Keep your phone until it breaks

  

    Gary Shteyngart's novel, "Super Sad True Love Story,"  takes place in a dystopian future, where we all hang "apparats"—souped up cell phones—around our necks on cords, like security passes. The devices share information with each other, and notify us of the credit rating of the people nearby. Are they Low Net Worth individuals or, better, High Net Worth individuals?
     The specs for the new Apple iPhone 6S are released Wednesday with great ceremony in San Francisco. The 6S will not include a function evaluating the financial solvency of those around us — something to look forward to — and indeed, the general insider view is that the incremental improvements will not charm and thrill the phone-buying public in the way that they expect, almost demand, to be charmed and thrilled.
     A better camera, a faster processor, and that's about it.
     Though lack of electronic marvels will not stop people from lining up to buy the new phones when they become available in a month or two.
     Which makes this an apt moment to whisper, under the roar of unmerited Apple hoopla, a few words in support of my own philosophy toward phones: Use them until they break.
     That sounds practically Amish, and I hope I'm not tarring myself as a Luddite. But that attitude has guided me from my first cell phone, a 50-pound Motorola behemoth bolted in the trunk of my Chevy Citation in 1984 to today. If something works well enough, keep it.
     My own phone is an Apple 4S, introduced in the hazy yesteryear of 2011. And why did I choose that particular phone? I didn't. The paper issued it to me, and in my world, that consideration dwarfs all others. If Apple introduced a new phone—let's call it the Apple 7—that allows you to communicate with your dead relatives, I would not buy one over a lesser but free, to me, company model, not if it involved my personally entering into one of those hellish phone agreements, which the paper shields me from, a perk I consider on par with health care.
     I know, because earlier this summer my younger boy needed a new phone after his broke when he was about to go on a trip overseas and immediately required an operative phone to constantly reassure his mother he wasn't being held captive in a cave. I accompanied him to the T-Mobile store to get one, a transaction at least as complicated as buying our house and involving as many forms. Later, my wife studied the bill — she does that kind of thing — and informed me that T-Mobile had socked us $50 for a phone case that we were told was free, a point I remembered clearly because my heart had swelled in gratitude at the gift. And as much as I wanted to take the pile of paperwork and march right back to the T-Mobile store and demand satisfaction, I had, in the sign-here-and-here-and-here whirl of getting the phone, initialed a page buying the case, and I decided it was worth fifty bucks not to ever return to their pink-tinged perdition.
     I know I'll sound like Andy Rooney passing a kidney stone, but I'll say it anyway: I don't want a new phone; I don't want new features. I have a hard enough time grasping the features on current phones. I'll give you an example.  The aforementioned younger boy and his spanking new, expensively-cased phone leave for college Friday. My wife has been busy equipping him with necessities. During one recent trip to Target, I was given the simple task of picking out a flashlight, because she imagines the lad will need one, both to guide him through the smokey halls to safety and to shine menacingly under his chin while he tells The Hook to his wide-eyed classmates at the wiener roasts we imagine these college kids are fond of holding.
     So I'm standing in Target, looking at my flashlight options, and my first thought is: Thirty bucks for a flashlight?  Sure, it's titanium. But he'll never use it. I decided to look for a cheaper flashlight that would still be adequate for sticking in a drawer.
     An hour later, this thought came to me, like a bubble rising in warm honey: ....you know... his phone.... which he always keeps on him ... already has  a flashlight ... built in.
      I was tempted to tell my wife, "No flashlight necessary, honey, but what about a camera?"
      I resisted. All this is stressful enough as it is.

Chicago needs more tweets!

     A Canadian motivational speaker listed the "September Top 100 Twitter Users in Chicago, Illinois" and tweeted congratulations to me for making the list,. I'm No. 78.
     Which surprises me. I don't feel like I tweet all that much: the column on the days it runs, the blog on the other days, a few times in the morning, plus posts from exactly one and two years ago, to pump the numbers up, not to forget the occasional bon mot. 

     In the roughly 1575 days since I joined Twitter in April, 2011, I have issued some 9,300 tweets, or about six a day. That doesn't seem like it should get me on the Top 100 list. It makes me wonder if their count is flawed—this wasn't produced by the Bureau of Standards, but some guy in Toronto. Or perhaps it is correct, suggesting that Chicago might really be the small time backwater we all passionately hope it is not. 

    Anyway, it reminded me of this 2011 column I wrote welcoming myself to Twitter, and given that it will be new to many, I thought it worthy of revisiting. And to the rest of you, get tweeting. I should not be on that list.

     Friday after work, instead of bolting for the train, as is my custom, I strolled to Tribune Tower, pausing to pop my head in the Billy Goat Tavern, where I was rewarded with a hearty hello from Bouch Khribech, a wiry busboy when I met him 20 years ago and now a burly bartender, and from his brother Marco, who called over Rick Kogan.
     If you don't know Kogan—and if you don't, you might be the only Chicagoan who doesn't—he's a veteran, shoe-leather reporter, with a gruff, nicotine-and-bourbon voice, the only man I've ever met who not only calls other men "honey," but makes it seem a macho trait, like carrying a Buck knife clipped to your belt.
     It was the last day of Social Media Week, a global conclave welcoming our shiny communications future. Normally I avoid these somber wakes for journalism, since after the mourners depart the profession always gets out of the coffin and goes back to work.
     But this one had an intriguing title — "Reinventing a Media Career on Alternative Platforms" — plus an all-pro lineup: the Sun-Times' own Richard Roeper, a columnist and radio star; Robert Feder, fearsome online media critic; Steve Dahl, the radio legend, and a TV news reporter named Nancy Loo.
     Kogan was going, too, so we headed off together into the Tower, through its Gothic horror show of an entrance, with the enormous map of North America, mute testimony to the terrified isolationism that once gripped the place. In the seventh floor meeting room I found friends I hadn't seen in years, so more hugs and handshakes, smiles and updates.
     The 90 minutes of discussion can be boiled down to this: Twitter is important. The service, which allows you to shoot 140-character messages to others and in turn read the haikus they write, is the barge that will carry our society wherever it is drifting to, and if you are laboring away at some outdated mode of communication—say, slowly writing stuff that will be printed on paper and flung at people's front steps—you are a brontosaurus in a tar bit, bellowing your indignation, unheard, as you slowly sink into the bubbling mire.
     Still, the session was a lot of fun—primarily because Kogan and I, like two seventh-grade boys in the back of health class, kept up a running banter of highly uncharitable thoughts regarding the proceedings.
     Leaving, I felt reassured that I could safely skip Twitter, just as I never owned a CB radio or watched "The Sopranos."
     But the next day uncertainty set in. I should see what Twitter's about. So I dropped onto Roger Ebert's website—somehow I knew this is a topic the tech-savvy Ebert would comment on, and sure enough, there it was, upper right corner, an essay on "some observations about successful tweeting."
     Ebert has 532,782 Twitter followers, and while he mercifully offered me an out—"You may well have better ways to spend your time"—he also clearly explains Twitter's appeal: "The stream, the flow, the chatter, the sudden bursts of news, the snark, the gossip, time itself tweet-tweet-tweeting away."
     That last part makes it sound like opium. But I signed on, figuring, "Why not? I can always quit," went to create @NeilSteinberg, but found I had already done it, apparently, long ago. A whopping 16 people were following me, even though I hadn't tweeted a thing. Well, mustn't keep my public waiting . . .
     Hmmm, for my first tweet . . . something pithy, Oscar Wilde-like—that's what Twitter seems to be: millions of would-be Wildes, Shaws and Whistlers, furiously flinging bon mots into the ether, hoping for a good ripple.
     The first thing that came to mind was "What hath God wrought," the message Samuel F. B. Morse sent to inaugurate the Washington-Baltimore telegraph line on May 24, 1844. Not Wildean, but certainly very me. So I sent it and signed up for various feeds—the Sun-Times, of course, the Associated Press, Rich Roeper, Sarah Silverman, who shares thoughts like "Don't forget to play catch with your kid" and "Quiet moment with my dog." She's supposed to be funny, right?
     The ironic thing is, while social media might indeed be the future, someone still felt obligated to gather people in a room on a Friday to tell them the good news. Which means, in my mind, the future ain't quite here yet. To be honest, after Kogan, I liked the gathering-in-a-room part best. It didn't matter what for—we could have been swapping meatloaf recipes. I would have preferred that, frankly, because I like meatloaf, and while a new recipe might come in handy someday, I wouldn't also feel obligated to bake a meatloaf every three hours for the rest of my life, which is what Twitter seems like right now.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 26, 2011

Maybe the mail stopped at a bar

     Running a restaurant is more than just cooking up good food and getting it to the table.
     Though many fall short even on that basic task.
     There is also service to get right. And decor.
     Beyond that, there is filling the role of being a business in a community, with teams to sponsor and charities to support.
     All of which Harry Caray's, the landmark steakhouse and Italian restaurant on Kinzie, not to forget its various satellite locations, does exceedingly well.
     Or rather, does well when the United States Postal Service manages to deliver their mail.
     Pull up a chair.
     Tales of the ineptitude of the local branch of the post office are such a Chicago tradition, you hesitate before offering up a new one.
     You ask, does it meet the classic standards? The piles of letters found burning under a viaduct? The sacks of undelivered mail discovered in a disturbed postal carrier's home? The bar is very high.
     But heck, it's Labor Day weekend. I shouldn't even be working. And while Harry Caray's CEO Grant DePorter certainly plays the media like a conductor directing a well-trained orchestra, and could generate press for a stoplight changing, there is sincere interest here.
     I hope.
     A stack of letters that Harry Caray's sent exactly 10 years ago was delivered last week, the moldy envelopes arriving to their startled recipients, in some cases, with others returning to the restaurant office.
     "People are getting mail all over town, 10 years ago to the date," said DePorter, marveling at a particular return-to-sender letter from Children's Memorial Hospital.
     "They said they couldn't locate it," he said. "You would think the post office would know Children's Memorial has moved."
     In 2012, from Lincoln Park to Chicago Avenue, changing its name to Lurie Children's Hospital.
     Mark V. Reynolds, spokesman for the USPS' Chicago office, said that forwarding instructions are only good for one year, then mail is returned to sender.
     From how Grant was talking, I envisioned a burlap sack stuffed with mail moldering in a forgotten corner of some vast postal facility. It turned out we're talking about six letters—one delivered to the Cubs, one delivered to Chris Chelios' charity, and four returned to Harry's.
     So far. DePorter worries there are many others he has yet to hear about.
     "This is like the Nielsen ratings," he said. "Where one person represents 100 more."
     He first learned of the problem last week at Wrigley Field, fittingly.
     "Andrea Burke, who works with the Cubs, ran up to us and said, 'You will never believe what I got in the mail,'" said DePorter, "an envelope that was mailed 10 years ago that contained gift certificates for Fan Appreciation Day in 2005,"
     At first he thought it was funny.
     "Like a time capsule. Then I got the letter from the Restaurant Association."
     A letter contained gift certificates for a silent auction.
     "They never got my charity stuff and I was the chairman," said DePorter. "I was guy calling people to say, will you donate? You never know the ripple effect. Ernst and Young never got my thank you letter for their event. The letter to Children's Memorial Hospital had a certificate for dinner with Cubs manage Dusty Baker. They could have gotten a lot of money for that, but it never happened because the certificate for the dinner never arrived. There's probably a lot more. This is only the tip of the iceberg."
     DePorter speculated the mail was "probably under a table for 10 years."
     The post office couldn't offer much light.
     "This is a mystery," said Reynolds, vowing to investigate. "We need to know what happened."
     Don't hold your breath, though.
     "The only person who could tell us what happened to the mail is the mail itself, if it could talk." Reynolds said."This is highly unusually, an anomaly. Mail may be found in equipment we thought was empty. It does happen, unfortunately."
     I've known Grant for years, and he is devoted—perhaps even obsessed—with the image of the restaurant. The idea that people were promised something from Harry's and didn't get it horrifies and torments him.
     "I think people were too embarrassed to call us out on it," he said. "I didn't know they were mad at us."
     So look within. If you harbor any lingering, decade-old resentment against Harry Caray's for not sending that gift certificate they promised, well, maybe they did and it just didn't arrive, for reasons that will probably never be known.
     In 2005, the Postal Service handled 211.7 billion pieces of mail. Last year it was 155.4 billion pieces, a 25 percent drop.
     "This is why FedEx is doing so well," DePorter said.

Religious bigots aim at gays and harm themselves

     Black people can be bigots. Some deny this, but then, bigots always deny their irrational prejudices are motivated by baseless prejudice, preferring instead to pretend they are based on practical experience, solid science, or, when all else fails, religion.
     I know this because when the civil rights struggle of our time, the growing acceptance of gay, lesbian, transgender and other assorted folk into the realm of accepted humanity, is called that, sometimes African Americans will complain to me, and vigorously point out that while race is naturally assigned—by God, if they are so inclined—and unchanging either way, that sexuality is a choice, sometime a sinful choice.  
     That isn't in any way true, but a good try.
     The struggles of the civil rights era are evoked in the push for gay rights because they're so relevant. For instance, today, the New York Times ran a story about Kentucky clerk Kim Davis going to jail rather than issue her gay fellow citizens marriage licenses, as the law compels and a court has ordered her to do. It explained how her defiance has rallied American mullahs to press their lost cause of intolerance anew, It mentioned how 13 of the 67 counties in Alabama, like Davis, stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether rather than comply with the law and end discrimination against gay people. 
     This is called, in the vernacular, "cutting off your nose to spite your face," and evoked a similar practice in the 1960s and 1970s, where small towns in the steamy Deep South would fill in their swimming pools with dirt rather than integrate them. They'd rather no one swim at all then let those black kids in with their white sons and daughters.
    They no doubt could quote scripture and science. 
     I remember that because it was a particular horrible and telling detail, and showed the ultimate self-destructive quality of being a bigot. While prejudice certainly hurts the object of irrational scorn, it also blows back on the prejudiced. Your worldview is skewed and nobody gets to swim. Or gets issued a marriage license. 
    The more particular hatreds fall into disrepute, the easier it is to see the damage that bigotry causes the bigoted. Regarding race, a person who openly expresses a contemptuous racial prejudice will now suffer more than the minority being condemned. Regarding sexuality, the backwoods religions making a last ditch stand against gay rights are undercutting whatever fig leaf of moral authority they might have had, much more than they are stopping the rapid progress of human rights in this country. Sad that they don't see it, but then if they did, they wouldn't behave the way they do. 

Foes of Iran deal toeing Israel's line

   

     When John F. Kennedy was running for president in 1960, voters were uncomfortable with the prospect of being led by somebody who wasn't Protestant, and aired their fears.
     Could Kennedy, they wondered, as a Roman Catholic, manage to put the interests of his country ahead of pressures from the Vatican?
     Kennedy was forced to repeatedly address these worries. Speaking to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, he first chided his audience for ignoring issues like poverty and Communism, and instead forcing him to talk about whether he'd take his marching orders from the pope.
    "Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured -- perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this," he said. "So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again — not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me —but what kind of America I believe in. I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act."
     Kennedy was good to his word. In the countless histories of his all-too-brief administration, JFK has been accused of many lapses, but excessive zeal for his Catholic faith and fidelity to its teachings are not among them.
     That is not surprising. The idea of divided loyalties is typically a baseless slur, tossed  at anyone who is different, suggesting that our country's common interests are being subjugated to some outside loyalty.
     The same accusations have been hurled at Jews, after they got a country of their own, Israel. And these insinuations always seemed the same kind of disguised bigotry that Kennedy faced. 
     Until now. 
     Look at the Iran deal. Who can say there isn't a segment of American Jews who are , if not exactly following the orders of the Israeli government, then buying its worldview, hook, line and sinker, and passionately opposing American policy for that reason alone?
    Here Barack Obama, the president of the United States, has worked out an agreement that he and our five most important allies feel is the best strategy to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. 
     Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, however, believes that any agreement with Iran is worthless and prefers steep economic sanctions leading toward pre-emptive war. He has been trying to undercut the deal, and is aided by a distressingly large cast of allies in the United States, mainly the chorus of Obama's fanatic GOP foes—not one Republican in Congress supports the deal—and that slice of American Jewry who believes that supporting Israel means endorsing anything its government does, no matter how misguided.
     Netanyahu might be right, I should add. Or might not. Nobody knows, and those who claim to know are just bluffing. We have only one past, but a multitude of futures, and we can never tell how our actions now will affect what unfolds.
   The stunning thing is, in all the discussion of the merits of the deal, the fact that our president supports one side, and the head of another country, even a country as historically friendly as Israel, supports the other, hardly enters the calculus. I'm mentioning it here because I haven't heard anybody mention it. Maybe it's a naive point, but there you go. 
    At the end of last week it seemed there are enough votes in Congress to keep the deal from being overturned, though the We-Never-Lose-We-Just-Fall-Back-and-Keep-Fighting Republicans are already digging to find creative ways to undercut it.            
     Tough economic sanctions that isolated Iran certainly didn't keep it from making the progress toward a bomb it already has. And a deal might allow them to continue, aided by renewed economic support. Everyone suggesting the best route are really guessing, based more on their biases and partisanship than any cool analysis of fact. The bottom line is, if Netanyahu embraced the deal, the critics here would fall in line. But he doesn't, so they echo his denunciations. 
     That isn't good for the future of Jews, already a dwindling minority facing rising anti-Semitism. I'm not saying that we should keep our place; just that we should consider whether throwing in our lot with foreign leaders in fevered opposition—so extreme that the Anti-Defamation League found itself accusing certain Jewish groups of anti-Semitism— is a long-term success strategy. 
     Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is a blip. But someday a viable Jewish candidate will runs for president, and somebody will raise the question of whether he (or she) will do what's best for our country, or owe special allegiance to Israel. Those critics will wave the bloody shirt of the fierce opposition to the Iran deal as evidence, and who will be able to say there isn't some kernel of truth there? The best defense will be the existence of J Street Jews who did not dance to whatever tune the current administration in Israel is piping. But that is a a nuanced argument, the type all too often lost in the gale of political discourse. Whether the deal will work or not is unknown by anybody. We'll have to find out. But that the debate has undercut the always tentative position of the American Jewish community is a certainty.  

The cucumber you just ate might kill you.

     "Would you like some cucumber with that?" my wife asked, busying over the stove while I read the paper at the kitchen table.
     "What, in the eggs?" I said, wincing slightly. She was making eggs before our walk in the Botanic Garden Saturday morning.
     "No, on the side."   
     "Sure!" I said. 
     It's hard to wait, and a plate of sliced cucumbers was just the thing to nibble on. Healthy, cool, refreshing.
     "Cucumbers make a good appetizer," I observed, and she agreed.
    We ate our eggs, sipped our coffee, read our papers.  I kept working on the cucumber slices. One slice left.
    "Would you like the last slice?" I asked.
    "No, go ahead," she said. I ate it, reflecting on how much I like cucumber.
    "Let me check the computer and we'll go," I said. I like to keep tabs on the blog. 
     I go upstairs, call up Twitter. This is the first tweet I see: "Woman dies from tainted cucumber, prompting recall in 27 states."

    
     I click on the article and read it carefully.  Yes, Illinois is one of the 27 states.
    Well, I ate the first part of this particular cucumber ...Wednesday, in a salad. So if it were infected with salmonella, I would have figured it out by now. Whew.
     Or so I tried to reassure myself.
    Unless, that rebellious part of my brain that likes to cause trouble countered, the end you ate Wednesday wasn't the part with the salmonella. That was the part you and your wife ate just now!
     Can there be salmonella on one part and not another? It's just a certain bacteria, right? It can be just on one spot. On the other hand, the woman who died was 99 years old. A bout of salmonella, while unpleasant, probably won't kill me. 
     What would kill me—what is killing people—is inactivity. Earlier this morning I read an Economist story that inactivity, worldwide, is "the new smoking," and "a silent killer" that is now the fourth leading cause of death, after high blood pressure, smoking and high blood sugar. 
     "C'mon, let's go for our walk," I told my wife, heading downstairs after posting this. If I'm going to keel over, I want it to be at the Chicago Botanic Garden. 
     

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     It's pretty clear what these are: three merry-go-round horses. But where did I see them? A museum perhaps? Or a carnival? But I've said too much. 
     The person who knows the exact location of these three equine beauties will receive one of my now truly dwindling stock of 2015 blog posters, suitable for framing or thumb-taking up on a wall. Place your guesses below. Good luck.