Readers endorse pomp, circumstance for 8th graders

& meet the man behind the "Uncle Duke" account

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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.

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

On 8th-grade graduations

Last week I reposted a tweet that groused about graduation ceremonies from junior high, grade school and even pre-school. The complainer suggested these rituals were something that arose in the 1990s. This excited considerable comment:

Marc M. — My first graduation ceremony was at the end of high school in 1973. My kids’ junior high school, in the late 80's, had the whole deal — caps, gowns, speeches, diplomas, parties, signs in yards etc. We went to the ceremony and then went out to lunch. I thought the whole thing was excessive and sent the wrong message about accomplishment.

Craig R. — I dislike graduation ceremonies at any level. They are pretty useless.

Don B. — For gosh-sakes, no kindergarten or middle-school graduations. Ever.

Zorn — As these poll results show —

— you fellas are in the minority. Here are a few readers who like the idea:

DancesWithDogs— It’s not an indulgence to cheer on students.

Amy P. — I had an 8th-grade graduation ceremony in Evanston in 1972. I think young people enjoy the sense of celebration that they made it through something. Middle school is a tough time for most kids. Finishing it and leaving it behind is something to relish!

Patricia S. — I remember my 8th grade graduation fondly. I got a very pretty dress that I loved so much and we had a big party for me to celebrate this step forward. I think it's sweet.

John McH, — I got cash gifts totalling $50 for my 8th-grade graduation from St Theodore's in West Englewood in 1959. That’s more than $500 in today’s money. Of course at the party I had to eat the strawberry flavored Jello-ish product with ham from"the Jewel," but it was well worth it.

Zorn — You must mean “the Jewels.”

On the ‘right to be forgotten’

I wrote approvingly of the Sun-Times’ new “right to be forgotten” policy in which readers can ask the newspaper to remove from its database old stories that unfairly portray them in a negative light. I said I thought it was a sensible private initiative and that I was glad it wasn’t based on a government mandate.

Skeptic — I agree that the Sun Times is making a good decision and it is important that it is their choice. The "right to be forgotten" gained traction with the Evanston City Council a few years ago. Evanston used to have a searchable database of police arrests and incidents. The desire to protect people who are named in those reports by some alders resulted in the city limiting online access to a short time (maybe a few weeks). Yet it also allows the city to make claims about trends in crime with no easy way to validate those claims.

Ray S. — Boy, I have to assume the Sun-Times has some technology allowing them to verify that the petitioner is legit and not simply trying to hide his malfeasance from posterity. Seems like the papers are letting themselves in for a ton of clerical cost if they can’t conveniently trace whether the person is qualified against all those possible reasons for deleting his coverage.

Zorn — Some cases will be easy to adjudicate but others will certainly prove difficult and time consuming. And it will lead us into conversations about the gap between the legal definition of “not guilty” and the common understanding of innocence.

If John Doe is credibly accused of domestic violence based on credible and comprehensive evidence including victim affidavit and then prosecutors have to drop the charges when the victim decides not to cooperate, Doe is formally not guilty, but is it responsible or accurate or fair for a media outlet to delete any coverage of this case from its archives?

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?

What about a policy wherein the paper appends to every news story “about crimes for which charges were dropped, dismissed, reversed or expunged” an update about the resolution of the case? That seems like a better idea to me, though it still doesn’t overcome the informal assumption most people make that if you were arrested and charged with a crime, you are probably guilty of something whether or not the case is ultimately dropped or a jury acquits you.

We know this is not necessarily true, but human nature is what it is, and victims of mistaken identity, planted evidence or lying witnesses are victimized again when false assumptions follow them through life.

Odds and ends

Kathy M. — The message in Mary Schmich’s Father’s Day post, “Dear Dad,” spoke to me. Decades ago Ann Landers said the same thing about the value of writing a letter to a dead person. I had a very mean father so I wrote him a letter and read it, alone, out loud to a mirror. I felt an immediate release of negative energy. Mary is the best.

Zorn — Hey, I’m right here! No, but seriously, Mary still does amazing, moving work. I’m always honored she gives me permission to repost what she writes.

Rick W — I’m wondering why you aren’t including the Kansas City Royals in your coverage of the possibility that the Oakland A’s will end the season with the worst record in modern baseball history. They’re only doing a few percentage points better than the A’s.

Zorn – Fair point about the foul teams. As of Tuesday morning, with the season one game shy of half over, the Royals are 22-56 (.282) and the A’s are 20-60 (.250). The A’s need to win 19 more games to avoid setting a record for ineptitude. So they are barely on pace to avoid that. The wretched teams will play each other three times in mid-August, and all eyes may be on that series. Well, my eyes will be, anyway.

Chuck B. — I'm surprised that you didn't mention Steve Goodman's "My Old Man" when you revisited the topic of Fathers Day songs. He wrote it after his dad died at age 58, and the pain is evident in his lyrics and voice. I'd also include Dan Fogelberg's "Leader of the Band.”

Zorn — Agreed. Goodman’s song is really moving:

Now the old man's gone,
And I'd give all I own
To hear what he said when I wasn't listening
To my old man

In a “Behind the Song” entry, Paul Zollo wrote:

Like many songwriters, when I first heard Steve’s song about his dad, I abandoned any idea of ever writing one of my own for my father. Because he’d done it so well. It’s simple, funny, poignant and beautiful. It doesn’t get better really. After knowing this, what could I write?

It didn’t make this list of the 50 best Fathers Day songs, and neither did the deserving “Leader of the Band:”

I thank you for the music and your stories of the road
I thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go
I thank you for the kindness and the times when you got tough
And, papa, I don't think I said I love you near enough

Tribune subscription practices

I collected a bunch of letters from subscribers complaining about being jerked around, confused and infuriated by the way the Tribune handles its subscription pricing. I’m not going to print them this week but I will answer this question from one reader — “Why would you trust the Tribune’s content when they’re so slippery and unfair with their subscription pricing?” — by offering a reminder that the newsroom and the circulation/marketing departments are totally separate.

Ya gotta see these tweets!

Here are some funny visual tweets I've come across recently. Enjoy, then evaluate:

Vote for your favorite. I will disqualify any tweets I later find out used digitally altered photos. I’ll share the winner in Thursday’s main edition.

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

Meet ‘Uncle Duke’

“Uncle Duke” is by far the most prolific contributor to the visual tweets that appear in the weekly poll (his entry won last week), so I wrote to ask him for some background details. His response, lightly edited:

My name is Eric, I’m 53, self-employed small retail store owner on Long Island. The 25 years that preceded that were in various project/program management roles.

I was born in the New York City borough of Queens, currently married to my second wife, two kids with first. Daughter, 28 and son, 25. My parents reside in DeSantisland, as required by law when you pass a certain age.

The story behind my Twitter handle is rather simple. When I signed up a million years ago, I had no intention of posting, so I didn't give it much thought. Sitting on top of my monitor at that time was an Uncle Duke action figure that came with one of Garry Trudeau's “Doonesbury” compilations. As a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson (on whom Duke is based) and of Trudeau's (from whom I learned a great deal of my American history and much of my politics), I went with “Uncle Duke.”

To find tweets, I scroll through several photo dump sites daily until a picture "speaks to me." I do this in the morning before getting ready for work, and during slow periods at the shop when I can. As to the captions, I try (but don't always succeed) to find a different or unexpected angle, or I try to create what might be the story behind the picture. Writing dialog is what I enjoy the most.

I don't believe I'm really doing anything new here. I think my influences are fairly obvious. I write like a middle-aged east coast semitic fella that grew up on Catskill comedians, Warner Brothers cartoons, and comic strips. In the earlier years, it was exclusively text-based jokes. After a while though, a blank screen and a blinking cursor became increasingly more intimidating. When I returned to Twitter after a hiatus, I found that it was much more enjoyable to be reactive to a prompt, in this case, pictures. The pressure was lower than to write from scratch, and it led me towards new ideas and scenarios that I might not come to on my own.

The picture with my account is me. If you’ve kept an eye on it over the years, it’s usually a fairly current picture. The beard’s been tamed (slightly) since the current one was taken.

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