A real man needs a ‘REAL ID’ driver’s license. Doesn’t he?

     A letter arrived from the office of Jesse White, Secretary of State.
     “Congratulations!” it began. “As a safe driver, you are currently eligible to renew your driver’s license via Internet, phone or mail, and receive your new driver’s license in the mail.”
     I assumed this meant I could renew my driver’s license via internet, phone or mail, without bringing myself bodily to the license bureau, not one of life’s peak experiences. I remarked upon this to my wife.
     “Oh sure,” she replied. “You could do that. If you were the type of man who would be satisfied with an ordinary driver’s license.”
     I raised an eyebrow, interrogatively.
     But, she continued, if I want the new super duper driver’s license, the “REAL ID” as it is called — which would, under tighter Homeland Security rules, allow a real man such as myself to board a plane to Cleveland without bringing along a passport as if I were flying to Tunisia — I would still need to apply in person.
     Apply in person, I learned during the study that followed, along with a sheaf of supplemental documentation. And thus is our nation made secure.
     What sort of documentation? My passport, for starters, plus my old driver’s license or other ID showing my signature, plus two bills to prove my home address is recognized by the post office and, the cherry on top, my Social Security card. 

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Between summits

     When I set about to write a book on failure, I wanted to include something about people who got close to their goal yet still missed it. I settled on Mount Everest, because I knew climbers had gotten very near the top of the mountain, within a few hundred feet, yet never attained the summit. 
     Or did, and died on the way back.
     In researching the chapter, I read a lot of books about Everest. And I learned something about mountain climbing: you aren't on the top long. Those who made it to the summit of Everest typically spent 15 minutes, a half hour tops, enjoying the view. Then it was time to hurry back down so as not to die.
     Which meant months of assembling money and equipment and expedition teams, and weeks of slogging through Nepal and setting up base camps. Then days of tortuous effort, up the mountain. All for a few minutes of literal peak experience. Then down you go.
     This seemed valuable for non-mountaineers to keep in mind. You look forward to a certain event—say a big trip somewhere, oh-for-instance South America. And you spend months getting ready. Then a brief time actually on the trip.
     Before you know it, you're back, walking the dog, making dinner, doing your job. Which, even if it is a very cool job—for instance, exploring things that interest you and you feel are important and writing about them in a major metropolitan newspaper so that other people can think about them and maybe feel they are important too—is still a job that must be worked at, and is not as exciting as, oh, watching a glacier collapse. 
     And you scan the horizon, and there's ... more of the same. 
     Which can be, yes, dispiriting, until you remind yourself that peak experiences wouldn't be very peak if they happened all the time. Then they'd become routine, no matter how great they were. 
     Climbing is a skill, as is reaching the peak. But so is waiting, and planning, and trying, and being patient and, often, disappointed. Jiggling the handle of one door, then another, then another, waiting for one to open. One experience is lauded and sought, the other ignored and derided. But they are inexorably linked. Without being really good at waiting, you never reach that mountaintop. One requires the other. Worth bearing in mind.

Facebook boots Farrakhan, but who does he harm? Himself, mostly

Florence Baptistery ceiling

     Honestly? I was sorry that Facebook banned Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan from its global social media platform for his steady patter of anti-Semitic nonsense, which is old as the hills, common as dirt, and lodged, in larger or smaller shards, in the hearts of half the people in the world. Maybe more.
     Not that his twisted worldview isn't harmful. It is. The harm is real. But like most bigotry, like most self-administered poison, it is destructive primarily to the possessor; the career of Farrakhan is ample proof.
     He yearned to shine on a larger stage, to be taken seriously and touch the hearts of millions, and came close at times. But like any addict, either because he was feeling too good or too bad, he celebrated his successes and mourned his setbacks with another heady hit of hatred while good people, revolted, looked away.
     Generally. Some folks like junkies. Find them thrilling, romantic, fun. While Farrakhan's flock of die-hard faithful is small, he is largely tolerated, certainly not denounced, among a larger group of supposedly-decent observers because raging against whites in general and Jews in particular provides them with a low-rent naughty pleasure, a kind of catharsis. They never pause to realize they are doing the exact same thing — diminishing the humanity of a group they don't know based on laughable fiction — that they find so offensive when directed toward themselves. It's not a unique shame — all humans are prone to this, alas — but nothing to be proud of, either.
     When I worked at the Wheaton Daily Journal, a third of a century ago, conservative Christians in that town engaged in a strategy I called "wallpapering the world." They would seek out what they objected to and try to cover it up so they didn't have to look at it, whether Playboys tucked behind the counter at the local 7-Eleven or the College of DuPage performing "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You."

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"All global warming predictions are computer based monkey business"

     I laid out the letter below and then went to meet a friend for lunch at Taco Diablo, one of my favorite eateries in Evanston.  Walking to my car, I noticed this mural by Shawn Bullen along the 'L' line, just south of Davis Street. I assumed it had to be brand new—I'm on that stretch of street fairly frequently. 
     No, put up in 2017; I just never noticed it before.
     Typical. There's a lot of that going around. Thinking about how I missed it, it occurred to me that the Internet favors the ugly, the crazed, the extreme. Human nature perhaps. We see, and remark upon, the hostile, menacing stuff—the echo of natural selection, some vestigial protective trait, no doubt—and tend to overlook the beautiful.
     So I thought I would pair these images—which certainly speak to our precious natural world—as a balm, with the letter, which is actually not as crazed as it first seems. Climate scientists I spoke to on my trip were also concerned that they can come off as too extreme, too shrill, predicting disasters that don't come to be, or not for 100 years. Of course they don't have the sneering tone of this letter, the aggressive dismissal of anything that one does not already believe.
    We live in an age of contempt. Why argue when you can condemn? Why educate yourself when you can just express the venom that condemned you to a lifetime of ignorance in the first place? That's a whole lot easier. Yesterday's column on climate change of course was automatically rejected by the people who might benefit from it most. I think this letter can serve to represent them all. Notice how he rejects science in favor of something an old woman told him. I refrained from altering it in any way.

I have studied weather my whole life, any one can do better than a professional weather caster! I live in Palos Hills, home of ‘moraine valley’ carved out by glaciers 20,000 years ago, prior to us being here. No green house gasses by us yet. And yes, the glaciers receded back up north all by themselves, no help from us. I asked a 90 year old lady on vacation in Florida, if the ocean level has ever changed over the years, the beach line. Nope. Hmmm? Almost all you weather climate change dooms day people are very confused over global warming, and natural climate changes, that happen through out time, due to the wobble of the earth and our earth moving around. Dust bowl in mid west during 1800, lasted 50 years, no cars yet just cows farting! Climate change. Ice is forming still, new ice all over the artics, a lot of it. You see the ice falling into the oceans, global warming? A natural phenomenon. You did not see global warming. You can’t even write on paper how much water covers the earth, billions and trillions of gallons, 10 miles deep in the Atlantic trench. All the global warming predictions are computer based monkey business. There are far more scientists who debunk global warming that believe it. Look it up. It’s simply, weather changes. It will get warmer, and it will get colder by natural causes and us, a bitty. (Moraine Valley, natural ice age) who caused it, no body, we weren’t here. One natural volcano dumps more junk into the atmosphere than we can do in a lifetime. Now here comes the science for fools! The earth is alive and takes care of itself unless we don’t nuke it first (far worse fate to worry about). Hurricanes, typhoon, tornado, floods, torrential rainstorms, lightning, wind storms, waves, sand storms, the sun, hmmmm, all the ways our earth cleans itself up, all by itself. It keeps up well. Look at the car you drive after it rains next time, what are all the spots all over it, where did they come from, the earths washing machine on duty! Acid rain too. Don’t worry Neil, the earth is just fine! We get 6 hurricanes one year and crap our pants, oh they are so strong, and the next year we get two and forget? It gets so hot here, and we have the coldest winter on record in the Midwest, oh! There used to be tropic weather up in the arctic millions of years ago, fossils prove it oh my! How could that be? Let nature do its job, it is and will. The earth is 80% water, we only live on 20% of the land, most of earth is barren (deserts, jungles, wasteland). We are a pimple on the earth. I will re write you in 12 years when we all die as Cortez claims, probably an idol of yours,another mis informed taco waitress with a dangerous venu. Be careful those icebergs don’t float into your yard. Don hall

Global warming easy to believe happening before your eyes

Asia Glacier, Chile, April 6, 2019

     Nearly 400 billion tons of ice break away from the world's glaciers every year, one symptom of the earth warming due to humanity pouring pollutants into the atmosphere.
     Or so scientists say. I can't vouch for the entire figure. But I can attest to 1,000 tons or so of glacier loss, the ice mass that broke off the Asia Glacier in Southern Chile on April 6.
     I am certain of that because I was standing uncomfortably close when it happened and saw it: a wide swath of the blue ice face, maybe 150 feet top to bottom and 50 feet across, explode away in a cloud of ice crystals.
     "Up! Up! Quickly!" cried a scientist off the Resolute, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society vessel that had brought us to the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.
     I turned and, as suggested by informed scientific opinion, ran for my life, scrambling back up the slick, steep rocky outcropping.
     It's surprising how even the most cynical fellow can instantly follow the advice of climate science under certain circumstances. It helped that I also saw the big swell of gelid water, studded with chunks of ice the size of refrigerators, push away from the collapsed mass of glacier, rolling directly toward us, fast.
     We had all been observing the glacier from the relative safety of a promontory. Arriving an hour earlier from the ship by Zodiac boat, a sturdy black inflatable craft, as part of a two-week expedition up the Chilean coast, we gingerly worked our way up the stone face and found comfortable vantage points.
     I had been talking with Ian Goodwin, a climatologist from Australia, who explained that symptoms of climate change in the more temperate regions of the world can be less pronounced than at the pole.
     "Down here in Patagonia, and the Antarctic peninsula, Southern Australia, South Africa, these are the areas where climate change is being amplified, at the Southern ends of the Tropics," he said. "We might be seeing something less than a degree in the equatorial regions, but down here we're seeing 2 1/2, 3 degrees of warming and major shifts...the changes we're seeing here, these are massive retreats."

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Climatologist Ian Goodwin before the Asia Glacier, April 6, 2019

Maybe he's thinking, "Oh my GOD, what IS this?!"

     Yes, I wrote the below, re-read it and thought, "Man, this is the most trivial shit EVER." I could feel the ghost of Andy Rooney, laying his big, dyspeptic paw on my shoulder. "The torch is passed to a new generation..." 
     So be forewarned. You no doubt have more important things to do, to read, to think about. Go to it, and power to you.
     For the rest of us, however.... at least it isn't long.
        
     You'd think people designing cereal boxes would step back and examine their work, from a distance, to see how it looks on a shelf. which obviously didn't happen when the current iteration of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch box left the drawing board. Glance at the little anthropomorphic square of cereal gazing down into the bowl, right under the "ch" in "Crunch."
     Fiercely frowning, right? Maybe pulling back in revulsion. It's almost as if he's looking, not into a bowl, but a pit, an open grave with the bodies of his fellow squares, face down, after having been shot perhaps..
     Now look closer. There is a little smile, a black crescent, high up, right under the downcast eyes. What I took for a frown is just a pronounced vein of cinnamon. 
     And who knows? Maybe it's intentional. A bit of cognitive dissonance thrown in to cause shoppers like me to pause, look a second time. That's no doubt giving them too much credit. If intentional wrongness in marketing isn't actually subtle science, it should be. Tuck a single tiny ant in the bowl of cereal and see what happens to sales. 
    Not that it helped here. I've never tasted the stuff, have no intention to—tastes like a bunch of cinnamon wheat crunchy cereal, right? Who wants a bowl of cinnamon? At best you want a dash, a sprinkle on your vanilla yogurt. No wonder the little guy is frowning.
     

Costly candle.

     Luxury is a scam, right? A trick to see how much more rich people will pay for something that's only a little better than the usual. I've driven a Bentley: nice car. Double-glass windows. Breitling clock. But a price tag of about $180,000. If money means nothing, and you want those windows, and that clock, I suppose you might as well pop for it. What's the difference? But the truth is, a person who can get by with regular windows, and an ordinary digital clock, can drive a perfectly good car and pocket the extra $150,000.
     When I first visited Ancient Aire, the faux Roman baths opened late 2017 in an old factory on West Superior, I was impressed. Big, dim, quiet and, since I was in the media, free. Free is a sauce, a spice, that enhances any experience. I was also by myself, and as I soaked and cogitated, I thought, "I should really take my wife back to this." So I did, last Valentine's Day. Our friends were jetting off here and there, I had this big trip to South America coming up, and rather than fly somewhere nice, we thought we'd explore our home town—a "staycation" Edie calls it.
    Ninety minutes of burbling hot pools and aromatic steam rooms. Plus a half hour massage. Not hideously expensive—$276 for the two of us, plus tips. We couldn't both fly to Cleveland for that. Overall, a positive experience. Indulgent fun. I paid the tab. We were almost out the door.
    But stapled to our receipt, was this little card.  Selling an Ancient Aire candle in a box. For $54.
    That card irked me. It's as if they were saying, "Before you go, we're curious: just how gullible ARE you? After all, you came here, paid a lot of money for, in essence, the hot bath you can take at home. Maybe you'll shell out half a C-note for a votive candle in a black box."
     There's no way to tell scale. Maybe the box is a yard square, but I doubt it. I would expect it to be, oh, three inches on a side . And maybe it smells nice. But really, it would have to release the perfume of paradise to justify that cost. (Checking online: bingo for the size, about 3 inches. And it smells of orange blossoms). 
    It is limited, if that helps. That's what the fine print says, "Limited to 250 pcs. of bathrobes and 250 pcs. of candles."  That wasn't written by a native English speaker, was it? "250 pcs. of candles." You'd think, for $54, they'd perfect the translation in their ballyhoo.)
      I shudder to imagine what the robes cost. ($65, not bad really, though that also underlines the scam aspect of luxury, as if the prices were assigned randomly and not dependent upon market forces). 
      So the candles are limited, but it doesn't say limited by what. The dreams of avarice, I assume.