The shortest bucket list ever

Man and dog resting after a run, Nashville

     I am morally opposed to bucket lists of all kinds, those bossy catalogues of experiences that every upper middle class person ought to aspire to. One hundred books, places, restaurants, whatever, that you must—must!— read, visit, eat at before you die. In order to live a full and complete life. According to someone else, to some low-wage assistant editor at a fading magazine or web site who never met you.
     To me, it's as if the martinets of fashion, driven out of the business of dictating our clothing choices by general slovenliness, regrouped around lifestyle for their last ditch stand at ordering people to do something.  We may not be able to ordain your skirt length, anymore, but we sure as hell can demand you go to Prague. You can't die and not see Prague. 
     Really? Just watch me. 
     The world's a big place. You could sit down and start reading books from this moment until you take your last breath, and you would still miss wonderful works of literature. You could stand up, and begin a Conradian wander across the earth and still miss fabulous places. The idea of generating lists of obligations is such a dreary eat-your-peas, fill-in-the-stamp-album notion, I'm astounded anyone has ever done it once, never mind made it a tiresome journalistic cliche.  
     I've been to a number of very nice cities. London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Tokyo, and such. But I'd never suggest that you must go to these places. You should. It's not a bad idea, if you are so inclined. But lots —the vast majority of people in the world—have never been to any particular place, and to suggest that their lives are somehow incomplete because of it is another form of cultural imperialism and intellectual arrogance. Paris is filled with Parisians whose lives are neither charming nor fulfilled despite their being right there. You could read half of Moby-Dick and cast it away, hating the book. There's a lot about whales.
     When I look at my own life, at things I've done that I'm most happy about, most proud about, never show up on anybody's list. I've never seen "Get sober" on a bucket list, but I'm glad I did. Or "Have children," though that's an adventure that beats the hell out of bungee jumping into some gorge, not that I'll ever considering doing that. 
     If I had to compose a list, if you put a gun to my head and made me, I'd recommend people get a dog. Because I never had a dog, never wanted a dog—in fact, was dead set against them. I didn't even want to touch a dog. My dad was from New York City. We never had dogs.  When my older boy began pressing for one, I replied. "You're not asking for a dog, you're asking me to pick up dog crap twice a day and I'm not going to do it." He was eight or nine. 
     But my younger son also wanted a dog, and asked for it for his bar mitzvah, and that was the loophole that brought us Kitty. I was terrified at the time—I sincerely thought the dog would ruin our lives. She didn't, and now that care for her as devolved to me, as it invariably does, I'm really glad we have her. Walking Kitty is the most normal thing I do, often the highlight of my day, and as we take in the air, morning and night and noon if I'm around, I think, "I'm really glad I got a dog. My life is so much fuller." 
     That said, I be reluctant to put "Get a dog" on my never-to-be-written bucket list, because all that really says is that I like having a dog. You, a completely different person, might not, due to whatever persistent personal flaw makes you immune to a dog's charms. 
     Of course, I didn't want a dog either.
      So maybe I could take a risk and write a very short bucket list, because if you really are the sort of person who'd be unhappy with a dog, well, that's awful, and you should get a dog and endeavor to change yourself while there's still time. So, as much as I thought I'd never do it, here's Neil Steinberg's What You Must Do Before You Die list:
     1. Get a dog.
     At least you won't have trouble remembering it.         

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     I did not look up and see this.
     Rather, I looked up and saw this. 

     But with sufficient climbing, and head craning, and body angling, and I was able to get the result above, which has a certain satisfying balance.
      So where is this oblong tableau? It's sufficiently obscure that a hint is in order. It was mid-afternoon Friday, the work was done, and I sort of hit a wall and thought, "Get out of here, poke around." So I hopped on the Divvy at the Mart, took it north, then south, and then wandered around on foot until I came across this.
     Let's sideline Dale -- he won last week. But all you non-Dale readers. If I'm looking up and seeing this, where am I?
    The winner will receive one of my not-so-special-after-all 2015 blog posters, of which I have a superabundance. Good luck.

Go to bed.

         Due to popular request, from now on the Saturday Fun Activity will post at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, to give people who aren't insomniacs or Dale a better chance to win. 
      Or at least for today, given the chance of my automatically reverting to my routine next week. But I'll try to stick to the change, because it seems sensible and fair.
      Please check back after 7 a.m.     
      Thank you.

Serve and protect ... themselves

     The truly disturbing thing about the photograph of two cops brandishing rifles and grinning over the prone body of a black man wearing antlers (wearing antlers — how do you even do that? "C'mere buddy, put these antlers on and let this third cop take your picture before we turn you loose?") is not that it jarringly captures one moment of grotesque bad judgment and racial insensitivity a dozen years ago, but that it is also a perfect expression of the main ongoing problem then, now and into the foreseeable future of the Chicago Police Department.

     The motto on Chicago squad cars, "We Serve and Protect," is a phrase without an object. "We serve and protect whom?" The implication is the people of the city of Chicago, and to be fair, much serving and protecting goes on, all the time, all day, every day. Any discussion of the Chicago Police has to start with a caveat: that there are over 12,000 sworn officers, most doing their jobs in a laudable fashion, enduring an at times dull, at times difficult routine, performing acts of heroism, sometimes laying down their lives.
     But the ooze from the bad apples spatters them, big time. The routine competence and occasional excellence of the department is undercut by a general atmosphere that could be emblazoned on their cars as "We serve and protect ourselves." The attitude is that their job is so dangerous that their first duty is to each other, and it fosters an insular world of corruption and cronyism. Every illegally parked car with a pair of handcuffs or a checkered hatband hanging from the rearview mirror is a whisper of "I'm a cop; give me a break."
     And they do, on matters big and small, and it leads to cops like Jerome Finnigan, on the left in the instantly infamous photo. Finnigan is in a prison in Florida serving 12 years for robbery and home invasion. The other officer, Timothy McDermott, is still trying to get his job back, and the public has to shake its head that the Police Board voted 5-4 to fire him last October.
     Really? A close call? McDermott argued it was a youthful prank, and to the degree that could be true, you have to feel sorry for him. But the Chicago Police Department has long been a weight on our city's reputation. Try to pick an era without a jaw-dropping police scandal, from this latest embarrassment rocketing around the Internet to Burge torture to the police riots of the 1960s. It never ends.
     At some point the police need to at least give the impression they care, that the best interests of any officer who does any misdeed imaginable and some that aren't won't trump what is in the best interests of the department and the city.
     Finnigan and the three officers working for him logged 200 complaints without raising any alarm among their superiors, and when you look at how one of those complaints was handled, you see why. In 2002, Finnigan and his fellow Chicago Police officers broke into the home of Robert Cook, who turned out to be a Chicago firefighter. They beat him in front of his children. Cook filed a complaint. Here is how the complaint was handled, according to Cook's lawsuit against the city:

     The next day, May 30, 2002, an investigator from the CPD came to plaintiff's home to discuss his complaint. The investigator told plaintiff that plaintiff was a drug dealer and that his complaint was "bogus." A day or two later, the investigator returned to plaintiff's house and told him that if he pursued his complaint the police would cause him to lose his job. Plaintiff told the investigator that he would not pursue the case so long as the police did not arrest him, plant drugs on him, or have him fired. As the investigator left plaintiff's home, he told plaintiff, "just forget about this; otherwise kiss your job goodbye, and you're f----."

     Over the past decade, the city of Chicago has paid out $500 million in lawsuits based on such police work. A half-billion dollars. That's almost exactly the nut due on the ballooning police pensions. If cops weren't so adept at ignoring the malfeasance of their brethren, Chicago wouldn't be quite so broke.
     Police have a tough job, which they make tougher by coddling the rotten apples among them. We haven't had a Ferguson-type crisis in Chicago yet out of pure dumb luck. But luck only holds so long, and the Chicago Police Department must start policing itself better.

Prize Possession

     The Sun-Times ran a story Wednesday —about physicist and former Fermi head Leon Lederman selling his Nobel Prize — that brought to mind one of my favorite stories I ever wrote, not so much for its execution, but for the idea sparking it. It was 1988, and the Small family had just started a new magazine called Chicago Times, and I wanted to impress them with my sense of quirk.  My first piece is below, on Nobel laureates, where they put their Nobel prizes when they get them home, and do they show them off to dinner guests. The original lede on this story was a non-sequitur —"Most people know that Albert Nobel invented dynamite, but few realize that his father invented plywood"—that appealed to me because I felt it set the proper surreal tone of focusing on a mundane aspect of the Nobel Prize (faithful reader Gry Haukland contributes this sublime item from Scientific American about trying to get your Nobel through airport security). But the editor rejected my beginning, so the story was printed the way it appears below, in September 1988, a few months before Lederman won his Nobel Prize in physics. Bidding for the medal starts at $325,000. As for my story, well, I hope it's worth the time it takes to read.

     On December 10, a new group of academics will be paraded, blinking, into the glare of global publicity in Stockholm, Sweden. There they will receive what may be the world's most prestigious award, the Nobel Prize, along with a payment of approximately $225,000.
     These laureates will be questioned about the discoveries and life work that led to their awards. But, if this year is like others, the really pertinent questions about the Nobel will go unasked. Where do the winners put the prizes when they get them home? And what do they do with the money?
     Luckily, the University of Chicago has produced fifty-five Nobel laureates, more than any other institution in the world. Consequently, answers are close at hand.
      "It's a lovely paperweight," George Stigler says of the beribboned two-inch-across, one-eighth-inch-thick solid gold medallion he received in 1982 for his work on economics and public information. "It's in my desk and I bring it out once in a while to amuse people."
     Stigler says he knows of one laureate who carries his Nobel Prize around, presenting the stamped profile of the inventor of dynamite at hotels, along with demands for discounts.
     Other laureates are more hesitant about displaying their prizes out of a combination of fear and modesty. 
     "The prize is usually in a safe-deposit box," says Jim Cronin, who, with Val Fitch, won it in 1980 for his work on subatomic particles called K-mesons. Cronin does have a facsimile prize close at hand, however.
     "What the foundation does, for a minimum charge, is give you a replica, a fake," he says. "It's sitting in the study with all the other memorabilia that I'm ashamed to show to anybody I respect. Maybe I'd like to, but I'm too embarrassed. But the children like to see it."
     Theodore W. Schultz, who received the prize in 1979 along with W. Arthur Lewis for pioneering work on economic transformation of traditional agricultural societies, found the idea of making a replica distasteful. He keeps his prize locked away in a special safe the Defense Department gave him to store classified documents. "I've not displayed it—once in a while my children may look at it, and that's about it," he says.
     As an economist, Schultz chides himself for holding on to the prize, which he calls "a gravestone that draws no interest. I could have sold it and drawn interest on it." But the man who was insightful enough to develop the idea of the importance of human capital recognizes that, in the grand scope of his personal finances, the interest off a Nobel Prize will not make or break him. "my marginal interest would have been quite low compared to knowing it's just there."     
     Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the great astrophysicist who theorized the existence of black holes when he was nineteen and who won the prize in 1983, never thought about selling his Nobel. "What can one do?" he asks in a faint, philosophical tone. "You can melt it down for gold, or you can put it in a bank. I don't go to the extreme." Chandrasekhar did have a reproduction made, but then gave it away to his brothers in India.
     The "minimum charge" Cronin mentioned for the replica—other laureates estimated it was between $25 and $40—points out another interesting aspect to the award. "You'd be amazed," Cronin laughs. "They give you all this money, pay for your transportation and hotel, but if you want photographs—and they photograph the ceremony like crazy—they charge you $10 apiece."
     Cronin also dispels the myth that laureates use the prize money to "further their work." He says he used some of the money to put plumbing and a new porch on his cabin in Wisconsin. Stigler built a cabin in Canada. Schultz pointed out that travel expense to the ten days of festivities in Stockholm for twenty-nine family members "took a good hunk out of the prize." 
     And finally, for all the scientists working away in obscurity, dreaming of the day they will wow the academy in Stockholm with the scientific brilliance of their acceptance speech, Cronin offers a disillusioning revelation.
     "I put a lot of work into my speech," he says. "This was a social occasion, and my speech was a scientific paper—no jokes. It went over like a lead balloon." 
     

Can you spell 'labyrinthine?'

     The finals of the 88th Scripps National Spelling Bee are going on in Maryland over the next few days. One of those quaint bits of Americana that persists in the face of being utterly mooted by technology. Who needs to know how to spell? Tap out a jumble of letters somewhat close to the correct spelling and your phone will do the rest.
     Yet millions of kids dutifully study long lists of words, and jam themselves into the wide end of that funnel squirting out one lone champion (or, at best, like last year, two) this Friday.
     Why? That’s easy. It’s a way for children who otherwise might not find opportunities for acclaim to win big. Any kid who can run fast or pitch hard can find fleeting glory playing sports. But the ability to focus, to study hard, for years? Who honors that? You’ve got science fairs, chess tournaments and the spelling bee, and that’s about it.
     This year there is bee controversy. The Washington Post, which watches the bee more closely than most, since it finishes up in the newspaper’s backyard, spotlighted the domination of the bee by Indian-American kids, who have taken the championship seven years in a row.
     Which led to ugly social media condemnation last year. Co-champions Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe “were greeted with a barrage of racist comments on Facebook and Twitter,” the Post reported, citing examples such as, “The kids in the spelling bee should only be AMERICAN.”
     Like the Post, I have a particular interest in the bee. In 1993, I was writing a book on failure, and thought it should include something related to public school — that’s where much of our fear of failure comes from, the red F, all those nightmares where you’re taking a test you haven’t studied for. But what to actually report on? A student failing a class? A girl who didn’t make the cheerleading squad? That seemed so bleak. And then I remembered the National Spelling Bee. It was perfect. Nine million kids enter. They all lose, in a public, humiliating way that gets more public and more humiliating as it goes along. And it’s spelling, it’s stupid, it’s not even a valuable skill.
       So I decided I would follow a student through a year of the bee, through local, regional, state and national bees.
     But how to find one student in the Chicago area with a chance of going to the nationals?
     I formed a strategy: hedge your bets. Those who go to the national round are often those who went to the nationals in the past. So I would observe a past state winner who would have a better chance to go back for another go. The two previous winners from Illinois were kids named Gary Lee and Sruti Nadimpalli. My reporter’s instinct told me it would be far easier to find the latter, and I did. She was 12 then, a serious girl, the child of two doctors. I followed her through her bees at the school, regional and state levels. She didn’t go to nationals, but I did, and found a brutal competition. The chapter in my book was called, “Shiver Like Rhesus Monkeys,” the way a Scripps flack described the weeping losers.
     Twenty-two years is a long time, but again, thanks to her distinctive name, I found Sruti in about 10 seconds, a doctor herself now, teaching at the Stanford University School of Medicine. I asked her how she views the bee, from the perspective of an adult in her mid-30s.
     “I think studying spelling fosters a love of language in many of the participants, the preparation is intense, and rote, and — depending on one’s parents’ approach — can be a bit much,” she wrote in an email. “In this age as well, I don’t think good spelling carries the value it used to. That said, I probably wouldn’t have opted out of participating if I could do it over again.”
     Her mention of parents made me realize something. A lot of these kids are in the bee because their folks push them. Which puts an extra cruel spin on the abuse of winners. Their ambitious, often new immigrant parents force them to participate in this surreal struggle where, after years of effort, should by some fluke they emerge victorious, then the children of parents who let them spend their youths playing Xbox await to heckle them online. That isn’t right.

Will my air bag kill me?

The author with his 1963 Volvo P1800, 1984.

    Once I drove a car without brakes. Intentionally. It was my first car: a 1963 Volvo P1800, the Swedish idea of a sports car with stubby fins, white in color, just like The Saint’s. The brakes quit abruptly. Push the pedal to the floor and nothing happened. But I could still downshift and had the emergency brake, so I drove it home. I was 22 and stupid, if that isn’t being redundant.
     But I got away with it.
     Now, 32 years later, the same guy who climbed behind the wheel of that brakeless Volvo contemplates the burgeoning Takata air bag recall. I’ve been manfully ignoring it, but like the radioactive blob in one of those 1950s horror movies it keeps getting bigger. Last week the recall doubled to 34 million cars, the biggest recall in automotive history.
     The air bags, which are supposed to save you in an accident — a nice touch of irony — instead can spray metal shrapnel into your face, even after a minor fender bender. Six people have died. A hundred more have been injured, some with gruesome facial injuries. Nothing like someone having their throat cut by an air bag or a shard of steel jammed in their eye to catch public attention.

The 2005 Honda Odyssey on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

       This has been gathering for years. Now seems the moment when even the most complacent driver looks up from his silage, utters a worried “moo,” and goes shuffling off to find out whether his silver bean of a 2005 Honda Odyssey is among those now being recalled. The van that my darling boys and precious wife drive.
     The government has a website — safercar.gov — good old government, catching business when it falls in a swoon. Easy to find. And look, a big yellow button marked “Search for recall by VIN.”
     Trot out to the driveway, open the driver’s side door. The expected big white sticker. Fall to my knees. Squint at the tiny type: “MFD. BY HONDA MFG. OF ALABAMA.” Of course, Made in America. I can’t even work into a towering “Remember Pearl Harbor” sense of betrayal. “THIS VEHICLE CONFORMS TO ALL APPLICABLE FEDERAL MOTOR VEHICLE SAFETY AND THEFT PREVENTION STANDARDS IN EFFECT ON THE DATE OF MANUFACTURE.”
     Ha! All the good THAT did! Too bad Congress didn’t pass the “Don’t Bungle Producing The Air Bags So Badly That They Start Killing People Act of 2005.” All of this might have been avoided.
     There, the VIN, a blindness inducing jumble. “5″ or is that an “S”? “FNRL38″ or is that a “B”? And so on. Seventeen digits.
     Back to the computer, plug ‘em in.
     “Number of Open Recalls: 0.”
     Hooray, right? Wrong. Thanks to the orange box reading “Please Note: If you are checking to see if your vehicle is affected by the Takata air bag recalls, it generally takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks for automakers to gather individual VINs associated with a recall. It is important that you check back periodically as a recall on your vehicle may not show up immediately.”
     Oh. It is important, is it? Another important task that may or may not help keep me in some infinitesimal way.
     So do you drive the car and try not to think about it? Or what? Walk? Wear a hockey mask? Buy a new car? A new car that might also have some defective part you’ll find out about in a decade.
     Sigh. Keep driving. Try … not … to … think … about … it.
     Earlier this month, Malcolm Gladwell published a lengthy article in the New Yorker on the safety of the Ford Pinto, which my generation knows as the pinup for unsafe cars — they burst into flames if you rear-ended them. Only, as Gladwell demonstrates, they didn’t, at least not any more than any other of the cars at the time. “In 1975-76, 1.9 percent of all cars on the road were Pintos,” Gladwell writes, “and Pintos were involved in 1.9 percent of all fatal fires.”
     Whoops. Turns out the Pinto wasn’t more dangerous than any other lousy mid-1970s car.
     You know what is the most dangerous part of any car, don’t you? What causes tens of thousands of deaths every year?
     The driver.
     But we can’t recall those, can we? So instead we fixate on these one-in-a-million risks — which are a big deal if you or your loved one is that one unlucky driver out of a million. For the rest of us, it’s all just part of the endless, confusing, scary hassle that is modern life. Drive safely. If you can.