Suburbia isn't all neatly trimmed lawns anymore

     The front yard has Queen Anne’s lace and coneflowers, both purple and yellow. Joe-Pye weed and ironweed, hydrangea, phlox and more.
     “We have a lot of milkweed,” said Tina Paluch. “Because we like the butterflies.”
     What her yard doesn’t have a lot of is lawn; only about a quarter is grass, and that is uncut. The rest is covered by wildflowers and what some would call weeds, up to 5 feet tall.
     The small brick house sits next door to Greenbriar Elementary School in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook. I’ve been walking by for 16 years, admiring the front yard for both its appearance and for what it symbolizes: a departure from the lockstep green buzz cut most homeowners aspire to. The suburbs get a bad rap as cookie-cutter Levittowns of identical ticky-tacky houses and Astroturf lawns. But look closer and there is individuality there too.
     I’d never seen the people who lived there. The exact moment I was passing the house, thinking, “A real reporter would knock on the door,” a woman rolled her garbage can to the curb. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. I introduced myself.
     Tina Paluch, 50, lives here with her parents, Anne and Jerry, in their late 80s....
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Wheat Chex has a new box

     I feel oddly protective of Wheat Chex.
     First because it's one of only two cold breakfast cereals I still eat, the other being Shredded Wheat
    Second, because Wheat Chex seems imperiled. It can be hard to find, while Shredded Wheat is everywhere. secure. Shredded Wheat is like Cheerios — popular enough to be here forever. 
    But Wheat Chex ... it's the red-headed step-child of the Chex family of cereals.  There's always Rice and Corn and all the new varieties, Cinnamon and Chocolate and whatever, and you wonder whether they just ran out of Wheat Chex, or can't be bothered stocking it just for me.
   So when I was at a run to Sunset Foods -- trembling in the shadow of Mariano's but still managing to hold on — I paused in front of this graphic shift. The new box is on the left, if it isn't clear.  That's a good sign. They wouldn't redesign the box, then drop the product. 
    Would they?
    Since not too long ago we were mourning the change in the Celestial Seasonings box, I feel obligated to point out that the Wheat Chex redesign is a big improvement. It's cleaner. The typeface on the "Wheat Chex" is friendlier, and the see-through "X" a nice touch.

Yes, that's Elizabeth Taylor

    I did pause, uncertain, at the square of four squares arrayed on the spoon. That would never happen in the living world, of course, not unless you stuck your fingers in your cereal and set them onto your spoon like that.  Still, there's a certain purity, not unlike Wheat Chex itself, and that too is an improvement over the old box, with its droplets of milk that look like white paint.
     I probably shouldn't be eating Chex at all—the stuff is fattening as hell. A modest bowl will set you back 42o calories, with the milk, and because its mostly carbohydrates it'll leave you hungry at mid-morning. You're far better off with a grapefruit and yogurt.
     But having given up bourbon, I'll be damned if I'll surrender Wheat Chex too. Someone has to keep the faith. Breakfast cereals are on the decline, and have been for years. Sales fell 25 percent between 2000 and 2015—still at $10 billion, but shrinking.  Reasons abound. One survey said 40 percent of Millennials described breakfast cereals as "too difficult to eat," which is just sad.  They're referring to the clean-up, not the pouring milk part. But still.

1952 ad -- Wheat Chex phasing out the old name.

    Chex, by the way, was introduced in 1937 by Ralston Purina as "Shredded Ralston" (The history of breakfast cereals is intertwined with nutty American dietary fads, and just as Kellogg's started as sanitarium food for nutritional fanatics, so Ralston was related to "Ralstonism" a late 19th century movement not unlike Scientology, with various levels of progress toward a new, superior race of humans, a belief that the minds of others could be controlled through magnetism, and other assorted nutritional hoo-ha, such as a conviction that watermelons are poisonous).
    Ralston always struggled to produce a product that an increasingly important breakfast cereal demographic—children—would eat. It overcame that Hot Ralston was "steaming paste ... that children hated" by hiring Tom Mix, cowboy star, to be its mascot (his image, anyway. The actual Mix, a squeaky-voiced alcoholic, was kept out-of-sight). 
    Rice Chex was introduced in 1950, about the time the name "Wheat Chex" was introduced. Back then, the Wheat Chex squares weren't the careful geometric grids we see today, but puffier and more jumbled, closely resembling a Shredded Wheat biscuit. 

Space Patrol's Ed Kemmer finds them "tops for taste" in 1953.

    The next year Ralston tried to sell the duo to kiddies, sponsoring "Space Patrol," an early space-themed TV show. Shot on a shoestring budget with special effects considered cheesy even then, the product was woven into the plot line—members of the Space Patrol would pause from their adventures to keep their energy up by wolfing down a few bowls of Chex. 
     By 1955, Ralston Purina was trying reverse psychology. "Children," an odd character dubbed Prof. Checkerboard warned. "Wheat Chex are only for adults. Don't eat Chex."  Another commercial featured a man eating it at a fancy Victorian table complete with candelabra, announcing it was the "grown-up cereal from Checkerboard Square" (a Checkerboard is the Ralston Purina logo). 
    They kept that tack for years, edging back and forth between sincere appeals to adults and sideways pitches to kids, all the while recognizing that lots of people just didn't like the stuff ("People who don't like Chex cereals haven't tried Chex cereals," a 1976 commercial claimed, suggesting that opposition to the taste was merely notional). 
    Corn Chex showed up in 1958. In more recent years, there have been the typical palette of failed flavors-- Vanilla Chex, Honey Graham Chex. Sugar Chex. I never ate those—well, I remember giving Bran Chex a try (bleh) and Raisin Chex (not bad). 
    Anyway, too much about Chex. But we can't fret over the candidacy of Donald Trump every single day, can we? 

Flashback: Tussling with Oscar D'Angelo

     Oscar D'Angelo, the "Mayor of Little Italy" has died, the Sun-Times reported. Back in the day, I had a few tussles, and a few lunches, with D'Angelo, one of those shifty characters who gave the city its murky charm. The incident I remember most regarded planters in West Fulton Market, put in for the 1996 Democratic Convention, but a danger to traffic. They stayed in, even after a police officer was paralyzed crashing into them. Eventually, they came out, and I helped. This ran under the headline,  "City inaction on planters sure to end up deadly."

     Nobody has been killed yet.
     No car filled with children, nudging its way north onto Randolph, its driver trying to peer around the plants and planters -- a combined 6 feet tall -- erected by the city four years ago to decorate the Democratic National Convention, has been broadsided by one of the semis thundering west on Randolph.
     Yet.
     But that day is coming, despite the efforts of local business leaders, a dozen of whom gathered this week to publicly appeal to the mayor to redo the planters, a pet project of his.
     "This is a very, very dangerous situation," said Larry Pienta, a co-owner of J.P. Graziano Importers. "We told the planning department and the engineers when they first started it that it wasn't going to work, and it hasn't. Somebody is going to get killed here."
     Someone getting killed would make the job of lowering the planters a little easier. Though public complaints about accidents have been pouring out for years, nothing has been done or is close to being done to fix the situation. The suspicion is that mayoral pal Oscar D'Angelo is somehow blocking action.
     "It's true," said Chris Aralis, owner of La Quinta Food Importers.
     When confronted with the issue at a meeting at the offices of the West Loop Gate Community Organization, where he is a board member, D'Angelo reportedly said: "We spent $5 million to put those things in. I don't care if three or four people have an accident." This stunned those present.
     "We have a good relationship with West Loop Gate, and I was really shocked that one of their board members would say that," said Roger Romanelli, executive director of the Randolph/Fulton Market Association.
     Even fellow West Loop Gate officials were disturbed by the comment.
     "I'm not going to lay down for Oscar," said Tom Kapsalis, West Loop Gate president. "If he said that, he said it. He gets emotional. He gets angry, and many times he says things he really doesn't mean."
     "Those planters are always brought up," said Gail Filkowski, executive director of West Loop Gate. "The planters are the mayor's baby, not really Oscar's, not really Tom's. The two of them are involved, of course. I know they love the planters. The planters are beautiful and add a lot of green."
     Finally, after I spoke with his minions, D'Angelo consented to speak with me. He did not deny his statement, but rather tried to put it into the larger context of his life -- the millions of dollars given to charity, the decades of selfless public service, the general malice of the media.
     He was very smooth: a pleasing velvet fog.
     Fine, fine, I said. Are you against altering the planters?
     "Absolutely not," he said. "If that's what the experts say. If (the Chicago Department of Transportation) or any responsible agency said it was a safety issue, I would not be opposed. But I haven't seen a single word."
     The business leaders have been appealing to CDOT to release those figures, I said. Perhaps somebody -- an Oscar D'Angelo, perhaps -- is quashing them?
     D'Angelo said, a smile in his voice, that he "hadn't written a letter" telling anybody to withhold data, and I countered that even in my limited knowledge of politics, not many people write letters like that.
     And on and on. The need for study seems to be the party line. Kapsalis said the same thing, despite believing the planters are dangerous.
     Yet, he concluded that "I'd hate to see them changed," and suggested, rather than an immediate fix, "a little investigation" is in order.
     Meanwhile, accidents happen every day — sometimes four times a day — on Randolph from Halsted to Ogden. It is merely a matter of time.
     I am not a lawyer, but I know that part of liability can increase with advance knowledge that a situation is dangerous.
     The planters were installed four years ago; for the past three years the warnings have been sounded, unheeded.
     Nothing happened. Nobody paid attention. But they will. Just as nobody cared about selling truck licenses in the secretary of state's office until six children were incinerated in an accident with a truck whose driver apparently bribed his way onto the road, so they will also care about the planters.
     Maybe not this year. Maybe not the next. But someday a driver trying to see around those planters will be hit by a truck. The heirs will sue the city, claiming that it was warned again and again about the peril and did nothing. It hasn't happened. Yet.
     But it will.

        —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, August 23, 2000

Too close for comfort

     Forty-two percent.
     More than a third, less than half.
     That is the number of Americans who would vote for Donald Trump for president were the election today, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll.
     Which I guess could be seen as encouraging, because 50 percent would vote for Hillary Clinton. Which means the epic and undeniable disaster of a Trump presidency would be avoided were the election today which, sadly, it is not. Only 92 days of this to go, folks.
     So I don’t want to go all Debbie Downer on you. But 42 percent. Who are these people? They can’t all be the snarling haters hopping up and down at Trump rallies, gleeful that they have permission from someone in authority to take their gruesome politics out of the basement and into the light of day. Can they? I sure hope not.

     The bulk of Trump’s support is among economically stressed white males without college degrees. They thrill to his impossible idea of a big wall across our southern border, embrace his daft, anti-American scheme for barring Muslim immigrants — whoops, it seems now to be all immigrants — and fantasize at how rich we’ll be once we curl up in a protective ball, trade-wise, and the world stops eating our ...

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It's Sunday, give it a rest.

     Gizmo was named by the boys, when they were 7 and 8. For a character in "Gremlins," I believe. Now 12 years old, he sleeps a lot, and I suppose he's earned his rest, for a dozen years of vigilance, and constant hauteur, and strolling, and that careful monitoring of the molecules in the air that cats scrupulously perform.
    Even when sleeping, as above, he's on the job.
    He is also a living link to my wife's first two cats, a brother and sister team rescued from the Anti-Cruelty Society, Anna and Vronsky, named for the lovers in Anna Karinina.  They lived to be 19 and 18, respectively, ancient for cats. I happen to have a photo of the three of them—that's Anna, on the left. You can tell because she was always fatter. Meaner and fatter. Though able to fetch—not something cats are known to do. But we would fire those gold elastic Marshall Field's gift strings like rubber bands, and Anna would retrieve them. What people did for fun before the internet. 
     Vronsky in the middle. Sweeter than Anna, very quiet and gentle. And a young Gizmo, getting what corner of the food bowl he could. I'm surprised he survived in their company. Both are buried in the side yard now, under cat-shaped stones.
    And my point being? Well, it's Sunday. And it's August. And Saturday I didn't do much of anything. Parked on the couch mostly, reading a book: my new book, as it happens, which turned up in the FedEx late Friday, and I thought I would give an immediate read. No typos, no slap-my-forehead mistakes, which is not always the case. So that's a relief. The thing held my attention. Five years of work. 
     Five years of work, you should take a day off and read the thing.
     Gizmo kept me company the whole time, on the wing chair across from where I sprawled, his paws just so, as if he had dropped off and the little book of Cat Tales tumbled from his paws. Cats serve many purposes; reminding us to take it easy ourselves is a vital one. Gizmo wasn't working hard this weekend, and I hope you aren't either. I'm certainly not.  

Olympics a tedious, mystifying waste of time

     I missed the Opening Ceremonies of the Rio Olympics last night --a long family dinner in Evanston at the excellent Tapas Barcelona, then a stroll on the lakefront. I'm not sure what I'll be doing today, but tuning in to the Olympics is not the the dance card.

    Then again, I've made scorning the Olympics a tradition, and tend to put it in the paper, not to antagonize fans—hey, do whatever floats your boat—but as a comfort to those of us who don't share in the excitement. This is from 16 years ago, but I like to think still has bite, and I'm sharing it, even though my optimism that the Olympics were fading was obviously misplaced, as was my hope that we were learning not to be sucked into the media maelstrom swirling around us. Shows that even I was a dewy optimist, at one point long ago. 

     The Olympics are a very strange cultural oddity that should have died out years ago. I'm speaking generally. I can't refer to the current Olympics unfolding in Sydney because I haven't watched, not a minute, and I was just beginning to feel guilty about that when my colleagues in sports came to the rescue with the news that nobody else is watching much, either.
     El floppo. A big ratings disaster.
     The sportswriters, true to their trade, find this worrisome and have offered up all sorts of reasons for the collective public shrug of indifference: end of the Cold War, rise of the Internet, lack of any huge Tonya Harding-esque drama to drive people to their televisions.
     My reaction is different, and can be summed up as follows:
     Hooray!
     Our long nightmare is over. The Olympics, though not without moments of interest, are a tedious, mystifying ritual waste of time.
     Think of the opening and closing ceremonies: these gigantic displays, part May Day in Beijing, part Disney World parade grown huge on steroids, and part Mardi Gras on Jupiter, with some ridiculously bland pop entertainer thrown in for good measure.
     Think of gymnastics. How frightening are they? These poor little girls, duped into wasting their lives bouncing around floor mats and pommel horses. Their parents should be in jail. I'd rather have my boys become juvenile delinquents, making zip guns in shop class, reading hot rod magazines and sneaking smokes behind the garage, than have them spend six hours a day for a decade of their irretrievable youth trying to leap off the uneven bars and land squarely. How tragic.

Mary Lou Retton

   Remember Mary Lou Retton? She was like something out of a horror film. The bulked-up body of a monster somehow hideously compressed to tiny size, perhaps through radiation. And that fixed smile—just the right touch of Stephen King normalcy-gone-haywire. They put her on the Wheaties box, but she would have been more at home in a Wes Craven movie, still in that red, white and blue leotard, that smile still plastered on her face, but twirling and somersaulting toward her victims with an ice pick in each hand.
      Of course we would turn away, eventually, once the culture had stopped shaming us into watching, once it stopped being a patriotic duty to show up and boo the Ruskies, once the quaint allure of amateurism had been overwhelmed by the pervasive stink of commerce, once the entire thing turned into less sport and more a cattle casting call for the next two years of Nike commercials.
     Good that we are retreating, averting our faces. Maybe people are finally wising up that they don't have to sit up and beg, transfixed, every time the bell is rung and the next Huge Honking Deal announced.
     If access to information can be plotted on a curve, from the days when farmers left their plows and hurried into town when the mail packet arrived, bringing with it a 2-month-old newspaper with tales of the Treaty of Ghent, to today, when you can keep your cell phone and your Palm Pilot jiggling on your belt and be plugged into everything all the time, maybe now we are reaching some kind of limit, some zenith of access, the moment when we realize that the next challenge for humanity is no longer faster, greater access, but to think about delegating, about culling, about triaging, about learning to ignore stuff.  
     Like the Olympics.
     Think about it. Even if you expected the most incredible thing in the world to happen. Even if you were certain—if you knew—that a wonder would occur, that a gymnast would throw herself into the air, and remain there, spinning, a foot above the ground, for half a minute. Would you then watch the darn thing every night?
     No. You would wait until it happened, until news broke, then catch one of the endless replays of the miracle, on the news, on cable. You'd log on somewhere, to the site where they show the clip upon demand. That would do.
     Time does not expand, no matter the technology. And while I would hate to argue that we have reached an apex of sophistication—the Babylonians felt that they had scaled the summit because they had bronze and perfume—I will argue that it is dawning on people, slowly, that they need to be selective, to master their own destinies.
     Maybe nobody is watching the Olympics because we remember how transfixed we were by the O.J. trial. All that time wasted soaking up the endless parsings and analysis. Maybe we learned something. That we can opt out, we can ignore. I didn't watch a minute of "Survivor," either, despite the hoopla, despite readers sending in videotapes, despite colleagues challenging me, testily, saying that I was betraying the duty of a columnist to keep a finger on the pulse of the world.
     Duty shmooty. Nothing is going on in Sydney of any importance whatsoever. Feel free to ignore it and do something else: Make taffy with your kids, go for a walk, learn to knit. You'll be glad that you did, and proud, too. I am. 

                              —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 24, 2000

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This is one of those cases where you've got the name already. But can you match it to the face? Or, in this case, the shore?
     I would wager that every last one of you has heard of this body of water, read about it, thought about it. But have you ever seen it? Well now you have. 
     So what is this? Because I know it's a toughie, I'll post a clue at 12 noon. But my gut says somebody will put two-and-two together. It's not within 500 miles of Chicago. 
     The winner gets .... something different this time ... how about a cup of coffee at the Chicago Sun-Times, and an official Sun-Times cup to take home? Or if you can't make it, I'll just mail you the coffee cup.