Tricked by a bug

   

     Not to give women any ideas ... but praying mantises do not always need a male in order to reproduce.
      Sure, they can do it the standard birds-and-bees way, with male praying mantises famously being eaten by the female after serving their purpose. And usually, they do. But females can also reproduce through parthenogenesis, laying eggs that are clones of herself, without needing to  bother with the annoyance of involving a male, and all the drama that entails.
     And yes, the female occasionally eats their special friend after copulation. This happens mostly in captivity though, where males have been seen continuing to mate even with their heads gone, which is also par for the course. Though the nymphs — young mantises — also eat each other, and mantises are so generally voracious that they inspired a rare bit of wordplay in the no-nonsense Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ends its entry for mantids (a variant they prefer to "mantis"): "Since all mantids are ferocious carnivores, 'preying' rather than 'praying' may better describe them.") Touche!
     I spied this fine specimen on our doorpost Wednesday morning.
     "Hello gorgeous," I said. "Where have you been all summer?"
     She hadn't been there the evening before — at nearly four inches long, I could hardly have missed her at eye level — but then praying mantises are crepuscular (coming out at twilight) and nocturnal. She probably showed up in the night. I was surprised to see her — it's been getting a little cold for such an ectothermic (drawing heat from the outside rather than generating it from within; I know people like that) creature.
     I admired how still she stood as I snapped her portrait — I assumed it was a female, who had just laid her eggs, in a protective egg case called an ootheca, a lovely word that seems to have a pair of eggs right there in the beginning, coined by 19th century science, turning to the Greek, of course, ōon meaning egg, and thēkē meaning container. (Ootheke is ovary in Greek; mantis is straight Greek, for "prophet," which enhances the praying part).
     It was only later, when I passed by our doorpost a second time, did I remember the iron fist that nature hides within the velvet glove of all that beauty. My mantis wasn't holding still; she was dead. 

     Or so I thought. I returned later in the morning, thinking I would collect the corpse and perhaps deposit it on a shelf in my office, as a wintertime companion. But she was gone. I looked on the ground, figuring she had fallen off. No mantis. Maybe a bird got her.

      Then I noticed her, a few inches down, head facing earthward. Front arms definitely wiggling with life. And I remembered that mantises — and there are nearly 2,000 kinds, the praying mantis is only the most familiar — are mimics, imitating flowers, leaves, stems, blades of grass. There are orchid mantises and stick mantises, dead leaf mantises and mantises that mimic ants.  They blend in. 

     I'd been fooled. By an animal with a brain the size of a mustard seed, one that can carry on a meaningful romantic life with its head bitten off. I smiled, admiringly, and wished her well as she carried on with her Wednesday, and I continued with mine.

Donald Trump: Every brag a blot.

My father's carving of Don Quixote, bought in Spain in the 1950s.

     Donald Trump was praising himself on social media the other day. No news there. Now if a day passed when he didn't puff himself — that would be something special. Otherwise, to even report the fact of our president prattling on about his own superlative self is like sharing  the bulletin that molecules are flitting through the air, or that water is rushing across the landscape, seeking its own level — it happens everywhere all the time, and to notice it is to state the obvious.
     Yet this week, regarding some droplet flung from his firehosing self-puffery, spattering more salve at the festering open wound that is his ego, I thought again of a line from Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman as, "Self-praise is self-debasement" mentioned in my 2017 examination of our then-new president through the lens of Don Quixote.
     But for some reason, this time I paused. Something wasn't quite right. There is a problem with that quote, particularly "self-debasement." A clunky word, not one you'd ever use. You'd never say, "I'm not that good at bowling — this isn't self-debasement; it's true."
     We can do better. 

     I wondered what the original was, and found it in Chapter XVI. Don Quixote is ruefully singing his own praises, pointing out, in Miguel Garci-Gomez's translation: "though self-praise is degrading, I must perforce sound my own sometimes, that is to say, when there is no one at hand to do it for me."

    Which makes Trump's constant upchuck of auto-flattery all the more puzzling, because it is so unnecessary. There is always someone at hand to do it for him; many someones. He's surrounded by a hallelujah chorus of lackeys, lickspittles and lapdogs — and those are just the L's — scrambling over each other to pay tribute like piglets fighting for position around a sow. He needn't bother. But bother he does. Because that echoing void where a soul might go demands to be fed, 24-7, and as an addiction expert once said, "It's hard to get enough of what doesn't work in the first place." I am often accused of hating the man but the bedrock truth is, I pity him. I can't imagine a worse punishment than just being who he is.
     "Self-praise is degrading" is an improvement on "self-praise is self-debasement." But we could still do better. Let's look at the original Spanish for clues: "Las propias alabanzas envilecen."
     "Propia" is own, as in your own self. "Alabanza" means praise, often in religious sense, as in worship. There is Alabanza Christian music, singing of the glories of God. So "Las propias alabanzas" means, literally, "The self-praise." We could flip it to "praising yourself," which sounds better.
     "Envilecen" is a verb, meaning to debase, or degrade.
     We could try, "praising yourself is shaming yourself." An improvement on the translation I used in 2017, "self-praise is self-debasement," though the doubled "yourself" grates as much as the doubled "self" did. Or spice it up even more with a bit of the vernacular: "singing your own praises is cutting your own throat"? Even better. 

     But we live in a time when language is sandblasted into an endless series of smooth bloops and bleeps, thoughts polished smooth like pebbles so we can continually slingshot them at one another through social media. It's often said of our president that every accusation is a confession, so why not build on that and observe that every brag is also a blot? "Every brag a blot." Now, that's a keeper.

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