How great is a nation, really, if you can't drink the water?

Yellowstone National Park

     The leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook dropped off a quintet of bottles this week, large squat containers, neatly arranged in a thick clear plastic bag. The letter accompanying them explained that water quality is being tested. We were to fill these five bottles, then they'd be picked up so the water could be checked for lead and copper.
     I suppose I could have bristled at this, considered it an intrusion upon my precious personal liberties, and tossed the bottles. Don't tread on me! The effort by the Environmental Protection Agency is exactly the sort of wasteful government overreach that our dear president, Donald J. Trump, is committed to excising root and branch.
     But honestly, keeping tabs on the water we drink seems something the government ought to do. When I phoned the village, I was told that this effort would be done every six months for the next five years. I couldn't help think, grimly, "Sure it will." I am not confident there will be an EPA in five years, nor an America, at least not one you or I would recognize from past experience.
     That experience leads me to expect the water to be checked, along with bridges and airplane engines. The mail should arrive. When I take my handful of pills in the morning, I don't sniff them for the telltale odor of arsenic; I'm confident the Food and Drug Administration has done that already, thanks to the taxes I pay, without going through an agony of indignation at the thought they might also be used to buy hot lunches for poor children or maintain trails at a national park.
     Have you ever gone to a national park? They're quite nice. In 2009, the paper went bankrupt — struggling to exist is nothing new here at the Chicago Sun-Times — and part of the effort to keep afloat, we were all forced to take two weeks of unpaid leave. That inspired me to take my boys on the road, to California. Five weeks, seven thousand miles, nine national parks — Badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Rocky Mountain and Redwood.
     Before we left, I called the first park we'd be hitting for guidance. This is how I described the process:
     "They have a phone number you can call, to talk to a park ranger, and it felt odd, to be sitting in my office at home, looking at the bright green leaves of the saucer magnolia tree, talking to some briskly polite ranger in Yellowstone. I phoned twice, so relieved to be able to consult an expert about what was best for us to do that the magic of telephones, dulled by long familiarity, flashed anew for a moment—from my home in Northbrook to a ranger’s office in Yellowstone National Park. Fantastic."
     Would anybody be there now to answer the phone? I wondered about that when Elon Musk was carving apart the National Park Service, not only sending platoons of rangers packing, but insulting them as layabouts in the process. I remembered mailing in my application to secure a back country camping permit on Hell Roaring Creek Trail.

     "Exactly one week later, an official-looking letter arrived in the mail. 'YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK—BACKCOUNTRY RESERVATION CONFIRMATION. Reservation #09-R1090 for 3 People, Travel by Foot.' God bless America, something in the government still works."

To continue reading, click here.

The joy of competency

Strother Purdy, a CSW instructor and experienced cabinetmaker, skillfully applies some brute 
force to a student's table. And yes, I bought one of their way-cool sweatshirts.

     Sometimes I smile at how far short my imagination falls of any given reality. When my wife suggested we go to Spain, I was initially taken aback, wondering: "Why would anyone want to go to Spain? What's in Spain?" Before conjuring up ... wait for it ... bullfights and ... that's about it. 
     I had no idea that Atoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia was waiting for us in Barcelona. 
     That is standard for me. Years before, when I contemplated the arrival of our first child, I thought I'd better go out and get a set of Dickens. Honestly, I looked for one in used book stores, the plan being to read it to the babe during what I imagined would be the immense yawning empty spaces of child-rearing. I did not consider being a dad would be a frenzy of constant activity broken up with too-short periods of exhausted collapse. I hardly had time to read the back of a sugar packet, never mind, "Little Dorrit."
    My younger son and I signed up for Introduction to Woodworking last fall. Whatever I expected the Chicago School of Woodworking might be, the reality was much better. Enormous. Unbelievably clean and orderly. A team of experienced, focused, energetic instructors. With room after room of unimaginably cool, enormous machines that made the stuff at Home Depot seem like so many penknives and potato peelers.   

     Now I was nine weeks into the second course, Methods of Mortise and Tenon Joinery. Ready for the last class. Which, we were told, would be spent gluing together the pieces of the end tables we'd just spent two months crafting.
     Conjure up what gluing together a table might involve. Tell me it isn't just me. Gluing together anything, I imagined, involves ... pots of glue, right? Dabbing the glue on the appropriate spots with a brush of some sort, maybe holding two pieces together while they dry. It seemed a sedate, easy, solitary process.
     Wrong.

     My son had to miss the last class, due to the demands of work. I told him if I succeed in completely gluing my table together with time to spare I would then glue his, too, to save him having to take the make-up class. 
     Ha. Double ha. Working fiendishly, with the help of all my classmates, I was lucky to finish my own table in the two and a half hours allotted.  

  

My table, made of maple and cherry.

   I did not realize that gluing a table is a mass, brute force undertaking where the entire class has to set upon each table, one at a time, glue brushes and spatulas flying, so as to finish before the thing dries out of kilter. I did not realize the number of big rubber mallets that would be necessary, with considerable pounding pieces into place. The table needs to be square, aligned. Thus various pieces have to be rammed home then braced using big Jorgensen Cabinet Master Parallel Jaw Bar Clamps, sometimes applied directly to force pieces into place. 

     I did not realize that everyone had to do it together, one table at a time, because glue dries quickly.

     I was horror struck when the entire class was invited to begin learning on my table, first thing. It was like showing up for what you thought was a picnic and finding instead you had to trust drop off a cliff. I divided my time between dabbing glue into mortises and grabbing squares of paper towel moistened with spit to prissily clean up glue others had slopped on my finely finished cherry and maple surfaces. When the thing was done, with eight orange Jorgensen clamps squeezing it together, my little table seemed like some kind of crazed wooden alien beast being restrained for transport to a moon prison.
     Here's the thing. I did the entire final class a second time, assembling another set of tables. I wasn't sure how many other students in the mortise and tenon unit would miss their various last classes — the school does seem to attract lawyers trying to keep a foot in the living world of tangible reality — so showing up bright and early Saturday for my kid's make-up session to lend a hand with his gluing ordeal seemed the kind of boss dad flex that I've mastered.
     There were four other students, and a teacher who pitched in, so it wasn't as if we were alone, père et fils. Still, I was very glad I'd come, not just to aid my son, nor the personality-effacing challenge of doing woodworking against the clock. But having just done this all the previous Monday, I actually was the one beside the teacher who knew what we were supposed to be doing. So I could point out where a piece was being put on backward, or advise someone to line up the grain with another piece, and in general proved more helpful than I normally would.  Not only did I get a table out of it, but a whiff of something far more precious: a sense of competency in an area where previously I was completely inept. The joy of knowing what you're doing. Gluing together the table a second time was really fun. Another aspect to the process I just did not expect.

     My son and I were too preoccupied to get ourselves into a weekend session of the third class, Techniques of Machining Wood, when it begins next week. These classes fill up fast. And frankly I think he could use a breather — I know I could. But are 100 percent committed to snagging a pair of spots in the session that begins in May. While I've decided not to take the buy-out — I think, having until Sunday at 5 p.m. to change my mind — I'm not 100 percent confident I won't be canned anyway. Woodworking will then come in handy, to both pass my greatly expanded free time and maybe pick up some pocket change.

Gibbs, the school dog, likes to hang out by the window, waiting for trains.

Fighting anti-Semitism by hurting Jews.

     Never confuse reasons with results.
     The government is withholding $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University. The reason being given is that the New York institution supposedly isn't doing enough to fight antisemitism.
     To convey the actual result, consider a metaphor: Imagine a Chicago synagogue threatened by neighborhood Nazis. So I go spray-paint a big red swastika on the front door, explaining this will satisfy any antisemites who might be tempted to go inside and cause trouble.
     Would you say, "Well done, Neil! That'll keep the congregation safe." Or would you suspect that, pretense aside, I'm actually hurting the very people who I am pretending to help? Because that's the practical result of clawing back nearly half a billion dollars from Columbia, which though not quite a synagogue, has an undergraduate population that is 23% Jewish. Princeton University's is less than 10%.
     Meanwhile, 10 other colleges whose campuses were riven by pro-Palestinian protests during the war in Gaza, including Northwestern University, have received letters from the Justice Department warning them that they too are on the block.
     Don't get me wrong. Did student protests at various colleges, in the heat of the war in Gaza, often end up harassing Jewish students and calling for the destruction of Israel? Sure. Is that kind of thing going to happen in any situation where large groups of 20-year-olds are permitted to say what's on their young minds? Again, sure. Defunding colleges for that reason is a ruse, the way that imposing tariffs on other countries because Americans abuse a lot of their fentanyl is a ruse.
     In this era when language is degraded — I can't bring myself to say "meaningless" though we've bought the ticket and are on the platform — one shouldn't get caught up on reasons. Bullies are cowards and liars. They rarely say, "I'm hitting you because I'm a bad person and like it." They always gin up excuses: "He bumped into me," or "I didn't like his face." The reasons are supposed to explain away whatever wrong act is being done. They don't, and it doesn't help when the victim falls into the trap of assessing the validity of the excuse: "Hmm, maybe I did look at him funny...."
     I would never pretend to read the government's mind, no longer having the microscope I got for the boys when they were growing up. But one can connect the dots. With the Department of Education being disbanded, government scientific research frozen, study results censored, facts suppressed and the media threatened, demanding that elite universities gag their students feels par for the course. It's all part of a war on the learned and on free expression.
     Judaism is a religion, but it's also a culture, and that culture values education, Stephen Miller notwithstanding, and believes in speaking out. Jews tend to think about stuff, then ask questions. Attacks on education, like attacks on free speech and tolerance, are attacks on Jews. And if Jews aren't in the cross-hairs at this particular moment, give it time.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 1995: Addicted to the Street — How Drugs Lead to Prostitution

    

                                    From "The Immortal Plena," by Antonio Martorell

   On Monday, I wrote about the unique Chicago social service agency, The Night Ministry. That got me to wondering how many stories of mine they've been part of — dozens. This is the first, and one of those stories that burn in memory. I'd spent the night with the Cook County Sheriff's Police, arresting sex workers on Cicero Avenue. It was a revolving door — they'd be back on the street before the paperwork was finished. Toward the end of the shift, I wanted to talk in-depth to one of the prostitutes, and we picked Pamela Bolton at random. A choice that troubled me and I came to regret, because two weeks later she was picked up and murdered. I never knew for sure that the police saying she had AIDS led to her death, maybe by a former customer. But it was possible. Nobody had ever murdered her before...

     "How old do you think I am?" she says, turning her face under the streetlight; a worn, freckled face, under crinkly red hair, a face spotted with open sores. A kind viewer suggests she is 35 years old. "I'm 31," she says.
     Her real name is Pamela Bolton, but they call her "Cotton," for the drawl in her voice that harkens back to her youth in St. Louis and a half decade in Memphis, before she was a street prostitute.
     Bolton is a regular. "Just about every guy in county vice and every member of the Cicero Police Department has arrested her," said Paul Olson, a vice investigator with the Cook County sheriff's police. "We know she has hepatitis. We believe she has AIDS, but she won't admit it."
     Exactly why a person becomes a prostitute is a complex question. Drugs are a major factor.
     "The biggest problem with these girls is they are drug addicts," said Ted Kowalski, an associate judge in Branch 29 court. "I have seen hundreds of them. They all have drug habits."
     Behind the drug use is frequently a history of being abused.
     "The majority have been sexually abused in the past," said the Rev. Peter Brick, project coordinator for The Night Ministry, which does outreach to prostitutes. "My belief is that sexual abuse seriously damages one's self confidence. One result of lowering of self-concept is to feel good by escaping into drugs, and prostitution can then follow."
     Of her upbringing, Bolton says only, "I come from good family. My daddy was a police. If you had told me when I was 10 years old that I would be out here doing this, I would have laughed."
     She has been a prostitute for 12 years, and has been arrested hundreds of times, to no effect.
     "Oh baby, I walk Cicero Avenue like it's legal," says Bolton, who was arrested the day before by Maywood police and released a few hours later.
     A prostitute will charge whatever she thinks she can get, Bolton says; $10 from a drunk immigrant, $50 from a "scared, paranoid white man."
     "I'll tell you this," she says. "Any girl who tells you she won't do it for $10 is a liar."
     Bolton has three children. Her youngest is less than a year old — a "trick baby," meaning the little girl was fathered by a customer.
     "Right now this lady named Nancy's got her," Bolton says. "DCFS started having her, because she had cocaine in her system. But I got somebody to take temporary custody. Still, she was 8 (pounds) 4 (ounces). She had 10 fingers and 10 toes and a head full of hair. I don't know how it happened, but she is Puerto Rican or Italian. She's beautiful."
      Perhaps because their job involves such an assault on their dignity, prostitutes tend to be proud — of themselves, their demeanor, even their choice of trade. Even when reality contradicts what they're saying.
     "I was raised very well; I'm very well-dressed all the time," says Hope, another streetwalker, wearing her dress, it appears, backward, so that her tattooed breasts show through the plunging crisscross straps of what should be the back.
     "I come from a pretty influential family in St. Louis," Bolton says. "I've got a boyfriend who would support me if I wanted him to."
     So why, then, be a prostitute? Bolton says she has no choice.
     "Prostitution is one of the worst addictions you can have out here," she says. "This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin. I still can't come away from here. This is home. My 3-year-old's daddy would take care of me for the rest of my life if I let him. I don't have to be out here. But once you get into this, you can't stop it. Lord knows I've tried. I do go home occasionally. But I go stir-crazy. I can't take that life. Too dull. This is what I'm used to. I can't get out. I can't stop. I cannot shake this."

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 21, 1995 

One feeds minds, the other feeds bellies and offers warm socks

 

     Let The Night Ministry take you by the hand and show you souls in hell. Virgil to your Dante, a View-Master of the Damned, forcing your well-fed face against the eyepieces and clicking through scene after awful scene.
     The old woman, covered with huge MRSA sores — methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a hard-to-treat staph infection — slumped on a Humboldt Park bench. Those aiding the homeless deal with MRSA all the time. But police don't, and seeing her so rattled a pair of District 14 cops that they hurried over to a nearby Night Ministry medical bus making a scheduled stop.
     "Can you help us please?" one officer said.
     The teenage girl ejected from The Night Ministry shelter, The Crib, because there wasn't enough room for all the young adults with nowhere else to sleep that November night to curl up on foam mattresses on a church basement floor. Her housing plan for the night was a CTA fare card with $2.50 on it.
     "What am I going to do?" she cried, tears rolling down her cheeks, standing on a windswept Addison Street L platform. "I don't know where to go."
     And the three abject crack cocaine addicts huddled in a nest of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive. I was tailing a Night Ministry nurse carrying a backpack to get to the cut- off places where the medical bus couldn't navigate — there are always hells below this one, lanes and narrow subterranean warrens below Lower Wacker Drive.
     I asked the trio if they minded my taking their photo. But honestly, they didn't care about anything other than getting drugs into their bodies as quickly as possible. Nearly a decade later, I'd be surprised if any of them are still alive.
     Why was I there? The Night Ministry is not only the last strand in Chicago's fraying social service network, caring for all those people too lost to even try to avail themselves to what scant aid is available.
     But they're also very good at letting the Sun-Times show the public the work they do. They've helped me write dozens of stories over the past 30 years, ever since I called them in 1995 to talk about sex workers the Cook County sheriff's deputies were arresting along Cicero Avenue. Whenever I've reached out to the Night Ministry for insight, they rise to the occasion.
     That's rare. Many organizations do good work but botch the communication part. They don't respond to inquiries, or they answer three days after the story ran. Or don't understand the assignment. Last week I reached out to Catholic Charities for a column on medical anxiety among the needy, asking to be put in touch with one of their social workers.
     What I got was self-promoting boilerplate beginning, "As a cornerstone human service provider and trusted partner within our region, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago provides vital services, including food, direct financial assistance, housing, counseling, and other support for more than 370,000 vulnerable people across Cook and Lake counties ..."
     All true but never addressing the matter at hand, therefore useless to me.
     I'm writing this today because the Sun-Times has joined with The Night Ministry for a joint cup rattle. The paper, itself a struggling 501(c)3 charity like The Night Ministry, has a goal of drawing 1,500 new donations to help keep the newspaper going. A small portion of each donation to us in March will go directly to The Night Ministry.

To continue reading, click here.

'Is that what we do in a democracy?'

       As a rule, I don't do protests. The futility of appealing to those deaf to reason, or in this case, savoring the distress they've created, is too much. But having encouraged readers to attend the "Stand Up For Science" rally at Federal Plaza on Friday, and being downtown anyway, I thought I should go. It was blustery, and cold, and snowy, but there were at least 300 people, maybe more, and I felt their enthusiasm. It's a truism to me that protests benefit the participants more than anything else but, having participated, I see the value in that. Several readers — hi Jill A.! — paused to say hello, which was nice. I didn't plan on writing anything, but the paper skipped the rally, to my surprise, so I though I should at least share the remarks of two speakers.
     The first was Sen. Dick Durbin:

Sen. Dick Durbin

      "The situation facing us now in Washington is pretty obvious. Just a few days ago. I have a purgatory experience called the State of the Union address."
   The crowd lustily booed.
    "It was worse than that. I will tell you, I brought as my guest, Elizabeth Sokol. Dr. Sokol is a medical researcher at Lurie Children's hospital. Her speciality is neuroblastoma, the No. 1 pediatric cancer in children 1 through 5. Through the research they have been part of the past decade they have cut the death rate from 100 percent to 50 percent.We need to keep her on the job and we need to keep you on the job."
   "My science is political science, so let me tell you — the key to this campaign to restore funding for medical research is very basic, It comes down to six words that should be part of your conversation on this subject: 'Let me tell you a story.' Tell a story about your research and the difference it makes in the lives of ordinary people. Tell your story about parents desperate to hear from a doctor, 'There is a cure.' That kind of information gets to the heart of the issue here. We need to stand together for medical research. 
    "The last point I'll make is this point: If you want a great nation, you don't eliminate the Department of Education. You don't eliminate research. Research looks into the future and gives us hope. We need to stand together. "

    Several academics spoke:  Dr. Luella Allen-Waller, a post doctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at the University of Chicago, said this:

 Dr. Luella Allen-Waller

     "In 2017 I chose to dedicate my life to studying the ocean," she said. "And  I thought I knew the stakes. I knew that rising temperatures meant bigger storms, crumbling coastlines, sicker animals, poorer fisheries. I thought that understanding these risks meant that people around the world could come together to come up with strategies to survive. 
     "But of course it's gotten worse than I predicted. The White House's severe  new funding guidelines directly attack the work of me and my colleagues.  Projects trying to identify strategies for resilience to climate change are now at risk. Projects like indigenous land stewardship. Things like protecting low income communities that are at risk from pollution. 
      "And not only are they trying to defund life saving science, but now they want to censor the research outcomes too. Is that what we do in a democracy? If we are going to meet the challenges of climate change, we need to be able to predict it. We need to support a diverse group of scientists able to predict the towns most at risk of flood and fire. We have the support of people around the world getting involved in  community science because they rely on food from the forest in their backyard or the coral reef that they fish every day. We need free and independent inquiry into these problems like our lives depend on it, because they do. 
     "I hesitate to talk to younger students about this part sometimes: but I'm afraid. I'm afraid for the ocean that I study. For our future on a warming and more unstable planet... But I don't hear speaking up, when there are so many of us speaking up, and the more of us who speak the stronger we are.
     "Go reach out to a community science initiative. Get involved. Reach out to your grad student union. Talk to your colleagues. Get started building solidarity. If we can build a shared vision for what we want and need, with the people we are already spending 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day in the lab with, we have a much better shot at making lasting change at a national level. It is urgent we do so. The time is now, we cannot afford to lose this moment and we cannot afford to lose each other. "

      Tina Gnade, "an educator, and an earth lover," with her children, Lily, 11, Max, 8, and Ben, 10, attending their first protest rally. "We want people to know science is good," said Lily. 

Flashback 2007: Breathe easy, Cook County TB district is on the way out

      Friday I got an email from the source of the planter story below, inspiring me to take a look at the column and decide to post it today. The opening item about the Suburban Cook County Tuberculosis Sanitarium District might be a reminder that government can always use some cutting, though of course not the wholesale hacking that even the Orange Enormity is now having second thoughts about. The TB district was finally dissolved in 2013.
      DEI might be on the ropes, but I should probably point out that the second item, while  considered funny at the time, counts as fat shaming now. So if that kind of thing bothers you — and people do get bothered — please skip today's offering and avoid the need to write in, scolding me. This is when the column filled a page, and I've included the original headings and the joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT

     The case of Jeffrey Speaker, the Atlanta attorney flying about the world with his case of untreatable tuberculosis, of course brought to mind my favorite entity of local government: the Suburban Cook County Tuberculosis Sanitarium District.
     "We're still here," said Dr. Susan Marantz, medical director of the district, a living monument to the ability of governmental entities to outlast the problems they were created to address.
     We may not have sanitariums anymore, but we have a district, with offices in Oak Park and satellites in Harvey and Des Plaines, all battling the scourge of tuberculosis.
     "We see patients every day," said Marantz. "About 125 active cases a year, though we need to screen two or three times as much in suspect cases."
     So far, they have not had to forcibly quarantine patients.
     "We have been lucky," she said, explaining that usually people voluntarily agree to quarantine.
     If not, "there's a whole system set up," she said. "I literally need [only] to make a phone call."
     Times change, even in Cook County government, and the sanitarium district, redolent as it is of spittoons, cane-backed wheelchairs, and Eugene O'Neill in a straw hat, is being absorbed, at long last, by the Cook County Health Department.
     "I don't know if we're going to be division or a program," she said.

BIG LOOK HUGE FOR MEN IN SPRING

     The following is the result of reading a fashion column immediately before walking across the Loop:
     Morbid obesity is bigger than ever this spring season, and men are showcasing their beer keg bellies with bold horizontal stripes or seeking to camouflage them with enormous tent-like tropical shirts.
     Size 48 waists are girt with woven belts, disappearing under waterfall shelves of fat, and sport big black plastic holsters where BlackBerrys would go were they ever removed from their owners' ears.
     Security cards are de rigueur, jangling jauntily at mid-sternum, with creative souls customizing their own brightly colored lanyards that tell the world, "I'm not a corporate drone, I'm not! I'm not!"
     Not everyone is 100 pounds overweight, yet, and the pre-obese set is hitting the boulevards in tight polyester shirts, untucked and matched with sandals and over-the-shoulder rice planter's bags for the popular "Saigon 1975" look.
     With June upon us, men of all sizes are leaving their suitcoats at home, creating a dramatic Q-Tip effect for the narrow-shouldered, while the necktie-sans-jacket ensemble boldly states: "I won't be in this cubicle forever!"
     Dark pinstripes aren't just for British bankers anymore. Pinstriped navy suit pants are being worn with clashing broadly striped shirts of brown, purple and green, and not just by those who dress in the dark.
     Meanwhile, the entire concept of fashion, if not civil society, is being challenged by beefy young technocrats showing off the mandala tattoos on their swollen sausage calves by wearing big-pocketed cargo shorts and Cubs T-shirts.
     So whether your look is elfin Lord-of-the-Rings refugee in a child's hooded sweatshirt and neon Crocs, or hip hippo proudly clearing the sidewalk with your blend of plaids, stripes and floral prints, spring is here, time to let it hang out and celebrate the glory that is you!

SOMETIMES YOU JUST GOTTA KNOW

     There it was. A small advertisement in the Reader: "Myopic Fine Books" at 1564 N. Milwaukee.
     It stopped me cold.
     "Myopic?"
     Doesn't that mean "shortsighted?" "Shortsighted Books"?
     With a sigh, I reached for my Oxford American.
     "my-o-pi-a — n. nearsightedness; lack of imagination, foresight, or intellectual insight. . . . my-op-ic adj."
     I dialed the store's phone number.
     "It's shrouded in mystery," said store manager Catherine Behan.
     There was a pause. I thought there'd be more, but there wasn't. That was it.
     "Shrouded in mystery — it really is," she continued. "There's different theories, if you read too much. . . ."
     The store is 16 years old. Behan has worked there for six years and no, she doesn't know if she's related to the Irish playwright either ("I'm not really much help, am I?" she said).
     "The logo is a big, huge occult-looking eyeball," she said. "So maybe that has something to do with it."
     Another why-don't-you-hang-up-now? silence, which I filled with questions.
     She said the owner, Joseph Judd, was not available to elaborate.
     "He's farming," she explained. On Mars, apparently, or some place beyond the reach of modern communications.
     "Just say, 'It's shrouded in mystery.' That's the best answer," she persisted.
     I don't argue much, but I argued here. "Shrouded in mystery" isn't the best answer for my curious readers.
     She laughed an I-don't-care laugh.
     So there you have it: It's a mystery. Some things are mysteries. The Easter Island statues. The Loch Ness monster. Myopic Books.

TAKE GOOD CARE OF MY BABIES

     It's one of those crimes you feel embarrassed even reporting to the cops — two 70-pound planters, stolen off the porch of Jeffrey Smith's home in East Ravenswood during the small hours of Memorial Day.
     It isn't as if the police are going to drop everything and start pounding on doors.
     But the loss of the planters rankled Smith, and he printed up this sign, both to tweak the conscience of the thief and to see after the well-being of his purloined plants. Who knows? It just might work.
     

      Russia is much in the news, eager once again to lock horns with the United States. Which means it's time to recall Calvin Trillin's timeless assessment:

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

      I have read about those Russian tractor factories where vodka-sodden workers fulfill their monthly quota in a frantic last-minute push that can succeed only if they attach the transmission with Scotch tape. So why have I always taken it for granted that those goofballs would be so good at annihilating continents?

— Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 1, 2007