Company with a punny name earns big payday

     

     ‘He that would pun, would pick a pocket,” Alexander Pope wrote nearly 300 years ago, and the taint of the disreputable clings to wordplay as strongly now as it did then.
     Particularly when it comes to business. Double entendres are the realm of hot dog stands (“The Wiener’s Circle”) hair salons (“Curl Up and Dye”) and dog groomers (“Pet-a-Cure”). There is inevitably a sense of tinyness, of someone’s flicker of a dream puffed into momentary life. Bad enough to pour your life savings and hard work into a yarn shop, but to name it “Ewe and Me Fiber Studio,” well, the heart breaks.     You would never expect a major company to name itself after a pun. “The U.S. government today placed an order for 22 of the new stealth fighters manufactured by Fly By Night Industries...” Even automobile companies — car names are a blizzard of numbers and letters and animal names and geographic terms, so many they seem to risk draining the dictionary of nouns — draw the line at puns. There is no Chevy Rollon, no Ford Runwell. Nobody would buy a Honda Mushroom van. (Get it, “much room.” No? You’re a tough audience ...)
     Thus an extra unsettling dimension was added to the news that not only is everybody’s favorite way to show off lunch and brag about grandkids — Facebook — spending $19 billion on a text messaging application, but the company behind the application is called WhatsApp.
     WhatsApp? Not much, whatsapp with you?
     My immediate reaction - "That's billion? With a B?"— underplays the sense of dislocation the news brought. Like you, I had never even heard of WhatsApp, nevermind used it. While there is no question a sense of playfulness in the whole computer world — Apple Computer got its name because Steve Jobs was on a fruit cleanse and had just visited an orchard — the fact is, people are spending an unfathomable amount of money on a company with a name that sounds like an Abbott & Costello comedy bit.
     WhatsApp was founded in 2009 in Mountain View, Calif., by two former Yahoo executives, Jan Koun and Brian Acton. ("Yahoo" isn't exactly "International Business Machine" either, but at least it isn't a pun). It has 55 employees, which means Facebook is spending a third of a billion dollars per WhatsApp employee, the idea being by absorbing this service, which is like Twitter, it'll better hang onto its 1.2 billion users.
     Facebook would be smarter to send each user 10 bucks, as thanks for spending the time we do pouring our data into Facebook and keeping each other entertained. The Chicago Sun-Times pays me good money to air my thoughts and parse my likes on its website and in print. Facebook gets it for free in the increasingly strained and dubious notion that having a big hive of Facebook pals somehow reflects value back onto the newspaper. Obviously Facebook thinks WhatsApp brings something that makes up for its lack of that necessary apostrophe.
     Yes. During cataclysms, it's easier to focus on something small, manageable — the company name, the apostrophe — and not that Facebook, for its gizmo, just paid 76 times what Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post. The Smithsonian used to have a Hall of Journalism that made my profession seem like a Tom Clancy novel. Last time I visited, the Hall was gone, and what few artifacts didn't go into storage had been folded into a data processing exhibit. It was like going to the National Gallery and finding the John Singer Sargent portraits moved to an exhibit about the history of paint.
     Give them credit. A pun is its own marketing campaign. "It gives people the idea that we're lighthearted," said Krysten Fane, manager at the Barking Lot, which has two locations, in Chicago and Deerfield. "They hear it and they giggle. It helps us sit in their brain a little bit. It's great for advertising and repeat customers. It says, 'We take our job seriously but we love the dogs and know this is about letting dogs have fun.' "
     So the Barking Lot is a kennel? I asked.
     "Day care, grooming, training, all-natural products," she said. "All Your Dog Needs Under one Woof." Didn't see that coming.
     Actually, "Apple Computers" was, if not quite a pun, then a bit of a word puzzle.
     "It doesn't quite make sense," said Mike Markkula, Apple's first chairman. "So it forces your brain to dwell on it. Apples and computers, that doesn't go together! So it helped us grow brand awareness."
     In addition, Steve Jobs once said, it put Apple ahead of Atari in the phone book.
     So maybe WhatsApp has a future. And if smartphones come with a port to facilitate its use, they can call it the WhatsApp Dock.

Rahm Emanuel: the nature of the beast

     When Esquire phoned at the end of October and asked me to profile Rahm Emanuel, I was both excited and slightly dubious. The last article they asked me to do never saw the light of day, and I told the mayor that we might go through the whole process and end up with nothing in the magazine. But he was game, and it wasn't like I could say No. It's Esquire. I spent four days with the mayor, and while I didn't feel like I exactly saw a candid slice of his working life—we spent a lot of time doing fuzzy activities such as reading to kindergarten classes and cutting ribbons at tot lots— I got to know him a little, to the degree that he can be known.  It was a ton of work -- a very busy November, December and part of January — but it ended up nine full pages in the magazine. I learned much, got a chance to speak with people — David Axelrod, Garry McCarthy, Karen Lewis — I hadn't spoken with in depth before, and am satisfied with how it turned out. A few things didn't end up in the article that I wish were there — such as a fleeting encounter with the ever charmless Rich Daley — but I suppose those will find their way into print eventually.

     Sister Rosemary Connelly was not pleased with the mayor of Chicago. The head of Misericordia, a beloved home to 600 people with Down syndrome and other disabilities, the eighty-three-year-old nun might not at first glance seem to be in a position to carry much influence over city politics. But this is Chicago, and Misericordia offers gold-plated care in a state notorious for its nightmarish residential institutions. The children and siblings of the powerful—politicians, TV anchors, lawyers, developers—are cared for there, and an A-list of Chicago’s leadership arrives on command, on bended knee and with an open checkbook.

     It was 2011, and the City of Chicago had to bridge a massive budget deficit. Before he was even sworn into office, the mayor had announced that churches and social services would have to pay for the water from Lake Michigan like everybody else. With a stroke of the mayor’s pen, Misericordia’s water bill would go from zero to $350,000 a year. Sister Rosemary invited the mayor to speak to her fundraising breakfast. To his great credit, he showed up.

     In his benediction, Misericordia’s Father Jack Clair felt inspired to bring a visual aid, a glass of water, to hold up and say, “Thank you, God, for the gift of water.” Then he paused. “Oh,” he said, looking at the mayor, “it’s not a gift anymore.”

    At his turn to speak, the mayor returned fire. “I thought Jewish mothers had a corner on the market as it relates to guilt,” he said. The issue lingered, and two years later, when he appeared at a Special Olympics breakfast at the lush University Club, he spoke about the hard decisions that reality forces on leaders and about that time he made everybody pay for water, including Sister Rosemary, who was sitting in the audience. As soon as he finished speaking, he strode directly over to her and gave her a big hug. In a city known for political brawling, the mayor is a bastard’s bastard, profoundly profane and epically vindictive. But this was not a fight he relished. Give him a ward heeler or a senator or a president, no problem. But a nun?

     “You know what the mayor says about me?” she had told the table, minutes before, smiling beatifically, her pleasant, deeply lined face ringed with an angelic halo of white hair. “He says, ‘Sister, you scare the shit out of me.’

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Facebook checks your pants

     "Language is power,” the feminist British writer Angela Carter wrote, and it’s true. Words represent concepts that can shake our world. 

     This week a new word certainly shook mine. I was noodling around Facebook, encountered a term I wasn’t familiar with, found the definition, then hurried downstairs, where my wife was in the kitchen baking banana chocolate chip muffins.

     “I have an announcement!” I said, with well-practiced grandiosity. “One that I think will explain a lot that has gone on in our relationship over the years. I am coming out of the closet. I am . . . cisgendered. I am a proud cisgendered male.”

     She paused, mixing bowl in the crook of her arm, wooden spoon in hand, looked at me, her face placid. Then returned to mixing. She was not taking the bait. OK, OK, I told her, Facebook now gives its billion members not just the choice of familiar “male” and “female” genders to identify themselves as, but 50, count ’em, 50 alternatives, many I had never heard of — “agender” and “pangender” and “non-binary” — but could at least roughly figure out.

     Then there was “cisgender,” which made no sense at all, as it turned out. I checked the dictionary. Nothing. Then Wikipedia, which defines it as “where an individual’s experience of their own gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth.” In other words, someone who is born a boy, in possession of a penis and then cleaves to the realm of traditional maleness, such as it is.

     “My God,” I thought, “that’s . . . that’s me.”
     And let me tell you, it feels so good to get that out, to reveal my true self. Finally, a burden has been lifted. . . .
     Sorry. I can’t even have momentary fun aping the victim envy that ignorant people indulge in. Can’t wink at the theater of coming out without recognizing the widespread human tragedy that makes it necessary. That is: It’s easy to be the norm. With our frisson over gay marriage, with religious conservatives hot to portray our country as some sinkhole of anything-goes depravity, the fact is, most people who stray off the narrow path of the ordinary — blue trucks for boys, pink ribbons for girls — step off a cliff into a realm of woe. The usual stuff that we straights expect — say, go to school without torture — is up in the air.
     Homosexual men and lesbians have, after long struggle, finally established themselves being bona fide members of the human race, nearly, whose participation in regular human activities, such as getting married and raising families, should no longer be thwarted by the anxious sex-averse puritanical wasp’s nest that we call our society. Not everyone has gotten the message, however. Some still sit in the stands chanting for a fifth quarter, though the game is over and the rest of us are heading for the exits.
     Now the question is whether the transgender world, those who identify themselves along a spectrum of mind-twisting complexity as reflected in Facebook’s 50 terms, will be able to piggyback on the success of gays and slip through the door into acceptability that gays have jammed their foot in.
     The answer, at least based on Facebook’s action, seems to be a tentative yes. “Cisgender,” as far as I can tell, is a half-clever term cooked up so the opposite of “transgender” isn’t “normal.” And why not? The trans world is a far smaller sliver than the gay/lesbian world, and will no doubt feel the wrath of frustrated religious types looking for a group upon which to shower disapproval. We’ve already seen anti-bullying measures opposed on the insane grounds that kids being bullied are often transgender kids.
     As with many subcultures, the trans world places much emphasis on fine distinctions. So I phoned the contact listed by GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for “Transgender Media Inquiries” to make sure I’m not calling hellfire upon myself through some faux pas (noticing that they seem to violate their own guideline, “Transgender should be used as an adjective, not as a noun.” In that case, wouldn’t “Transgender Media Inquiries” describe inquiries from the transgender media? Which I assume doesn’t need GLAAD to help navigate this ever-shifting labyrinth).
    Back on Facebook, I tried to plug “Married” into gender — not technically a sex, true, but the term speaks to my condition. No go. Just as well. The idea that Facebook, a medium for showing off your dinner, your Caribbean rental and your kids, should suddenly grab at our collective crotch and demand we pick what team we’re batting for from a huge laundry list of proclivities — that seems a bridge too far. I struck the category from my page.

Technology wins

     Technology wins. You can complain about it. You can be unhappy about it, point with open-mouthed protest at whatever pleasant social dynamic seems to be melting away in the gentle glow of electronics. But it still wins. Nobody crosses the country in an ox cart anymore, which in one sense is a shame, because doing so was probably three to six of the most deeply-felt months a person could experience, between the deserts and the Comanche and the pitiless elements. Nothing bound people together like sharing an ox cart. Now we fly across the country in what, six hours? Not much time to get to know each other.
    Still, it's an improvement. A big improvement. We have lots of those, really. From remote door locks on your cars to security cameras. People cling to some vestigial fear about cameras, but where's the harm? They don't lie. They're always on. They catch crooks. We worry they're the overture in some Orwellian control state, but where's the evidence of that? Maybe it's coming, true, but if you look at the past, and the present, we don't need cameras to have a police state.
     Cell phones are an improvement. That sounds obvious, but I know a lot of people of my generation —the tail end of the Baby Boom — are not comfortable with the phones, or at least with the idea of them. We got 'em, in droves, but they worry us. We worry that we're always being distracted, that because of the phones, people are never really where they are, never notice who's around them, but are always off in some electronic world, playing Angry Birds or checking their stocks or tweeting their 32 followers.
     We're still getting used to them. Radio was cutting edge technology, too, once upon a time, and people fretted what it would do to society.
     You don't have to carry a phone. But most people do. That's their choice, right? I'm of the generation—the last generation, probably—who remembers when none of us had little pocket phone/computers. You know what? It wasn't an era of deep Bryonic feeling, high adventure and lives richly lived. You got lost more. You missed appointments. You looked out the window blankly, drew tic-tac-toe boards in the condensation on the glass.  People twiddled their thumbs. They read newspapers more. That was a good thing, in my view.  
     Technology wins because we adapt to it. We become different people than our great-grandparents were, with different attention spans, different expectations. Thirty years ago people using cell phones were jerks. Rich jerks. The phones were new and expensive, so the public consensus was anyone using one was a show-off, to be making a phone call in public like that.  Who does he think he is?  Now we pull them out almost as a reflex, the way a 4-year-old on his first day of nursery school will clutch a tattered strip of beloved blue blankie. They're safety. The communicative aspect is almost secondary. It isn't like we're waiting for the Madrid office to sign off on the big deal. It's a tic. The phone is something to do with your hands, a time-filling fumble. Like a cigarette only it doesn't give you cancer.
      That's good, right? Another improvement. If you were to explain it that way -- go back in time, tap one of the 48 percent of Americans who were smoking in 1965 and say, "In 50 years, half of all you smokers, instead of reaching for a cancer stick, will reach for the entire world of knowledge and communication at their fingertips in a device of startling complexity and power," most anyone would take that deal, would probably sign off on that, accept that development as an advancement, view the prospect with a pang of envy that they wouldn't be around to see it. 
     We are around to see it, and perhaps it's human nature to be underwhelmed by whatever actually happens. I'm glad I wasn't like that, glad that getting my first iPod make me proud to be a human being, to belong to the same race who created that device. And I still am, still delight that I can phone people from the train, listen to Mozart as I clomp around the city. And even given the tradeoffs—people whistle less, but then, they'll have all recorded music at their disposal any time of the day or night—it's a pretty good deal. That goes against the common wisdom, I know. We're supposed to be concerned about all this stuff, what it's doing to us, the idea that we might change, as if we were perfect to begin with and should have stopped developing at some point centuries ago. Stop the presses: we weren't perfect.. 
    Worrying about technology is an empty question., as you can see if you turn around and apply it to any technological development in the past. Was the telephone a good thing? It ended the practice of paying social visits. Were antibiotics a good thing? They ended the special world of sanitariums. You can debate any development—the bicycle, the automobile, television. They're all part of a process. Autos had bad effects, sure, but they also had good effects and, ultimately, they were what happened. Technology is a process, unfolding. There's no going back for a redo. We should give ourselves more credit. It isn't so much that technology wins, as we win, embracing the change that we want, that improves our lives, in the main. Technology wins because we make it win, even though we immediately doubt and second guess and worry about what we've just done. We ought to trust our own judgment a little more.

Young man with a suitcase

     A combination of things drew my attention to the young man hurrying past me one morning recently. That gray fedora, of course, not unknown but certainly not common, particularly in February. A sports jacket instead of a winter coat, despite the deep cold, the jacket being of what looked like velvet, of a rich blue, almost purple. The black gloves. And that large, old-fashioned suitcase with brass clasps. It seemed like it had something special in it: a ventriloquist's dummy, maybe. A magic act. A bear costume. 
     He was headed up Franklin Street. I followed.
     Years of reporting have dulled the sense of reserve found in most people. I'm trained to blunder up to strangers in the street and quiz them about their lives. They usually take it pretty well. I picked up speed and measured my approach. "You seem like an interesting person," was the first thing I thought to say, but that seemed, I don't know, too much like a pick-up line. No point in frightening people. "What's in the suitcase, bud?" Too intrusive. 
    Pondering this, I increased the pace. He was losing me.
    Probably some banal explanation. A Columbia College student, dragging his laundry home to mom.  An apprentice necktie salesman hauling his sample case back to the Merchandise Mart having failed to interest the buyer at Macy's. That last one would be a good story. Actually, they both might. Everyone has a good story, they just usually don't know it. You have to tease it out of them.
     Maybe he was an artist—he looked the type. Maybe his rolled canvases, his small ceramics, his careful etchings, his intricate jewelry, were in the suitcase, and he was lost in thought, wondering, "How can I get get the attention of the media?" Just slow down, pal.
     Alas, he was too fast for me. I snapped off a photo, for documentary purposes, as he was picking up speed, and hurried ahead. But by the time I got to Lake Street, he had crossed and the light had changed. I could bolt after him, but bolting seemed to defeat the purpose. This was something that had to be done casually or not at all. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it was not to be, and just as well. The trouble with instinctively finding out stuff is that doing so wipes away what can be an appealing mystery. Sometimes it's better not to know.  

Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery

   

     Ting-a-ling.
     "Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery. May I help you?"
     "Yeah...I'll have ... let's see ... six schneeballs ... three of the cream horns....a half dozen ruggelah..."
     "Cinnamon, chocolate or raspberry?"
      "Two of each."
      "Excellent. What else?"
      "Lets' see ... a stollen..."
      "I'm sorry, we're out of stollen."
      "No stollen? Okay, how about a pound of the assorted butter cookies..."
      "Any in particular?"
      "No, just give me ... well, okay how about one of those, and one of these, that one and this one and two of leaf-shaped ones. A few with the candied cherries, and the almond crescents..."
      "Here, with the powdered sugar?"
      "No, behind it, there."
      "Got it. Having a party?"
      "No just a few people over for coffee after church ... and a couple of the poppyseed cookies."
       "After church!?"
       "...and a lemon square...what? Oh yes, church. That lemon square there...."
       "Christian church?"
       "Yes, that's right. The one in the front looks nice."
       "You want to serve my baked goods after your church?"
       "The lemon .... Yeah, you got a problem with that?"
       "Frankly yes. Well at least now I do. I mean, if state legislators in Kansas can try to pass laws allowing bakeries there not to make wedding cakes for gay Kansans, just because they've decided doing so violates some ad hoc notion of religious belief, then why should I be any different? Why should I insist upon my beliefs any less than they do theirs? Why should Steinberg Bakery provide my delectable Special Pecan Raisin Bread Pudding so you and your goyish pals can stuff yourselves silly and talk about Jesus?"
      "Hey..." 
      "Maybe we should all just unleash our deepest prejudices and let them roam free, under the guise of extending our peripheral religious beliefs to our business transactions. I mean, it's one thing if we were all in the same country, right? You know, Americans. Fellow American citizens who respect each other and try to get along with each other despite our differences, within the parameters of our idiosyncratic, often conflicting, almost random biases and belief systems."
      "Maybe I'll come back later..."
      "But if we throw that out, if one group feels entitled, feels empowered, feels free to proudly and consciously step back from the basic capitalist system, and wants to claim that it is a violation of their ineffable pact with the Lord God Almighty to rent their Grange Hall to a couple of ladies who want to have a commitment ceremony, so much that they want to even consider passing laws to codify their right to turn away anybody whose existence they disapprove, then why should I be so loosey-goosey about my own sincere religious beliefs that I'm going to supply the mandel bread for your Sunday-after-church-lord-ourselves-over-our-neighbors session?"
       "I think I'll just head over to Deerfield Bakery..."
       "Sure, sure, St. Bartholomew, shop around, find some cookie cleric who shares your hierotopic outlook, some muffin mullah whose worldview perfectly meshes with your own, cause soon that's the only kind of person you'll be able to buy macaroons from, buster, when our heretofore cherished, fought for and protected democracy crumbles into the same anxious wasp's nest of warring tribes that wrecks half the world. Because we wouldn't want you suffering in your imagined fiery pit of hell along with my children for all eternity because you helped a gay couple pick out green tulle rental napkins for their wedding, would we? Because it's all about you, cupcake, isn't it? You you you and your precious theology, well, do you ever think about anyone else, huh? How they might feel seeing you run to legislature to protect yourself and your Bible buddies from the sin of selling a couple of queers some flower arrangements for their moment of happiness? I'll tell you this, Mark the Apostle: you're not the only religion around anymore. You never were, but the boot has slipped off the neck of we untermenschen, and your not wanting to provide your lousy limo service for Adam and Steve today means that Hajji the taxi cab driver won't take you to communion tomorrow! Or the Steinberg Bakery gets to tell you to hustle your mayonnaise-larded Christophany right out the door and bring your business somewhere else. Ever think of that? Huh? Ever imagine that other people might harbor toward you a fraction of the disdain you glibly heap on others? No? 'Course not. Sorry to be the one to bleepin' tell you, mon-seen-your. Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news. Go! Go, you cross-caressing Vanilla Wafer! I wouldn't sell my profoundly puffy and ethereal jelly-filled sufganiyot to you if you were the last cash-paying customer on God's green acre! Get the Keebler elves to cater your Sunday tent revival soiree, you English muffin munching moron! Out! OUT!"
      "Well I.... I... Fine! I'm out of here!"
      Ting-a-ling.

     Ting-a-ling.
     "Welcome to the Steinberg Bakery. May I help you?
     "Umm yeah. Do you have honey cake?"
     "Sure, fresh out of the oven."
     "Okay, I'll take two."
     "Two of the honey cake? Of course. Having a party, are you...?"



                                                          ###

Paddling the divine canoe

   

      An ellipsis, as you no doubt are aware, is the little train of three (or four) periods signaling there's more, either words that are missing, or yet to come. Or just a pregnant pause. 
     And yet...
      My wife has a rare ability to actually pronounce ellipses.
     "I liked your column today..." she'll say, in such a way that I hear those three dots and think, Oh boy...
      "...but?" I'll add, encouraging her to get on with it. Just pull the Band-Aid.
      "...but I think you misunderstood what Sister Rosemary meant," she said Friday morning, regarding my column on Sister Rosemary Connelly of Misericordia, telling an audience, "Who's God but us?" My wife explained that Sister Rosemary didn't mean, as I archly suggested, that we are supposed to step in when God lets important matters drop. But rather that we are the agency God uses to perform His good works. 
    To illustrate this, she referred to one of my favorite jokes, the canoe joke. More about that in a moment. 

Chapel in the Sky in the Chicago Temple

     I said something like "Yeah yeah." I was feeling good about the column and didn't want to entertain its deficiencies, didn't want to take what she said to heart. As people in marketing know, sometimes a message has to be delivered a few times before it is actually received. It wasn't until later Friday morning, when I got the following from reader Scott Whited, that I began to give the question serious thought. He wrote:  

     My wife and I met each other while working at Misericordia, and we were blessed to be a small part of the magnificent organization that Sr. Rosemary built and continues to build. Without assuming to know exactly what is in her mind, I think you misinterpreted the meaning behind her comment, "Who's God but us?"  Rather than rebuking God for failing to help those in need, she recognizes, embraces and acts upon the concept that God uses people to do His work.  It's like the joke about the man surrounded by flood waters who turns away people in boats and helicopters while proclaiming that God will save him, only to drown and find out that it was God who tried to save him by sending those people.  God isn't dropping balls, He's calling all of us to be His hands and feet in this world.  Sr. Rosemary hears that call and, unlike most of us, responds to it and great things happen.  Thanks for using your forum to highlight Sr. Rosemary and Misericordia.  It's an amazing place and Sr. Rosemary is a very special woman.

     Not only the same point my wife was trying to make, but using the same joke to deliver it. One thing I've learned is that when two very different people, from very different realms, say exactly the same thing about a piece of writing, well, you should pay attention, because they're probably correct.

     Of course this is all interpretation. I don't think there is an overarching intelligence that is either neglecting our fates or expecting us to step in and do nice stuff. If there is a yawning need in this world, from a practical point of view, it hardly matters if the need is due to cosmic indifference, or divine non-existence, or because an antic Heavenly Father is testing us to see if we'll jump through these hoops and do good. That's a theological matter. But what I took to heart, and what was important, to me, was that I was layering my own viewpoint upon Sister Rosemary, who no doubt by "Who's God but us?" meant that we are the agency of God, not that we are here to cover up His omissions which, being God, are fairly scarce. It seemed something worth noting.