Gut feeling steers you wrong on potty wars

    One evening last summer. Dinner over, darkness settling upon suburbia, the citronella candles flickering. We're sitting around the iron table on our deck with old friends from the city, a couple and their 19-year-old son.

     The lad hunches over his phone, arranging to meet up with a buddy later, and refers to this friend as "them." His mother explains that the friend exists in some zone between the genders and so rejects the prosaic "he" or "she," instead going by the plural, "they."

     Just as I was smirking, thinking how strange this is, no doubt some practice bred in the superrich petri dish of The Latin School — the city kid's alma mater — my older son pipes up that he, too, knows someone from Glenbrook North who goes by "they." Now there's two. Nearly a trend.

      "What's wrong with 'it'?" I ask. "A perfectly good word."

     Harsh, yes, but I was viewing it from a grammarian's point of view. I didn't realize that the American Dialect Society picked "they" as a singular pronoun for the 2015 "Word of the Year"....

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A cold spring

     A Facebook friend posts a video about how the Rothschilds control every central bank in the world. I watch as much as I can stand, a few seconds.
    Not only anti-Semitic crap, but old anti-Semitic crap. That's like floating conspiracy theories about fluoridated water.
    I start to type a reply, get a few letters, then stop.
   Sigh. Erase what I've begun, unfriend the person and move on.
   A few posts down, my attention is caught by a video of an Asian woman dancing vigorously. Harmless stuff, until I eye the comments.

   "This is why The American Empire works so hard to control us, which includes going so far as to install an *african-American*into the white house," Eric Hudson opines. "Because they know that without such controls, Black people will take over the world, just by being ourselves."
     Sigh.

     I almost type, "Take over the world ... by dancing vigorously?"
     But why bother? Why even be part of it? You reach into the cage, more often than not, you draw back a bloody stump. And who's fault is that? Theirs? They obviously have no control over thoughts that border on random hallucination. You do. You have discernment. So discern, goddamn it.
     I'm not the Idiot Police. Can't be the Idiot Police.

    Because there are so many of them
    And only one of me.
    So don't try.
    Not that I'm alone. Lots of sensible people, crossing swords with the army of madmen, like some monster horde in one of those "Lord of the Rings" movies I can't watch because they're just so exquisitely boring. I've fought this fight enough, in the past and, I suppose, again in the future. Retire from the field, for now anyway.
     To tell you the truth, I'm getting tired of Facebook too, tired of the shit that people believe or, worse, don't even believe but are too thick to wonder about, and just pass along because, either way, it's interesting.
     And then there's email.
    "Why should Trump bother releasing his tax returns if media is complicit in the cover up of crimes evident in Obama’s tax returns," something called Orly Taitz—some kind of pun, no doubt—writes. Into the filter with Orly. In doing so, I'm told I have 12 previous emails from him—a patient man, I am. Filter them all. Talk to the hand, Orly.
    It must be Donald Trump. Just watching the Republican Party collapse in front of him last week, a little voice has been whispering, "He's going to win you know."
     The Voice of Doom perhaps.
     Though honestly, even if he doesn't win, the damage is done. Republicans will elbow each other to take the Trump Highway in 2020. And the shame of a major American political party embracing this fraud, this unqualified clown, after hectoring and catcalling Barack Obama for seven years, to roll at the feet of Donald Trump like puppies. You want to vomit. Having watch them be venal hypocrites for decades, I thought I had their measure. But they still have the capacity to astound.
     "6 Corporations Own the Media."
     Jets chasing a UFO.

     Every patriotic fiber in my body says Hillary Clinton is going to win. And then the haters and howlers who have been writhing under Barack Obama can go back to hating and howling. They may even be secretly relieved, to be spared the burden of actually having to try to get something done. I'll sure be relieved when she wins, and not secretly either.

     Until then, well, it's in the 30s today. A cold spring, in more ways than one. 

A bit of doggy heaven within O'Hare

     If I still ran my "Saturday Fun Activity" feature, I'd toss up this animal-friendly spot, with its verdant grass, bushes and trees in the background, perhaps first snipping out that tell-tale Yellow Cab to the far right. Not that it would fool anybody: savvy travelers would instantly ID it as O'Hare International Airport, perhaps even pin-pointing it as Terminal One.
     I had never noticed this oasis before, because I never brought our dog to the airport before. And while my older boy often asked if the dog might show up to greet him at the airport when he returned home, it seemed one of those bothers that could be waved off — enough that I was going to the airport to collect him, wrangling his filled-with-bricks-of-unwashed-clothing luggage back to the car. Asking me to bring the dog as well was a bridge too far.
      But he was arriving at 6:24 a.m. Thursday. My wife realized she could come along and still make it to her office on-time. And suddenly the dog got scooped up into our little welcome party.
     Of course I walked the dog before we left. So it wasn't a matter of necessity. But the flight was delayed a little, as flights will be. And while we camped by baggage claim, waiting, my wife noticed a sign pointing toward an "Animal Relief Area." Curious, I figured a walk was in order.
     The little white metal container for bags was empty. Otherwise a rather well-tended little rectangle of wood chips, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, dotted with round stones for dogs to sniff. Kitty, who seemed put off by the lack of smells in the airport, joyously nosed around, blotting out the evidence of previous dogs with her own splash of tribute.
    There are similar areas at Terminals 2 and 5, plus an indoor zone, with artificial grass and miniature red fire hydrants—basically a bathroom for dogs—within the security zone in the Rotunda at Terminal 3.
     The boy was elated to see Kitty waiting for him, and while he effusively hugged and praised her, it did cross my mind that, after a few months apart, I wouldn't mind some of that. But it wasn't as if, without her, the joyous welcome would be transferred to me. Don't be jealous of a dog, I told myself. Eventually, while the dog was being greeted and re-greeted, I cleared my throat and dipped my head into his line of vision and generally made my presence known, and was rewarded with a nod and a light, momentary hug, as if my clothes were dirty and he didn't want to get any on himself.  Burdened with the two heaviest pieces of luggage, I staggered after the boy, his dog and mother and they happily made their way toward the car.

"For a piece of bread you can hear God sing"

Tony Fitzpatrick at the DePaul Art Museum

     Birds do not loiter. They dart and dive, swoop and soar. Occasionally, they'll pause at a spot, and if you're lucky, you can steal a glance, close-up.

     I was lucky Wednesday, crossing a bridge in Northbrook; a flash of red caught my eye. I looked up and got a good three second's study of a scarlet tanager lingering on a branch, right in front of my nose.

     Wow.  

     Is it me, or are there more birds around Chicago this spring?

     "We've had a solid month of rainy weather, and that's not ideal for birds," said James Steffen, ecologist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

     "Some springs are better than others, but it's been pretty typical," said Josh Engel, a research assistant at the Field Museum. "I wouldn't say it's different."

     Okay, it's me....

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Design just has to work

     Certain things are so iconic, so ubiquitous that it's odd to think that someone designed them, and they have an official name, like this classic of industrial seating, the GF 40/4 Chair, designed by David Rowland, who spent eight years, from 1956 to 1964, perfecting it.
    I noticed the chair last week at the Art Institute of Chicago in, appropriately enough, an exhibit on the influence of architects on chairs (and some people think the Van Gogh bedrooms are the most exciting thing going on there now!)  The "GF" in its name is for "General Fireproofing," the Youngstown, Ohio company that made a variety of iconic office furniture: swivel desk chairs, metal bookshelves, generic office desks. The "40/4" part of its name is because 40 chairs can be stacked four feet high. It was shunned by "skeptical manufacturers," according to the exhibit, who didn't believe the wiry chair could support human weight and stand up to hard use. Until Skidmore, Owings and Merrill ordered 17,000 for the new University of Illinois at Chicago campus in 1964, and General Fireproofing happily took the job. Millions more of the chairs have been made since then, though I would bet many of those original  U of I chairs are still in service. A reminder that design doesn't have to be beautiful; it just has to work, in order to endure.

When did Saudi Arabia become more progressive than the U.S.?

 

Giant Coal Lump, Jim Thorpe, PA.

   Saudi Arabia, despite great wealth, is one of the most socially backward countries in the world. Women can't drive, or open a bank account without permission of a male relative. They only got the right to vote, in municipal elections, in 2015, a year that saw Saudi Arabia conduct 151 beheadings.
     Despite being mired in the 12th century, Saudi Arabia still manages to be forward looking when it comes to important business matters.
     Such as oil. Oil is what brought Saudi Arabia from being a sandy nowhere of nomadic tribes to a wealthy global power. So it might be surprising, to those paying attention, to see a dramatic shift this week. I will spare you which ministers are ousted and which are in, and give you the first three paragraphs a May 10 story on Gulf News Saudi Arabia headlined, "Shake Up Moves Saudi Arabia Down New Path":

     RIYADH: In a series of sweeping royal decrees on Saturday, King Salman of Saudi Arabia replaced a number of top ministers and restructured government bodies in the first moves of an ambitious plan to chart a new direction for the kingdom.      The decrees were among the first concrete steps in the plan, which was announced late last month to great domestic fanfare by the king’s son and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is about 30, oversees economic policy and runs the Defence Ministry....

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Just another gravel barge....

    Expectations mold perception.
    What you think you're going to see colors what you think you saw.
    This can't be emphasized enough, since most people never get beyond using their current beliefs, not only as a screen to mask out information that doesn't agree with those beliefs, but as a filter to distort what they're seeing. You can't convince them otherwise because they don't allow themselves to process contradictory information. They can't even perceive it's there.
     I'm no different, as illustrated by this momentary exchange on the Madison Street Bridge a couple weeks ago.
    A long gravel barge was moving up the river. I've often seen these barges, loaded with gravel, heading to points elsewhere. Something about it — the lookout on the bow maybe — made me whip out my phone to take a picture of the gravel barge going by.  My wife observed that it was probably destined for Oak Street Beach.
    "The gravel?"I said, as we started to walk.
    "No, the sand," my wife said. "It's a barge full of sand."
    "No, it's...." I began, then stopped, and actually looked at the barge disappearing under the bridge. Wouldn't you know it? She was right. It was sand.  I would have sworn it was gravel. In my defense, I never really focused on what the barge was carrying, just that it was a barge full of something. Usually, it's gravel. This time it wasn't. 
     I'd be an idiot to insist that, appearances notwithstanding, it's still a barge of gravel because that's what I thought it was, initially. So sad that those surveying our political or cultural landscape can't adjust their perceptions with similar ease. They're expecting gravel because it all looks like gravel to them, and by God, it must be.