Flashback 2012: A late-night romp with exotic models

     An Ohio teen, Hannah Jones, came home early from college late last month and thought she would surprise her mother. She did. Her mother was indeed very surprised, and shot her. Only winged the young woman, thankfully. But a reminder that people who really care about the safety of themselves or their families would ditch their guns, since owning a gun ramps up the odds that you'll shoot yourself or a loved one. It made me think of this column, which, to my surprise, I have never posted here before.

     Between the time the back door opened with a metallic "kathunk" and when it closed with a dull "knuhtak," I was on my feet, in the early morning bedroom dimness.
     I gazed across the sleeping form of my wife, at the clock on her night table: "5:03." My first waking thought was, "cats," the usual source of nocturnal disturbance: cats knocking cups into sinks, cats chasing each other howling through the house. Cats. 

     The next sound was a very human treading of feet downstairs. My second thought was a grim, "That's not a cat."
     I reached into the night table for a weapon.
     Many prudent men keep a handgun at their bedside. Houses are broken into. Horrors occur. A man must protect his family.
     And though I am certainly a prudent man, I am also a mathematical fellow, and can do numbers: the odds of bad stuff taking place in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, of dangerous situations that can be resolved by my being armed, are minuscule—say a 10-second window every 20 years, if that—compared to the low-level threat posed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just by having a weapon. "The blade itself is an incitement to violence," as Homer put it. Plus accidents: the possibility that, reaching into the drawer for a pen, I would manage to fire the handgun and blow my kneecap off. Owning a gun in Northbrook makes as much as sense as owning a grenade.
     Yet many people, indulging in their Clint Eastwood fantasies, don't see it that way.
     Anyway. For reasons mathematical, I reached, not for a pistol, but for a black Mag-Light flashlight. Not the most potent weapon, true, but a 10-inch-long steel cylindrical club that at least instilled a tiny bit of confidence—and isn't that what weapon ownership is all about? To calm our insecurities? Why otherwise would people assemble, not one gun or five, but whole arsenals, plus bottled water and dried food and God knows what else. A desperate, futile attempt to feel protected.
     The flashlight was satisfyingly heavy in my hand, thanks to its trio of D batteries, ready to bash whoever was making those footsteps.
     At the bedroom door I saw the downstairs lights were blazing. A second possibility, after cats, stirred at the back of my mind.
     "Ross, is that you?" I squeaked, my voice suddenly thin and anemic.
     "Go to bed," my 17-year-old commanded, tossing a pile of calculators, pens and notebooks onto the kitchen table, then looking around at the downstairs, lit up like a cruise ship.
     "Why are all the lights on?" he asked
     "Your mother probably left them on for you," I said, meekly complying with his command, climbing the stairs, limply holding my flashlight. "Turn them off before you go to sleep."
     Not that I would have shot him if I had a gun, mind you—I like to think that I would be the sort of gun owner who takes a gander at what he's shooting. But doesn't every gun owner tell himself that? Yet teenage boys creeping in at dawn are still blown away by sleepy dads, far more, I'd bet, than the number of potato-nosed villains in black and white striped shirts and soft caps, caught dead-to-rights, with the family silverware in a sack over their shoulders.

The reason

     OK. OK. I know my audience. I can't just have my kid waltzing home at 5:03 a.m. without SOME explanation.
     But it's delicate . . . and as much as readers say they enjoy reading about the boys, they just don't appear here all that much anymore. They're studying a lot, or slumped on sofas, flipping through magazines or watching TV. There isn't much to say. I try to respect their privacy.
     He was coming home so late because . . .
     Oh, this will be hard to believe. I have a hard time believing it. When I was 17, and crept home with the dawn, it was not for this reason or anything like it. But kids nowadays . . . I'm no dupe; I've considered other scenarios, just to see if there is any chance an alternate might be possible. I wish there were. But there isn't.
     OK. Here goes: The 15th Annual High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling, run by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications. Each team—he and three pals—picks a problem and has exactly 36 hours to answer it. They were at a buddy's house crunching numbers all night. After he had slept, my wife's attempt to pry more information resulted in exactly one sentence, an exasperated, "We were modeling gasoline prices, mother." And that was it.
     Don't get me wrong. I'm proud. Though I worry he's frittering away his youth, and have encouraged him to pursue other, umm, non-mathematical activities ("Think of it as a new skill set you could master," I said, wanly). But with kids, you have to accept what you get, and as strange as it is, at times, I'm not complaining. I'm just glad I didn't shoot him.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 26, 2012

Flashback 2000: Miracles of not-so-modern medicine

    

     You've probably never been to the International Museum of Surgical Science on Lake Shore Drive. Few people have. I've been twice; last year, so I could compare it with Philadelphia's notorious Mutter Museum. And the first time, for a party in 2000.

     The bone crusher caught my attention.
     A massive, chrome device with a pair of hooks that go over a limb, holding it in place, and a threaded rod tightened by a steel bar, that pushes down, breaking the arm or leg so it can be reset. The thing was dated to 1918, though it seemed as if it belonged to the Middle Ages.
     The intriguing contraption was just one of the eye-popping—sometimes literally—displays at the International Museum of Surgical Science, located, along with the International College of Surgeons, in a grand pair of side-by-side mansions on the 1500 block of North Lake Shore Drive. The museum is a perennial favorite in the pantheon of offbeat Chicago sites.
    I had always intended on visiting, someday. But the years passed, then decades, and the desire never coalesced into action until free food and beverages were thrown into the mix.
     Then I was there in a heartbeat, joining the throng celebrating the publication of Secret Chicago (ECW Press, $ 17.95), Sam Weller's guide to odd, little-known places in the Chicago area.
     As is inevitable with such guides, the book is a curious mix of genuine hidden treasures, such as the museum, visited by as many as 20 people a day, and better-known locales, such as the Art Institute, or that obscure gem known only to the 4 million people who somehow discover it, Taste of Chicago.

     While I enjoyed the museum, I don't know if I would recommend it to everybody, particularly the faint of heart.
     True, it has a certain naive charm. In an era when most museum exhibits are ultra-slick endeavors, assembled by teams of academics and funded by multinational corporations, the surgical museum is endearingly rustic, almost crude, in a cobbled-together way, between the rough stone statues in its Hall of Immortals, and the haphazard jumble of displays, identified haltingly with handmade labels, all skewed and fading.
     But the folksiness of the place also contributes to its chamber-of-horrors feel, the way the serenity of a town in a Stephen King novel underlines the nightmares building below the surface. I had heard about the uteral and kidney stones on proud display, but was caught off-guard by the vivid oil paintings of unspeakable pre-modern surgeries, not to mention the saws, knives and, of course, that bone crusher.
     I left the place intrigued by a pair of questions.
     First, why is the museum there? As flush as the International College of Surgeons, which runs the museum, must certainly be, it also must be tempted to cash out on such a prime piece of real estate and put its museum, oh, in Navy Pier or Woodfield Mall or some place where people could actually get at it.
     Short answer: They can't.
     "Of course the buildings are landmarks," said Dolores Leber, a museum associate. "That's why we're in the place we're at. It's the perfect site for high- rises, but being a landmark . . . .       And second: Sure, that bone crusher seems barbaric. But how do they reset bones now? For all I know, every hospital in America has a bone crusher.
     They don't.
     "Things are much more sophisticated," said Dr. David Beigler, an orthopedist at Illinois Masonic Medical Center. He said the problem with a device such as the bone crusher is you never know where the bone will break. Nowadays, they'd operate, going in and cutting.
     Still, the process is not without its throwbacks to the past.
     "We do have a wire saw that you operate with two hands called a 'giggly saw,' " said Dr. Brian Cole of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center. "It's sort of a prehistoric device."
     Dr. Cole had no idea, however, what the ominous "giggly" in "giggly saw" refers to. That's the problem with this profession. You solve one question, and another pops up to take its place.
         —Originally published May 18, 2000 in the Sun-Times

Flashback 1994: Cultural Differences Hamper Health Care

Station Hospital, by Robert Smullyan Sloan (Metropolitan Museum)

    
     "Medical stories are always interesting," I told my wife, justifying the hours I've been spending downtown this week, researching an upcoming column at a Chicago hospital. Between that, and a big piece due for Mosaic early next week, I'm going to have to phone in the blog for a few days. Since I'm in a medical mode, a few medical stories from the hazy past, including this, which I found out about through contacts in the Russian emigre community.

     They complain of serdtsa boleet -- literally "heartache" -- or pitchen boleet, a pain in the liver. They wave mysterious bottles with Cyrillic labels and demand valerian, an herbal tranquilizer rarely used here since the 1800s.
     They are immigrants, mostly Jewish, from the troubled, fractured land that once was the Soviet Union. Their steady influx into Chicago—3,000 last year, 14,000 in the last seven—has created a massive health care challenge for local social service agencies and affiliated hospitals.
     "They're sick folks," said Joan M. Schulhoff, director of Jewish Federation programs at Mt. Sinai Hospital, summing up the general health of the immigrants.
     "We are seeing many more problems than had before, because of the deterioration of the economy of the former Soviet Union. We are seeing more untreated cancer, untreated heart disease, untreated diabetes."
     Mt. Sinai and Michael Reese Hospital treat without charge any Soviet immigrant with a serious medical condition for the first four months they are in the country. Sometimes it's longer.
     "Any urgent or emergency care," said Carol S. Goldbaum, director of Michael Reese's department of social work. "We're not piercing ears, we're not doing breast reconstruction. We do cardiac bypass, radiation therapy, anything that has to do with cancer. Cataracts or glaucoma if they're looking at permanent damage unless something is done."
     The program is set up under the auspices of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, under contract with the state to provide health care for all refugees.
     Mt. Sinai provides $1.5 million a year in unreimbursed services, and Michael Reese as much as $1 million. The federation spends $2.5 million a year on immigrant health care, including the money it gets from the state.
     "We've been refugees for thousands of years—we know how to do this stuff," said Joel Carp, associate executive director of the federation.
     Many of the new immigrants are elderly relatives of people who came to this country years ago.
     Naum Zhits and his wife, Tslya, both 68, spent only one night under the roof of a relative in Highland Park before Tslya, who has a history of heart trouble, needed to be rushed to the hospital. Less than a week after leaving Minsk, she is in Michael Reese awaiting a triple bypass.
     For those with less urgent needs, the first step is a screening at the Touhy Health Center, run by Mt. Sinai. Doctors have two goals—ascertain individual health care needs and spot public health dangers—syphilis, AIDS, even leprosy.
     It is no vain exercise: One-third of all the immigrants are carrying tuberculosis.
     Ed Gilmore, a physician assistant, helps examine the 30 patients a day coming into Touhy.
     A major challenge is dealing with the myriad differences in medical culture. The Russians, for example, often are averse to taking aspirin. But many are addicted to tranquilizers. "It is an over-tranquilized population," Schulhoff said.
     Then there are the aftereffects of Soviet medicine with which U.S. doctors must deal.
     "Oftentimes their doctors lacked the facilities to perform necessary tests, so they made diagnoses 'from the ceiling,' " said Gilmore, using the Soviet slang term for a doctor sitting back in his chair, gazing skyward, and making up a significant-sounding diagnosis.
     An important part of this care is teaching new patients fundamentals of nutrition and preventive care, and how to use the U.S. medical system.
     Caregivers have been sent to Berlitz courses so that they have at least a rough understanding of Russian.
     It helped Gilmore one recent day, as he examined 8-year-old Ilya Samovskiy.
     Gilmore set the boy at ease with a magic trick, and proceeded to examine him, speaking a mixture of English and poorly pronounced Russian. "My bad accent amuses the old folks," he says. "They like it a lot."
     The boy's condition, he tells Ilya's mother, Galina, is "ne seriosna," -- he just has a slight fever -- and Gilmore perscribes "Tylenol, two tabletski."
              —Originally published in the Sun-Times April 4, 1994

Quaker Oats quietly touches up its iconic oatmeal man

Out with the old, left, in with the new and slightly different. 

     Maybe because we’re both gents from Ohio who ended up working in downtown Chicago. Maybe because we’re men given to chubbiness and self-promotion.
     But the Quaker Oats Man is on my radar. Always has been. So when my wife came home with a container, the moment it was removed from the Sunset Foods bag I noticed something amiss. I set the old and new cylinders together on the counter.
     The new Quaker Oats man is different. Windblown, for starters, his white neckerchief flapping in the breeze. His complexion paler, with rosier cheeks; his predecessor had a uniform, peach quality. The image a little smaller, his face a little thinner too, more of a distinct chin. Behind him, a faint image of farmland has been worked into the deep red background.
     Could I have missed the big announcement? Online, there was nothing but a brief mention in a trade magazine earlier this year. I found more hoopla from 2012, when they last fiddled with his image. Trimming five pounds, according to Quaker, which let slip that in-house, they call him “Larry.”
     “Larry”?
     Seven years is awfully quick to redo Quaker’s icon. Calls and emails were fired at Quaker — headquartered in Chicago — and PepsiCo, which bought the brand in 2001.
      While waiting, I started to dig, beginning with Quakers. Formed in Britain in the 1650s, George Fox called his sect “The Society of Friends.” They immediately got in trouble for failing to bow and scrape to officialdom, and were beaten and jailed. After Fox told a judge he should “tremble at the word of the Lord” the judge called him a “quaker,” derisively. Eventually the sect started calling themselves Quakers — a kind of defiant rebranding, the way gay people started proudly referring to themselves as “queer.”

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Something new under the sun: Hoplark HopTea

    For a guy who doesn't drink, I spend a lot of time in bars. Which raises the question, What do you drink in a bar if you don't want to drink booze? Club soda is zupped down in a heartbeat. Regular sodas are either sugary or vile. Non-alcoholic beers are surprisingly good nowadays—Beck's, St. Pauli Girl, Clausthaler—but not every bar stocks them. Lack of demand, I suppose.
     Craft mocktails can be quite good, redolent of mint or basil or cucumber, particularly at a chi-chi restaurant like The Dearborn in the Loop, my new favorite go-to place.
     But both of those have drawbacks: calories for one.  And they also can be hard to find.
     I was far from the Loop, however, last spring, sitting in a sushi bar in Boulder, Colorado, when the bartender, considering my strange interest in beverages non-alcoholic, suggested Hoplark HopTea, iced tea that is brewed like beer, with zero calories, zero sugar and zero alcohol.
   Introduced in June, 2018, made right there in Boulder, it had a surprising, refreshing, kindy beerish, kinda tealike taste.  It was complicated, and took time to drink, which is kinda the point. You can buy HopTea at a number of Whole Foods around Chicago, as well as other locations, as detailed on their web site.
     The restaurant, just in case you ever get to Boulder, was Japango on the Pearl Street Mall. I liked the food, the service, the ambience, and the cylindrical tank filled with jellyfish.  So much that, with the broad range of Boulder restaurants at our fingertips, we went back the next day to have lunch at Japango a second time. Good call.

Turning away from wonder to gaze at matters Trumpian

     The word “placebo” is not only from Latin, it is Latin, an unaltered Latin word meaning “I will please,” the first person singular future indicative of placere, “to please.”
     It wasn’t originally used to describe a sugar pill pretending to be medicine, of course, but a part of Vespers, Book of the Dead, taken from the line, Psalm 114:9 in the Latin Vulgate Bible: “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum,” or “I will please the Lord in the land for living.”

     By 1200, it was used to describe flatterers — Chaucer names a character in The Merchant’s Tale “Placebo.” By 1811, it was a term for pills with no medical value but offering psychological benefit. 
     OK, OK, Donald Trump. Do you think the media wants to natter on obsessively about him? Others perhaps do. But not me. Gazing into Trump’s world is like directing a flashlight down the hole in an outhouse while the Northern Lights flash and flicker in the heavens right outside.
     But focusing elsewhere, no matter how fascinating, also feels like describing a pretty flower when the school next door is burning. Worse, your entire country aflame. I was going to write today on last week’s Alabama debacle. You know the particulars if you’re paying attention. With Hurricane Dorian turning up the East Coast, Trump said Alabama was in peril when it wasn’t, the risk already past.
     A small error. Worth correcting only because people in Alabama could be alarmed by the president suggesting a deadly storm is bearing down on them. A normal human being would dismiss it with a shrug.

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Lighted balloons

    Did you have a good summer? Now that we're hurtling into September, hard to believe it's almost gone. For me, spine surgery carved out a big two-month chunk, cancelling two vacations and sucking up all my attention and energy. That was unfortunate.
     But I did have one beautiful day. Center Avenue had a block party a few weeks ago. It was a marvel of planning—thank you Carla, thank you Tanya, thank you all the other neighbors who helped out. Not only the usual tables of food and tubs of cold drinks, but live bands. A fire truck and bouncy house for the kids. Games. My oldest boy was in town, and we all hung out, chatting, eating, listening to music as day turned into evening, then into night. I think I spent eight hours, from setting up to the last stragglers sitting around a fire pit in the front yard. Playing corn hole. Dancing in the street—really, how often do you get the chance to dance in the street? Not often enough.
     After dark, someone produced something I had never seen before. Lighted balloons. I hope that doesn't tar me as hopelessly out of it, and that you haven't been enjoying LED balloons since the 1950s. I'm sure you'll let me know. But they were new to me. Not only did the balloons glow sooth shades of blue and green, but they changed colors. I'd never seen anything like it. Finally, a new technology that isn't menacing.
      A tiny girl—5, 7, it's hard to tell anymore—walked up to me and, with heartbreaking solemnity, presented me with one, saying, "Would you like this balloon? Please take it." You can't very well say no to that. I accepted it with a bow.
     Though once I had the balloon, there was a difficulty: what to do with it? I carried the balloon for a bit, giving it a few tentative tosses into the air and catching it. But that got old. I didn't want to cast the balloon away, not after that little girl had so earnestly entrusted me with it. It would pop on the ground. And be my fault.
     Then I had a brainstorm. There was a low branched tree in the yard where the block party was centered. I took the string from the balloon and wrapped it around a branch. A good idea spread. Other people automatically followed my lead—that never happens—and soon the tree was festooned with balloons, all gently changing colors. It was gorgeous. When I think of the summer of 2019, I'll think of that.