Nothing to see

 

    
      My granddaughter lives within walking distance of the White House, and Monday we all took a break from cooing over her to stroll our little lozenge of concentrated cuteness over to eyeball the place for the first time since the East Wing was torn off.

      You can't see anything. Which itself is odd, because typically this administration is too arrogant and dumb to be ashamed of the bad it's doing. In truth, the careful concealment was more worrisome than any glimpse of ripped up architecture. Because it is a reminder that, as awful as what we know of the current administration certainly is, imagine what is going on out of sight. Not just the self-dealing, the corrupt practices — those are also pretty plain, though there must be more and worse that will someday be revealed. 

     Beyond that, think about those windowless ICE detention facilities. We see how ICE behaves in public, with upstanding members of the public whose only crime is exercising their Constitutional rights. What is going on in darkness, with zero oversight nor accountability? When the facts come out — and they always do — it'll make the recent tempest over abrupt removal of part of the people's house seem silly. It isn't a matter of speculation, but a certainty. Anyone wondering whether the faceless thugs operating outside the law are behaving themselves in private is an idiot.
    It was very sad to see the White House. Usually I thrill to consider the greatness that once resided here. Now it's hard to think beyond the evil therein, the excrescence occupying it, tearing it apart, and our country too. 
   At least we can still speak out. Free speech hasn't been cast as obstruction of justice, yet, though ICE is halfway there, hassling Americans for taking videos in a Sam's Club parking lot. There were protestors in LaFayette Park. They seemed to be having fun, and I thought I'd amplify their messages in my own small way. 

Frosty mug

   
     You know what made car alarms so annoying? They never stopped. They went on and on and on and on and on. And on. And on and on and on and...
     You get it. Plus, inevitably there wasn't anyone actually breaking into the car that was shrieking in front of your apartment in the middle of the night.
     Which makes the annoyance of car alarms different from the present situation in our country, where indeed a criminal is right now trying to steal our country, abusing peaceful residents one day, defacing public monuments the next, all the while planning to corrupt our election system so he and his cronies can never be removed from power no matter how unpopular they become. The danger is very immediate and real.
     So no false alarms here. Constant warning, as loud as possible, is justified, maybe even essential.
     But also deadening. Soul-sucking. So the strategy at EGD is to occasionally turn our gaze away from the horrific shit show in Washington — and increasingly around the country — and regard something that doesn't suck.
     Such as this frosty mug of A & W root beer I was served earlier this month in Weston, Michigan. I hadn't eaten at an A & W in 20 years, if not more, if ever. But we were driving my brother's hot new Audi Q6 — an all-electric SUV, it seemed a challenge to get it to Ontonagon without ending up on the side of the road. And was. Planning was required.
     So we were making one of three pitstops required to make the seven hour drive, timed for an early lunch, and walked over to this A & W. Where I ordered a double cheeseburger and a diet — thank you Mr. Diabetes! — root beer.
     "Do you want that in a frosty mug?" the clerk asked.
     I was taken aback — a frosty glass mug? In a fast food joint? it's as if I spied a worker seated next to the deep fryer, churning butter.
     "Hell yes!" I said, or words to that effect, and she produces from a cold case a big, heavy, indeed frosty glass mug.
     The sugarless root beer was quite good, as was the cheeseburger — I had a hunch that A & W fare wouldn't be the queasy, why-did-I-put-that-in-my-mouth? offal found at McDonald's. After we ate, when I went to deposit my garbage at the can by the door, I placed my mug on a tray, along with all the other used mugs, and marveled at this nod to tradition, which required an expenditure of time, effort, much mug washing, and no doubt considerable breakage. I thought maybe A & W Restaurants were family-owned; they're not. But they are the only major restaurant chain that is franchisee-owned, meaning someone closer to the customers decided to go to the effort to keep the frosty mug tradition alive.
     It's worth it. As was the typically glorious weekend at Ontonagon, complete with cigars, sauna, tomahawk steak, conversation, lake swimming, and the largest beach bonfire ever constructed by mankind, in my estimation. On the way back, we stopped in Weston again, topped up the battery, and hit the A & W, where I ordered exactly the same thing: double cheeseburger, frosty mug of diet root beer. It was still good.
     Does the persistence of the A & W frosty glass mug in the annus horribilis of 2025 counterbalance the destruction of democracy, the erosion of freedom, the encouragement of the cruel and the dampening of hopes of any of this ending anytime soon, if at all? No. Not in the slightest. But it's not nothing, and at this point I'll take any glimmer I can get. America may not be great, anymore, but it is still good, at certain times and in certain places.

Erie Canal, the ditch that made Chicago great, marks its 200th birthday

 

     The Erie Canal is one of those historical topics that traditionally make eyes roll up. It's so pre-industrial, and mule-centric. But as a student of the origins of Chicago, I knew that there is a fascinating tale there, one not only key to the development of the city, but also important today in this time of rapid technological change. I was so certain that last November, when we drove to Cooperstown for Thanksgiving, I detoured 45 minutes to Lockport, New York, to eyeball the thing, and take the above photograph. I'm glad that the paper recognized that I'd found something worthwhile, and splashed the story across the front page, and hope you agree.

     What was the most significant event in the history of Chicago?
     The Great Chicago Fire? Wrong. The 1893 World's Fair? Wrong. The Cubs winning the World Series in 2016? Tempting ... but no.
     Those don't count. Because Chicago was already a dynamic city when they occurred. What happened to create a major metropolis here in the first place?
     Time's up! The most important thing to ever happen in the history of Chicago — for starters, it's the reason Chicago is not a city in Wisconsin — isn't well known here because it didn't happen here, but 500 miles east, exactly 200 years ago Sunday: the opening of the Erie Canal, a 363-mile waterway, 40 feet across and four feet deep, from Albany, on the Hudson River, west to Buffalo on the northeast tip of Lake Erie.  

     The opening was announced by a cannon firing in Buffalo at 9 a.m. Oct. 26, 1825, with the news echoed across the state, all the way to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, by guns placed within earshot of each other.
     As that cannonade reverberated, kicking off eight days of celebration, Chicago was a swampy nowhere, a log stockade fort and, maybe, 100 residents. St. Louis, "the Rome of the West," had 100 times the population. There were more enslaved miners digging for lead in Galena than there were residents of Chicago.
     So how did the Erie Canal push Chicago to the forefront?
     The canal meant a ship could sail across the Atlantic Ocean, pass New York City, travel 150 miles up the Hudson and transfer cargo to flatboats at Albany. Those boats would transverse the state via canal, load goods and passengers back onto schooners at Buffalo to range across Lake Erie, up the Detroit River, across Lake St. Clair and the St. Clair River, up Lake Huron following the contours of Michigan, through the Straits of Mackinac down choppy Lake Michigan, to be deposited on its southernmost point, at Chicago, which on an 1825 French map in the Newberry Library was the name of the portage where Native-Americans carried their canoes from the Chicago to the Des Plaines rivers.
     If that sounds arduous, it was easy compared to the previous system — ox cart — unchanged since ancient Greece. Considered an engineering marvel on par with the pyramids, the Erie Canal cut shipping costs by 90%.
     Not everyone got it. President Thomas Jefferson, in a rare moment of short-sightedness, withheld federal funds, calling the canal idea "a little short of madness." New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton made it his personal project. Work on the canal began July 4, 1817, three days after Clinton took office.
     Some called it "Clinton's folly." Others immediately saw the canal's implications, including Nathaniel Pope, the Illinois territory's delegate to the House of Representatives.
     The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the northern border of Illinois as a continuation of Indiana's northern border, cutting Illinois off from access to Lake Michigan.
     Pope pressed Congress, already rattled by storms that would lead to the Civil War, arguing that being connected to the Great Lakes and the East, via the nascent Erie Canal, would tie Illinois to the Union.
     Without lake access, Illinois's proximity to the Mississippi might draw it into the camp of the restive South. Congress agreed and pushed the state's border 60 miles north.
     That's why Chicago is in Illinois rather than Wisconsin. What got it going as a city was the prospect of the goods of the world landing at the sand bar blocking the mouth of the Chicago River. Where would they go from there? What would be loaded for the return trip? The soldiers at Fort Dearborn got busy excavating the mouth of the river, while the federal government began developing the port of Chicago.
     Meanwhile, a dream that began when Joliet and Marquette visited Native Americans here in 1673 — a canal leading to the Mississippi — was put into motion: The Des Plaines River wasn't good for much beyond canoe traffic. But If a canal could be dug from the Chicago River, 96 miles south to the Illinois River at LaSalle. Then boats could continue into the Mississippi and down to New Orleans. The Erie Canal dropped Europe on Chicago's doorstep; the I & M Canal would invite South America, too.
     Such A canal cost money. had to be paid for. There was one readily available resource here: land. Chicago was surveyed and platted up so lots could be sold to finance a canal, plus land along the canal route.
      If you look at the original James Thompson Chicago map of August 1830, you'll recognize Loop streets — Wells, La Salle, Clark. And west of the river are two street names that hint why this is being done: Clinton, for the Erie-building governor of New York, and Canal, which kind of gives the game away.

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Guest voice — Little Village "America is the promised land"

     Longtime reader Ephrain Silva has been keeping me posted about developments in his Little Village neighborhood. I asked him if he wanted to write something for the blog, and he submitted this:

      It was nice to get out and about today...cool and crisp and the leaves and all of that stuff. I did manage to walk a stretch of 26th between Kedzie and Pulaski. In a normal place and time, it would have been jam-packed with all types of people. But this is no longer a normal time nor place. I kept expecting to see the Trump storm troopers coming through like bats out of hell...Bovino riding high with his Kevlar helmet. But not today. They are probably busy terrorizing some other neighborhood. And in America under Trump terror sells...and it sells well.

     I expected to hear a lot of anger out there and yes it there alright...there is more than enough hate, anger and fear out here. It shouts out mostly under bated breath is the feeling I get. I think most of the folks who are under the scope out here though have different sort of feeling. I think they feel betrayed and sad. They aren't stupid or ignorant as the Administration portrays them. They knew when they came here by whatever means that they were risking it all for one shot at the dream. They knew they would be marked and possibly hunted someday. Sadly that day has come. But they also put down roots and worked their asses off. They raised their families, paid their taxes, bought homes and through it all kept believing in the promise of America. America may have turned its back on them.... But I do not feel that they have turned their backs on it. They agree that criminals should be expelled and they too want safer neighborhoods and to not feel like prisoners in their own communities because of crime. No different than anyone else.
      The larger issue I believe is the terror. The terror emanating from far away....in DC and in the halls Congress and everywhere else in this land that feels it okay to eat away at communities they feel are less than themselves. They were fed a steady meal of bullshit, and they ate it all up. Then they gave the keys to the kingdom to these folks with the badges and the masks and the guns and said make America great again. We have always been and maybe we are destined to always be a great experiment. A place where everyone has a chance to be what they can make of themselves and to dare to believe that they can make a better life here than where fate set their feet the day they were born.
      I do not know if we will survive this presidency as one nation. I do not know if the terror on these streets and in many other communities is making America great again. But I do know that in the hearts of those to whom this terror is directed, no amount of pressure is going to stop them from believing that America is the promised land for them and they will continue to resist, to work, to live as best they can.

Flashback 2007: Humor campaign — Politician banking on funny-sounding last name

Clown, by Charles DeForest Fredricks (Met)

    No column in the paper today — my big Erie Canal celebration was moved to Sunday (and yes, I know, your eyes roll up at just the thought of the Erie Canal. Mine did too. But read it; you'll be surprised).

    Cruising around old White House columns — I've visited a few times — I found this, and couldn't help be drawn in by my uproarious, boy-filled house.  I'm slightly amazed I got that wife's name in the newspaper — we were a more freewheelin' place at the time. As was I. Given the gravity of today, and my own fade into senescence, I doubt I could reproduce the spark of this piece. 

     Jay Footlik didn't win, needless to say, and had a surprising second act. Lately he is a lobbyist for Qatar. As such — geez — he is alleged to be a bagman in Qatargate, one of the countless scandals to plague Benjamin Netanyahu's regime, where his advisors are accused of being in the employ of the desert monarchy. A warrant is out for Footlik's arrest in Israel.

      And the question I concocted to pose to Control's "Ask the Experts" column is the same question I posed to myself, in different terms, this morning and just about every morning, until I settle down to the work of the day. So points for consistency.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     My family lives in a house of laughter — raucous, loud, echoing laughter, often at the expense of others. I could put on a pouty face, and solemnly pretend I'm sorry about that, but nobody else seems to be apologizing for themselves nowadays, so I'll just present being mean as a handicap and dare anybody to cast aspersions upon my disability.
     I do, however, feel a slight twinge at how my world view has infected my loved ones. Just this morning, my wife, a sweet young woman when I met her, walked into my office.
     "Look at this," she said with a guffaw, shoving a large blue brochure into my hands. " 'Jay Footlik for Congress.' Couldn't he have taken his wife's name?"
     "You mean Jill Asswype?" I said smirking. "I can try to find out."
     The good news is that his campaign acknowledges the oddness of his name -- among the several possible campaign slogans posted on his Web site is: "Jay Footlik: Funny name, serious experience."
     The Buffalo Grove resident was special assistant to President Bill Clinton and now is a security consultant trying to unseat Mark Kirk in the 10th Congressional District.
     "This is probably the best chance to get him," said Footlik, 42, who feels Kirk is vulnerable for his abrupt personality and his fawning support of the folly in Iraq.
     "He's a rubber stamp for this president," Footlik said.
     Being the sort of guy I am, I had to ask Footlik about his name.
     "It makes you tough as a kid," he said. "My father left when I was 4, so I never had any real connection on the Footlik side of the family until I got in the White House and, lo and behold, a lot of Footliks came out of the woodwork . . ."
     "As they tend to do when you get into the White House," I said, unable to stop myself.
     His Brazilian-born wife had the more euphonic maiden name of Grace Mozes -- why not just take her name, as my wife suggested. People do that.
     "She would have preferred it," he said, tactfully.
     Of course, Footlik's odd name also highlights a quality that Kirk lacks: humor.
     "The more people make fun of Jay's name, the more name recognition we get," said campaign manager Simon Behrmann, pointing out that others with funny names enter the political fray, such as John Manlove in Texas.
     "Or look at Barack Obama," he said. "It didn't hurt him."

HOT, DIRTY, FROTHY NIGHTMARE

     I can be like one of those creepy guys you meet at a party who shakes your hand then doesn't let go.
     Nancy J. Bartels of Itasca wrote a perfectly pleasant note, mentioning in passing that she is managing editor of Control, "a small B2B publication for process control engineers."
     Say no more! Would you, I asked, mind sending a few copies? As the former editor of the newsletter for Castle Metals in Franklin Park, I have a lingering affection for industrial publications. There's nothing like a good trade magazine to put dirt under your fingernails -- figurative dirt, I mean.
     Soon the September and October issues of Control were in my hands.
     The magazine is a tad too well-designed for my taste, with a sleek nameplate and nice layouts — I prefer my technology a little retro — but there were the requisite articles on "Distillation Control and Optimization" and "Measuring Flow of Gas-Entrained Liquids."
     The advertisements — remember, this industry measures stuff inside factories — are also a delight. Phoenix Contact boasts both "flexible expandability" and "hot-swappability" (and really, isn't that what guys in their 40s are looking for?). Magnetrol tosses a chummy arm around our shoulders and asks, "Torque Tube Displacer Problems?" (Is it that obvious? My torque tube displacer just isn't its old self anymore . . .)
     Then there is "Ask the Experts," a column "moderated by noted process control authority Bela Liptak."
     Anyone who claims that sharp writing can't be found in business publications didn't read the question from William Love of Kredit Automation in Liptak's October column headlined "Difficult Level Measurements."
     "We have a large tank in which sodium hydroxide is mixed into water and the high pH (>13.5) caustic mixture is heated to 200 degrees F. and continuously agitated and recirculated . . ." Love writes. "The fluid in the tank is a hot, dirty, frothy, corrosive nightmare. It is hard to measure level in there, and we have destroyed several types of sensors."
     Liptak's answer boils down to using a diaphragm to keep the liquid off the sensors, using its mass to gauge its level.
     I've been trying to think of what kind of tough calibration question I could pose to Bela Liptak:
     "I'm trying to measure a 47-year-old container under severe pressure, a roiling mixture of acid thoughts and base instincts, sometimes agitated and sometimes calm. My problem is that I'm not sure whether to calibrate it against smaller containers — in that case, it seems pretty full — or contrast my measurements to fuller, more placid containers, by whose measure it seems almost empty."

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     I'm going to get in trouble for printing this joke — even worse, because I came up with it — but it's a little late to start getting squeamish.
     Blame Elie Wiesel. He was in town a few weeks ago, speaking at a luncheon for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and he mentioned that the present political situation worries him. "I'm a frightened Jew," he said, which, considering he lived through Auschwitz, is saying a lot.
     They give you a ton of materials at these things and, preparing to pitch them a few days later, I
noticed a card with the slogan "NEVER AGAIN!" And hence the joke, which I apologize for in advance.
     Times are always perilous for Jews, and it can be difficult to judge whether a particular moment is unusually worrisome, or merely offers the standard danger. Though I did notice that the Anti-Defamation League has quietly dropped its "Never Again" slogan and is now using, "Not Anytime Soon."

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 31, 2007

Not secure

     Sometimes, the small things get to you in a way the big things don't.
     It isn't that tearing off the East Wing of the White House to install a grotesquely huge ballroom that 44 presidents managed to live without is worse than, oh, a crusade against immigrants sending masked thugs into cities to kidnap workers off the street, or squashing the free press, or murdering people at sea, or demonizing LBGTQ Americans, or corrupting the justice department, or extorting money from the government, or accepting bribes from foreign governments, or undermining of women's rights, voting rights, science, health care, higher education and the general destruction of the federal government as a tool for helping people.
     To name a few.
     That latter part is worse. Far worse. And yet. Seeing the rendition of the huge honking Versailles of a ballroom he is erecting hurt in a new way. The surprise, the suddenness of it — an airy plan one day bruited by a chronic liar who sometimes follows through, usually doesn't. Then backhoes ripping out the walls. It's so symbolic of what is happening all around us. A hundred novelists couldn't dream it up. Ripping apart the White House. It would be too obvious, too crude. Too wrong. It would look trite in fiction. 

     But it's not fiction. It's real. Another impossible to imagine development that, in retrospect, we should have seen coming. What made us think he would limit himself to figurative destruction of the edifices of democracy. Of course this lurch into the literal. 

      Outrage was both on point and pointless.
     "It's not his house," Hillary Clinton said on X, summing the situation up perfectly. "It's your house. And he's destroying it."
     Got that right. Maybe the creeping terror is because the White House is still exactly that. A house. A residence where people live. Like all homes, it's supposed to be secure. Safe from vandalism and the whim of tyrants who temporarily — or not so temporarily — dwell there. 

     But it isn't safe. None of us are. Not anymore. We're supposed to be secure. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be secure in our houses. If the People's House is not secure — if Trump can destroy it at will, right before our eyes — then whose home can't he destroy?

Tattooing inks rich Chicago history

 

     Large portraits of tattoo icons Tatts Thomas and Ralph Johnstone watch over Nick Colella as he works.
     "Both of those guys tattooed on the 400 block of South State Street where the Harold Washington Library is," said Colella, owner of Great Lakes Tattoo on Grand Avenue.
     Tattoos go way back. The oldest known tattoos are on Ötzi the Iceman, a body preserved in the Alps for over 5,000 years. Tattooing was common in ancient Egypt and is found on mummies, mostly women, who often etched fertility signs onto their bodies.
     Chicago is part of that history.
     "Chicago plays a vital role in tattooing in the country," Colella said. "That area of State Street, you had all the sailors come from Great Lakes Naval Base. That's why this place is called Great Lakes Tattoo. You had this naval training base here where all these sailors in wartime came to train, then went down to State Street to see girls and get tattoos. All the arcades had tattooers. All the burlesque shows had tattooers. This stuff on the walls is all from those arcades."
     The walls of Great Lakes Tattoo are jammed with framed selections of classic art: swooping eagles and beribboned daggers, grinning skulls and flaming hearts. Like any fashion, tattooing goes through phases. Polynesian tribal tattoos were popular in the 1990s, then strands of barbed wire on the upper arm.
     But the snarling panthers and cheesecake ladies are always in style.
     "That's pretty much what I do: traditional American tattooing," Colella said. "That's what Danni's doing: repainting in the same tradition they repainted 80 years ago."
     Danni Nievera, at the next stall — 10 artists work at Great Lakes — carefully dabbed red onto a dragon on a sheet of paper.
     "I'm just using gouache, adding color," she said.
     I was not there to get tattooed — I have a hard enough time picking out a new pair of glasses — but to visit World Tattoo Gallery, a small exhibit space downstairs, and see a show of Tony Fitzpatrick's colorful paintings. Tony was heavily tattooed himself, and his art was influenced by tattoo art. Popping in, eyeballing his pictures, then leaving seemed a lost opportunity. So I asked to talk about tattooing while there.
     Besides aesthetics, the old designs carry the spirit of their originators.
     "I like tattooing off these old designs because that's what keeps those guys alive," Colella said. "That's what the history of it is. That's the tradition of it. I'm doing their designs in the current manner with better tools and nicer inks."
     What does Nievera, 30, like about tattooing?

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Danni Nievera