Dispatches from off the grid

Correspondence with readers and still more on cereal preferences

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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.

I’ll have limited access to email this week. No, really!

Whenever I get an auto-reply email from someone on vacation that says “I’ll be traveling and will have limited access to email” my first thought is, “Oh, nonsense! The 1990s called and wants its excuse back.”

Unless you’re traveling in the dense woods of southwest Tennessee or something, you have plenty of access to email. It’s on your phone and you are never without your phone, now, are you? In the old days, when you needed your desktop or laptop to read your email, OK. But now, no, sorry. What you mean is you have limited time you want to devote to answering email while you’re traveling and you may or may not get to it when you’re back. And fair enough. Just be honest about it.

And, well, honestly, I am spending this week in the dense woods of southwest Tennessee at a music and dance camp — with OG “Songs of Good Cheer” cast members Valerie Mindel and Michael Miller along with some Chicago-area friends — with no cell service and wi-fi " available in one spot in the camp "with special permission.”

So I’m generating modest, advance issues of the Picayune Plus and the Picayune Sentinel just to keep the faith with subscribers.

Be nice on the comment threads!

Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses

Partial Income, No Grandkids

Mysteries of Life — If couples of your vintage are PINGs — “Partial Income, No Grandkids” — then DINKs who never had kids will retire as PINKs.

Donna B. — The PING acronym is used by an Oak Park-River Forest community nonprofit, Providing Instruments for the Next Generation. PING! enables all kids, regardless of family circumstances, to participate in extracurricular music activities. I bet that’s something you could endorse!

Michael W. — I have read that the natural successor to DINKs is the SITCOM family-- Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.

Joan P. — “Partial income”? Really? I bet there are a slew of folks who wish your “partial income” were their full income. So no, PING should never be a thing.

Zorn — That was a little bit of acronymic license there. “Fractional” might have said it better. “Diminished.” FING or DING. Both work.

Cereal polygamy

Rick L. Regarding your lament over the sometimes stunningly high cost of cold breakfast cereal, I eat cereal every morning for breakfast. I eat a mix of Quaker Oat Squares and Frosted Mini Wheats with skim milk. I agree that the Mini Wheats are a bit too sweet, so I ‘cut’ them with the blander Oat Squares. Jewel has the Oat Squares on sale maybe 3-4 times each year for under $2.00/ box. I buy a ton when there’s a sale. And I’ve found that ALDI sells the same product as Mini Wheats that they sell for about $1.75. The cereal buying has become sort of an obsession with me. My family thinks I’m goofy and they mock me, but I don’t care. I know what I like and I hate spending a ton of money on cereal, as the regular prices are so much higher than the sale prices!

Zorn— My experience with Oat Squares is the same, purchase wise. Love ‘em. Buy ‘em up whenever Jewel puts them on sale, as they were marked down during my trip to Jewel Friday:

I tend to mix them with bran flakes or the unheralded but terrific Heritage Flakes from Nature’s Path. I like the taste and the slogan, “Not just for hippies anymore.” And Trader Joe’s usually has a good price.

Ken L. — I'll bet a lot of your readers, like us, would rather have corn flakes, Wheaties, Chex, raisin bran or Rice Krispies than the cereals you included in your poll.

Zorn — I’ll bet you’re right, even though those were on the list of 10 top sellers from which I created the first poll. See below for links to follow up polls that include your faves.

From Fans of Vanna

Dan Mc.G — You wrote that viewers would not defect from “Wheel of Fortune” if the program ditched letter-toucher Vanna White and her $3 million salary. But she is there to attract the male viewers who might otherwise watch five  or ten minutes and then start flipping around in search of something.

Bill L. — People love to watch Vanna turn those letters. If they used a machine to turn the letters, they'd lose audience by the thousands. Weird though it is, she earns that money.

Skeptic— If they didn’t pay Vanna $3 million to touch letters, that money would surely go to into the pockets of the owners of the production company that makes the show. So pick a side. Do you want the money to go to someone who went into the risky world of show-biz and had it work out, or to the owners of a Hollywood production company who are probably part of the illuminati who are channeling demonic powers through Mt. Rushmore?

Dances With Dogs — Paying Vanna $3 M allows her to purchase many items, thus stimulating our economy. We all win!

Marc M. — I would put Vanna ahead of the Kardashians in usefulness. The beauty of capitalism is that a function is worth whatever value it commands in the marketplace.

Zorn — Yes, but I challenge that ascribed value. I doubt she draws in any viewers or attracts any ad dollars to speak of. I had never considered the Vanna Trickle-Down Effect. It’s boggling my mind. And the Mt. Rushmore hypothesis is one we ignore at great peril to our souls, I’m sure.

RE. Descendants of enslavers

Brian Z. — You linked to a Reuters genealogical study of U.S. leaders that found five living presidents, two U.S. Supreme Court justices, 11 governors and 100 legislators descended from slaveholders. I say so what? How can it possibly be a surprise — let alone a finger-pointing event —that our nation's history created genealogies which wander back 150 years to slaveholders?

Rick. W — There are also lots of Black Americans who descend from slaveholders, considering the casual way that slaveholders had sex and children with their female slaves. And not the fault of other fifth-generation descendants of slaveholders either. Let’s put this survey away.

Zorn — “Had sex with” is an awfully genteel way of describing rape, which seems to me to be the proper term to describe such an interaction. It’s not like the enslaved woman would have thought that she had a choice. But yes, the only value of this survey, if any, is to reveal the tentacles of slavery through the years. It offers nothing probative about the distant descendants.

Neil Steinberg’s blogaversary

Rick W. — You wrote about Neil Steinberg observing the 10th anniversary of his blog, “Every goddamn day,” and noted that some people take issue with the title. But my only issue is that "every goddamn day" makes it sound as though Neil drags himself out of bed every morning, gnashes his teeth as he eats his Froot Loops, and then sits grudgingly in front of his keyboard waiting for the next painful inspiration to arrive. If Steinberg has as much fun and takes as much pleasure as he says he does in writing his blog, why not a slightly more upbeat title?

Zorn — I always thought of it as Neil ironically, self-deprecatingly describing the reaction of readers to the relentlessness of a daily blog that is truly and unfailingly daily. “Every Glorious Day!” would be off-brand for him.

I asked Neil for his response to this question and he replied:

As the great Robert Crumb said: “Not everything is for children. Not everything is for everybody.” If the name of my blog bothers you, then you are in the wrong place. It’s like the calibrated stick at the entrance to a roller coaster: not everybody should take the ride. Some are too small. Go find something you like instead of complaining about me. 

Praise for the Rascals

Marc. M — “The Mincing Rascals” podcast was great again as usual. You, host John Williams, Brandon Pope and Anna Davlantes are a great team. Really fun and interesting.

Zorn — Thanks. John’s producer Pete Zimmerman assembles lively casts for the roundtable news chat every week — I’m also a huge fan of our other regulars — and we’ve been honored to have Davlantes start joining us. We are hoping for our first live show in several years — tentatively set for early Tuesday evening Sept. 12 at one of the smaller Second City stages. Hoping to meet some of our regular listeners. Mark your calendars and watch the Picayune Sentinel for details.

We will never forget Jussie Smollett, no matter what the Sun-Times does to its archives.

Peter Z. — In following up on your commentary regarding the new Sun-Times policy in which readers can ask the newspaper to remove from its database old stories that unfairly portray them in a negative light, particularly if they are acquitted of criminal charges, you asked:

If somehow Jussie Smollett gets his conviction overturned based on a defect in the trial and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office decides not to invest still more resources in prosecuting that hapless phony, will the Sun-Times delete all references to the case from its accessible archives?

But let’s get real. The Sun-Times is only one source. Do you really believe if the Sun-Times eliminated everything on his criminal case that suddenly his privacy and reputation would be restored? Clearly not. I’m afraid in this world of the internet and dishonest trolls it’s nearly impossible for a person to eliminate unfair information about themselves. The idea is good and we should support it, but recognize the new policy is very limited in scope.

Zorn — For sure. I suspect it will only end up applying to instances where just one or two small news stories appeared in just the Sun-Times. I imagine the process will be confidential — a news story describing the removal of a particular story would be counterproductive — but perhaps we’ll get an idea soon enough how it’s going in general terms.

Cereal rankings, revisited

In Thursday’s issue I posed a link to a preference survey asking readers to rank the top 10 selling cold breakfast cereals by their preference. Several readers complained that some favorites and old standards weren’t on the list. So I’ve made two more surveys.

Here are the more “adult” cereals — Total, Bran Flakes and so on.

And here are the sweeter varieties — Honey Smacks, Alpha Bits and so on.

Others complained that Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios ought to have been lumped together just as I’ve lumped together the varieties of Honey Bunch of Oats, Life and so on. Good point. Special K, which appears in the “adult” survey, has oodles of iterations, only some of which are pictured here:

When I return from the wilderness I will can create a bracket tournament and we can see how the combined team Cheerio fares against more challengers. So far, Omar’s favorite is doing quite well:

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!

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