Tommy Wong: "Everyone is like your family"

     "Number three!" the maitre d' growled.
     We were standing outside Lao Sze Chuan, in Chinatown. With college looming, my boys have been ticking off must-visit restaurants before being consigned to university food service fare: High Five Ramen. Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder, Cross-Rhodes in Evanston and now Tony Hu's flagship restaurant.
     We had "14" on a square of cardboard. A 40 minute wait.
     "Why don't you go explore the mall," I said to the family, "I'll wait here."

Tommy Wong

     A ploy, to get them out of the way—my boys cringe when their dad takes a picture—because I wanted to photograph the maitre d', who had a very distinctive look. Large Harry Caray eyeglasses. An orange polo with the collar turned up. Dripping with bling. A sparkly earring the size of a pea. A wide jade bracelet on one wrist, an enormous gold watch on the other. Eight rings, two to a finger. A pendant His name, "Tommy," on a white tag.
     "Do you mind if I take your picture?" I asked, tentatively because of his fierce growl. He posed for a pair of demure shots, hand on hip, and then raced back to the maitre d' station and returned with a black fan, which he held in a variety of tai chi poses, one knee in the air, arms back.

      "I am the teacher!" Tommy Wong exclaimed. "I am the master!" He vanished into the restaurant, and came back with a sword.

     The Chicago restaurant scene goes through various trends: sushi wanes, steakhouses blossom like mushrooms after a rain. But one aspect of the eating out experience has fallen from popularity and shows no risk of returning: the colorful host. He—and it was always a man—added to the dining drama, picking up where the food left off.
     It could be a maitre d'--the old world charm of Arturo Petterino at the Pump Room. It could be a chef. The beef wellington at the Bakery on Lincoln Avenue was justifiably lauded, but the moment you really waited for was when Louis Szathmary, looking exactly like a chef in a Maurice Sendak children's book with his snowy mustache, tall toque and ample stomach--would make the rounds.
     The apex of the form was Petros Kogiones at Dianna's Opaa on Halsted Street. I never went anywhere else in Greektown. How could I? Because more than flaming saganaki, which he claimed to invent, we wanted Petros, the lanky host welcoming us with shouts of "Cousin!" kissing our girlfriends, quieting down the restaurant to perform what was in essence a one-man floor show. On the very rare nights you went to Dianna's and Petros wasn't there, you felt robbed.
     All gone. I suppose a few remain: Cesar Izquierdo, doing his spinning top tricks at Taste of Peru on North Clark Street. The fact he also feeds you is an added bonus.
     And now Tommy Wong. A couple days later I returned to get to know him better, or try. No sooner did we settle at a table in the back then he hopped up again.
     "Excuse me," he said, hurrying to the door.

     "Hi, welcome, how are you? Four ladies?"
     Then he was back.
     "I've done this job 35 years," he said. "I was born in Hong Kong,"
     How does he see his role at the restaurant?
     "You do the job," he said. "Like a family. Everyone is like your family. your grandmother or brother or sister, who likes your food and he likes your service. I'm very happy to see everybody, I say, 'Hi! How are you?' Like a brother or sister or father or mother. I like to make people happy, come here for lunch and think, 'I like Tommy' I want people to remember me and keep coming back and do business."
     As a hobby, he is part of the society that puts on the Chinese New Year's Parade—he operates the lion's head, he said. Wong is 48, married, one child, 15.
     Before I could ask the teen's gender, he was gone again. I sat for a long time.
     Wong eventually returned, redolent of Baisha cigarettes. He seemed a little surprised I was still there.
     "This is for the newspaper?" he asked. I admitted it was. He left again, returning with a take-out menu, which he pressed into my hands, pointing to the address: "2172 S. Archer Avenue." There seemed nothing left to do but leave, so I did.

"If you want drama, go to the opera"— Top Opera Movies

     Scarcity creates value.
     So when computer graphics were new and expensive, and therefore unusual, films crammed with eye-popping special effects and feats of physical-impossibility were just the thing to draw an audience. 
     Now every mangled tale of a forgotten B-list Marvel superhero of the '70s conjures up a convincing army of physics-defying orcs and droids and CGI ho-hum magic whatever. Common as dirt. Far harder to find are actual human stunts, performed by actual human stars. So they stand out, despite being a practice that traces back to silent picture days.
     Or at least one stunt was enough to draw me to the cinema to see the latest "Mission Impossible" installment. Just as Tom Cruise bouncing around the top the Burg Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai forced my ass into a seat to see "Ghost Protocol" in 2011, so his heavily-publicized take-off clinging to the outside of an airplane as it takes off was lure enough to compel me to see "Rogue Nation" a couple weeks back.
    Boy-howdy. The short review is, it's everything it's supposed to be. A superb thriller, packed with the sort of stuff that a movie like that is supposed to be packed with. And the airplane stunt, at the beginning of the movie, was truly memorable.  I don't know if  Cruise does his own stunts because he's crazy, or to show off the physical prowess of the Scientology lifestyle, or with the exact cynical intention of drumming his movies.
    But it works.  
    I even, at one point during the film, said to myself: "Okay Tom, so be a Scientologist then." Not that it isn't still a scary, vindictive cult. But really, what faith isn't?
     The movie is not without flaw: a few BMW product placements too many, intrusions that stop the plot as surely as if John Cameron Swazye stepped from behind a pillar and attached a Timex watch to the frame of Cruise's motorcycle to illustrate its durability. And the hero-is-about-to-be-tortured-but-gets-away trope has to be proclaimed officially dead and buried after "Rogue Nation." No mas. 

Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson at the Vienna Opera.

     But that's not why I'm writing about it. This quasi-review is just prelude, and could be left in the capable hands of my colleague, Richard Roeper. No, the reason I'm focusing on the new "Mission Impossible" movie is because one product placement is far more satisfying and subtle than constantly flashing the BMW logo: a good 10 minute chunk of the film, at least, takes place at  the Vienna State Opera House. 
    Sure, the segment is another cliche, an attempt on the life of the Austrian prime minister by a team of bad guy assassins,  interspersed with satisfying snatches of "Turandot." Though the set piece is forgivable because it contains the immortal line, "You want drama, go to the opera." 
    Exactly. And its very derisiveness made me think of the many, many great opera movies that are not only fun to watch, but help introduce newcomers to the art form. This being a humble blog, I will limit myself to my favorite six opera movies, though feel free to add your own (though not "Pretty Woman," which I didn't forget, but am excluding, because it's a romantic comedy about a streetwalker who looks like Julia Roberts, and whose prostitution leads to wealth and happiness, which is like writing a musical about a heroin addict who looks like Taylor Swift and who, thanks to her addiction, finds love and fulfillment).
     I'm also leaving out the Bugs Bunny shorts that introduced most of us to opera, since they aren't technically "movies," and probably deserve a post of their own someday. 
    So, with no further throat-clearing, my list of Great Opera Movies, in order of their greatness..

Tom Hulce

1. Amadeus. Thirty years later, I still remember shock of seeing Pinto from "Animal House" cast in the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But it worked.  Milos Forman's movie version of the Broadway hit not only  offers up a gloss of Mozart's greatest compositions, but explains how they were created, including a wonderful "Queen of the Night" aria from "The Magic Flute" and the chilling climactic moment from "Don Giovani" that set me up for disappointment when I finally saw it live at the Lyric. Winner of eight-Academy Awards, including best actor to F. Murray Abraham, in his one-hit-wonder star turn as Antonio Salieri, the court composer, enemy of Mozart, and narrator of the film. Elizabeth Berridge  steals the show as Mozart's bright-faced, scheming wife, Constanze Weber.

2. Moonstruck. I would have put this first—it's one of my favorite movies—but didn't want people to smirk. Norman Jewison's wonderful 1987 family comedy stars Cher, of all people, who is surprisingly capable, despite what you think of her. She is the aging accountant, 

Cher and Nicholas Cage at the Met

Loretta Castorini, who, seven years after her husband was hit by a bus, is poised to marry a schlub—or whatever the Italian version of a "schlub" is—Danny Aielo, when she meets maimed baker Nicholas Cage, back when he could still act. The movie begins with the Met preparing to stage "La Boheme," and pivots on their date to the production. "I didn't really think she was going to die," Cher says through tears afterward. "I knew she was sick...."  Then the movie is filled with memorable lines, Cage seems to get most of them, including the useful "I ain't no freakin' monument to justice!" and a poignant meditation on love. "Love don't make things nice—it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die." Sounds like the plot of every opera.

Klaus Kinski

3. Fitzcarraldo. No movie captures the obsessive passion of the opera fan like Werner Herzog' 1982 tale of an Irishman, improbably played by Klaus Kinski, who wants to build an opera house in the middle of the South American rain forest. To do so, he needs to make money—how else?—in the rubber industry, and to do that he does the only sensible thing: try to drag a 320-ton steamship across a jungle portage with  an army of Peruvian peons, while blasting Caruso on his gramophone, it's the perfect metaphor for art and human passion giving the finger to the indifferent forces of nature.

4.  The Untouchables. Kevin Costner in a historically-iffy but satisfying portrayal of Elliot Ness and his battle against Al Capone in Jazz Age Chicago. Sean Connery is the street smart

Robert De Niro at the opera

Chicago cop who utters his classic definition of the "the Chicago Way." Not only is there a thrilling homage to the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" filmed in Union Station's Great Hall, but Connery is gunned down in a a classic back and forth between Capone, played by Robert DeNiro, enjoying that most cliched of movie opera moments, Pagliacci's "Vesti la giubba" aria while director  Brian De Palma cuts from the opera to the unfolding murder (used again in "Godfather III, "which doesn't make our list, well, because it's "Godfather III"). 

5. A Night at the Opera. The only way Margaret Dumont could be any stuffier was to make her a wealthy dowager interested in investing in the New York Opera Company. What opera goer hasn't, at one point or another, wished the Marx Brothers would burst in an bring some interest to a production? Here they switch the sheet music to "Il Trovatore" for "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and in general make a hash of the production (including a chase in the rafters that isn't anything like the one in "Rogue Nation.")  This 1935 classic—No. 12 on the American Film Institute's list of all-time funniest movies— did much to kidnap "Pagliacci" and hold it for ransom in popular culture, with Groucho adding his own lyrics. "Ridi, pagliacci, I love you very much-ee." 

6. To Rome With Love. While the funniest part of Woody's Allen's 2012 movie is Roberto

Fabio Armilato can only sing when wet.

Benigni's Leopoldo, an ordinary man who wakes up one morning to discover he's become a wildly-popular celebrity, one of the movie's sub-stories involves a mortician named Giancario, an amateur opera singer who can sing beautifully, but only in the shower. So Allen's character, Jerry, a vacationing American opera director, arranges for him to sing—"Pagliacci," of course—in the shower on-stage. It might not be the Marx Brothers, but if you can't laugh at a man standing in a shower stall on stage in a concert hall, singing opera in front of an audience, well, you can't laugh at anything. 

Anyway, those are mine. Did I miss any?

(Yes, I have. Readers on Facebook have been suggesting their own favorites, and one mentioned the heartbreaking scene in  7. "Philadelphia" Jonathan Demme's ground-breaking 1993 movie about a lawyer with AIDS, where a dying Tom Hanks, who won the Academy Award for his role, tries to explain "La mamma morta" from "Andrea Chenier"—sung by Maria Callas, no less—to Denzel Washington. "The place that cradled me is burning..." Notice the moment when Washington glances at his watch. That's what we're up against. Just love that scene. I can't believe I forgot it).

Scott Walker's handful

Scott Walker

     So how many Muslims aren't radical terrorists?
     Take your time.
     You don't have to come up with an exact figure.
     I would say, "the vast, overwhelming majority."
     Or, for the mathematically inclined, 99.99 percent.
    First, because that's demonstrably true. While quite a bit of the bloodshed in the world can be traced to those acting in some crazed notion of Islam, the fact remains that almost all of the 1.6 billion Muslims are, like most people everywhere, trying to go about their business.
    If that weren't true, we'd all be dead. 
    Or a lot more of us would be dead. 
    Not everyone thinks this way of course. I've had otherwise sensible readers tip-toe toward it, saying, "Yeah, maybe, but what about ISIS and the mullahs in Iran." It's important for them to establish, at the very least, that Islam is more bloodthirsty than Christianity is, at the moment. 
     I think, in their view, it means they win. 
     But some aren't satisfied playing that sorta sad exercise in playing nyah-nyan-we're-more-peaceful-than-you.
    Scott Walker, on the campaign trail in New Hampshire this week, squinched his eyes shut and came up with an estimate of how many Muslims aren't murderous terrorists.
     His guess:
     "A handful."
     You can listen to the quote in context here.
     I imagine he'll eventually apologize—groups like CAIR are already demanding he do so. 
     Or maybe he won't. As Donald Trump amply demonstrates, being the big dog means never having to say you're sorry.
     Besides, this was no gaffe. It is a received truth of the Republican party that, just as Mexican immigrants tend to be rapists, murderers and criminals, so followers of Islam are hot to wage deadly Jihad, if not one and all, then the vast majority. Those who haven't struck yet are perhaps biding their time.
     This is important more than an illustration of gotcha politics. Scott Walker and his like-minded soul mates are in league with the terrorists they so strenuously condemn. The reason terrorists commit those acts is because they want to drive a wedge between Islam and the West. 
     So when hacks like Walker take the bait, they are doing the work of terrorists. Walker is what the Communists would call "a useful idiot."  A phrase that, applied to Walker, is only half true.
     The second half.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     There are hundreds of gas stations in the Chicago area. 
     So how are you expected to nail the exact location of this sign, colorful though it may be?
     Well, you just are.  Because this is not your run-of-the-mill gas station sign, and I'll leave it at that.  And to be honest, my gut says it'll be pretty easy—it's either this, or one that I worry is too hard, and somehow I hate to inflict the too hard one. It feels like cheating. 
     So where is this green and pink neon beauty? Place your answers below. The winner gets one of my red and black wonders, the 2015 blog poster sign. Good luck. 

Trump isn't winning; the rest are losing

     For weeks, the nation has been watching Jeb Bush, waiting for him to finally push back against the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of Donald Trump. 
     Bush was comatose at the debates. Since then, while Trump prances and preens like Mussolini in the spotlight, outlining a platform that is, in turns, racist, misogynist, unworkable, cruel and insane, Bush has been crawling around the campaign shadows, looking for his manhood with flashlight. 
     Then Thursday, on the stump in New Hampshire, it happened. Bush lit into Trump ... wait for it ... not for his economy-killing and immoral plan to deport all illegal Mexican immigrants. Not for his complete lack of political experience.
     No, Bush damned Trump for not being conservative enough. 
     "There's a big difference between Donald Trump and me," Bush said in Kenne, New Hampshire. "I'm a proven conservative with a record. He isn't."
      Ohhh, so that's the problem, is it? That's like saying the difference between myself and Hitler is that he's a vegetarian and I'm not. 
     Bush went on to palaver about taxes, about abortion, about insurance, claiming that Trump, who has rode to the top of the polls and stayed there by directly channelling the poisonous id of the far right, is insufficiently right wing. The man used to be a Democrat! 
     Maybe so, Jeb. But he sure ain't a Democrat now.   
     When he wasn't weakly trying to repudiate Trump for lacking GOP blue blood, Bush was aping him. Only two years after Bush wrote a book outlining a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, he suddenly started tossing around the phrase "anchor babies" Thursday and was defending it at his press conference after his speech, asking what else he should call children of undocumented workers.
    Umm, suggested a reporter, how about "children of undocumented workers?"
    Too long, Bush replied. 
     Lots of things are too long. Election campaigns. Trump's comb-over. Bush's dithering. The time the public has been forced to endure Donald Trump's personality. Though I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The man could win. Although watching Jeb Bush in action, I would finesse that notion. It isn't that Donald Trump is winning, so much as the rest of them are losing, badly. 

Ashley Madison is like the lottery: many play, few win

     In 1965 Mike Royko took a look at Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and came to a surprising conclusion.
     "I'm not sure that Hefner is a playboy," the great columnist wrote in the Chicago Daily News. "He seems to be as middle class as the people he criticizes in his giggle-giggle philosophy."
     Real playboys, Royko said, "have sensational affairs with famous actresses, singers and countesses." They gamble at casinos, sail yachts, drive race cars. "Rome on Monday. Paris on Wednesday, Saturday night in New York, and breakfast in Rio."
 

    Then there's Hefner who, if you puff away the PR smoke, is a sedentary Midwestern guy married to his job who wants nothing more than to hang around his own living room night after night, guzzling Pepsi and listening to the stereo.
     "Except for the fact that it is bigger and all paid for, he's put together an overgrown split-level, right out of a "better homes" magazine," Royko wrote. "Hefner's kingdom is the same kingdom the 5:15 suburban commuter is rushing home to. Item by item, it's middle-class, sub-development living."
     In other words, don't let the sexy image deceive you.
     Good advice when considering Ashley Madison—to bring those who are just joining us up to speed—the online dating service for married people that was hacked last month, with names, emails, credit card numbers and sexual fantasies of its 37 million members snagged by a group outraged by Ashley Madison's business model. Earlier this week, the hacked details were posted on the notorious Dark Web, the hard-to-access land of bulk narcotics and illegal drug deals. Technically minded souls have already re-posted the data where suspicious spouses can check if their honey had been trolling for a special pal.
     The media of course eats this up. The would-be-Lothario humiliated is the oldest trope in literature, the stuff of countless Elizabethan dramas. The Washington Post speculated that "millions of users held their breaths" after the data theft was revealed.
     Maybe. My guess is those members don't have much bad behavior to worry about coming to light. As we learn about Ashley Madison, the more we'll find that, rather than some online game of musical beds, its clientele consists of a tiny portion of swinging adulterers who actually hook up with each other, and then a vast population of duped sad sacks and desperate house fraus ponying up their credit cards in pursuit of some unattainable dream. An image as romantic as a city laundromat at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night.
   Give Ashley Madison credit for monetizing married ennui. The most incredible thing about that membership list is its size: 37 million. Quite a lot. That's about ... 16 percent of the adult population of the United States. Though it turns out Ashley Madison also has a big international membership (some of whom, located in repressive countries that frown on this kind of thing, now have their lives put in peril by this breach. It's all good fun until somebody gets hurt).
      The details of how Ashley Madison works are fairly jaw dropping. It's basically a text service. Women can send messages for free to men—who make up 70 percent of members— while the men must pay to read them and pay to reply. The web site—and this is astounding—generates fictional women who send bogus messages to men to gull them into participating.
     The closest thing to Ashley Madison, in my view, is the lottery, where most pay for a dream that comes true only for a very few. Though I might be showing my age. Ashley Madison could be seen as a slightly raunchier subbasement of online dating which, if you haven't been paying attention, has morphed into a billion dollar industry. Match.com is 20 years old; 20 percent of young adults have dated somebody they met online, and some significant number of people who get married —studies range from 5 to 30 percent—are wedding people they met online. The taint of desperation that used to hang over online dating is pretty much gone.
      Not so for Ashley Madison. The secrecy and attraction implicit in its logo—a pretty woman holding her finger to her red, red lips in a "shhhh" gesture—is belied by this hack. Though 80 percent of Americans think that infidelity is "always wrong," we shouldn't take too much pleasure in Ashley Madison's secrets spilling out, because next it could be us, our bank, our hospital, our email, our secrets. Let he who is without something to hide cast the first stone.

FM radio poet

Lin Brehmer

     The dog needed her teeth cleaned. Her appointment was at 7:30 a.m. Monday, so I left the house at 7:15, which put me in perfect position to listen to Lin Brehmer's "Lin's Bin" on WXRT, 93.1 FM, which airs Mondays and Fridays, at 7:15 a.m., repeating at 6:15 p.m.
    I'm not sure how to describe Lin's Bin for someone who hasn't heard it. A little poetic digression, answering a listener's question, which can range from the prosaic ("Why are teenagers so grumpy?") to pop culture ("What are the best album covers?") to the profound, ("Can you explain string theory?"). 
     His answers start on the surface of his subject of the moment, then dive into the depths of existence, holding a profound mirror on modern life. Brehmer's droll, steady commentary is interspersed with clips from movies and songs, a sort of aural montage of words and music. He's been doing the twice weekly segment since 2002. 
    Monday's was a question from Chris DeRosa of Westmont. "Lin, after living with my parents, my college friends, and now my fiance, I noticed one similar oddity: Why does every household have a junk drawer?" 
     That's a simple, almost obvious question, one you'd never hear addressed on WBEZ. They'd use the time to tell you about building a road in Guatemala, and would shrug off the junk drawer as lacking in gravitas. 
    Which is why Lin Brehmer can be in turns funny and profound. He has no gravitas, no political agenda, other than to puzzle over the same world we're all puzzling over. His catch phrase, "It's great to be alive," is a 50-50 mix of sincerity and sarcasm. Brehmer understands the small ball most of us play, the tiny interests and flickering, selfish concerns that occupy our lives, somehow redeemed by occasional flashes of wonder. Friday's Lin's Bin was a riff on the phrase, "Take care of you" which he spun into an ode to love and sacrifice that brought a tear to the eye.  
     To my eye, anyway. 
     Monday was more typical, half rumination, half romp.
     "Why does everyone have a junk drawer?" Brehmer asks. "...the junk drawer is just a manifestation of our postponement,  of all the junk we accumulate, the curios that wind up in a drawer are just a mental map of our random lives. The best part of this question is how it forces us to go through our junk drawer and  revisit tokens of our own common existence. Matchboxes from shuttered restaurants. A cheap James Brown wrist watch that doesn't work. . . Our junk drawer is not to be judged or abridged, because we need a place to hold onto what is least important."

    As a person with several junk drawers at home—because one just isn't enough—his existential reflection on our worthless-yet-precious stuff struck home, particular since it evoked —I swear to God—a description of the surface of a desk, my favorite passage from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:

         Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bit of tape, string, chalk ... above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland" ("He does have some rather snappy arrangements," Tantivy reports, "He's sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing," but Bloat's decided he'd rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skins of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl ... a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall—a dictionary of technical German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan—and usually, unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too—Slothrop's a faithful reader.

    There, now you can say you've read most of a paragraph of Gravity's Rainbow. If you think that was tough sledding, imagine getting through 776 pages of similar. Exhausting, but satisfying too. When you're done, you know you've accomplished something, and it sticks with you, obviously, or at least that part stuck with me.
    Brehmer's words also stick with you, a blend of personal and universal, an oasis of intelligence in a media landscape that too often seems as if it has hit the bedrock of stupid and is struggling to drill deeper. I sat in the van outside the veterinarian's office, listening, scritching my dog, waiting for Lin to finish his segment. You only get two chances to hear each "Lin's Bin" on air, then it vanishes. While he will post scripts on line, occasionally, the finished product, with its fun acoustic embellishments, does not exist on the web. Because of the medley of music and movie clips, and the insane hash of our copyright laws, he can broadcast it, but not post it. So you have two chances to hear it and then it disappears. 
     Which is both regrettable and apt. Because one of the points underlying Lin Brehmer's writing is, I believe, that life is not only great, but fleeting, and we have to appreciate what's in front of us while it's there and while we can.