You say "po-tay-toe," I say "po-tah-toe"

   The freedom and immediacy of the web are wonderful. But there is a tradeoff.  Tossing something online now means that it doesn't have to punch its way up through a substrata of editors before it reaches daylight. Good for speed, bad for accuracy.
    Until it comes time to fix mistakes — then that speed is appreciated. No printing little "Errata" sheets and tucking them inside the cover. Just hop back online, boom, it's fixed.
    Otherwise, preparation time is accuracy's friend, generally.
    Then again, what is accuracy?
    Of the hundreds of comments this blog has gotten in its first two weeks, only one gave me a chill.
    "Shouldn't it be 'every goddamned day?'" wrote my longtime pal, Jimmy Seidita.
     "Holy crap!" thought I. "Goddamned," with an "-ed" at the end.
     The first impulse was automatic denial. No, of course it shouldn't be that. Definitely not. It's "every goddamn day." That's the blog's name.  
     And I wouldn't have named the blog in error.
     Would I?
     Next bargaining. I said, "Every goddamned day" aloud.
     It sounded ... appropriate. Maybe ... even ... good.
     To the dictionary I fled, like a child who fell rushing to embrace his mother's knees. Help me help me.
     The New Oxford American Dictionary -- my wordhoard of choice, always close at hand at the newspaper office (at home, I use the two volume New Shorter Oxford, which forces the extra step of figuring out whether the word in question is between A and M, and thus in the first volume, or N to Z, and so ... you see where this is going, yes? ... in the second. A challenge I invariably surmount—I went to college— but it does introduce a moment's pause).
     And to "goddamn (also goddam or goddamned) -adj., adv & n. informal used for emphasis, esp. to express anger or frustration [as an adj] we're sick of this goddamn weather..."
     Stop right there. Whew. Problem solved. And thank merciful God. To be honest, flipping through the book, the grim scenario of Jimmy being correct was already unspooling in my mind. I would either have to change the name of the blog — sheesh — or spend the next however-long I keep this up manfully trying to ignore the fact that I had built my castle upon sand, and created a blog that was named in grammatical error.
     So in answer to your question, Jimmy. While it could be "every goddamned day," it not only shouldn't be, but "goddamn" is the preferred usage, with "goddamned" tagging along as an alternative possibility.
     So I'm right. Actually, we're both right — your usage is fine, too. Though mine is a little righter. Or at least it came first.
     Double whew. Win-win.
     I love when that happens.
     This is a version of one of the more common stumbling blocks in language — and faith, and philosophy, and just about everything else, now that I think of it. What I call the "Two Definitions Problem." People are familiar with one definition of a word, or a faith, or a philosophy, and they see another person using that word, or that faith, or philosophy in a different way and assume that because it's different than what they understand it to be, it's therefore wrong. When in fact it isn't wrong; it's just different. Words can have two, sometimes different, sometimes even contradictory, meanings. Or more.  Anyway Jimmy, glad you asked, glad we could clear this up, and even gladder that the chips fell in my direction. This makes up for the time I thought "moral turpitude" was a praiseworthy thing.

Measuring the Metra Mess

 
     This is one of those start-one-place-and-end-up-somewhere-completely-different kind of columns, beginning with a dollop of fractal theory, then commenting on the conflict between speed and significance in news, and, finally, wading into the Metra brouhaha, almost as an afterthought, which it was — I got the first two subjects out of the way and had a little room left at the end. Any of the three themes could easily have been teased out into an entire column. But people are busy, and want some bang for their buck, so I try to cram a lot in there and not just hobbyhorse on a single subject. I hope people enjoy skipping from one idea to the next, as opposed to being, oh, annoyed and confused.

     How long is the shoreline of Chicago? That’s a more complicated question than it sounds. If you eyeball it on an AAA map, using the distance key, it looks about 24 miles from Rogers Beach Park, at the far north, to Calumet Park, at far south.But the more accurate answer—as anyone who is mathematically savvy could tell you—is that when calculating the shore of Chicago, or any coast, the final length depends upon the unit of measurement you start out with.
     What does that mean? If you took a 10 yard piece of string and walked the beach, you’d get one answer. And if you took a foot long ruler, measuring every outcropping and inlet, you’d get another, bigger figure. And if you took a measuring stick an inch long, following every bump and notch along the sand, you’d get a third, even longer distance.
     None of them is “correct.” All depend on how finely you focus. Which has an echo with the news industry, as I was reminded Friday, when two concurrent events took place.
     First, I was talking to the governor’s press secretary about a story that should be published this week.

To read the rest of the column, go to:

Measuring the Metra Mess (This link is broken; apologies). 

Dante and Me

   
     Giovanni Boccaccio did not know Dante Alighieri personally. But their lifetimes overlapped; Boccaccio was eight when Dante died. Which makes the brief biography — the first of countless Dante biographies — by the author of the Decameron of great value. He was able to speak to people who actually knew Dante, and could discuss, at least generally, such otherwise lost personal details such as how Dante dressed ("in good clothes, of a fashion appropriate to his years") or how he walked ("his gait was grave and gentle").
      Boccaccio mentions Dante's dark complexion and, as if to back the claim up with documentary proof, unspools this anecdote which, since it neither praises Dante nor makes any grand philosophical point, has a whiff of truth to it:

It happened one day at Verona — when the fame of his works was already widely spread, and especially of that part of his Commedia which he calls the Inferno, and when he was known by many, both men and women — that, passing before a door where many women were sitting, one of them said softly to the others (but not so softly that she was not clearly heard by him and his companion), "Do you see the man who goes to hell, and returns when he pleases, and brings back news of those who are below?" To this one of the others responded naively, "Indeed, you must be speaking the truth. Don't you see how his beard is crisped and his complexion browned by the heat and smoke that is below?" Hearing these words said behind him, and knowing that they came from the women's simple belief, he was pleased, and passed on, smiling a little.

     I like that story because you would think that, being Dante Alighieri would be enough. That having written the greatest work of literature in the Western canon, one that would be continually read, republished, praised and argued over for the next 700 years would instill unshakable self-confidence in a man. That he would not also need to find satisfaction from the attention of random townsfolk encountered in the street.
      But obviously he did. That smile was of pleasure and, no doubt, relief. Dante was still human. As are we all.
     Which softens, a little, the shame of being burdened with a vanity that follows me around, quacking like a pull-toy duck.  If you're going to have an objectionable quality, it helps if it's a common one. Everybody wants to be noticed and appreciated; me, a little more than most.
    When I last appeared on the ABC 7 morning program, "Windy City Live," I was amazed — and gratified — at just how many Chicagoans saw the thing. I got more comments from friends, readers and strangers out-of-the-blue mentioning having seen me on the program than I get from a month's worth of columns.  Everyone must watch it.
    Which also explains why I leaped to agree when asked to appear on the show again — Monday morning, July 15, about 9 a.m. It's worth my catching a train an hour earlier than usual, hotfooting over to State Street, allowing make-up to be smeared all over my face, for the narcotic boost that being on TV — and being recognized as having been on TV — brings. It helps that the host, Ryan Chiaverini, does his homework, and asks interesting questions (co-host Val Warner was on vacation when I first went, but I assume I'll meet her Monday).
    It's nice to go out into the world and encounter readers, in person and electronically, and I've created a new page, at the right side of my blog — "Upcoming events" — so people can learn of pending TV and radio gigs, signings, speeches and the like. Unseemly vanity? Hell yes. But if Dante could succumb to that failing, then so can I.  Now as to whether I will begin cunningly crafting vicious slurs that will stick to my friends long after all other facts about them are lost to history — another habit of Dante's — well, let's just say, time will tell.

About the photographs

    "You better say something about that picture," a friend said, after I showed him the above at lunch, "or people are going to think it was Photoshopped."
      It wasn't. It wasn't even cropped. I don't know how to Photoshop and have never been inclined to learn -- that's the realm of advertising, not journalism. This photo was snapped, on a cell phone, on Monday, July 1 -- standing in the doorway of the Burnham Building at 160 N. LaSalle, where I ducked to keep the sun from spoiling the picture, on my way to lunch down the street at Petro's (try the pork chops, they're delicious). I wasn't going to mention the photographs on this blog at all, not even admit that I took them, though I have, all of them.
      First, they're not the point of the blog, in my mind. The posts are. As a writer, I'm of course biased toward words, and the pictures, while I hope they're nice, are supposed to encourage you to read the writing.
      At least that was my original thinking. Now I find taking photos is fun, keeping an eye peeled for images that might look good on the blog. An aspect of blogging that I hadn't anticipated.
      Still -- second -- laying credit to the photos suggests I think they are anything but amateur efforts, taken for the purpose of decoration.  And I don't.  One of the primary hazards of amateurism is falling in love with your own mediocre efforts, and giving them more weight than they deserve.  Since I have no idea what good photography is, I can't tell if the above is an intriguing image or a tired cliche. You'll have to be the judge of that.
      Third, photography is a sore subject where I work, at least to me. The newspaper laying off its entire photo staff leaves anyone who presumes to snap a photo afterward in an awkward position. Let's be clear. There is no replacement for professional photographers. They have the skills. They have the experience. They have the eye, the connections, the equipment. I'm just as upset as anybody else about what happened but, unlike the critics, I work there, so don't have the luxury of condemnation or mockery. I have to hope there's a larger purpose, that survival of the paper is at stake. And, frankly, on this blog it's a side issue, because this is unrelated to the newspaper. I'm taking these photos, not as a protest or statement, as my friend also suggested, but out of necessity, because I have no choice, and I'm trying to do a good job because I want them to be interesting -- I like patterns, juxtapositions, curious images. Readers also like pictures, I believe, they help the words go down, and I'm hoping to create a blog that readers like.  I would prefer to have an entire a team of professional photographers working for union wages at my disposal, just as I would love a union copy desk plucking out my frequent typos and misspellings. But I don't. This is a one-man show.
     Anyhow, all the photos you are going to see on this blog were taken by me during my peregrinations around town, except in clear instances where they weren't, such as the photo illustrating my story about fireworks, which was shot through the windshield of our Honda Odyssey in Battle Mountain, Nevada in 2009. Sometimes I'll reach a few years back for a picture that, I think, still works.  
      When I took the one above, I was drawn by the contrast between the hideous salmon and blue modernity of Helmut Jahn's horror show of a building, the Thompson Center, opened in 1985, with the classic Corinthian columns of Holabird & Roche's 1911 City Hall. Though now that I look at it, particularly compared with the photo I shot later from the same spot, showing the larger scene, so you'll know I didn't weld the images together electronically, I see this photo does illustrate something key to both photography and writing: the importance of framing, of presenting just part of reality. You often must trim away distractions and clutter in order to emphasize something dramatic or to underline a point, and so make the ordinary seem a little extraordinary.

Governor's office exploring whether it can fire Metra board

A savvy columnist doesn't expect his suggestions to echo through the chambers of power. But the flip line at the end of my Friday column -- linked to in the post below -- about how the governor should fire the entire Metra board did resonate somewhere. According to his press secretary Friday, Quinn's office is looking into it. See details on my first post on the Sun-Times blog:
 
Steinberg joins Sun-Times Voices blog

Addendum: within a few hours, Quinn's office decided that, alas, firing the Metra board is beyond the governor's powers, at least for now:

http://voices.suntimes.com/none/governor-cant-fire-metra-board-yet/

When politicians play with trains...

    Morning at the station.  Soon as Mr. Train shows up, we’ll be on our way.

    Sure, Metra has troubles. Who doesn't? Money woes. Management sunk in bad publicity hell. Some lines are chronically late. But not mine. My Milwaukee District North Line runs like clockwork, for the most part. 

     Not that I’m without complaint. The announcements, for starters.

     “Attention,” the generic male voice begins. “The next inbound train to Chicago is now arriving in your station.”

    Usually, a bit of a lie, that "now." What they really mean is, look far down the track, a train will hove into sight any moment. Not quite "now." But close enough.
     And that last part — “in your station.” I really hate that. For its superfluity. As if we might be wondering how other trains heading for other stations might be doing. For its fake chumminess. Like the cheerful greeting of a panhandler hitting you up for coins. “Hey chief, nice suit. Spare change?” A false familiarity, like those cheap custom-order children’s books peppered with a specific child’s name, always seeming to feature the same crude polka dotted character, a blend of polar bear and duck, expressing unqualified love for the recipient child. “Golly        Jacob  ,  I just am so glad to be your friend....”  Even when a child myself, I pitied children who owned those books, whose parents -- or, more likely, grandparents -- were vapid enough to buy them, who didn’t know enough to get Sendak and Seuss and books of quality. Who felt so happy to read their kids' name, over and over, they missed the essential fact that the books were crap. 
     "In your station." That's Metra's whole problem, in a nutshell. They think the riders are idiots.

      But we're not. We could accept an announcement that ended  “is now arriving.” Period. No need for "in your station." That's what they’d do in France. "Est maintenant arrivée." Enough and no more.
      It gets worse. After the meaningless back pat, the true mystery. “For your safety, please stand behind the yellow line until the train has come to a complete stop before boarding.”

    Really? Are we that dumb? We need to be told to wait until the train stops before trying to get on?

    “Another feller went under the wheels, Conductor Clem, climbing aboard a moving train.” Are people really that frantic to get to their joyless jobs downtown? Is this warning really necessary? 
      I suppose so. 

     “Don’t try to board until the doors open,” is shorter, but pushes the needle even further on the old people-are-idiots meter.  I would vote for something more positive —  “Please stand back and let departing passengers off before boarding.” Shorter, and would help avoid an unfortunate circumstance far more common than overeager commuters trying to scrabble aboard moving trains: incoming riders forming a tight knot around the doors, blocking those trying to get off. A little canned  manners lesson would have the effect of keeping people from flinging themselves under the train — you can’t grab a moving rail if you’re standing back — without raising the specter of dismemberment.

      Of course, the fine points of track announcements are of no concern to Metra honchos at the moment, as they try to climb out from the very deep hole they've dug for themselves. My column in the Sun-Times Friday:

     Metra outside counsel Joseph Gagliardo probably did not mean to summarize exactly the sort of cronyism that has plagued the railroad for years.

      But he did, and in a dozen simple words.

     “Elected officials don’t lose their First Amendment rights to talk to people,” he told State Rep. Deborah Mell (D-Chicago) and her House Mass Transit Committee at a meeting Thursday intended to call the Metra board and its very expensive former CEO, Alex Clifford, on the carpet.

     The elected official Gagliardo was referring to is Michael Madigan, Illinois’ all-powerful Speaker of the House, whose Chicago office was only steps away. And the talk in question was Madigan’s 2012 request that a friend of his working for Metra and — Gagliardo stressed — does a super job, perhaps was underpaid.

     “Speaker Madigan inquired about a raise for an employee,” said Gagliardo. “It’s not inappropriate for an elected official to inquire about a wage increase for somebody. It’s not based on politics . . . Mr. Clifford viewed the request as political.”

     Well, yeah, unless Mike Madigan is part of the ordinary salary review process at Metra, then it would seem that way. Gagliardo tried to simultaneously imply this was nothing unusual and also something Clifford should have reported to the board immediately.

To read the rest of the column, go to:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/21265677-452/steinberg-madigan-metra-call-not-political.html

Every goddamn day would like to access your life at any time

     As with any birth, the arrival of my new blog last week inspired old friends to share their enthusiasm, good wishes and suggestions. 
     One fellow columnist, discussing the various technical details of running and promoting a blog, recommended that I manage my Twitter account on something called HootSuite. The site saves you from tweeting continually -- something the conscientious blogger must do to grind his thoughts in the face of an indifferent public -- by scheduling tweets to be sent automatically.  Just set them up and they fire off at the appointed time. 
     That sounded like a plan, and I hurried to join. A few easy steps, though I paused when HootSuite asked me to sign off on the following request:

Hootsuite would like to access your public profile, friend list, email address, News Feed, relationships, relationship interests, birthday, notes, status updates, checkins, education history, events, groups, hometown, interests, current city, photos, religious and political views, videos, website, personal description, likes and your friends' relationships, relationship interests, birthdays, notes, status updates, checkins, education histories, events, groups, hometowns, interests, current websites, personal descriptions and likes. HootSuite would like to access your data at any time. 

      Golly. I see. Boilerplate written by a 12-year-old. Well. On the one hand: most of that information is sitting in plain sight on my Facebook page already, and any of my thousands of Facebook friends, busily mining honey in the subchambers of the Hive Intelligence, are free to look at it any time they like. So why begrudge this upstart company, which I expect to flawlessly provide me with advanced technological service—scheduling and analyzing my tweets—the right to do the same?
      Fair is fair. I certainly expect to get paid, this blog notwithstanding.
     And yet ... on the other hand ... perhaps it's just the bald stating of what they expect — no, demand— and right off the bat, too. It seems too much, too early in the relationship. Imagine if, on a first date, the person you have just met were to push a piece of paper across the table that reads:

Toots Swit would like to access your face, name, pen, phone number, time, companionship, opinions, jokes, meal, attention, personal history, interest, hope, sexual desire, hand, car, apartment, sofa, lips, neck, body, bed, erogenous zones, cigarettes, refrigerator, bathroom, inner thoughts, heart, friends, family, future children, earnings, savings, patience and geriatric care services. Toots Swit would like to access your entire life at any time.

     Who would sign such a document? Even though that may be what is happening, in essence. Obviously, HootSuite cannot draw people into a relationship blind, the way they are lured into romantic liaisons. Still, I initially fled HootSuite's demand, the way any date worth his or her salt would run out of the bar and leave Toots dangling that little legal request.
      How to understand our desire to share everything about ourselves with countless near random strangers with our simultaneous ability to seize up at particular requests? Are we that afraid  somebody is trying to see what we so obviously want to give?
     I have a theory—and it's only a theory, I'd be interested to hear what you make of it—that what really bugs us is the hard truth that nobody really cares about our political beliefs or our birthdays or our taste in restaurants. We're not important enough to monitor. The government isn't really paying any attention to us. 
     Which is what we crave: not sharing, but attention. When you look at the dream communities of our nostalgic past — Mayberry, Bedford Falls, Brigadoon — those were places where everybody knew everything about each other. (Remember "Cheers"? — "Sometimes you want to go, where everybody knows your naaaaaame...") That's the small town ideal. A place where a kid can't draw on the sidewalk with chalk without a passerby threatening to tell his mother.
     If we yearn for that lost Eden, then why get all worked up because some company wants to know our height and weight? What's really so threatening about that? And the answer is, because they don't really care about it. They don't care about us. They're like the village gossip, digging for the details of our lives, not out of real concern, but just to have some dirt to share with the other busybodies who don't really care either. We resent handing over information that means so much to us, the grist of our lives, to somebody for whom it only represents currency, and a handful of pennies at that.
     With this clearly in view, being of sound mind and body, I went to join HootSuite. A lot of tweets between here and where I need to be. I clicked "Okay" on their dizzyingly-detailed demand, giving them permission to pull open the drawers of my life and poke around inside.
     But like Hitler gobbling up lebensram, satisfying one demand only led to the next. As soon as I clicked "Okay," this popped up:

     HootSuite would like to post to your friends on your behalf. 

     What the hell could THAT mean? To my friends? On my behalf? The friends in my phone book — which HootSuite has already slipped out of my briefcase and has started thumbing through — will begin to get wheedling emails, supposedly from me: "Hey Bill, it's Neil here. I just got done using HOOTSUITE and, boy, oh boy, is it the greatest web site ever!!! I'm livin' in HOOTSUITE Heaven!!!!"
     That I cannot risk. It's bad enough to be sweet-talked into dropping my informational drawers in front of some attractive tech start-up. But I'll be damned if I'm going to pimp my friends for it too. I fled HootSuite like it was on fire.
     For now. It's only 2013. I'm sure, in a few years, these qualms will not only fail to bother people, they'll never even occur to anybody. Such concerns will seem quaint, inexplicable, the way we view a matron in 1910 who refused to have a telephone installed in her hallway because she could not bear the thought of suppertime being interrupted by persons to whom she has not been properly introduced. Our children will wonder why we made such a fuss over something as meaningless as privacy.