What to expect when you're expecting a verdict on Jussie Smollett

Twelve unanimous jurors won't settle the case in the court of public opinion, but at least we had a trial

12-9-2021 (issue No. 13)

As I wrote last week, I’ve committed to publishing the Picayune Sentinel through at least the end of 2022 and asking readers who can swing it to provide support with a paid subscription at the minimum price permitted by the Substack platform — $5 a month or the discounted annual price of $50. There’s a “Founding Member” level which is for those who want to be able to put “Founding Member, Picayune Sentinel” on their curriculum vitae, and the Substack platform makes it easy to give a gift subscription.

The Thursday Picayune Sentinel will continue to be free, but as of today there is a patrons-only comment forum, part of assorted bonus content to encourage you to join the online PS community. (Earlier this week I posted a behind-the-scenes look at the Tweet of the Week feature for supporters.)

This week’s issue includes:

• Whatever the jury decides, I’ll be satisfied with the Jussie Smollett trial

• News & Views on denying health insurance coverage to the unvaccinated, youth mob violence in Chicago and more

• Songs of Good Cheer is underway

• Mary Schmich pays tribute to her former piano teacher

• A meditation on quarterbacking statistics

• A Zoom choir from Oak Park performs a song of cheer and hope and joy and love.

Last week’s winning tweet

mean things I say to myself @meantomyself

My favorite thing about being a parent is being told I am wrong constantly by someone who depends on me for food, clothing and shelter

Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or just click here to vote in the new poll.

We are never going to stop arguing about Jussie Smollett

Update — The jury returned a guilty verdict on 5 of 6 felony counts against Smollett roughly 12 hours after publication of this week’s issue.

As we await a verdict in the Jussie Smollett trial, his defenders on social media have been arguing that there’s no proof that the “Empire” TV star staged a hate crime on himself in the Streeterville neighborhood back in 2019 and then filed false police reports that sent the nation into a tizzy.

I’m not sure what evidence would satisfy them. The words “fake beating” in the memo line of a check written to the Osundario brothers, the acquaintences who testified that he hired them to shout racist, homophobic slurs as they cuffed him about? A surreptitious recording of Smollett giving the brothers instructions as he drove them around his neighborhood days before the incident? A “Great hoax, guys!” text from Smollett?

Smollett’s champions observe that it’s only circumstantial evidence that supports the prosecution’s claim that the brothers are telling the truth.

And they’re mostly right. “Circumstantial evidence” is a phrase that many people use with scorn, as though it requires large and unfair leaps in logic. But in fact, we infer truths through circumstance all the time.

If you look outside after you wake up and the sidewalk and streets are wet and puddly, that’s merely circumstantial evidence that it rained overnight even if you didn’t see or hear it yourself.

Years before astronomers actually saw Neptune and Pluto they inferred their existence through circumstantial orbital irregularities of other bodies. Physicists know of electrons, protons and neutrons purely by circumstantial evidence.

The circumstances here — that Jussie Smollett just happened to leave his apartment at 1:45 a.m on one of the coldest nights of the year to buy eggs and two hate-spouting MAGA goons from Lakeview just happened to be laying in wait for him, and they just happened to have with them a rope to drape around his neck and some bleach to pour on him. These lucky goons — for they truly must have been the luckiest goons in the world to guess that Smollett would venture forth at such an hour to procure ovoid comestibles — somehow failed to give him much of beating and Smollett somehow failed then to cancel the workout he had scheduled the next morning with one of the brothers.

My common sense, my intuition, tells me that the counter-narrative offered by Smollett’s defense team — that the brothers stalked and attacked Smollett, perhaps in hopes of convincing him to hire them as bodyguards — is too far-fetched to be believed.

Maybe if I’d been in the courtroom or if the judge had allowed a live stream of the trial, I would be thinking that Smollett’s version of events leaves room for reasonable doubt of his guilt.

It won’t surprise or particularly disappoint me if the jurors who heard all the testimony and reviewed all the evidence vote to acquit based on such doubts.

Smollett had a trial, which is all most of us were asking for when Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx abruptly, inexplicably dropped all charges against him after a grand jury had indicted him nearly three years ago. And from news reports it certainly sounded like a fair trial, with skilled lawyers on both sides.

The threshold for a finding of guilt is appropriately high.

“Not guilty” does not equal innocent, as so many of you who were unhappy with Kyle Rittenhouse’s recent acquittal in Kenosha never seem to tire of reminding me.

And “guilty” does not equal “case closed” — not legally, given avenues for appeal, and certainly not in the court of public opinion, where we will continue to disagree and argue about this silly little story for years to come no matter what 12 people decide.

Expect a verdict. But do not expect resolution.

News & Views

News: Proposed legislation would put unvaccinated on the hook for COVID-19 expenses

State Rep. Jonathan Carroll, D-Northbrook, filed a bill Monday that would require unvaccinated Illinoisans to pay for their COVID-related medical expenses if they contract the disease.

View: I love the idea in theory, as I’ve totally lost patience with the anti-vax crowd that’s selfishly, ignorantly prolonging this pandemic. But this isn’t a bill, it’s a fit of pique that runs afoul of contract law at the very least.

A better idea would be to encourage or even require insurers either to charge non-vaxxers higher premiums for exercising the prerogative to remain unvaccinated or offer premium discounts to those who are fully vaccinated.

A still better idea would be universal health care coverage, but I digress.

News: Chicago plans 2% tax on sports betting

If approved, the total rate on revenues from sports betting would rise to 19%.

View: Gamblers seem to be in perpetual denial about what chumps and suckers they truly are. The city, the county, the state and entrepreneurs everywhere are making big plans to spend your money. Think about what lousy bets you must be placing, on average, for sports books to pay nearly 20% in taxes and still rake in the profits.

The skin game is right out in the open! They make no secret of the fact that you, the gambler, are the mark, and that your foolish belief in your own powers of prognostication is reliably bankable.

I’m no moralist when it comes to gambling, which is good because I can hardly think of a more futile moral stance. It seems like a sad way for government to raise revenue and not a particularly productive economic engine but, well, thanks, I guess, gamblers, for marginally reducing my taxes.

News: Weekend Loop mob violence spurs calls for change

Another outbreak of mass youth violence over the weekend has downtown merchants, a big labor union, police and others trying to determine what should be done to prevent a repeat. The arrests include that of a 15-year-old, who has been charged with a felony after engaging in a particularly vicious attack on the bus driver, who had stopped his vehicle on the 100 block of North Michigan Avenue to check on a loud noise when the crowd swarmed…..Greg Hinz, Crains.

View: I don’t think it’s an overreaction to say that the kinds of crime we’re seeing — these rampaging youth mobs downtown, the incredible uptick in carjackings, the increasingly brazenness of shoplifters and, of course, the relentlessly growing pile of murdered bodies in the city — mark a qualitative in not quantitative change in the problem.

Stories about criminal suspects committing new and heinous crimes while out on modest bond don’t increase the general confidence that smart, tough people are on the problem and have some good ideas to improve the situation.

Land of Linkin’

• It's Crazy We Have To Do A Debunking Episode About The Jacob Blake Shooting In December 2021 And Yet Here We Are — The “Blocked and Reported” podcast takes a close look at what we know and what we think we know about the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha in the summer of 2020, the incident that lit the fuse on the Kyle Rittenhouse story.

• A horror story to shock you out of your complacency is Barton Gelman’s new piece in the Atlantic, January 6 Was Practice: “Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire,” he writes. “Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.”

• Daily Beast columnist and fellow Substacker Jonathan Alter writes that the abortion issue provides yet another good opportunity for Democrats to modify the U.S. Senate rules: Make it harder to filibuster by forcing senators to actually hold the floor if they want to try to block legislation: “Republicans and Roe are often compared to the dog that caught the car,” he writes. “In a country where 80 percent support abortion rights, a long, high-stakes Senate debate under public glare is not likely to go well for old men on the wrong side of public opinion.”

• Gallup’s historical look at Abortion Trends by Gender shows how comparatively consistent public opinion has been on this issue for nearly 50 years.

• Rittenhouse Trial Verdict Divides Americans Along Partisan, Racial Lines — A Morning Consult poll finds 31% of Democrats and 71% of Republicans approved of the Kenosha County jury’s decision to acquit Kyle Rittenhouse of all charges. It also found 47% of white respondents approving and 23% of Black respondents approving. Fully 18% of respondents had no opinion on this question (see pages 92-93 of the extensive cross-tabs)

• Audio “illusions”? Fascinating.

• Why — and how — is Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics so soon after it had the 2008 Summer Games? — Short answer, because the only other serious bidder was Kazakhstan and evidently just being “very nice!” didn’t cut it.

• The Creepy Origins Of Graham Crackers And Corn Flakes -- both were pioneered as anti-masturbation foods.

• "Kinda," "Sorta" and "Activia" are among BuzzFeed's 127 Questionable Words That Would Actually Be Nice Names For Girls. Mental Floss, meanwhile, took the trouble to identify really unpopular names for both sexes from 1880 to 1932 according to Social Security Administration databases. Some I actually kind of like, though. Such as, for boys: Commodore, Council, Mayo and Early. Girls: Cuba, Capitola and Ivory.

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: Today, Thursday, at the special time of 4 p.m., WCPT AM-820 host Joan Esposito and I will chat about ideas raised in today’s issue. The listen-live link is here.

Bill Staines, 1947-2021

Singer-songwriter Bill Staines died this week at age 74 of complications from prostate cancer. My favorite song of his is “Roseville Fair,” which tells the story of a couple meeting and falling in love at a traditional music festival (“You took my hand
and we stepped to the music / With a single smile you became my world”). “River” is also particularly evocative:

The whistling ways of my younger days
Too quickly have faded on by
But all of their memories linger on
Like the light in a fading sky.

Paul G. — If you read the other verses of the hymn "Come Ye Thankful People Come" you would see that this hymn is really about the end of times and the final judgement.  The end of the Christian calendar comes around Thanksgiving time, so thoughts of "the end" are on people's minds.

I had no idea that the warm fuzzy Thanksgiving hymn favored in my elementary school in the 1960s was so eschatological:

Even so, Lord, quickly come/ Bring thy final harvest home /Gather thou thy people in, Free from sorrow, free from sin

The deeper you to into the verses of certain songs the darker they get. Consider “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/ From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave” in the third verse of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Or the second verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which begins “I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel/ As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal/ Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel…”

A “contemner” is one who displays contempt, a word we should probably rescue from the ash bin of history.

Cheer Chat

It’s Songs of Good Cheer week at last.

We opened with a full-on rehearsal of our annual holiday singalong Wednesday afternoon for an audience of local seniors and we will be performing Thursday night for a documentary film team led by Mollie Nye.

If you’d like to be in the audience for that taping, there are still some (free!) tickets left. Here’s the pitch:

We need energetic, excited folks to join us in Maurer Hall (at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.) to sing along. Please wear your finest holiday sweaters, Santa hats, reindeer antlers, and light-up items! Songbooks will be provided.

By reserving tickets to attend you agree to be recorded on video and audio for this event and for promotional purposes in the future. The production & performance is scheduled to take about 2 hours with a break and may include some stops and restarts. Our bar will be open for drinks, candy and light snacks.

Please note: due to the production crew on site, views may occasionally be obstructed and camera operators may be communicating via radio. Seating is limited to the center section of the main floor and balcony only.

Like all of Old Town School's in-person activities & concerts, proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test required for entry. Masks are required in the building and in the concert hall when not actively eating and drinking. View our Health and Safety page for full details.

Reserve your seats here, space is limited

The concert film will be available for rental on Sunday, December 19. Downloadable songbook included in the price. More details on all that in next week’s Sentinel.

We’re doing fewer shows this year because pandemic fears have quite understandably depressed ticket sales, but we had the largest crowd of seniors we’ve ever had on Wednesday. They didn’t seem to have trouble singing through their masks with gusto and, yes, cheer.

There are still a few seats left for shows Friday and Saturday night and Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Order here.

Here’s a video snippet from our sound check Wednesday afternoon. Our newest cast member, Zahra Baker, spins through “Angels in the Band.”

Mary Schmich: Thanking Mr. Fine or How I Learned to Fake It on the Piano

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts column-like thoughts most Tuesdays on Facebook. Here is this week’s offering:

A few minutes ago, I was about to go practice piano for our upcoming Songs of Good Cheer shows when Art Fine popped into my mind. Without him I wouldn’t be playing piano in a holiday band at the Old Town School of Folk Music. So today I wanted to take a moment to do what I’ve never done publicly—thank Mr. Fine.

First, though, I have to thank my mother.

My mother was a wonderful pianist who learned to play as a child and studied piano seriously in college. Classical, gospel, boogie-woogie, Broadway. She could do it all. But for most of my itinerant childhood we didn’t have a piano in the house and my mother, Mary Ellen, rarely had the chance to play. Still, she sensed I had some instinct for the instrument so she signed me up for group lessons with one of the nuns at St. James School in Savannah, Ga., where students learned to “play” on a folding, cardboard keyboard.

“Learn to play the piano,” Mama once told me, “and it will be your friend for life.”

For a while, that cardboard keyboard was all I knew of the piano. But when I was in fifth grade, my father rented us a spinet, with the option to buy. I took a few more lessons, again from a nun, this time at Sts. Peter & Paul in Decatur, Ga. Alas, my father couldn’t afford the payments, so the spinet soon went to the home of an aunt who paid it off. If I learned to play anything during that period, I’m not sure what.

By the time I was in eighth grade, when my father could no longer support us, my mother and my siblings and I were living in my grandfather’s house in Macon, Ga. At the end of that school year, Granddaddy died--and my mother inherited the Baldwin baby grand her parents had given her when she was 16. Shortly after his death, just before I entered high school, my family moved to Arizona, hauling that big baby grand.

During my four years of high school in Phoenix, my family lived in four different places. Every time but the last one, the big old Baldwin came with us. My mother didn’t play as much as she wished to—eight kids, money crises, domestic chaos cramp an artist's style--but whenever she did, I felt a stirring. I wanted to do that.

Enter Art Fine. Mr. Fine, as he was known.

One night when I was in high school, my parents were in a bar where a balding man with big glasses, wearing a tux, was tinkling the keys. My father enjoyed listening while sipping his third or fourth highball. My mother knew enough to know the piano player was really good. They went to talk to him. Did he give lessons?

And that was how it came to pass that before long Mr. Fine was sitting on the piano bench in our home once a week teaching a teenager who never found time to practice—i.e. me—and whose parents didn’t reliably have money to pay him.

I still have the “Music Writing Book” (pictured here) in which the hopeful Mr. Fine wrote down all the mysteries of how music works. How to do fill-ins and substitute chords, the relationship of major and minor keys, timing.

I was a frustrating student to him, I’m sure, because I was more interested in my pom-pon rehearsals than in practicing piano. And yet a small but vital fraction of what he noted in that music writing book penetrated my teenage brain.

He managed to give me the basic tools of “faking,” meaning I learned how to take a set of chords and a melody line and play a song even without a full set of sheet music. I learned to play “Love is Blue” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Lara’s Theme.” I was thrilled when he suggested I learn "Yesterday" and told me that although a lot of adults thought The Beatles were just long-haired noisemakers, “Yesterday” was one of the most musically sophisticated songs of the era.

Eventually Mr. Fine stopped coming by for lessons. We couldn’t afford it and couldn’t fake that anymore.

But I carried what he taught me to college, where I played Laura Nyro and Carole King and Joni Mitchell on the dorm pianos. When I got my first newspaper job, I bought a little piano and moved it into my third-floor attic apartment in a ramshackle house in Palo Alto. I’ve had a piano ever since. For my 50th birthday I bought a Steinway baby grand.

And for the past 23 years, a bunch of great musicians have let me play piano with them as we put on the Songs of Good Cheer holiday singalong at the Old Town School. The shows begin this week, so I’m going to go practice now, with thanks to Art Fine for helping to make the piano my lifetime friend.

Post comments here.

Minced Words

I was on musical duty so had to miss this week’s Mincing Rascals podcast, but they put out a great one without me: John Williams of WGN-AM hosted Brandon Pope of Ebony Magazine and WCIU, Lisa Donovan of the Tribune, Heather Cherone of WTTW and Jon Hansen of Block Club Chicago. Topics included crime in Chicago, the proposal to require unvaccinated people to pay their own medical bills if they catch COVID-19, and the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts, which for me is now Pocket Casts. Or bookmark this page.

Re: Tweets

This week’s nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• No vegetables were harmed in the making of tonight's dinner.  — @lmegordon

• I had to buy bigger pants, but it’s not for the reason you think. It’s because I’m getting fat. Actually, you were probably right about the reason. — @JohnLyonTweets

• People tend to feel bad for Rudolph, but he never mentions that he always brought his acoustic guitar to all the reindeer games. — @dorsalstream

• I love this time of year because I can tell the kids I'm wrapping presents and then just go take a nap. — @ozzyunc

• Your stomach probably thinks all potatoes are mashed. — @cerealtndencies

• If everything that goes well is because of your own staggering brilliance and everything that goes wrong is because of the evil monsters trying to destroy you, then maybe a career in politics is for you, — @wildethingy

• One good way to let people know you’re important is to honk during a traffic jam. —@SonOfCha

• Come hell or high water, I pledge to stop beginning sentences with niche idioms that no one really understands. — @Heff_Ra

•  “Talk to you soon” and other filthy lies. — @UnFitz

• If I'm drunk enough to "do a little dance" I'm probably too drunk to "make a little love." — @MelvinofYork

Click here to vote in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Stop blaming Bears QB Andy Dalton for 4 interceptions!

A Tribune headline the other day read, “Justin Fields can’t return soon enough — especially after Andy Dalton’s 4 INTs.” And yes, the journeyman backup did have four picks on the stat line. But the second one — when the Bears were driving and trailing just 7-0 — was totally not his fault. The pass was right in the breadbasket of tight-end Cole Kmet, who bobbled it up in the air for Arizona Cardinals safety Budda Baker to grab and scamper 77 yards all the way to the Bears’ 15.

In baseball, official scorers don’t blame the pitcher when a fielder makes an error. So why should Dalton, who threw an accurate pass, take the blame for Kmet’s miscue?

While I’m on the subject of quarterback statistics, it’s long struck me as strange that a quarterback who throws a short screen pass behind the line of scrimmage that the receiver then breaks for a long touchdown gets credited for all the territory that the receiver gained after the catch.

A more telling statistic would be a QB’s total vertical yardage — the distance from the lines of scrimmage (or possibly the points where he releases the ball) to where the ball is caught. And I’d like to see college and pro football officials introduce the concept of receiver errors to adjust statistics in a way that better allocates credit and blame when calculating completion percentages

Yes, there would be controversial judgment calls. More fun sports arguments!

Any statistical refinements you’d like to make, while we’re at it?

Today’s Tune

Speaking of Mary Schmich and Songs of Good Cheer, in 2005 she wrote the song “Gonna Sing” and proposed it for inclusion in the program.

It was an instant hit with the crowd and we’ve led it at every show since. In 2020, cast member Anna Jacobsen and her husband Evan, a music teacher in the Oak Park public school system, revised the official lyrics slightly with Mary’s help and crafted a Zoom performance for the ages.

This version of the song, secularized for your protection and free of glancing references to death that might upset some more sensitive listeners, really ought to become a seasonal staple in schools across the country.