Mayor Brandon Johnson, a work in progress

& Oh, yes, eventually you will be saying 'The Griffin Museum"

5-16-2024 (issue No. 141)

This week:

• How’s he doin’? — A look at Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first year in office

• Last week’s winning tweet

• News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Unknown number? — I have a suggestion for you!

• Mary Schmich — Why you should know the late Alice Munro

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week

• Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Re:Tweets — The winning visual tweet and this week’s contest finalists

• Good Sports — The intriguing “No No Sox” are now just the Ho Hum Sox

• Tune of the Week — “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead, nominated by reader Richard Hutt

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

How’s he doin’? Mayor Brandon Johnson at one year

“No one has to lose at the expense of someone winning. There is more than enough for everybody in the state of Illinois” — Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson in an address last year to Illinois lawmakers prior to his inauguration.

Johnson reiterated the “there’s more than enough for everyone” sentiment last week talking to reporters in the Capitol.

His optimism and self-confidence continue to border on the delusional, which was among the profound doubts I had about him during last year’s mayoral campaign. He had visions of funding new programs by reinstating the corporate head tax, increasing the hotel tax, implementing a local tax on securities transactions and jet fuel tax, and increasing the real-estate transfer tax on homes costing more than $1 million.

Those were all big political lifts — and none has come to pass — so what was his Plan B if and when those proposals failed? He had nothing, just restatements of the urgency of his wishes and the righteousness of his causes.

In interviews Johnson granted in the runup to his one-year anniversary in office this week, he proudly pointed to a $1.25 billion bond issue to fund housing and economic development and violence prevention programs (an idea first promoted by his predecessor and for which the city will pay $2.4 billion when it’s paid off in 2061). And though the plan is to use funds from shut down tax-increment finance district programs, it’s not exactly free money he’s borrowing.

There isn’t close to enough for everybody’s needs and wants — not for the state, which is facing a budget shortfall in excess of $700 million; not for the city, with a $538 million deficit; not for Chicago Public Schools ($391 million); not for the Chicago Transit Authority ( $577 million) and, well, you get the idea.

See the Tribune editorial, “With or without CPS/CTU ‘day of action’ in Springfield, there’s no more money for Chicago schools.”

It’s not as if CPS has been suffering a decline — or even a leveling off — of state funds since Pritzker took office in 2019. State contributions to CPS have increased 14% in that time frame to more than $2.1 billion, from less than $1.9 billion. The percentage increase is substantially more when one accounts for the 10.4% decline in students attending Chicago Public Schools over that period. Looked at that way, state contributions per CPS student are up 30%.

Elected officials face tough choices in prioritizing needs and crafting often unsatisfying compromises, and Johnson’s determined optimism seems divorced from that reality.

If you read through these lengthy anniversary stories —

• Analyzing Brandon Johnson’s 1st Year in Office: Push for Progressive Change Complicated by Migrant Crisis, Unforced Errors (WTTW-Ch. 11)

• A Better, Stronger, Safer Chicago? Mayor Brandon Johnson’s First Year (Block Club Chicago)

• Mayor Johnson at one year in office: Former activist grapples with being the boss and Mayor Johnson on the record: The full Tribune Q&A as he approaches 1 year in office (Chicago Tribune)

• The ups and downs of Mayor Brandon Johnson's roller-coaster first year (Sun-Times)

• Brandon Johnson hits back (Politico)

• Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushes education agenda with ‘urgency’ during first year in office (Chalkbeat)

• Recap: One year of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, watch out in year two (Illinois Policy Institute)

— you’ll see a mayor with far more confidence than accomplishments.

Johnson told Politico’s Shia Kapos:

I’m 100% certain that my first year in office is more substantial than any other administration’s, from passing a sub-minimum wage ordinance to abolishing debt to expanding paid time off. There are the United and American Airlines deals (to expand and renovate O’Hare International Airport). We’re building affordable homes downtown. We’ve already had 100 affordable homes and another 700 are in the works. We’ve responded to the unhoused. We passed the largest bond deal in the history of Chicago to build homes and create economic development.

He also, to his credit, advanced the “Treatment Not Trauma” initiative to have social workers rather than police respond to people experiencing mental health crises, reinstated the city’s Department of Environment, hired the popular Larry Snelling as police superintendent and moved to cut down on the regulatory red tape developers have long complained about.

Homicides dropped 15% during Johnson’s first year in office, according to a WTTW News analysis of police data,” though the relationship between mayoral policies and murder rates is questionable.

Yet he failed to pass the “Bring Chicago Home” ordinance that was a necessary predicate to raising the real estate transfer tax, tried and failed to locate a migrant camp at a contaminated industrial site in the Brighton Park neighborhood, failed to phase out speed cameras that he’d blasted as a “cash grab” during his campaign, and failed to meet his promise to hire 200 new detectives (“There were 1,141 detectives on the force at the start of April 2024 compared to 1,168 detectives at the start of June 2023 — a 27-detective decrease,” Block Club reported).

Johnson went back on his promise to advocate for a fully elected school board, opting instead for a phase-in that would keep him in control for at least two more years.

He ordered an abrupt and expensive end to the ShotSpotter automated gunfire detection system that is still strongly supported by his own police chief and many alders in neighborhoods that use it. He blasted the technology as ineffective and harmful to communities of color, yet decided he wanted to keep it in place through the summer, and so signed an $8.6 million contract extension that cost the city more than what it had paid the entire previous year.

Chalkbeat wrote that “Johnson supported getting rid of (public high school) campus police on the campaign trail but later said local schools should have the power to choose whether to have school resource officers. Then, in February, the mayor backed the school board when it voted to unilaterally remove officers from all campuses by next school year.”

 Listen to the lack of introspection in this snippet from the Tribune interview:

Tribune: What do you see as the area that most needs improvement within your administration?

Johnson: Well, I mean, look, we’ve had 40 years of gross neglect and disinvestment within the city of Chicago, right? And we’re talking about real severe disinvestment. I’m not sure if either one of you were here during the time in which schools were closed. It’s a very profound, lasting impact that it has had on the people of Chicago. And when mental health clinics are shuttered, that creates a lot of frustration that leaves a gaping hole, right? And so part of my responsibility, of course, is to address the age-old systems of failure and to build a better, stronger, safer Chicago, and that is something that I’m committed to doing. That’s what the people of Chicago elected me to do.

When asked what he would have done differently in handling the influx of migrants, he launched into blame and braggadocio.

When asked if he sees room for improvement in his testy relationship with the governor and many alders, he said, “Well, look at what we’ve accomplished…”

When asked which new revenue sources he might attempt to tap in the coming year, he simply prattled on about the need for more revenue and repeated his hopes for a “a better, stronger, safer Chicago.”

Johnson has thrown in with the currently dead-in-the-water proposal to build a new stadium for the Bears along the lakefront, and he’s exhibiting his trademark breezy confidence about potentially violent protests surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in mid-August.

Oh, and the way he dispatched popular public health commissioner Dr. Alison Arwady over past political differences with her was unnecessarily abrupt and rude. One canny observer of the local scene deemed it “chickenshit.”

I give Johnson a letter grade of C for his first year, which, to judge from the results of a poll published this week by Crain’s Chicago Business, may be generous:

Only a combined 28% of likely voters polled said they approve of Johnson’s performance in office, while a majority (57%) disapprove and 41% strongly disapprove.

Straight talk and genuine empathic collaboration with those who don’t see things his way will be the best way to bring those numbers up a year from now.

Last week’s winning tweet

I always love it when people say “baby steps!” to imply that they're being tentative, when actually, baby steps are a great unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown. — @OliveFSmith

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

News & Views

News: The Museum of Science and Industry will be renamed for a generous Florida man.

View: Resistance is futile. The media will go along with the change, prompted by a $125 million bequest from former Chicagoan Ken Griffin. They always do. Think of how the Circle Interchange is now the Jane Byrne Interchange in news and traffic reports, the Sears Tower is now the Willis Tower, Comiskey Park is now (checks notes) Guaranteed Rate Field, Lake Shore Drive is now DuSable Lake Shore Drive and so on.

A few of us dead-enders still refer to the lovely little nine-hole golf course along the shores of Lake Michigan as “Waveland,” though 33 years ago the Chicago Park District renamed it “Sydney R. Marovitz Golf Course” after a back-bencher on the Park District Board from 1974 to 1986 who owes his immortality to the fact that his brother, Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, was a senior federal judge from Chicago who had administered the mayoral oath of office to both Richard M. Daley and his father, Richard J. Daley. and whose son, William, happened to be a veteran Democratic state senator from the North Side at the time of the renaming.

And it’s not like it’s unheard of for local museums to be named for benefactors:

• The Field Museum is named for department store magnate Marshall Field.

• The Adler Planetarium is named for Max Adler, a Sears, Roebuck & Co. vice president and philanthropist.

• The Shedd Aquarium is named for John G. Shedd, who succeeded Marshall Field as president of Marshall Field & Co.

• The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum is named for the wife of telecommunications bigwig Richard Notebaert.

Chicago historian and journalist Cate Plys makes the point on this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast that, by rights, the Museum of Science and Industry should have been named for philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who founded the museum by giving the equivalent of slightly more than $125 million in today’s money to the project prior to its opening in 1933, but Rosenwald declined the honor.

But yeah, in time, the MSI will become the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and ultimately the Griffin Museum.

I, for one, plan to get over it. If the prospect of a renaming inspires super-rich people or companies to donate significant amounts to cultural institutions, that seems like a win-win to me. Selling naming rights looks like a good business to me. In fact, if the Marovitz family had ponied up big bucks to name Waveland after their obscure brother and give the course a face-lift, I probably wouldn’t still be sore about it.

News: Department of Homeland Security is warning that the 2025 Real ID deadline for new driver’s licenses is for real this time.

View: Yawn. I’m inclined to agree with Jim Harper’s new essay in The Atlantic, “The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive.”

Airport signs and travel stories have been telling us about a final deadline for more than 15 years. And yet, that deadline has never arrived. … Originally meant to take full effect in 2008, Real ID now looks like a particularly misguided bit of post-9/11 security theater. … If requiring a Real ID license for every airline passenger were essential to preventing another 9/11-style attack, this would have become clear years ago.

News: The Better Government Association reports that “One Year In, Johnson’s City Council Spends One-Third of its Time on Honorary Resolutions.”

View: The obtuse self-importance of the alders and their honorary resolutions is galling. The report does note that “all told, 32% of the council’s time in session has been devoted to honorary matters. During the three years of Mayor Lightfoot’s administration for which digital recordings are available, the Council spent 36% of its time on non-binding or honorary matters,” suggesting that we’re just seeing more of the same.

The report says that “the council’s current practice means that substantive matters are often not addressed until two hours or more into a meeting” and recommends moving the honorary initiatives to the very end of the meeting. I’d recommend ditching them altogether.

News: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have agreed to two debates prior to November’s presidential election.

View: Biden, who is trailing Trump in the polls in most of the key battleground states and is bleeding support among some of the key constituencies that elected him in 2020, has the most to gain (or lose, I suppose) in these televised tilts. If he does well and projects vigor and facility with the facts, he’ll reassure any wavering supporters that he remains more than up for the job, his age notwithstanding.

Trump is not good with facts, and he’s not a good debater. But if he keeps his cool, gets off a few good lines and doesn’t remind voters that chaos follows him everywhere, the debate will be at least a draw for him.

Team Biden is insisting on a few very sensible rules:

• No studio audience

• No third-party or independent candidates on the stage

• Off-switches on candidate mics when their time for giving an answer expires

• Must be on a broadcast outlet that hosted both a Republican primary debate in 2016 and a Democratic primary debate in 2020

The campaigns have agreed to a June 27 debate hosted by CNN and a Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC. Team Trump is asking for four debates, and Biden should accept that challenge with alacrity.

And as for the polls, perhaps it’s best not to draw too many conclusions from them just yet:

Bush ended up beating Dukakis in November by nearly 8 percentage points.

Land of Linkin’

• “The Ballad of Cricket Noem” by the Turtle Creek Two is awfully good for a topical song. “Oh Cricket, Oh Cricket , perk up your ears/ She may have shot you but she killed her career.”

• “A 142-page leaked document contains hundreds of Chicago Teachers Union contract demands.” Posted by the Illinois Policy Institute.

• That was then: “Opioid of the Masses” by J.D. Vance in July 2016. Then candidate Donald Trump “never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. … Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” Now, of course, metaphorically, Vance’s lips are firmly latched onto Trump’s hindquarters as he angles for the vice presidential nomination. Integrity elegy.

• P.J. Vogt’s “Search Engine” podcast has an excellent episode that throws shade on the idea of “trigger warnings.”

• Media Matters for America: “Major print outlets fail to adequately cover extreme agenda laid out by Trump in Time interview.”

• In the Picayune Plus, readers contend that Donald Trump is not being afforded due process in the courts and respond to my quibble with advice maven Amy Dickinson from last week. I respond.

• The Tribune’s Rick Kogan penned a lovely tribute to the late local folk music legend Stuart Rosenberg. A video of Rosenberg’s memorial service last Friday is here.

• As we approach 35th anniversary of the film’s release in July, it’s time to revisit “The Quiet Cruelty of ‘When Harry Met Sally’” a 2019 essay in which Meg Garber argued that the rom-com thrust the idea of the “high-maintenance” woman into popular culture.

• The CWB Chicago crime blog has posted a written interview with former Tribune City Hall reporter Gregory Royal Pratt about policing under Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ A former Milwaukee mayor now championing the expressway removal movement says it’s time to demolish the Ohio Street feeder ramp connecting the Kennedy Expressway and River North.

■ Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet says the Secret Service has been secretly building out a former big retail store south of Chicago for a communications center during the Democratic National Convention.

■ Trump’s “new criminal conspiracy”: Popular Information explains that the parade of high-profile Republicans that Donald Trump has called “surrogates”—complaining outside the courthouse about witnesses, the jury and even Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter—could constitute criminal contempt of the gag order on Trump.

■ “Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has finally out-stupid-ed herself”—USA Today’s Rex Huppke, assessing Greene’s failed attempt to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.

■ The Nation’s senior editor Jack Mirkinson is incredulous at what a Republican senator said, virtually unchallenged by feckless host Kristen Welker, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

■ Peacock’s announced a spinoff of NBC’s classic series “The Office,” set in the same universe, at “a dying historic Midwestern newspaper”—a venue that the official news release calls “a fresh setting ripe for comedic storytelling.”

■ But no one seems to be laughing at just how bad the Chicago Tribune’s website and how onerous its billing practices have become.

■ The Sun-Times’ Neil Steinberg has just a little sympathy for a California newspaper columnist “unceremoniously sacked” after 55 years.

■ “We are building one enormous ad-supported streaming pile of shit.”—Jimmy Kimmel’s brutal take on the state of television as he delivered his annual pitch to Disney and ABC advertisers.

■ How many of these broadcast TV shows getting canceled have you ever watched?

■ Tribune critic Michael Phillips talks to Second City’s director of comedy studies about why that “Saturday Night Live” open about protests fell flat.

■ PCWorld: “Did Comcast actually do something good for a change? On paper, it sure looks like it.”

■ Chicago-area cicadas have begun emerging. The key metric: Soil temperatures at 8 inches underground of 64 degrees or higher. And then beware: They pee from trees.

■ Chicago magazine ranks the Great Lakes … um … by greatness.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

When you don’t recognize the number on an incoming call

I seldom answer a call from a number that’s not in my contacts, usually sending them straight to voice mail. The standard text-reply options on the iPhone are:

• Sorry I can’t talk right now

• I’m on my way

• Can I call you later?

These are inadequate. But there’s a better option. Go to Settings » Phone » Respond with text, then enter the custom response, “Sorry, I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize. Email or text me if you want to connect.”

It’s reassuring how many of these unknown callers don’t bother emailing or texting.

Mary Schmich: Why you should know Alice Munro

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with her permission, is a recent offering:

I just heard that Alice Munro has died at the age of 92. Man, she had an influence on me. When she won the Nobel Prize, I wrote this column about her, explaining why.

When the news came Thursday that Alice Munro had won the (2013) Nobel Prize in literature, only the 13th woman to earn that honor, a lot of her admirers reacted like football fans whose small-town team had freakishly, though deservedly, won the Super Bowl.

Really? Not Philip Roth? Or Bob Dylan? Or Haruki Murakami? Go Alice!

As one of those astonished admirers, I cheered out loud at the news, and, like countless other cheerleaders, I posted it on Facebook, where an acquaintance promptly responded,

“Someone who writes so incredibly well as to win the Nobel Prize, but I’ve never heard of her. How is that?”

There are good reasons you may never have heard of Alice Munro.

She has been widely praised and reviewed since she published her first story collection in 1968; such well-known writers as Jhumpa Lahiri (“The Lowland”) and Elizabeth Strout (“Olive Kitteridge”) cite her as a major influence.

But Munro, who’s 82 and Canadian, doesn’t do big book tours, never has. Her short stories don’t feature an ace detective, graphic sex, adorable dogs, guns, dystopias, vampires, self-help aphorisms or Ivy League graduates brooding and having affairs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. She doesn’t clobber you with edifying facts or politics. …

If you’ve never read Munro and want to start, I’d suggest her 2004 collection, “Runaway,” or her last collection, “Dear Life.”

After the publication of “Dear Life,” Munro said she was retiring from writing, and the final four stories in that book are, she says, as much as she’ll say about her own life.

The last lines of the last story offer a taste of how much complexity she can pack into a few simple sentences:

“I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.”

Read Mary’s full column here or here.

Minced Words

Guest host Jon Hansen was joined by Cate Plys, Marj Halperin and me for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. Like every other newsy podcast in town, we took a look at Mayor Brandon Johnson at year one. Also we chattered about the new name for the Museum of Science and Industry, the upcoming presidential debates and more.

The pop-culture allusion in the show this week is to the anonymous donor incident in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately.

As we speak, the pharmaceutical lobby is suing to stop Biden from cutting RX drug prices, the banking lobby is suing to stop Biden from capping credit card late fees, and now the airline industry is suing to stop Biden from requiring them to clearly disclose fees upfront. … They're doing it because the President has been relentless in going after anti-consumer behavior that takes money out of people's pockets, and they're hoping Republican judicial appointees will stop him. — Bharat Ramamurti

There once was a puppy named Cricket
Who frolicked with birds in a thicket
She's dead (say my sources)
With a he-goat, three horses
Along with Noem's shot at the ticket — Betty Bowers

Classic irony is Kristi Noem having to go back to make changes and correct the lies in her book, “No Going Back.” — unknown

This year, Northwestern University came 242nd out of the 248 colleges examined by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in its annual College Free Speech Rankings. FIRE specifically highlights a speech code that chills free expression, a poor speech climate, and a pattern of disruptions and disinvitation attempts targeting speakers. That such deference for freedom of expression is only extended to these protesters doesn’t speak to a consistent application of Northwestern’s own policies. — Dima Spivak

When my time comesn (to be laid off at the Sun-Times), I like to think I'll tip the executioner and lower my head to the block with quiet dignity. But who knows? I might clutch the radiator and shriek like James Cagney at the end of "Angels with Dirty Faces." … Life is precious because it ends. We all have an arc, and now that I'm well into my downward plunge, and see the canyon floor racing toward me, I hope I can splat with a certain finesse and not too much indignation. The world has changed. Newspaper columnists offer the answer to a question fewer and fewer bother asking. — Neil Steinberg

Fifty bucks says that worm died of starvation. — @RickAaron

Just last weekend Trump mixed up Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Connors, and his sentences are increasingly turning into gibberish. But sure, news media, the upcoming debates will be “a big test for Biden.” — Mark Jacob

The thumbs up emoji is a nice way to tell someone not only did you receive their message, you’re also done with the conversation. — @ddsmidt

(Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot) publicly criticized her staff and had no idea how to govern. She was incapable of rallying the troops or building coalitions. … (Gregory Royal) Pratt’s book (“The City if Up for Grabs”) is certainly worth a read. It calls into question why Chicagoans — regrettably including me — chose to back and vote for a mayor with zero experience governing and zero experience running a $16 billion corporation. — Mark A. Flessner, former city corporation counsel and former campaign treasurer for Lightfoot

 Unemployment rate: May 2020: 13.2% ; May 2024: 3.9% 
S&P closing level: May 15, 2020: 2,864; May 15, 2024: 5,308.
 Weekly COVID deaths: May 2020: 6,900; May 2024: 294 
"Are you better off than you were four years ago?" — James Fallows

Renaming a school for Stonewall Jackson because of “his loyalty, his leadership, how Godly a man he was” is like naming a school after Osama Bin Laden. They were both religious fanatics who took up arms to fight the U.S. on behalf of some horrendous practices. — Charlie Johnson

What we are seeing (in the ongoing “hush money” trial) is the pattern and practice of a person who cheats. And in this case by “cheating” I mean, sets up a system with David Pecker and the National Enquirer to salt the primary of 2016 with lies about his opponents, and then use those lies to beat those opponents. … (Donald Trump) is wired to act dishonestly and to make the situation and the rules of the game work for him and create his own set of rules ... Those instincts are totally antithetical to the job that he wants to be rewarded with. That's the real presidential question here, which is distinct from the political. … When confronted with a situation where his personal self-interest or the greater good is at stake, he always picks his personal self-interest and cheats on behalf of that. — CBS news host John Dickerson on Slate’s “Political Gabfest”

Go, Bears — The kicker on Rick Telander’s Sun-Times column urging Chicago’s NFL team to move off the lakefront.

I have no words …

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Welcome to your 40’s: the awkward years in between Nike and New Balance. — @NotTodayEric

• Joseph: Happy Mother’s Day. I got you flowers. Mary: Did you steal those? Joseph: No, I grew them. Mary: We don’t have a garden. Joseph: It’s a miracle from God. Mary: … Joseph: You see how that sounds. — @PleaseBeGneiss

• I always respond with "I know" when someone says, "It’s nice to meet you” because I think it's only polite to acknowledge their good fortune. — @UncleDuke1969

• “Oh. Wow. Oh. Jeez. We didn’t think everyone was gonna bring a bag!” -airlines — @DanWilbur

• Yoko Ono turned 91 in February, and her singing voice is as good today as it ever was! — unknown

•  The worst outcome of the Kendrick Lamar/Drake beef would obviously be escalating physical violence, but the second worst would be if this was all leading up to a Sprite commercial. — @joshgondelman

•  Doctor: Drugs have destroyed your body. Me: You should see the other guy. Doctor: What other guy? Me: Only I can see him. — @OllyiConic

•  You have to admit that spleen is an intrinsically funny word. Anyway, sorry about your accident. — @BrickMahoney

• Is “the ol’ rumpy-pumpy” hyphenated or not? I need to get this Tinder profile just right — @PopeAwesomeXIII

• I was so poor growing up, we had to play Connect 3 — @jollyrobber

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media. And I will continue to call the platform Twitter if only to spite Elon Musk:

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Good Sports

The No-No Sox now the Ho-Hum Sox

As long as the race remains close — which it may not — I will offer you comparison standings of the 2024 White Sox with the 2003 Detroit Tigers and the 1962 New York Mets, teams that have defined futility for more than 80 years, and the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, the worst team in baseball’s modern era (20th century on).

In their last 10 games, the Sox have gone 6-4, a distinct sign that they will simply be mediocre this season rather than epically, entertainingly, interestingly awful.

After 44 games:

YEAR TEAM RECORD GB WINNING PERCENTAGE

1916 A’s 15-29 -- .341 (.235 full season)

2024 White Sox 14-30 1 .318 (season so far)

1962 Mets 12-32 3 .273 (.250 full season)

2003 Tigers 9-35 6 .204 (.265 full season)

I still have my eye this season on the portentously awful Florida Marlins (13-32, .289). When (or I suppose if) the Sox or any other 2024 team keeps and maintains at least a two-game lead on this field, I will discontinue these weekly updates.

Tune of the Week

I’ve been opening up Tune of the Week nominations in an effort to bring some newer sounds to the mix. I’ve asked readers to use the comments area for paid subscribers to leave nominations (post-2000 releases, please!) along with YouTube links and at least a few sentences explaining why the nominated song is meaningful or delightful to you. The following comes from Richard Hutt:

I nominate “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. The music of Jerry Garcia with words by Robert Hunter are a perfect addition to the American songbook.

The self-effacing lyric, “If I knew the way, I would take you home,” matches with the koan-like image in the refrain”:

Ripple in still water
Where there is no pebble tossed
Or wind to blow

Zorn note — This is such a terrific song. I can’t hear it without thinking of the final scene in the 1999 NBC series “Freaks and Geeks,” a show I recommend to everyone with obnoxious enthusiasm. Clicking on that link will be a bit of a spoiler. Go watch the series first. Just 18 episodes. No second season, no sequel. And it features early-career appearances by Linda Cardellini, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel, Busy Philipps and others.

In 2018, Tribune columnist Rex Huppke, now with USA Today, got this “Ripple”-related tattoo:

Question for the commentariat: What short quotation would you ink on your forearm either with a permanent or temporary tat?

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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