Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    Today is Flag Day.
    Happy Flag Day.
    Not the most popular holiday.
    Kind of a low rent, odd man out banner festival jammed between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. 
    Three patriotic holidays in the space of five and a half weeks.
    Quite a lot, really.
    Four, if you count June 6, the anniversary of D-Day, which is practically a holiday, and certainly carries more emotional heft than Flag Day. 
    Most days do.
    Makes sense that one would get the short shrift.
    Flag Day is not a federal holiday. It celebrates...for those who notice...the adoption of the United States flag on June 14, 1777 by the Second Continental Congress. Though not of course this particular flag, not the current flag, with its 50 five-pointed stars, one for each state. That only dates to 1959, when Hawaii and Alaska entered the union. 
    The original 1777 resolution reads:
    “Resolved, That the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.”
    That flag looks like this:

    So not the biggest deal, as far as holidays go. Sort of an Arbor Day level holiday but for flags instead of trees. Beer companies don't even notice it. 
    No Flag Day picnics. No greeting cards. You don't get the day off of work.
    A few stores have sales, I suppose.
    And the only only obligation to fly the flag.
    Which the vast majority of folks don't bother to do.
    I am not one of those folks.
    I actually look forward to Flag Day.
    Because I have a flag. 
    That I love to fly.
    I'd keep it out all the time. 
    But then flying it wouldn't be special.
    So I hold back and fly it whenever I can.
    Such as on Flag Day.
    I tend to notice flags too.
    Like this enormous beauty, hanging properly—the union to the left, I checked—in...well, a public space in Chicago.
    Frankly, I figured readers will ID the spot immediately.
    But I like the picture, so decided to use it anyway. Today being both Flag Day and a Saturday, when my Where IS This contest runs. 
    Besides, given how photos I'm sure will stump people get guessed quickly, maybe, in that perverse way life has, the one that seems obvious to me will leave you scratching your heads.
     Maybe not.
     Make sure to post your guesses in the comments section below. 
     The winner will receive ... what? ... I'm getting tired of handing out posters and copies of my books. 
     How about someone else's book? 
     How about a copy of First Son: The Biography of Richard M. Daley, by Keith Koeneman, published by the University of Chicago Press. It's about Rich Daley, but no book is perfect. 
      I have an extra copy that's yours, if you guess correctly.
      Good luck.   
       

Not an "issue," a "traffic snarl from hell"

     In the name of all that is holy, STAY OFF THE KENNEDY EXPRESSWAY for the next three weekends! That is, unless you want to be plunged into a TRAFFIC JAM NIGHTMARE HORROR beyond your worst imaginings!!!

     Not that state officials will put it that way.

     “The city of Chicago is still open for business,” enthused Ann Schneider, secretary of the Illinois Department of Transportation, at a press conference at IDOT’s emergency center at 35th and Normal on Tuesday. “People should, when they make their travel plans for these weekends, make sure they do so understanding there’s going to be some traffic issues. For sure, definitely understand that the city is open for business.”

     Translation: Part of the monolithic Ontario Street bridge, built in 1959, over the Kennedy Expressway is being demolished. Beginning at 10 p.m. Friday the clotted-on-a-good-day five lanes of the Kennedy will go down to a sclerotic two lanes, with speed limits of 10 to 15 mph, in theory, exiting at Ohio, executing a hairpin turn, and returning to the highway, eventually. While the $16.5 million project is underway, chamber of commerce types want you to fight your way into the city to stores. If you must, DON’T FOR ANY REASON DRIVE DOWNTOWN DURING THE WEEKENDS OF JUNE 13, 20 AND 27!!!!!

     In a strange marriage of traffic warning and tourist board puffery, state officials listed the two dozen special events taking place in the midst of this construction, from the Chicago Blues Fest, the Gay Pride Parade and the Gospel Music Festival.

     The bridge is a relic of 1950s gigantism, making it even harder to remove.

     “It was poured in one piece and, because of that, it has to be removed as one unit,” said Sarah Wilson, a bridge maintenance engineer at IDOT. She said that because of deterioration of the bridge, traffic has been restricted to the legal load limit of 40 tons four years ago — as opposed to allowing heavier loads by permit — and if the bridge wasn’t replaced, they’d eventually have to ban trucks from the Kennedy. “This is a safety issue in terms of getting this very old structure demolished and out of the way.”

     “Issue” was definitely the term of the day, along with “challenge.” But it is an indication of just what a SNARLED CREEPING ORDEAL OF MISERABLE MOTIONLESSNESS anyone entering the Kennedy during that time will face during that the dreaded p-word — “problem” was almost uttered.
     "That is a pro . . ." Schneider began when a reporter asked what would become of their schedule if it rains in June (average rainfall in Chicago in June: 3.45 inches, more than in April or November), before catching herself.
      "That is a challenge for us," she said. "There is the potential that the weather could delay some of this."
     Another issue will be the 260,000 cars that daily use the Kennedy pouring onto side streets, and state officials warn bicyclists to TAKE EXTRA CARE THAT THEY ARE NOT KILLED by frustrated drivers, though of course not in those words either.
     "Bicyclists are also urged to be aware that there will be additional traffic on arterial streets, and like motorists, are encouraged to plan accordingly," IDOT suggested in a press release.
     (Seasoned commuters know there's a slim chance that so many will be scared off the Kennedy that, at times, those few brave souls who hazard traveling it will find driving a breeze, at least until everyone else realizes the other guy is avoiding it, flooding back, jamming the thing totally).
     "Make no mistake, the city is open for business," echoed Gary Schenkel, executive director of the Office of Emergency Management and Communication. "There is no place like Chicago in the summer, after the long winter . . . " (It must be Rahm's tireless civic ballyhoo; it infects people) " . . . so whether you are planning to attend our festivals, special events, beaches, ballgames, shopping dining downtown or in our neighborhoods, we are asking motorists to plan accordingly and to cooperate with IDOT's request to use alternate routes and public transportation over the next three weekends . . . there are increased public transportation options for those who want to take advantage of all this world-class city has to offer."
     Translation: Take the train, if you can find a place to stand. Otherwise, have you considered visiting beautiful Milwaukee? Our neighbor to the north has a fine art museum and lovely lakefront. Just 90 minutes away, assuming YOU DON'T FOOLISHLY TRY TO TAKE THE KENNEDY THROUGH DOWNTOWN TO GET THERE!!!

Throw Eric from the train

 
     I try not to follow politics.
     Because tracking politics is like focusing on the telephone poles as they fly past while you travel aboard a train. Disorienting, a little queasy-inducing, and it distracts you from where you're heading.
     Eric Cantor, for instance.

     The Republican House Majority Leader.
     Soon to be the former Republican House Majority Leader....
     I was aware of him, as a clench-jawed zealot opposing the president, well, on just about everything.
    And then Tuesday he was vaporized by an even more extreme zealot, tea party zealot David Brat. It was like one of those science fiction movies where the big scary beast is abruptly swallowed up by an even bigger, scarier beast (or, in this case, by something much smaller. Brat winning is like a rat swallowing a wolf).
      And the media chorus analyzing the event has one conclusion: a big reason Cantor got the boot, general consensus decrees, is immigration.
     "Cantor’s defeat to tea partyer David Brat was so intertwined with immigration — 'amnesty' and 'illegal aliens' — that the few fence-sitters in the GOP-led House are going to flock back to the politically right side of the divide," the Miami Herald wrote.

     So the chattering heads fall to chattering about how this will affect the future of the Republican Party, which is now, supposedly, even more anti-immigration than it was before, which is saying something. And about the chances of immigration reform, which is dead, again, or even deader, assuming it was ever alive to begin with.
     And there they stop.
     Leaving off the most salient point. 

     The facts remain unchanged. The arc of history bends in the same direction. We're still heading exactly where we've been going for decades. The Republicans just decided, again, that if they leap off the train, that will somehow change the direction it is racing.
     Wrong. Leaping off the train hurts them a lot more than it hurts the train. You would think that they would finally figure that one out. 

     Immigration reform today is where gay rights were 20 years ago. A massive boulder held in place by a pebble on a steep hillside. One push and away it'll go. 

     Today, about 15 percent of Americans are of Hispanic origin, making them the largest minority group in the country. Not everyone who is a Hispanic is affected by the immigration issue, but many are. By 2050, they will triple in numbers, and make up 30 percent of the country. By then, one in five Americans will be an immigrant.
     How do you think immigration reform will be faring then? This is not an "if" question. This is a "when" question. 

     By then, Hispanic Americans will also not be the ooo-scary Intruder than can be shrugged off by Republican revanchists with buzzwords like "amnesty." They will be our neighbors, friends and co-workers — that is, if they aren't that for you already — fighting for their millions of parents, children, brothers and sisters living in rightless quasi-serfdom. 

     Actually, it is a safe bet that, long before 2050 rolls around, this problem will be addressed. Immigration reform will be solved eventually by somebody. It's a shame it couldn't be solved by us now, but as the Hindenburg of Eric Cantor's political career going up in a ball of flame dramatically demonstrates, the GOP just isn't ready yet. Easier to self destruct, again, than see the future that is already here. As always, they'd rather follow the dictates of their tiny hard anthracite black coal hearts and lose, than do what is right for our country and the route it is traveling, has been traveling, and will be traveling.

I think Trump is great because ...

     A considerable number of people took me up on yesterday's request to finish this phrase: "I think it's GREAT that the Trump name, that hallmark of excellence, is going up in the heart of Chicago. I sincerely admire Donald Trump because..."

                     ....Trump is so American. That's why we love it! Should make the letters larger in Red,White and Blue.           
                                                     —Carl Wanzung, Chicago 

Though the majority turned the statement against Trump: 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
                         ...because he gives the scale of human values its low.

                                                     --Neil Liptak, Elwood

...because the Trib Tower, Wrigley Building and Crain Building now will look even more magnificent, pristine and tasteful. So, thanks, Donald. Your sheer "presence," and that of a building that achieved taste and beauty in spite of you and now is getting duly pimped up by your lowness, reminds us that the rest of us, including those Chicagoans with as much money as, if not more than, the Donald do have taste and class that can''t be taken for granted.
                                                          —Laurent Pernot

Although this one, while the initial thought was one heard over and over, ended on a priceless note (I decided to omit his name, to shield him from the vindictive pettiness of condo owners):

The new sign is another egotistical move by the biggest pompous a$$ in America. I am sure he hated it when he saw those beautiful pictures taken from the east and they weren't subtitled to include his name.  He fixed that as he has now ruined the view.

To be honest, we thought long and hard before we purchased a condo there.  We love it, but as you pointed out, I tell people we have a place at 401 N. Wabash.

But it was a serious question, and we should give some serious answers, of which I got quite a few, such as this, from John J. Kula, of Mount Prospect. People often tell me they disagree with something I've said, but enjoyed how I said it. I'd have to say the same about this:

     I'd like to buy a letter. It's my building. It's my money. Welcome to America!
     The recent uproar and indignant outrage over the bold letters of TRUMP made me reevaluate my moral outrage meter settings. Why am I not upset over TRUMP? Now I can tell visitors to downtown Chicago the names of at least four buildings. That's great.   Perhaps the chosen font for the TRUMP letters upsets some people.
     I decided to search the streets and buildings to establish some sense of moral precedent.     Who dares affix their name to a building that others are coerced into reading each time they pass by the building? There are other buildings with names on them - fancy, large boldly illuminated from within and without - signs seen at night from miles around town. I believe the Vegas mecca has them in spades. The toll ways have hundreds of outdoor signs emblazoned with the names of real people and their businesses. Some people reasonably object to those as visual pollution.  Hospitals have name signs too provided by self-promoting investors. Some religion-affiliated hospitals have names of saints who are dead, so that's OK.
     Fine arts centers, businesses, and retail stores have name signs for owners, investors, benefactors, etc. Even Abe Lincoln has his name on a presidential library.  I believe Marshall Field, Carson, Pirie and Scott and Mr. Macy endorsed self-serving lettered signs.    You ask, "Where's the benefit?" To whom, I ask. to society? Really? Just think of Mr. Trump's sign as a token of civic goodwill. Think GOODWILL.  So, why the fuss if Mr. Trump wants a TRUMP sign on his own building facade? Just add the Trump tower to the tourist guide list of famous building names.

Many came in the form of letters. I'm not as big a fan of this one, from a John Marshall law professor, but it does include a derisive poem, and how often do you get one of those?

Dear Neil:           

       You may want to file this under be careful what you wish for, so I’ll hold you to your promise to print this.             

     I think it’s GREAT that the Trump name, that hallmark of excellence, is going up in the heart of Chicago, I sincerely admire Donald Trump because….              

       First, the Trump tower is a Chicago icon, like it or not, and was about the only large scale real estate project built here during the worst of the recent Great Recession.  Did anyone think that Donald Trump would deviate from his standard practice of putting his name on the building? There is no suggestion that the sign is not fully in compliance with the spirit and letter of the law.  The sign is on the lower quarter of the property and is visible from the river and Wabash Street.  It is white, simple and similar in design to other signs here in Chicago, including those atop Roosevelt University and the CNA building, both of which signs are larger and placed at the top where they are visible for miles around.

        There are other examples of signs in Chicago that have become part of our architectural heritage, such as the landmarked Wrigley Field sign or the ubiquitous Chicago Theatre and Berghoff Restaurant signs.  Oh, and there is one other prominent sign, actually two, larger andmore visible, right on the river at Wolf Point.  “CHICAGO SUN-TIMES” bigger and less appealing than the Trump sign.  Perhaps memory has faded for some, but the building that the Trump tower replaced, the former Sun-Times building, also included a great big CHICAGO SUN-TIMES sign in bright yellow letters.              

     When you and other critics opine that you don’t like the Trump sign, you are really meaning that you don’t like Donald Trump.  Clearly, if personal character was the standard for installation of a sign he would fail the test.  Trump is universally perceived as an obnoxious bully-- so what.  Perhaps you are suggesting a Litmus test for signs on loop buildings, evaluating the principal owners of the building for their moral charter?  Maybe a jerk factor test that will appease even the bleeding heart self-appointed Chicago architectural critic, who criticizes this sign through tears, as if someone was dying, “….oh the humanity.” I don’t see any Mother Theresas among the owners of any of the loop’s buildings. 

             So yes, I applaud the installation of the sign, it is big, bold and appropriate for Chicago,--a City of broad shoulders, not a city of ballet slippers.               

     I’ll see your Ozymandias poem and raise you with this little ditty….   

THE OLE GRUMP 

There one was a man who worked in a glass house. 

One day while riding his Divvy in our city, 

he came upon a story, as big as a tree.

A story beginning with a T, 

which stands for Trump.  

Soon he was back on his rump, 

to throw a big stone from atop his own stump, 

high above his own ditty, 

the great big words, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, 

flying high above our fair city.  

Very truly yours, John J. Lag

Well, I'd say that's more than enough—just because we can go on endlessly on-line doesn't mean we should. Thank you everybody for sending in replies. See you tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and onward into infinity....

He must not realize "TRUMP" is a slur...

     When Percy Bysshe Shelley was challenged to write a sonnet about Ramses II, he reflected on the emptiness of vanity, using the Greek form of the pharaoh’s name to title his poem, “Ozymandias.”

      Since Ramses II is taken, I’ll have to settle for Donald Trump.

      Not to try to one-up the great British poet, but Shelley hadn’t actually seen the regal ruins, the “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” that stood forlorn and abandoned in the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert. He read about it in a history book.

      I, on the other hand, jumped on a Divvy bike Tuesday afternoon and went to eyeball the huge “TRUM . . . ” being installed on the south face of the Trump International Hotel and Tower on Wabash. The big “M” was halfway up. The giant “P,” alas, is coming.

     Seeing it go up will make it extra sweet when it comes down.

     There is no accounting for taste. So if you are reading this column in a newspaper you found, say, in a plastic surgeon’s waiting room on North Michigan Avenue, killing time before the next collagen injection in your bee-stung lips, you might want to stop here, pick up an old issue of Chicago Social, and no harm done.

     Gone? Good. The allure of Donald Trump has always mystified me. I like fancy stuff as much as the next guy. A well-crafted English shoe. An exotic car. But to me Trump represents not quality, not taste, but expense for expense’s sake. Wretched excess. Money divorced from sense, from balance. “Trump” is so synonymous with a kind of gold-plated lusting after empty status, it’s hard for me to believe anyone thinks otherwise.

     Shelley notes the stone pharaoh’s face: Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.

     “Sneer of cold command” sort of evokes Trump, the man, does it not? I only met him once, when he was in town drumming his Atlantic City casino. No king he; Trump needed a shoe shine and a haircut.
     Despite my low regard for the man, Chicago’s Trump Tower struck me as a pretty building, except for the name of course. A cool blue finger pointing toward the clouds, like a skyscraper on Mars.
     Thankfully, the “TRUMP” will only deface one side. Standing across the river, looking all around, I noticed the lack of any similar sign. Nothing atop the Wrigley Building, or the Gothic horror show of Tribune Tower. A small “Hotel 71” on the old Executive House, and that is out of date too. It’s a Wyndham now. A reminder of how fast things pass.
     Rich Daley, despite shafting the city in many ways, was good about keeping downtown from devolving into the set from “Blade Runner.”
     I contacted the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel — a subtle multimillionaire if ever there were one — to ask: Why? The 5th floor said, in essence, don’t blame us. The sign was “approved in the mid-2000s” — code for it being Daley’s fault, just like the pension mess. The sign, they said, also was originally 25 percent larger and multi-colored (!), so let’s count our blessings it’s only as bad as it is and not even worse. The City Council had to approve the Trump sign, the special bill sponsored by Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd).
     The OK had to come not because the sign is too tall, amazingly enough — city ordinance allows signs 24 feet high, and Trump’s letters are 20-feet-and-change tall — but because it’s too long, 141 feet, when the legal limit is 100 feet.
     Who does this sign benefit? Out-of-towners who pass by and wonder which building this is? The hotel and condo owners ballyhooing themselves? As bad as being Donald Trump undoubtedly is, being caught basking in his glow is even worse. Admiring Trump is like bragging about shooting a lion; there might be some small band of humanity who thinks better of you for it. The rest draw back in confused revulsion.
     I would love to hear from Chicagoans who disagree. Begin your note, “I think it’s GREAT that the Trump name, that hallmark of excellence, is going up in the heart of Chicago. I sincerely admire Donald Trump because . . . ”
     Complete that thought, then sign your name. I’ll print it.
     I’m not expecting response to my plea. A big Trump sign is not the Chicago way. Not to go all Garrison Keillor on you, but we’re Midwesterners. Modest people, the Pritzkers notwithstanding.
     Self-flummery is New York-ish. And while in the distant past, New Yorkers did well in Chicago — our first mayor, William B. Ogden, was a New York lawyer — generally New York has a way of failing in Chicago. Nathan’s Hot Dogs? Failed. The Limelight nightclub? Failed. Howard Stern? Failed. Chicagoans don’t like to wait behind velvet ropes. Not a lot of helicopter service or even town car service here. Or doormen for that matter. We can open our own doors, and generally avoid the kind of grotesque display that passes for status in the scramble up the greasy pole that is Manhattan.
     I’d be more distressed about this, but frankly, I really believe this is temporary. (“Everything is temporary,” as Cosmo Castorini sagely says in “Moonstruck.”)
     Sure, but how long? How long will the noxious “TRUMP” be up?
     Squinching my eyes, I’d predict . . . 12 years. But maybe I’m being optimistic. I’m a cheery sort.
     Maybe more. The white, illuminated, block-letter “PLAYBOY” sign — at 9 feet, not even half as tall as “TRUMP”— was atop the Palmolive Building for nearly a quarter century, from 1965 to 1989. At the time, it was hard to believe it would be gone; now it takes effort to recall it was ever there.
     The Smithsonian, by the way, wouldn’t take the Playboy sign letters. Too big. Maybe they’re half-buried in the sand somewhere.
     A lesson for Trump. My guess is that after enough prospective tenants say that they’d love to live at Trump Tower, if it weren’t for a pang of shame they’d feel mumbling the name of the place, a change will come.
     “What goes up must come down,” I muttered aloud, straddling my Divvy bike, almost as a curse, then turned and pedaled gratefully away.
     Shelley’s poem ends:

              And on the pedestal these words appear:
              “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

               Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

               Nothing beside remains. 

               Round the decay

               Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

               The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Beautiful and strange and boring and homely and mysterious and normal"

      A key to doing this job right is nimbly hopping from one topic to the next. Let the zealots hobbyhorse obsessively over their pitiful handful of fixations. In that direction madness lies. Me, I float over God's creation like a butterfly, alighting for a moment and then gone again...
     Generally. 
     I'm going to make an exception today, because of something a reader said related to yesterday's column about "Calvin and Hobbes" genius Bill Watterson drawing a few panels of "Pearls Before Swine."


     I started the post out in left-field, talking about a favorite, surrreal "Nancy" comic strip. I was a little reluctant to begin that way—sort of off-point, and I had real news here, and should have cut to the chase. But I knew that a considerable percentage of readers would neither know nor care about either strip, and I wanted to say something larger about comics, and how strange and wonderful they could be, and so frequently aren't.
     The first comment was from "Jakash," a regular and thoughtful reader, who included this:

     I have to admit that I was stunned to see you lead off with a "Nancy" cartoon, however. I don't know what the comic may have been like in its early decades, but by the time I was paying attention, in the 70's, it seemed like about the lamest thing around. It boggles my mind that it is still running. Not that I pay much attention, but I think this is the first time I've ever noticed an accolade for it from somebody I respect.

     Well, we'll just have to fix that. Nancy was the coolest of the cool. Of course that was in the 1950s. By the '70s, Nancy was indeed in steep decline. In fact, one reason I want to revisit this, is because the question I asked yesterday of "Pearls Before Swine" creator Stephan Pastis — why do great cartoonists often retire so early? — is answered just by looking at what happened to "Nancy," and other strips, such as "Pogo," that became shadows and shells of themselves after their creators died, if not before.
       The miracle with Nancy is that her decline was reversed. She had a renaissance, a return to her roots in the mid-1990s, when the bogus Smurf Nancy was pitched, and Retro Nancy returned. In 2000, I wrote this brief ode:

     She is exquisite. The Mona Lisa. The Venus de Milo, perfect and sublime, from the tips of her squat little feet to the bow set in her glorious spiked hairdo.
     You may know her as "Nancy," and if you are mystified by the appeal, do not be ashamed. You are not alone. Just as many people drink cheap sweet wine and eat processed cheese product food substance, so many are blind to the appeal of the chubby little girl in a plaid skirt and her cartoon pals.
     You are thinking, "The jokes creak." You are thinking, "The strip is dumb and impenetrable." You are thinking, "When they look at stuff, dotted lines come from their eyes." You are missing the point.
     "'Nancy' was my most favorite comic strip when I was growing up because it was so beautiful and strange, and boring and homely and mysterious and normal," said Chicago cartoonist Lynda Barry.
     She was speaking of the original "Nancy," as penned by creator Ernie Bushmiller. When he died in 1982, the strip was seized by Jerry Scott, who, like Duchamp putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa, molded Nancy to his own "contemporary" style.
     That lasted a dozen years, until saner heads at the syndicate brought in the Gilchrist brothers, Guy and Brad, and deemed that Nancy should return to the style of her classic period, the late 1940s and 1950s, when Nancy and Sluggo clubs were formed at high schools, and the little lady ruled the comic pages.
     Long may she reign!

      But that was really just a summation of a longer panegyric to Nancy that I had penned in 1996, the first year my column appeared, I mentioned to fellow columnist Richard Roeper that I like Nancy, and he challenged me to say that in print. I sensed a trap, but couldn't resist defending her honor. This ran Nov. 3, 1996, and should explain to Jakash, if he's still reading this, that is, exactly where I'm coming from:

     Disagreement is surprisingly rare in casual conversation. As varied as opinions are, hardly anyone looks you in the eye and says, "I think you're wrong."

     Instead, people tend to keep their opinions to themselves. Because of politeness, mostly, and laziness. It's too easy to nod in feigned approval while thinking: "What an idiot."

     I do that all the time. If somebody starts explaining how "Miss Saigon" is the most profound drama ever written, with the most moving music ever heard by human ears, I will not argue.

     Why bother? If a person is that far gone, what hope have I of bringing them back?

     Thus it was a shock to run into opposition last week while chatting with a colleague about the comics. I mentioned that my favorite comic in this newspaper is "Nancy."

     "Nancy?" he said, rising in his chair. "Nancy? You like Nancy? Why do you like Nancy? Write a column explaining that. Explain why you're a Nancy Boy."

     My first inclination was to shrug it off. In journalism, as in any field, co-workers are always offering you a rope and suggesting that you hang yourself. Write a column defending Nancy, indeed.

     But the challenge lingered. I did not like the thought of turning my back on her.

     I know why my buddy was so horrified. Your passions define you. Liking Nancy is, to be blunt, not exactly manly.

     That's why men embrace such conventional enthusiasms. Nobody ever has to explain why he likes football. Nobody makes a face and says: "So let me get this straight — you sit there for hours, every weekend, watching all these games? Whatever for?"

     So here goes. I like Nancy, first, because of the graphics. She's pure comics—the epitome, what an Oreo is to a cookie. None of the freehand sloppiness of "Peanuts," none of the flat quality of "Doonesbury."  When I open my American Heritage Dictionary and look up "comic strip," there is one illustration: Nancy (and a funny strip, too. Nancy buys a talking doll. She sees the doll was made in Japan. The doll speaks — in Japanese!)

      Nancy observes the canons of cartooning the way the pope observes Catholic liturgy. When she notices something, a little dotted line forms to the object. When she gets agitated, exclamation marks fly off her head.

     She's an archetype. Like many archetypes, we almost lost her. For years, Ernie Bushmiller's pure vision was corrupted and contemporized—Nancy got a big rectangular nose and a haircut and she spouted smart, adult things with all the other pundits in children's bodies. A white-bread Smurf in drag.

     Then, just over a year ago, saner heads prevailed at the United Features Syndicate, and the strip was returned to its circa 1950 feel.

     It was a rare and welcome anachronism, as if Ford announced that it was returning the 1965 Mustang to production (not a bad idea, either).

     Beyond the graphics, there is Nancy's personality, such as it is. She's a chubby girl, a bit strident and self-centered, but with that core of sweet insecurity that is so often at the heart of loud people.

     My favorite strip illustrates Nancy's dilemma nicely. Just three panels. The first shows Nancy approaching four boys. The boys are all wearing stupid folded newspaper hats, and are gathering under their banner "Secret Cool Club." Nancy asks if she can join. "NO," the boys answer, as one.

     The middle panel shows Nancy striding away, her eyes angry comas, her jagged afro in full display, three splashes of tears flying off her face. "Okay," she says, "Fine—then I'll start my own club."

     In the last panel, Nancy is surrounded by her dolls, her dog and cat, and a bust of Washington, all wearing the same stupid folded newspaper hats. She's smiling, leaning forward, determined, banging a gavel and saying, "The meeting will now come to order." Overhead, a banner: "The Even Secreter Cooler Club."

     Now, if that isn't a guide to life, I don't know what is. If you are so secure, so part of the inner circle that this comic doesn't speak to you, well, then why are you reading this? Go make some more money.

     Finished? I've barely scratched the surface. There is the entire Sluggo question. Sluggo is the cap-wearing, buzz-cut little tough who is Nancy's foil, her defender and companion — and there's just a hint of romantic tension in the air.

     And Aunt Fritzi. A babe. Among the last of those cheesecake female characters who were once always lounging around the funny pages.

     Most people don't realize it was once her strip. Nancy was just a foundling thrown in to make a plot.  She fast became wildly popular, and the name of the strip was changed from "Fritzi Ritz" to "Nancy."

     There's another reason to love the strip. How often in life does the tubby, spunky little girl show up and steal the spotlight away from the curvaceous movie star? Not often enough.

    There, that's settled. Now for tomorrow, I promise, whatever I write about—Donald Trump's enormous sign, I expect—it won't be cartoons or Nancy.

A reclusive comic master steps in to pinch hit

     There’s a “Nancy” comic strip from the early 1950s that conveys the glorious and unlimited possibilities of cartooning in seven simple words over four square panels.

     “Anything—” our spunky heroine announces, walking down the street in the first panel, “can happen—” she continues, in the second, now indoors, “in a—” and here she walks up the side of a wall, because she can, concluding, “comic strip,” hanging upside down, from the ceiling.

     Anything can happen. But too often, as in life itself, usually it doesn’t, even in the funnies. Usually we get, well, the usual, tired jokes told by interchangeable casts of charmless creatures. Alas, the anarchic genius of Nancy’s creator, Ernie Bushmiller, is in short supply in recent decades, as comics shrink and struggle, along with the rest of the dusty print media, to stay relevant in our online world.

    But marvels still occur. Lovers of the daily doings of the comics got a much-needed boost last week, and didn’t even know it until Saturday, when Stephan Pastis, who draws the wildly popular “Pearls Before Swine” strip, revealed that three of his installments featured drawings by none other than Bill Watterson, the reclusive genius behind the “Calvin and Hobbes” strip that ran from 1985 to 1995, when he announced that he had said all he had to say and was going into retirement.

     For those unfamiliar with the comics — and too many are nowadays — it would be like me getting Thomas Pynchon to write the middle section of my column.

     It happened this way: Pastis, whose strip is syndicated in 750 papers, was passing through Ohio on a book tour, and thought he would try to contact Watterson, who lives on the east side of Cleveland.

     That got him nowhere, but a short time later Pastis’ character — he often appears in “Pearls Before Swine” — pretends to be Watterson and picks up a woman in a bar. The real-life Pastis emailed the strip to Watterson, who shocked him by replying. “Let me tell you,” Pastis wrote in his description of the episode on his blog. "Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he's communicating with me?"
     One of the running jokes in "Pearls Before Swine" is that Pastis can't draw. He can, though of course not as well as Watterson, whose masterful penmanship was a large part of what made his strip the cherished classic it was. Watterson suggested that he'd like to step in and secretly draw Pastis' strip for a few days.
     "The night he emailed me with the idea, I was utterly stunned," recalled Pastis, when I reached him over the phone Sunday. "I called my wife and said, 'You're not going to believe this just happened."
     The two cartoonists traded ideas — this was in mid-April. Watterson was "fun and flexible and easy to work with."
     Pastis told his wife and one person at the syndicate, but no one else, not even his editor.
     The strip has a six-week lead time, and waiting was perhaps the hardest part. "Oh man," he said. "It's hard to go to the Reubens" — the National Cartoonists Society awards at the end of May —"and not talk. Boy, talk about having to sit on a secret. Oh my God."
     On June 2, Pastis introduced a new character, Libby ("Libby" being sort of a mash-up of "Billy"), a precocious second-grader who arrives at his door to interview a cartoonist. ("Do you know a cartoonist?" she asks Pastis).
     The strips ran on June 4, June 5 and June 6, with Watterson drawing the center, elongated panel. On the first day is a zebra that, in retrospect, looks very like Hobbes in his stuffed tiger state. A crocodile gobbles Pastis, but you can see his feet. Which were a tip-off.
     "A lot of people said it was the shoes on the Wednesday strip," Pastis said. "My shoes are sticking out of crocodile's mouth. Apparently people in the know knew that those are only drawn by one cartoonist: Watterson."
     The second strip had an invading alien robot that was not at all Pastis' style. "Lots of people guessed it,"Pastis said. "The predominant feeling was, if this was anybody, it's Watterson. But how could he have gotten Watterson? What's going on?"
     What next? Are they buddies?
     "Ha ha," Pastis said. "I don't think I'm going to hang with him." They did finally meet, in Washington D.C., last week, where Pastis had a book signing and where Watterson happened to be.
     "That was crazy, wild to meet him. We talk for three hours the first night, two hours the second. I got to ask him everything I wanted to ask him."
     About what?
     "About cartooning, his background, some stuff about Calvin, stuff only comic nerds would care about, the rhythm and timing of a three-panel strip versus a four-panel strip. It was great, such a friendly person. A very nice guy. Quick to laugh. It was cool to be able to make him laugh, for somebody like me . . . he's an idol, and to meet him and have him be so nice is wonderful."
     He didn't ask about Watterson coming back to the comics page. "I won't ask him that," he said. "For him to do what he did, for me to meet with him, you have to play it cool, be a friend, don't ask things a reporter would ask."
     Ouch. But fair enough. Before I let Pastis go, I had to ask one reporterly question: What is it about successful cartoonists? They obviously love what they do; why stop so soon? Not just Watterson, but Gary Larson of "The Far Side," and Berke Breathed of "Bloom County." The old school was to draw a cartoon into your decrepitude then pass it on to your son. Why the high-profile retirements? Watterson was 37 when he set down his pen.
     "It's one of the few art forms that doesn't have to be collaborative," Pastis said. "You're truly on your own. Whatever comes out of your head goes into the paper, the only limitation being newspaper standards. The bottom line is it probably attracts people who like to be on their own. Maybe it does attract the loner more than any other art form."
     Which is ironic because, though penned by loners, a great cartoon — like "Nancy" in its heyday, or "Calvin and Hobbes" or "Pearls Before Swine" for that matter — makes you feel less alone, less isolated, more plugged in to the world of laughter, of other people, not to mention wisecracking rats, sweetly dumb pigs, and one irreplaceable long-lost little boy and his toy tiger.
     The beauty of a stunt like this is that not only is it a treat for regular readers of the comics, but it's a reminder to those of us who have wandered off that they are still there, despite everything, a glorious art form, when done right, waiting for us wayward souls to come home.

What is so dashing about a dashboard?

    "The ages live in history," Oscar Wilde once wrote, "through their anachronism." 
     Seeing something that at first seems out of place in its epoch, like "ROCKET" emblazoned on the heavily-riveted iron boiler of this early 19th century British locomotive, can cause you to pause and wonder.
      The Rocket was built by a father and son team, George and Robert Stephenson, in 1829—built for speed, briefly achieving a jaw-dropping 36 miles per hour at the Rainhill Trials that year, causing it to be picked as the design for the Liverpool & Manchester Railroad, beating three other contenders, including John Ericsson, who would go on to design the first ironclad warship, the USS Monitor, for the Union navy in the Civil War. 
      When I saw the vehicle, on display at the Science Museum in London,* for a moment I pondered if we got our word "rocket" from this train engine. 
    But I immediately realized that the word was already in use, 15 years earlier, when Francis Scott Key wrote "The Defence of Fort McHenry," the poem that would become the Star Spangled Banner: "And the Rockets' red glare, the Bombs bursting in air..."
     Rockets were used in battle far earlier than we might think. The Congreve rocket was used effectively in the Napoleonic wars, though they were not particularly accurate when it came to hitting targets.      
      Before that, they were used mostly as fireworks. The definition of "rocket" from Samuel Johnson's magnificent 1755 dictionary doesn't mention military use, but describes a rocket only as: "An artificial firework, being a cylindrical case of paper filled with nitre, charcoal and sulfur, and which mounts in the air to a considerable height, and then bursts."

Distaff spindles
(The British Museum)

     Johnson gives its etymology merely as "[Rocchetto, Italian]"** and leaves it at that, which is shame, because if you dig deeper you find quite a tale: rocchetto is a diminutive for rocca, which is Italian for "distaff." 
      A distaff is a spindle that wool is wound on during spinning—though if the word rings a bell, it's probably not from making yarn, but because in more recent decades the word lingered as a code to describe the realm of women,  a tad condescendingly. "With all her distaff classmates mooning nightly by their phones for a call from one jock or another..." Frederick Exley writes in the late 1970s in Last Notes from Home. 

From a 1634 British book
"composing all manner of fire-works
or Triumph and Recreation."

    Italians named their fireworks "rocchettos," or "little spindles" because that's what they looked like. They were small cylinders on sticks that resembled the distaff from a spinning wheel (before fins were invented, the stick was needed to point the rocket in the direction it would more-or-less go). 
      As far as how the Italians named that part of the spinning wheel, well, the evidence is murky, but all you have to do is take a look at the leaves of the rocket plant for a hint (although maybe the plants were named for the fireworks. Cause and effect can get switched over the centuries, and you can't make assumptions. For instance, the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa, are not named for the little yellow songbirds found there, as one might suppose. The name canary is derived from Latin for dog, canis. The islands were named in Roman times their large dogs; the bird was noticed later and named for the islands).

Rocket leaves

      But it's pleasing to imagine the plant came first. There's a joy in finding low-tech origins hidden in modern words. One of the more unexpected words in Johnson's dictionary is "computer" which, in the mid-1700s was a person, a "reckoner, accountant, calculator." Before picking apart "rocket"—to idle away the time before dinner on a Saturday—my favorite example of this was "dashboard," which Mr. Garman, my cagey 7th grade English teacher, once used to bore the rest of our class at Roehm Junior High School and fascinate me, lodging in my mind for 40 years.
      Think about it. The control panel of an automobile is called a dashboard. Why would that be? What is dashing?  The reason it's called that is when cars were still buggies pulled by horses, there was a low, angled board at foot level to keep horses from flinging mud up on the driver as they dashed. When newfangled automobiles were rolled out, the name carried over because it was in roughly the same location, even though the original use was gone.
      Cars are filled with anachronisms—the "trunk" of course harkens back to the era when a large suitcase was strapped to the back, the "glove compartment" on the passenger time to when that passenger was often a lady a lady invariably wore gloves. 
      I think that's what Wilde meant when he commented on anachronism making history live. It is a thread that connects us today with the people of the past. The next time you read of the latest rocket boosting a satellite into space***, or hurling robot explorers toward some distant planet, think back on those Italian wives and sisters and mothers, working flax methodically around their roccos, perhaps gazing out a window at the stars.


* To visit the Science Museum in London, and see how well the Brits do this kind of thing, is to forever cringe in shame at the corporate puffery and Hollywood junk foisted on the public by the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

** Anyone familiar with how Samuel Johnson constructed his dictionary knows that there was a lot of guesswork involved, so the connection between "rocket" and "rocchetto" could be more whimsical than real. If you consult Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary, he offers a completely different etymology for "rocket"as "probably from the root of crack and racket." Although Webster's sounds more like the hunch of a man who didn't know Italian, and I would place my bets on Johnson.

*** A "rocket" has been an engine thrusting a missile into space for nearly a century, since inventor and physicist Robert Goddard began using the term. "It is possible to convert the rocket from a very inefficient heat engine into the most efficient heat engine that ever has been devised," he wrote, in 1919.