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they’re getting.' She seemed to know her business, and I began to sense what turned out to be the truth — that I might as well stop asking for fresh orange juice, because few restaurants in Florida serve it."   

     Fresh juice is dismissed because it is "less consistent" (as is wine, McPhee observes). McPhee doesn't have to bother laying out how ashamed he is of his fellow Americans; instead he hurries to a hardware store, buys a hand reamer and a knife, and sets to making orange juice himself out of the fruit plucked from trees.
     The path of the purist is never easy.
     As much as I love fresh-squeezed orange juice, I stopped making it, for years. Fell out of the habit, mainly because grocery stores didn't generally sell juice oranges. I guess it takes too long, and the bottled varieties are good enough. Plus my wife doesn't particularly like it.

     But we started patronizing the Russian grocery, Fresh Farms Market on Milwaukee, and they sell Valencia oranges, and I began to buy a dozen, and occasionally take a break from my standard grapefruit to go with a glass of OJ. Heaven.

     Then diabetes hit — over three months ago — and fruit juice was forbidden as an unacceptable jolt of sugar. But as time went by, and I figured out how to adjust my diet and regulate my blood sugar using insulin, I realized that fresh squeezed orange juice had returned to the realm of the possible.

     I waited until the perfect moment — one day last week I was coming back from walking Kitty just as my blood glucose was beginning to tank into unacceptable levels. I set her up with her breakfast, then popped into the basement to retrieve three likely sacrificial oranges — you can tell by holding them in the flat of your palm, which ones are fat with juice.

     I'm not good enough a writer to describe just how excellent that glass of orange juice tasted after a three month hiatus. I won't say that contracting diabetes was worth it for that one glass of juice. But absence makes the heart grow fonder. And that glass did remind me that it is a joyful, juicy world, no matter who is going to be inaugurated a week from Monday. We mustn't lose sight of that. Being miserable won't shorten his administration by an hour. Enjoy your fresh-squeezed orange juice, if you can. It's worth the effort.

It looks huge in the photo, but it's an eight ounce glass.

Los Angeles is burning — or is it?

"Oranges on Fire," by Larry Sultan (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

     "What is truth?" Pontius Pilate asks the crowd, after Jesus tells him that he is not a king, but a man whose task is to bear witness to the truth.

     In the "Jesus Christ Superstar" version of the above, the governor of Judea continues, "Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?"
     Certainly not. Not for the two millennia since — actually, longer. Plato, four centuries before the Crucifixion, spent much time arguing what we know and how we know it.
     So as the United States of America prepares to inaugurate, once again, a man with a proven proclivity for telling lies — easily, continually, and without consequence — we can take a bit of cold comfort that at least we didn't invent this conversation.
     Mark Zuckerberg just gave up Tuesday and announced that Facebook will cease third-party fact-checking, and instead count on community notes after posts.
     How will that work?
     Take an indisputable fact: Los Angeles is on fire. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: Why is Los Angeles on fire? I would point to the 99 mile-an-hour winds and tinder-dry landscape. Prodded to dig deeper, I might remind readers how climate change is making ecological disasters more severe and more frequent.

     But a member of the community could attach a note saying: no, Elon Musk claims on his private megaphone, X, that the fires were fanned by racial inclusivity.
     "They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes," Musk wrote, retweeting a notorious troll's assessment about the L.A. Fire Department's "racial equality plan."
     In the past, Facebook might remove that odious piece of racism. Now it won't, but is counting on community members to, perhaps, point out that it is a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy to suggest that because the disastrous fire followed efforts to combat racism, it was therefore caused by them. You could just as easily, and just as inaccurately, argue that the department's Taco Tuesday caused the escalation of the fires Wednesday, since it happened first.
     Plato — spoiler alert — concluded that the truth is whatever he can convince others is true, though that could take some doing, even then, long before the advent of social media.
     "Could you persuade men who do not listen?" one of his associates asks, in the beginning of "The Republic," sounding a central question of our time.

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We're lucky he doesn't want to name it the "Gulf of Trump"

Loteria cards (National Museum of Mexican Art)

     Was I wrong to feel a flash of optimism upon hearing Trump announce he wants to change the name of the "Gulf of Mexico" to the "Gulf of America"?
     Not a spot on your National Calamity Bingo Card, right? Less than two weeks before the inauguration, Trump rears out of the shadows for a press conference, and that is what he comes up with? Well, plus seizing Greenland by force. And the Panama Canal.
     Those who still believe that the once and future president is some genius playing 3-dimensional chess might claim that these batshit notions are intentional, served up for distraction, the master magician directing your attention to the green felt table while he palms the crucial card. The detention camps are being readied while the public gabbles about changing names on maps.
      And maybe it is optimistic of me, to see floating the name change as the typical presidential dithering, another pipe dream that comes to nothing from the jabbering dupe who floated the idea of closing all the mosques in the country and killing the families of terrorists. We've had four years of those already; four more years on deck! Clap on those noise-cancelling headphones because it's going to get ugly!
     I mean, we get it. The man is broken, an enormous sucking black hole of ego, a void of such intensity that he will attempt to rename random geographical locations to better reflect our unquestioned national glory (although, now that I think of it, I'm a little surprised he didn't cut to the chase and call it the Gulf of Trump. Maybe that's coming).
     Plus Trump really, really hates Mexico. Or — to return to the chessmaster metaphor — knows that his base really, really hates Mexico. Though of course both can be true, as the his followers adopt his positions. It is the horse he rode in on, and he's spreading it for nearly a decade like a drunken sailor spreading gonorrhea. So seizing the gulf from the insult of Mexican nomenclature is just the latest thumb in the eye of our neighbors south of the border. He'll force Frito Lay to bring back the Frito Bandito next. 
    Given that, it's a shame one of his advisers didn't suggest they just rename Greenland, "Trumpland," or some such thing. Seize it without firing a shot. That's the easy path, and easy victories are what this is all about, as actual accomplishments in the living world are, you know, harder to do than just saying stuff.

Inauguration Day is coming and I haven't a thing to wear

 

     A colleague once found himself committed to the locked alcoholism ward at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Though we were not friends, I decided, being a sort of self-designated official greeter for recovery, it might be a fine thing were I to visit him there.
     Lutheran General is where Elton John got sober. If you ever saw "Rocketman," it's amusing to contrast the place as it appears in the film — arched hallways, Roman columns, brass sconces — to the dated, sprawling facility on Dempster. No self-playing grand piano noodling in the lobby, no life-size fiberglass whale hanging from the ceiling, none of the other fripperies found in the finer downtown or North Shore medical establishments.
     Arriving, I got the sense there wasn't a conga line of visitors. Finally I found someone to let me in, show me a locker to stash my possessions — a strategy to cut down on visitors passing booze to residents — and eventually was ushered into my co-worker's room.
     He wasn't in shape to receive company — restrained, with wide leather cuffs strapped to his wrists and ankles. I settled myself into a chair, radiating what I hoped was cheerful solicitude. He looked at me and started talking incoherently, a babble of nonsense syllables. I nodded, eyes wide, for 10 minutes or so before I decided I'd done my duty and fled.
     This episode came to mind when I asked my wife if she intends to watch the presidential inauguration, and she said she probably couldn't bear it. I said that I feel obligated to. Duty-bound.
     There is a value in showing up, bearing witness, being there, if not to the person being visited, then to the person doing the visiting. I doubt very much my few minutes in Park Ridge registered on the booze-shattered psyche of my former colleague. But it certainly stuck with me, one of those little helpful reminders that as refreshing as a big glass of Jack Daniels on the rocks might seem at any given moment, best to stay on the path instead. Avoid the ditch.
     That's why, even though everything I've written over the last decade, taken together, has not diverted the country from its running plunge into the abyss, I still feel the need to pay attention, through latticed fingers, and offer occasional commentary — not for the nation's benefit, but mine. And maybe yours too.
     Actually, a program I'm familiar with offers a variety of tips that might prove helpful to us in enduring what is to come. Over my desk is a plaque that reads, "One Day at a Time," and that is helpful, today being all we have.
     Then there is the escape of rote activities. When I went into rehab — 20 years ago this fall, my the time does fly — I think I spent five days cleaning the basement. I remember sweeping a line of fine gray dust across the concrete floor and thinking: This is very zen. Like being in a monastery. I easily have four years' worth of deferred household chores, if not 40. Now is the perfect opportunity.

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"A sense of closeness and carefree happiness"

     Monday's column on media maven Robert Feder — the man who urged me to join Twitter a decade and a half ago — getting tossed off Facebook drew a lot of response. One anonymous comment stood out:

     "Having noticed Facebook's sharp decline over the last few years, I think they're just making sure actual human-created content doesn't get in the way of the AI-generated pink slime that clutters the platform now."

      I've noticed that myself. We are always being told how AI is getting better and better. But most of what I read from it is near gibberish, like the above, recently plucked off Facebook. 

     I can't be sure it was produced by AI — it could, I suppose, been written by someone in some unimaginable basement boiler room in Mumbai, grabbing historical photos and slapping blocks of words under them.

     But it has the wordy obliviousness of AI. The suggestion that the photo "exudes a nostalgic allure" not only uses four words where one would do ("nostalgic") but it almost entirely wrong. That description might make sense to a machine or harried sweatshop habitue. But the photo is obviously a piece of 1920s cheesecake. Which becomes clear, if it isn't already, when you consider the woman's bare arms, stockinged leg and — most significantly — the man's right hand planted on her ass.
      Yes, I realize that pooh-poohing AI has become the go-to move for me, and I imagine I'll be doing it until the day the Sun-Times quietly lets me go and substitutes an AI-generated version of my column, dubbed "Ne*l Ste*nberg" or some other barely legal expropriation.
     Kidding. They'd never go to the effort. When I'm gone, the newshole will just close around me, like the surface of a pond after a stone has been thrown in, as if I were never there. 

When Facebook decides you are not a real person

"Hey Facebook — ecce homo!" Behold the man. Robert Feder, right, in the flesh at my older son's wedding in Michigan in July. The popular social media service shut down his page Jan. 1.

     Robert Feder is a real person.
     I know this from our countless interactions over the years, starting when he was the media critic at the Sun-Times. I would wander back to his tidy office on the fourth floor of 401 N. Wabash to pick his brain, schmooze, brag, complain, enjoy the pleasure of his company.
     I especially liked to run thorny journalistic dilemmas past him because, as anyone who knows Feder is aware, he has an oak-ribbed ethical framework. Not just a real person, but a good one.
     In the years since, I have confirmed his existence time and again, on the phone, over lunch. At his daughter's wedding and both my sons' weddings, even though attending the first involved a six-hour drive up to Northern Michigan. Who does that? A friend, I suppose.
     Alas, Facebook did not ask me to verify Robert's humanity before dealing him a blow that he announced on X this way:
     "As 2024 ended, Meta permanently disabled my personal Facebook account, saying it 'doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity.' No idea why. My appeal was denied without explanation or recourse. Now I have no access to any of my content or contacts. What now?
     Robert is integrity on steroids. I groped for something to say. "Oh, that's terrible!" is the best I could do. And it is terrible. I've been on Facebook for 16 years. Part scrapbook, part mnemonic device, both a block party and a shrine to my precious self. I look at Facebook far more than I look at the sky or the grass.
     Then I did what any friend does for someone who suffered a loss. I phoned.
     "It's traumatic; I'm grieving," Feder said. "The fact that they could just take it away, just like that, without any human intervention, is just appalling to me."
     The incident might not be worth airing in public, were it not a glimpse of the world we are all hurtling toward. Someday, we will not just get booted off of social media but admitted to — or rejected from — college without human eyes ever weighing credentials or reading essays. Medical procedures will be permitted, or denied, without an actual doctor glancing at a file.

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Editor's note: Meta reinstated Robert Feder's Facebook account the day after this ran.

'No crying in baseball'? There is if you visit the Hall of Fame

 

     I did not expect to cry.
     But there I was, misting up in the lobby of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Not even past the ticket taker, and I could feel my eyes moisten.
     Before me, a trio of statues: Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente and a sign explaining the importance of "character and courage" to the national pastime.
     Gehrig's words echoed in my ears, just as they had reverberated across Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939.
     “For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break," Gehrig said, referring to his ALS diagnosis. "Yet today ... I consider myself ... the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

     I am not a sports fan. No question there. But I was a baseball fan, from age 6 when I went with my grandfather to my first Cleveland Indians game, until my mid-teens. I knew the Brooklyn Dodgers were the "Boys of Summer" because I read the book of the same name. I also read "Me and the Spitter" by Gaylord Perry and "Strange But True Baseball Stories" and ...
     "This might be more complicated than I anticipated," I said to my wife, as we went in.
     "Why is the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown?" she had asked, the day before. We had come to central New York State for Thanksgiving at our younger son's new in-laws' woodsy retreat. The Baseball Hall of Fame just happened to be here. I'd visited it, oh, just 50 years ago, on some family trip in the mid-1970s. My only memory: brass plaques. I had no burning desire to return. But my wife seemed to assume that, being here, and my being a man, we simply had to go. What else could we do?
     "Because Abner Doubleday invented baseball here in 1839," I replied, with the supreme confidence of the misinformed.
     Only he didn't. The Doubleday story is entirely fictional, as admitted early in a display at the Hall of Fame. A convenient lie marches on no matter how many barbs of truth are planted in it. The museum does its best to set the record straight.
     "In fact, baseball was played decades earlier, evolving from similar bat and ball games," a display notes. "Doubleday didn't invent baseball ... baseball 'invented' Doubleday, a thriving legend that reflects Americans' desire to make the game our own."
     I couldn't help but reflect on the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, clinging to their spurious Lincoln stovepipe hat. Where is their display explaining that the whole thing is fanciful, if not fraudulent?

Chicago's role in America's pastime
     There was a lot of reflection back to Chicago. The commission that gave Doubleday his undeserved honor was established by an early star of the game, Albert Spalding, a former White Stockings pitcher and manager (that team actually became the Cubs). Spalding left his mark on the game by starting one of the nation's first sporting goods stores, at 108 Madison Street. It was Spalding who pressed first basemen to wear gloves and catchers to wear masks — measures then considered babyish — so he could sell them the equipment.
     The Baseball Hall of Fame offers a first-rate museum, not flinching from delving into complexities of race and economics, with plenty of fun stuff too. There is a hallway devoted to baseball cards, including the coveted Honus Wagner rarity.
     Steve Dahl's army helmet from Disco Demolition is on display. I never had reason to envy the man before, but he's in the Baseball Hall of Fame and I'm not. So kudos, Steve.
     I tend to read museum displays carefully, and noticed a chart titled "BASEBALL'S BILLIONS" on the exploding value of teams from 1990 to 2020. There was something I already know intuitively, but never saw laid out in hard figures before.

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