Iowa caucus mess offers lessons to Dems

     Monday’s Iowa Democratic caucus disaster already feels like ancient history, with Tuesday’s teary Queen-for-a-Day State of the Union and Wednesday’s shameful Senate impeachment acquittal in the meantime.
     But before the smoldering wreckage disappears in our rearview mirror, it’s worth a second look. Self-criticism is a liberal superpower. We can consider ourselves, assess candidly, recognize what is wrong and, in theory, fix it.
     So let’s take a look. Shadow Inc., an obscure tech company founded by former Hillary Clinton campaign staffers, was supposed to be the secret weapon to bring the Democrats up to speed against well-oiled Republican technology efforts. Instead, it thoroughly botched what should have been a dramatic Democratic milepost to the 2020 presidential election. What happened?
     I spoke with Shlomo Engelson Argamon, interim chair of the computer science department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He began by cautioning that neither he nor anybody knows exactly what went wrong yet and won’t for a couple weeks.
     That said, there are obvious take-aways that can considered right now.
     “In software development, a Silicon Valley attitude is: ‘Move fast and break things,’” Argamon said. “Build things quickly, throw them out there, see what happens. Get feedback from users. If they break, fix them and improve them. Learn by deploying.”

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Playing with your food

Cathedral

     I've played board games all my life. Starting as a young boy with Mousetrap and Candyland—how I admired that thick slice of Neapolitan ice cream depicted on the board—then Clue and Stratego, moving up to Risk and Othello, playing a game was a way to carve up the endless expanse of time that is childhood, give it boundaries, limits, rules, a purpose, maybe even fun. 
     Certain games came and went— 3M Bookshelf games like Twixt and Feudal were a big deal in the 1970s—and certain games were given a joyous second life with the arrival of my own children. Stratego came roaring back, and how I loved to play it with the boys. Even before the game started, just setting up your side, arraying your forces, planting your bombs, getting ready to play, was challenging and fun.  
     Ebay shepherded home lost games: another 3M Bookshelf game, Breakthru, a great game with each side has a different set of pieces and a different goal, somehow vanished along the way, and it was a joy to play it again. The pieces were polished steel cylinders, marvelous to behold.
     Some games weren't really that fun—the Game of Life, with their insurance policies and college tuition and little cars filled with pink pegs. Maybe the point was to acclimate children to the tedium and responsibility of the adult world. Some games were little more than coin tosses, barely more than luck: Trouble, which we played more than we ever would if it just used dice, just for the joy of their clear plastic hemisphere containing the dice, the "Pop-o-Matic." Battleship was basically the board version of blind man's bluff. You felt around in the dark for ships. The cool little plastic ships made the effort worthwhile, sort of.

Skylark

     Some games were just beautiful. The boys had one called "Skylark" that wasn't very challenging to play. It just looked great, with these sweet cardboard birds. I grew to view Monopoly more as a game of chance than anything else, played right. But I cherished its graphics—the question mark of "Chance," that cop blowing his whistle. Monopoly sets that departed from the classic set, using cities other than Atlantic City, where the streets were borrowed, were incomprehensible to me. Then the family played a game of Monopoly where the older boy bought one property of each color and perversely refused to trade. "It's a trading game," we argued. "It says so on the box!" The game went on for hours, nobody could win, until we quit in disgust and never played again. "You killed Monopoly," I told him.
     Games were location specific: my grandmother had a Cootie Set. We would assemble the odd primary bugs out of their primary-color parts sprawled in her living room and nowhere else. Our family buying Cootie was an unimaginable as our covering our sofa in clear plastic or or subscribing to Reader's Digest or any other practice that was the exclusive provenance of Cleveland Heights.

Cool

Idiotic

     Cootie was an example of the tendency of games to deteriorate. The original, 1950s Cootie was cool. Subsequent versions were idiotic. I took great pride that the armies in my Risk set were little painted wooden cubes. None of the crap plastic armies that came later.  
     Some games I loved as a child then stopped playing at some point—Dogfight, with little plastic biplanes to maneuver over the European countryside. And a few games showed up late, just before we pretty much stopped playing: a wooden Quarto set, bought on vacation in Canada. A shifting Labyrinth game. I was the one urging, "C'mon, play!" as the boys wandered off, into their own lives (where, I'm happy to report, games are still played on game nights at the New York University School of Law. So it isn't just us). 
     A few games never left, continuing into adulthood. Chess and checkers, of course. Scrabble, the godhead of modern games, that can be played throughout the day on my iPhone. A favorite new game, The Settlers of Catan, that our dear friends from Ohio gave us (the same couple that gave us a beautiful wooden game, Cathedral, as a wedding present. It involves walling off a larger part of the board, and has been on our coffee table for 30 years).
     So I was interested to see Cards Against Humanity is opening their Chicago Board Game Cafe in the Margie's Candy Building next week. Block Club Chicago posted a news story about the opening. 
    I would seem to be their intended audience. But I greet the news with more skepticism than excitement. What I'm wondering about is the idea of eating dinner and playing board games, at the same time. How does that work? Yes, in college, drinking and certain board games—particularly backgammon—were a thing. And back in the day I liked to pour myself a dram and play chess with anybody who'd sit across the board from me. 
    But dinner and Monopoly? At a restaurant? Or Risk, which takes forever—I remember waking up, face down on the board, at a sleepover. Or some other game selected by the cafe's "team of professional board game teachers [who] will help you pick the right game for your group and teach you how to play." That sounds kinda strange, right? A board game sommelier. "Might I recommend a 1965 Milton Bradley Mystery Date Game to go with the paella?" (The cuisine will be Spanish and Vietnamese,  a combination I had not heretofore imagined and can hardly imagine now).
      And won't the games quickly get dirty? Greasy? Spotted? Part of the appeal of board games is their clean perfection, these square folding cardboard worlds. Or their gentle wear, the result of your parents' play Not something manhandled by 100 strangers. The games tokens, armies, die, piles of cash, action cards. Sure, games get old, as do we all, and accommodations must be made. But a game of chess with a wooden spool standing in for a missing a rook just isn't the same. It loses a certain dignity.
     Maybe it'll work. Max Temkin, the guy behind Cards Against Humanity, a fun, wildly obscene game my family played exactly once (a dinner guest brought the cards) is a good businessman and obviously thinks this is a good idea. 
     This isn't the first time it has been done. The web site mentions a few other game cafes around town. And I remember places like the Blue Frog, a River North bar that had stacks of games. No one ever seemed to be playing them.  Now that I think of it, games in public establishments are like apartment balconies: you never see anybody using them. Still, best of luck to the Chicago Board Game Cafe. They're shaking the dice, beginning a game where 90 percent of the players lose. Let's see if they can win. 

Trump’s orange glow colors his opponents

     Whatever convoluted caucus process they’ve got in Iowa, under ideal conditions a Byzantine mess of neighbors gathering in public buildings to congeal in corners, broke down Monday night. A balky app.
     Results finally dribbled out late Tuesday. And the news, as of 6 p.m., is ... pretty good. Exhausted septuagenarian hack Joe Biden came in fourth, with 15. 6 percent of the vote. It would be good to be rid of him. Vinegary scold Elizabeth Warren did hardly better: 18.3 percent.
     Then Bernie Sanders. I have to admit, he makes my skin crawl. Whenever Sanders spools out the wish list of what he’s going to do — Medicare-for-All, Green New Deal, free college — I scowl and think: “We can’t get rid of the penny.”
     He stays alive with 25.1 percent. Second to Pete Buttigieg, who won with 26.9 percent. There are many reasons to root for Buttigieg: he focuses on the biggest problem facing America right now: bringing the country together. He has dignity and speaks in complete sentences. He would be the youngest president ever. He could lead us toward the future, assuming we still have one.

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Flashback 1998—Sun-Times: Digging and delivering for 50 years

   

     My first thought, stumbling upon this, was to save it for the paper's 75th anniversary, in 2023. But nothing is guaranteed in journalism, and I figure, better post it now, if only to clue in young people at the paper who might be interested in the storied past of the organization they've joined.
   Kidding. I know young people don't care about that kind of thing.
   And second, if we make it to 2023, and I do too, then I'll take a new crack at our history, telling it in a different way. 
    Yes, the actual date was Monday. I thought about pushing my Roman senate column to today. But it seemed odd to hold a current commentary so that a chestnut can stick the actual date, and I doubt many readers care about that kind of thing. Assuming they care at all. This is very long—3370 words—so the less preface the better. It makes me nostalgic, both for the colleagues lost—I remember Harry Golden Jr., striding into the newsroom in his Guys & Dolls double-breasted suit. And for the tone of optimism and enthusiasm, though I believe both are still warranted.

     Happy birthday to us!
     The Chicago Sun-Times is 50 years old today. Every day for the last half-century, without fail, the Sun-Times has been a vital part of the dynamic life of Chicago. 

     What changes we've seen. When the Chicago Daily Sun and Times published Vol. 1, No. 1, there were about six computers in the world. The United States had only 48 states. Just one household in 40 had a TV. The Dow Jones industrial average was 175. 

     For 50 years, the Sun-Times has not only reported the news but helped make it by digging deep and exposing corruption, a hallmark of the paper. The headline on the final edition that first day, "MAJCZEK TELLS OF $5,000 `GIFT' TO ILL. LEGISLATOR," referred to one of the most famous stories in newspaper history, the "Call Northside 777" murder case, in which Joe Majczek, a wrongly convicted man, was freed from a life sentence thanks to an intrepid Times reporter. Fresh from jail, Majczek was being shaken down by a state legislator for a share of the money awarded him as compensation for his years in prison.

     What took place Feb. 2, 1948, was really more of a marriage than a birth, so in a sense today we're also marking our golden anniversary. Marshall Field III had founded the morning Chicago Sun in 1941, three days before Pearl Harbor, as an alternative to the isolationist, anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune. 

     In 1947, he bought the afternoon Chicago Times, a scrappy tabloid begun at the tail end of the Roaring '20s. The two papers combined their Sunday editions in autumn, 1947 (Field, of course, preferring the newspaper he created to the one he bought, which is why you are reading the Sun-Times and not the Times-Sun), and were sharing the same building when a labor strike, affecting all five Chicago daily papers, made combining the two staffs a necessity. 

     The hybrid made for a powerful paper that was immediately noticed at the highest levels. Asked at a 1947 news conference what newspapers he read, President Harry Truman said he was "always very fond of the little afternoon Chicago daily consolidated with the Chicago Sun. I never thought much of the rest of the Chicago papers"—a dig at the Tribune, which Truman called one of the "two worst papers" in America. 

     The Sun-Times (the "and" was replaced with a hyphen in March, 1948) was from the start at the forefront uncovering Chicago corruption. When the New Yorker's famed press critic, A. J. Liebling, lived in Chicago during the winter of 1949-50, he was struck by the infant newspaper's aggressive approach.

     "It sometimes raises a great row with stories about local political graft," he wrote in his classic essay, "Chicago: The Second City." "Although Chicago municipal graft is necessarily Democratic, since the city's government is Democratic, it is the Sun-Times, rather than the Tribune, that gets indignant." 

     The 1950s were a boom time for the paper. In 1955, the Sun-Times was looking for a replacement for the woman who wrote the "Your Troubles" column under the pseudonym "Ann Landers." The paper hired a 37-year-old housewife named Eppie Lederer, who never had held a paying job or written a published word but who possessed a quick wit and compassion that made Ann Landers, under her guidance, one of the most familiar and respected names in the country and a force for social change. 

     In early 1958, the Sun-Times took up residence in its current home, 401 N. Wabash, on land along the Chicago River. The original idea was to bring the rolls of newsprint in on barges. For 40 years, the Sun-Times has been printed on 10 thundering Goss presses, which do their work while passersby watch from a long glass and marble gallery off the building's lobby, a tradition that will end late next year when the paper's modern $100 million presses go into operation. The Sun-Times wasn't alone in its new home. The venerable Chicago Daily News, purchased by the Field family in 1959, published from the same building. 

     A factor contributing to the Sun-Times' national image has always been that it just looks the way a big-city newspaper should. Many TV shows have used the hectic fourth-floor newsroom as a backdrop, featuring hosts from Herman Kogan to Bill Kurtis, who leaned against the last manual typewriter in the newsroom while taping introductions to his A&E specials. 

     The Sun-Times is the only newspaper in the country featured in a TV drama, "Early Edition," built around a fantasy, day-early delivery of the paper. Hollywood has included the Sun-Times in movies for decades. John Belushi filmed "Continental Divide" at the newspaper. In Harrison Ford's hit "The Fugitive," when a newspaper is shown headlining "Kimble in Chicago," that newspaper, of course, is the Sun-Times. 

     Speaking of movies, one of the greatest impacts the Sun-Times has had on American life was its promoting a young feature writer named Roger Ebert to film critic in 1967. Ebert revolutionized the art of movie reviewing, winning the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded a movie critic while becoming an international celebrity. 

     Another longtime Sun-Times star was Bill Mauldin, who in 1962 joined the newspaper to great fanfare—he was chauffeured to his first day on the job in an Army Jeep, a nod to his World War II "Willy and Joe" cartoons, which won him the first of two Pulitzers. 

     Mauldin did not rest on his considerable laurels after joining the paper, however. Instead he traveled the globe for the Sun-Times. When James Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss, backed by federal troops, Mauldin was at the riot. When John F. Kennedy delivered his famous "I am a Berliner" speech, Mauldin was at the Berlin Wall. He went to Israel in time for the Six-Day War in 1967, toured South America and saw combat in Vietnam, the only reporter on the scene when the Viet Cong hit the U.S. air base at Pleiku. His battle scene stories and sketches were carried all over the country.     

     Mauldin's most famous cartoon for the Sun-Times—and among the most famous editorial cartoons of all time—was dashed off that awful afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. The drawing shows the Abraham Lincoln statue from the Lincoln Memorial, bowed forward in its chair, face buried in its hands in grief. The Sun-Times bumped sports off the back cover to run the cartoon there, filling the entire page, without any text whatsoever. Many vendors sold the newspaper back page up, to display Mauldin's haunting work. More than 250,000 requests for reprints flooded into the paper. Jackie Kennedy asked for the original and placed it in the Kennedy Library at Harvard. 

     As the 1960s grew increasingly turbulent, the Sun-Times followed Chicago on its wild ride as, to paraphrase the protesters, the whole world was watching. Photographer Jack Lenahan was beaten by 14 cops outside the Conrad Hilton when he tried to snap a picture of a shopper knocked down during a police skirmish. Columnist Tom Fitzpatrick ran with the Weathermen as they rampaged through the city one October night in 1969, returned to the newsroom 20 minutes before deadline and cranked out a Pulitzer Prize-winning column with editor Jim Hoge looking over his shoulder. It was the Sun-Times' first Pulitzer, one of seven the paper would win, the most recent to cartoonist Jack Higgins in 1989. 

     One of the biggest Sun-Times scoops of that era came after police raided a West Side apartment and gunned down Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark. The Tribune dutifully reported the police version—that the Panthers had fired at them—and printed a photo purporting to show bullet holes from their guns. The Sun-Times went back to the apartment and took a closer look at the holes. They were in reality unplastered nail heads. The two militants had been killed in their beds. 

     Photos always have been important at the Sun-Times—if you look at the 1948 masthead, you'll see a drawing of a Speed Graphic camera and the slogan "The Picture Newspaper." In 1971, Jack Dykinga won a Pulitzer for his disturbing photographic essay "Children in Purgatory," depicting the deplorable conditions under which retarded children were warehoused in state institutions. In 1982, photographer John H. White won another Pulitzer. 

     On March 4, 1978, Marshall Field V shut down the Daily News. That dark day in Chicago journalism was a bittersweet boon for the Sun-Times, which inherited the stars from the Daily News. Columnist Mike Royko joined the paper, as did Carl Rowan, whose syndicated column is carried in newspapers nationwide today, investigative ace Charles Nicodemus, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist John Fischetti and book editor Henry Kisor. 

     The same year the Daily News was put to sleep, the Sun-Times printed a series that is studied to this day in journalistic ethics courses in America: the Mirage Tavern. The idea, ironically, was first pitched to the Tribune by Pam Zekman, then a reporter there. But it didn't go anywhere, and Zekman moved to the Sun-Times. 

     In 1977, the newspaper bought a decrepit neighborhood bar, created hidden crawl spaces in the walls and ceiling for photographers, and waited for the city inspectors to come by and accept their payoffs for ignoring code violations. "60 Minutes" filmed the proceedings. 

     A wave of indictments, firings and reform measures followed the Mirage, and while some argued the paper had entrapped the corrupt officials, it had done no more than answer Mayor Richard J. Daley's perennial chant: "Where's your proof?" 

     The Mirage was just one of several noteworthy exposes at the time. "The Abortion Profiteers" revealed horrifying abuses at clinics. "The Accident Swindlers" told of shady lawyers cheating insurance companies. 

     The 1980s saw Harry Golden Jr. strut his way for the last time through City Hall, where he was the dean of the press corps. He had an uncanny ability to dictate a straight story from notes all the way down to the "period, graf." He died in 1988. And it was the last decade that fabled reporter and columnist Sydney J. Harris would have his words set in print in the Sun-Times. He died in 1986. 

     While the 1980s began in glory, the middle of the decade was a trying time for the Sun-Times, during two years of ownership by Rupert Murdoch, from 1984-86. Investigative pieces continued, however. In 1986, the Sun-Times scuttled a city effort to stick the new public library in the shuttered State Street Goldblatt's store by showing that, among many deficiencies, the floors at the old store were too weak to support the weight of books. The paper's stories are credited with leading to the construction of the Harold Washington Library. 

     The "Bitter Lessons" series of 1987 exposed for-profit business and trade schools that were ripping off students and the federal Treasury for millions of dollars in student loan fraud. It resulted in the closing of more than a dozen schools and brought reforms in state law governing the schools and changes in the federal student loan program. 

     In the 1990s, the Sun-Times still digs for news as it always has. In-depth series such as "The Slum Brokers" and "Schools in Ruins" shook up complacent officials. The U.S. Postal Service was jolted into cleaning up its act after Nicodemus cataloged its dismal record of mail service in Chicago. Congressional power broker Dan Rostenkowski ended up in a federal prison after Chuck Neubauer, Mark Brown and Michael Briggs turned a bright light on his shady scams. Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet broke the story of how the Democratic National Committee sold access to President Clinton and other high officials in the White House. 

     The Sun-Times continues to blow the lid off big stories. Last October, City Council power broker Pat Huels was forced out after the Sun-Times exposed his financial dealings. Not all of the Sun-Times is about uncovering corruption, of course. There is political commentary and reporting by Washington insider Robert Novak. The sports section is the perennial favorite of Chicago sports fans. Richard Roeper's view on modern life has become so popular that it is syndicated to newspapers nationwide. Gossip of all shades is dished by the triumvirate of Bill Zwecker, Mike Sneed and, the king of Chicago, Irv Kupcinet, whose landmark column just turned 55. 

    During the early 1990s, some questioned the future of the Sun-Times, saddled as it was with debt after its purchase by New York investors. That question was answered in 1994, when the newspaper was bought by Hollinger International, a multibillion-dollar empire of approximately 85 paid dailies, including such famed mastheads as the London Daily Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post, and 400 non-dailies. The purchase solidified the future of the Sun-Times, particularly with the commitment to new presses. Under Hollinger's direction, the Sun-Times went online in 1995, preparing a cyber-edition to mark its place in the burgeoning and uncertain universe of the World Wide Web.

    —First published in the Chicago Sun-Times, February 2, 1998

Crumbling US senate echoes Roman collapse

Augustus

     Don’t be glum, chum. It isn’t as if the United States Senate is the first legislative body to dissolve into an impotent puddle at the feet of a domineering leader. History’s full of ’em. The most glaring example, alas, is the senate in the ancient Roman Republic.
     If it’s been a while since you reached for your Edward Gibbon, save yourself the back strain. I’ve spent the weekend thumbing through “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and, buddy, as bad as the news is today, by consulting history we are reminded that it can get worse.
     Much worse.
     Gibbon starts off his epic — some 4,000 pages — of decline with the first emperor; Julius Caesar’s nephew Octavian, who renamed himself “Augustus” and, like a certain president we all know, swept aside governmental norms to gather power to himself.
     “Every barrier of the Roman constitution had been leveled by the vast ambition of the dictator,” Gibbon writes. He had help, particularly in rural areas.
     ”The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants,” Gibbon writes. “The people of Rome, viewing with secret pleasure the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows.”
     Enjoy the Super Bowl Sunday? Good times...
     The thing is, Augustus liked the senate. He himself was a senator, and made a show of consulting his fellow senators, who were always welcome to show their fidelity to him, since “it was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous.”

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Hip-hip hooray! Replacement surgery a smooth ride

  
 
     “Another one of those chopped-up weeks,” said Sam, a friendly Metra conductor on the 6:26, when asked how it’s going.
     ”Exactly!” I enthused, delighted at his unintentional double entendre.
      He meant New Year’s Day coming midweek, like Christmas, breaking up his December schedule. I was thinking of why I was on an early train: to head to Northwestern Memorial Hospital to be cut open, the second time in six months.
     ”Chopped up” is not a polite description of the surgical process, ignoring the years of laborious training doctors go through, the great skill and care they exhibit. I apologize for that. But humor is essential for getting through even a fairly simple operation, like having my arthritic hip replaced with an artificial one. In the weeks up to the event, I developed a patter to explain to friends and, more importantly, try to convince myself just how easy hip surgery is.
      ”The thing is very quick,” I’d say. “You stroll in to the hospital, stop at a mark on the corridor floor. A medical team rushes out, like a pit crew at the Indy 500 changing a tire. One yanks your pants down, another swabs the affected area with Bactine. Meanwhile, the surgeon ambles by, whips out a knife, makes a few Hibachi chef-slicing motions — shwick, shwick, shwick — your old hip is glistening on a metal tray, and the new one is slapped in. Up go the pants, the surgeon puffs on his fingertips and strolls off in one direction while you stride happily away in the other.”
     The reality was a bit more complicated. At Northwestern, we were given a number on a card, which my wife tucked away.
      ”944091!” a compact young woman in green scrubs announced. My wife fumbled in her purse, but the card eluded her fingers for a moment, prompting the woman to call out “Steinberg!”
     We sprang up, babbling apologies. She marched us int o a room, ordered me to undress, followed by more instructions, with the air of a drama student in an acting class challenged to express contempt through a set of ordinary commands: “Take your clothes off.” “Put them in this bag.” “Put this under your tongue” and such. My wife and I exchanged glances. Maybe we’d picked the wrong day to do this.

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Which came first, hobby horses or hobbies?

    The internet is not a font of fascination. It could be: all the information's there. It should be. But the good stuff tends to be obscured by such a thick buzzing fog of endless malice, argument, trivia and nonsense that only occasionally does something interesting—at least interesting to me—bob into view through the murk.
     One example has been sitting in mind, waiting for a dance partner: a post on Facebook, some list of geography tidbits that had rattled around online for years, headlined "Australia is wider than the moon." This snagged my attention like a fishhook, and the old Daily News motto, "interesting if true" flashed in mind. I had never heard that. I knew the moon is 240,000 miles away. But I never paused to reflect upon its diameter.
    Turns out the diameter of the moon, 2,158 miles, and the width of Australia, east to west, 2,500 miles at its extremes. Making Australia wider (and the United States too, for that matter). Like any interesting fact, it rearranged my thinking a little, and I realized the moon is actually pretty close: 10 times the circumference of earth away. No wonder we made it there.
     I held onto that fact, waiting for a mate, which arrived a few days ago on Twitter. Maybe I should just reproduce the tweet:

     Hmmm. That's marvelous, as good as my favorite linguistic factoid that the Canary Islands aren't named for the birds, but for the dogs the Romans left there—canis is dog in Latin. Later a small yellow bird was discovered and named for the islands.
     But could such a broad category as "hobbies"—stamp collecting, knitting, woodworking, etc.—really take its name from such a marginal plaything? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and what is more extraordinary than the dozen jumbo blue volumes of the full Oxford English Dictionary, kept on my desk for just such a purpose?
     "Hobby ... 1. A small or middle-sized horse; an ambling or pacing horse; a pony," with usage tracing back to 1375. The second definition is a short form of "hobby horse," quoting Tollett from 1813: "Our Hobby is a spirited horse of pasteboard in which the master dances and displays tricks of legerdemain."
     Eventually, the Oxford works its way to "5. A favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest, that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse; an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance."
     I'm tempted to wonder whether the tone of disapproval isn't something British, or a function of my Oxford being 40 years old. The online Cambridge dictionary is more neutral: "an activity that you do for pleasure when you are not working." But I do think there is a slight air of chastisement to the term we might not even think about when we urge troubled friends to get a hobby.  When I refer to this as my "hobby blog," there is a note of humility in it, a suggestion of triviality. 
    Speaking of humility. At the risk of pointing you toward a blog that is more interesting than mine; Haggard Hawks, run by British author linguist Paul Anthony Jones, is definitely worth looking at. I immediately followed his blog, followed his twitter feed, and went on Amazon and bought his Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: A Yearbook of Forgotten Words.  It looks fascinating, and I figure, somebody should make a little money at this game.