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1-27-2022 (issue No. 20)
We live in stupid times.
Monday, President Joe Biden muttered into a hot mic that Fox News reporter Peter Doocy was “a stupid son of a bitch" after Doocy shouted at him the question, “Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?"
“What a nasty old man,” griped Fox News host Tucker Carlson later.
“Grave attack on press freedom,” hyperventilated windsock pundit Glenn Greenwald on Twitter. “This is what the Nazis did: incited hatred against those who challenged them.”
And many of them are the same people who continue to chortle at the expression “Let’s Go Brandon” as MAGA-speak for “Fuck Joe Biden.”
To be fair to Biden, whether or not Doocy is comprehensively, congenitally stupid, he did ask a very, very stupid question. It was trollish and tendentious, not a serious effort to gain insight.
And he wasn’t the first person to point out that Doocy asks stupid questions. Here’s the late Republican Sen. John McCain:
Biden called Doocy later Monday to “clear the air,” reportedly saying, “It’s nothing personal, pal.”
Meanwhile, Marcus C. Betts, assistant vice chancellor for the University of Illinois at Chicago, published an op-ed in the Tribune in which he complained that Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey, who is white, had called Mayor Lori Lightfoot “relentlessly stupid.” And that because Lightfoot is “Black, female (and) openly gay,” Betts wrote, Sharkey fed into “debilitating stereotypes rooted in racism and sexism.”
Here, for context, is what Sharkey said on Jan. 10 as negotiations had stalled about when and how to reopen schools during the then-surging pandemic:
“We feel like we’re at a point where we don’t have enough at the table to be able to go back to the people who, frankly, have sacrificed a lot at this point, and confidently say, ‘This is something that can help us ensure our safety.’ The mayor is being relentless, but she’s being relentlessly stupid, relentlessly stubborn. She's relentlessly refusing to seek accommodation and we're trying to find a way to get people back in school.”
Perhaps it’s too fine a point, but accusing someone of behaving in a stupid way is not the same thing as saying they are always stupid in every regard. Lightfoot is clearly well-educated, with an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan — Go Blue! — and a law degree from the University of Chicago. Referring to her tactics as “stupid” in the context of a war of words between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union doesn’t suggest otherwise nor does it have a particular racial or gender connotation.
Lightfoot herself is known to indulge in a bit of name-calling: “Jackass,” a “dumb, dumb person of color,” “clown” and so on. And Sharkey isn’t the only person in CTU leadership to launch rash verbal attacks on Herronor. Union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates, who is Black and a woman, recently charged that “the mayor is unfit to lead this city,” because “she is on a one-woman kamikaze mission to destroy our public schools."
But it was Sharkey’s comment that “reeked of the type of privilege, disconnect and disregard that some white men exhibit, without consequence, in boardrooms and seats of power in this country,” wrote Betts. “Sharkey’s derogatory description of Lightfoot turned what is normally a dog whistle in private settings into a bullhorn because of his public platform as an advocate for teachers.”
Betts does Lightfoot no favors by suggesting her race ought to insulate her from the garden-variety, harsh but race-neutral rhetoric that’s made the teachers’ relations with City Hall so toxic. It’s a polarizing assessment and ugly accusation that, if anything, makes peace between these two parties more difficult to realize.
This is the earliest version of this oft-stolen tweet I could find. Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or click here to vote in the new poll.
Hey public health officials: It’s time to end the chin-strap charade in basketball.
In nearlyeverynewsphoto I’ve seen of local prep basketball games, the players are not wearing their protective face coverings properly. Sometimes their noses are exposed, but most often the masks looks like chin straps hanging from their ears.
Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) policy requires that “individuals playing sports indoors must wear a mask during training, competition, other active exercise,” but Illinois High School Association (IHSA) referees enforce only the rules put forth by the National Federation of State High School Associations that do not mention masks.
When I inquired about this seeming discrepancy, IHSA Executive Director Craig Anderson responded with a statement that read in part:
We understand that our schools are in a difficult situation with the enforcement of the masking of basketball players. Obviously, the masks move during competition, which is why we strongly advocated that the IDPH make basketball players exempt from wearing masks during competition, just as the IDPH has done in IHSA sports like cheerleading, dance, gymnastics, swimming and diving, and wrestling.
IDPH spokeswoman Melany Arnold replied to this in an email: “Schools should be enforcing state guidance, which was drafted with the aim of helping protect students from becoming infected and missing in-person learning and/or becoming sick.” She appended guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics that clarified the circumstances in which participants in cheerleading, gymnastics, wrestling and aquatic sports were allowed not to wear masks.
I don’t pretend to know the value of various mouth and nose coverings in preventing the transmission of the coronavirus, but I do know the value of consistency in messaging. And I suspect that it would be better to have basketball players go maskless — as they do in college and pro games in Illinois and elsewhere — than to have them wearing cloth chin straps that suggest the whole idea is meaningless theater that no one should take seriously either on or off the court.
The IHSA, which oversees interscholastic prep sports, should either direct its referees to enforce the health department policy — by sidlining violators until they are properly masked or by issuing technical fouls — or go full bore in flouting the rules by telling the players not to bother pretending to cover their mouths and noses. It would be less of a mockery that way.
UIC employs ‘N-word’ to teach a professor a lesson about redacted slurs
Dutifully, University of Illinois at Chicago Law School professor Jason Kilborn has begun the diversity re-education program he must complete in order to return to the classroom this fall.
The story of his troubles is a long one and I told it here, but the short version is that Kilborn came under heavy fire at UIC and was suspended from teaching more than a year ago after he used a redacted form of a racial slur in describing on a final exam a hypothetical case for students to analyze: “N- - - - -” is what appeared on the exam.
Earlier this week, Kilborn sent along a screen grab from the first set of mandatory readings given to him by UIC:
Kilborn wrote to me and to his contact at UIC:
The author uses the exact same expurgated reference to a racial slur that precipitated this year-long cancellation push and hysterical character assassination campaign against me. The flaming hypocrites at UIC assigned me, in the very first reading, a text that commits the very alleged sin that has subjected me to the most hellacious persecution of my lifetime. And note that this isn’t from the 1980s—this passage was written two years before I administered the exam question with the exact same expurgation.
I mean, there are just no words for this. I feel both vindicated—by the implicit acknowledgment that what I did is entirely normative, and I now have direct evidence—and enraged, for obvious reasons. If I had any doubts about suing the feckless administrators who have subjected me to this outrageous abuse, those doubts are completely dispelled by this readings list that lays their hypocritical abuse completely bare. For that, I guess I am thankful.
UIC has not responded to my request for comment.
News & Views
News: Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, 83, announces his retirement, giving President Joe Biden a chance to fulfill a pledge to appoint a Black woman to the high court.
View: Just as I am refusing to read up on all the potential head coaches for the Chicago Bears, I will refuse to read up on all the judges Biden may be considering for the job. Just let me know when he picks someone. I just hope she’s healthy, progressive, relatively young and able to win the votes of moderate Democratic senators.
News: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones punk’d members of the Union League Club by beginning her Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech with a string of quotes from King that were lightly adapted to sound as though they were her own thoughts. Halfway through the speech she revealed the source of those somewhat radical quotes in an effort to underscore how so many have sanitized King’s legacy over the years.
View: Chef’s kiss. Perfect. The hypocrisy of many who speak reverently of King but who heap scorn and hatred upon those who are delivering almost the exact same message today is breathtaking, and should be regularly exposed.
I pulled a version of this stunt in 1996 for in a column headlined,“Marriage issue just as plain as black and white.” It began, “Same-sex marriage must be forbidden, said the Republican senator from Wisconsin, ‘simply because natural instinct revolts at it as wrong.’” And I went on to offer a set of similar, vehement sentiments opposing gay unions. Then came the reveal:
Everywhere I quoted the speakers referring to same-sex marriage, homosexuality and heterosexuality, they were actually referring to interracial marriage and their views of black people, white people and the proper interaction thereof. … The quotes date from 1823 to 1964 and, though the sentiments look hatefully ridiculous to us in 1996, they had sufficient appeal and staying power that 15 states still criminalized black-white marriage until the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned those laws in the appropriately named 1967 case, Loving vs. Virginia.
News: The Chicago City Council Finance Committee rejected a proposed $125,000 settlement payment to the mother of a man shot to death by Chicago police officers in 2013. The man had stabbed one of the officers in the face, refused commands to his two knives and allegedly lunged at the officers before they opened fire.
View: I’d like to see more of these cases aired in court and fewer of them settled with go-away money. The money here is chump change, but the message of any sort of payout concedes error where none may exist.
“Let me get this straight,” said Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, according to a Sun-Times story. The mother “called for help. The police arrived. They did the best they could. And now she’s suing?”
The mother, Lenora Bonds, initially sought $3 million from the city on the grounds that the responding officers didn’t have sufficient crisis intervention training to deal with her son’s mental breakdown. In fact one of the officers who arrived, a sergeant, did have such training, but he was the one who was stabbed in the face.
“This is a justified, but unfortunate situation,” said Ald. Silvana Tabares, 23rd. “Settling sets a bad message to police officers when they have to make these split-second decisions.”
Block Club Chicago quoted Ald. Nicholas Sposato, 38th: “If we’re opening these floodgates for people, no matter how small [the settlements] are, this is going to continue to happen. It’s going to continue to cost us money.”
If the officers are misrepresenting the situation — we can stipulated that it’s not unheard of for police to say they had to shoot because a person armed with a knife lunged at them — that should come out at trial. But if this is an attempt to cash in on tragedy in which police officers acted responsibly and reasonably, that should come out as well, and taxpayers shouldn’t have to shell out.
News: Better Streets Chicago has posted an online petition demanding the city of Chicago “take responsibility for clearing public sidewalks and pedestrian infrastructure of snow and ice during the winter.”
View: It’s undeniable important to have clear sidewalks after a snowfall. As the petition argues, “piles of snow and ice effectively trap people who use wheelchairs or other mobility supportive devices. It impedes parents with strollers. It makes accessing the bus difficult to impossible, especially for those with limited mobility.”
But this is major ask. There are roughly 4,000 miles of streets in Chicago, meaning there are roughly 8,000 miles of sidewalks. Paying for the equipment and employees needed to quickly clear all those sidewalks would be very expensive, and it’s up to those proposing this idea to at least come up with a ballpark figure of what it would cost.
Meanwhile, let’s put our backs into helping out our less mobile neighbors in the knowledge that most of us will one day be less mobile ourselves.
Novel notions
I have been faithfully reading fiction for at least 10 minutes every day in 2022 per the resolution I made about a month ago. I realize this is not all that impressive, but consider that I’ve already surpassed my fiction reading for all of 2021 and it’s starting to feel like a habit.
I finished “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout and am well into “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett. Next up will be “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles because it was the most recommended title in the flurry of recommendations that arrived after I solicited suggestions for novels to read a few weeks back.
Here, in alphabetical order, are the other books that got more than one approving mention from readers:
I’ll base my decision on which of these to read next on further input from readers.
Also, a number of you recommended books by Michael Connelly, but no title got more than one recommendation. So, in comments, please, where should a Connelly newbie start?
An online dialogue with transgender attorney Joanie Rae Wimmer
Joanie Rae Wimmer (photo provided)
Oak Park attorney Joanie Rae Wimmer has been a frequent commenter on trans issues on my Facebook wall, so I invited her to have an email dialogue with me on the subject. It begins below and continues over at EricZorn.com. Wimmer grew up in Chicago Heights and LaGrange and went to law school at the University of Illinois. She went into solo practice in 1990 and won a landmark Equal Protection Clause case in the United States Supreme Court in 2000. She transitioned in 2008 and is divorced with three children.
From Eric Zorn: I write here as a cisgender person who supports not just legal rights for those who are transgender and non-binary, but also social respect for them. I’m in the "no skin off my nose" camp that says, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, that it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg to extend full prerogatives and privileges to those of different gender identities and sexual orientations (not to mention different faiths, ethnicities and abilities).
That said, I'm wondering if you feel there are any limits to the idea behind the slogans "Trans women are women, full stop" and "Trans men are men, full stop." Should there be any limits, definitional or otherwise, to the idea that people who declare themselves to be female when they were born male or male when they were born female should have access to all the opportunities and spaces traditionally reserved for those who identify with their birth gender.
Who should play girls and women's sports, for instance? Who should be housed in women's prisons or given accommodations in domestic violence shelters for women?
I will concede that these are not big problems, numerically speaking, at least not yet. Most concerns about public bathroom access seem like an effort to create a problem out of nothing. But there are philosophical and biological questions at their roots, and as more and more people are re-identifying they may more and more often become questions that actually matter.
What's your take?
From Joanie Rae Wimmer: I don't think that there should be any limits “definitional or otherwise” to the gender identities of trans people. And I guess I sort of have issues with the idea that I was born male. Everyone has a gender identity. The gender identity is the deep seated sense in all of us of what gender we are. Gender identity is felt by most people at age 3, 4, or 5. I knew by age 4.
For most people, their gender identity corresponds to their assigned sex at birth. For a small percentage of the population, there is a discrepancy between their sense of who they are and their assigned sex at birth. "Self" is a very important word in understanding what it means to be transgender.
Gender/sex is a fundamental aspect of "self." One cannot live one's whole life with a false self. Sooner or later, the denial of one's true self becomes too difficult to bear, and the person with the discrepancy between their assigned sex at birth and their gender identity either transitions into who they really are, or commits suicide, or dies of stress-related illness. That's just the way it is.
Who are you? Where does your "self" reside? Does it reside in your body or your mind? If someone is a soldier and loses a limb in battle, like our brave Senator Tammy Duckworth, is the person's self intact? Is the person the same person that they were before? If someone gets progressive dementia, can the self be eventually erased?
It seems clear to me that the human self resides in the mind. That's why all efforts to "cure" transgender people through the mind -- i.e, therapy -- have proven unsuccessful over the years. You can't change the "self." You can't change your sense of who you fundamentally are.
Reparative therapy is more like a "re-education camp." So, the medical profession has learned that to help some people with this discrepancy, it is necessary to change their bodies to match their sense of self.
Am I a woman, full stop? Yes, because I have a female gender identity. My "self" is female and always was. Does that mean I accept our society's patriarchal gender expectations? Hell no. But I am female in the same sense that a soldier who loses a limb is still the same person they were before. The sense of self does not reside in the arm, or in the vagina or the penis. It resides in the mind.
Should society treat me for all legal purposes as a woman? Yes, because that is who I am.
You ask , "Who should play girls and women's sports, for instance?" The answer is women and girls, of course.
But, some will say, don’t transgender women and girls have an unfair genetic advantage over cisgender women and girls? No, they don't. The advantages, if they exist, are "unfair" only to people who do not consider transgender women and girls to be "real" women and girls in the first place.
Allow me to illustrate. NBA great Wilt Chamberlain, in his playing days, was 7-feet, 1-inches tall. He had a genetic advantage in the sport of basketball over people of average height. Yet no one claims his advantage was "unfair." Why? Why is it fair for Wilt Chamberlain to play basketball without restriction, yet it is "unfair" to allow a transgender woman or girl to play a sport without restrictions?
Some people's genetics make them long and lanky. That is a huge advantage in long distance running. Yet no one says that their advantage is "unfair."
It is "unfair" to allow a transgender woman or girl to play women's or girls' sports without restrictions only if one does not consider transgender women and girls to be "real" women and girls. Which, of course, is blatant cis-sexism.
"I am a real woman because I was born with a vagina," is really not too much different from "I am a real important person because I have white skin" or "I am a real person because I didn't have one of my limbs shot off in combat."
In the continuation of our dialogue, I ask Wimmer about the current controversy concerning the record times now being turned in by University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who swam for the men’s team at Penn for three years before she transitioned.
Land of Linkin’
Wordle freaks, enjoy: “These Copycat Apps Are Not the Wordle You’re Looking For.” Wordle letters (a study of the frequency with which each letter appears in five-letter words). And “Hooked on Wordle? You're really going to hate Absurdle:” “Absurdle doesn't have a single word up its sleeve. The game starts with 2,315 possibilities and responds to each of your guesses by keeping the maximum number of potential secret words in its back pocket, forcing you to narrow its options down until you essentially trap the AI into only having one word left.” Here was my first stab at playing Absurdle:
I acknowledge that “Manly” was a lousy guess. I panicked.
Politico’s Jack Shafer voices some of the same questions and doubts I have about WBEZ-FM’s acquisition of the Sun-Times in “Your Newspaper’s Not Making Money? Make It Permanent as a Nonprofit!” He writes, “The acquisition seems to be more about preserving the declining Sun-Times, a worthy goal, than capturing journalistic synergies. But perhaps the deal isn’t a complete waste. You could argue that it’s better for the Sun-Times to survive as a nonprofit than to be captured and husked by the notorious Alden Global Capital, which owns about 200 papers, including the competing Chicago Tribune.”
Several years ago I sat by local superstar violinist Rachel Barton Pine and her daughter Sylvia at an old-time string band jam. Sylvia was a pretty good fiddler for a little kid back then. But she’s since shown herself to be an extraordinary prodigy in classical violin:
“The Jussie Smollett calliope wheezed to life Tuesday when his attorney confirmed the former ‘Empire,’ actor will be sentenced March 10,” writes Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg. He goes on to offer Smollett some advice based on his own hard-won experience: “Come clean. You must, sooner or later, if you are to have any hope of a life beyond this shameful episode.”
The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in that day’s issue. And Monday from 2-5 p.m. I’ll be filling in for Esposito. The WCPT listen-live link is here.
The Picayune Sentinel preview: Monday at 11:30 a.m. I’ll be talking with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.
The World Health Organization estimates that 10-20 percent of people are experiencing new or lingering symptoms three months after infection. … The good news is that most with long Covid do seem to get better over time without treatment. ...
One of the many frustrating realities of long Covid is that it doesn’t look the same in everyone. ... Basically, symptoms can include pretty much anything, show up pretty much any time, and change or resolve pretty much whenever. ...
A systematic review published in November 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Medicine identified more than 100 possible symptoms that have been associated with long Covid. The most common ones noted in the research are those that are associated with the initial Covid-19 infection, such as loss of taste and smell, respiratory symptoms, chest pain, fever, and headaches. ...
Another major symptom is post-exertional malaise, which is a fancy way of saying that you are completely spent after doing even basic activities. ...
The first thing is to be very patient and give your body a chance to heal. Slow down. Don’t get in a push-crash cycle of pushing yourself, crashing, pushing, crashing. We tell people to pace their activity, meaning try to do the right amount of activity every day that doesn’t escalate your symptoms but keeps you moving.
Mary Schmich on the new Kurt Vonnegut documentary
My former colleague Mary Schmich posts column-like thoughts most Tuesdays on Facebook. Here is this week’s offering:
Over the weekend I watched “Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time,” the biographical film made by Bob Weide, who is best known as the producer of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
The film was released a couple of months ago but I found myself hesitant to watch it for some reason, some uneasiness I can’t quite name that had to do with my small, strange connection to Vonnegut. The short version of that story:
In 1997, I wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune that was a mock graduation speech, the advice I’d give to students if anyone bothered to invite me to give a graduation speech, which no one had. I wrote the column on a Friday afternoon. It ran that Sunday. And that was that. I thought.
A few weeks later, my column rocketed around the new thingamajig called the Internet—labeled as Kurt Vonnegut’s graduation address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Who orchestrated that misrepresentation? And why? The mystery persists.
But the misattribution made news. The column had gone viral before “viral” was a term; it was proof of of online misinformation before “misinformation” was identified as an online plague. Look how crazy this newfangled Internet can be!
The “speech”, which eventually became known as “Wear Sunscreen,” was widely parodied and also made into a popular spoken-word song by the Australian moviemaker Baz Luhrmann.
In the ensuing years, I had occasional encounters with Vonnegut. We once exchanged letters, his written on a typewriter and embellished with one of his trademark self-portraits. One night at the Waldorf in New York (pictured here), he obliged the American Academy of Dermatology by making a surprise appearance at their annual banquet to present me an award for touting sunscreen.
Once while he was in Chicago, he left me a characteristically dry, amused voice mail on my Tribune phone. I didn’t find it until he had left town, then, after hoarding it for years, mistakenly erased it while trying to make space on the full machine.
To this day, I still occasionally hear from people accusing me of stealing the great Kurt Vonnegut’s words. I don’t mind, but I always felt kind of bad that the “sunscreen” confusion stalked him. At least he was always witty and gracious about it, and I knew he was a connoisseur of the absurd.
Vonnegut died in 2007. A few years later, in 2015, I heard from Bob Weide. He’d become enamored of Vonnegut in high school and had been making a film about him—for 33 years. He was determined to finish it at last. But it had taken so long that he was short on funding. He’d started a Kickstarter for the project. He wondered if I’d be interested in writing something about his endeavor.
I’ve always been wary about promoting fundraising efforts in the newspaper, and rarely did, but the fact that Weide had been working on this movie for half his life seemed like a story, not just a product pitch. So I wrote a column. Bob was confident he’d have the movie made by 2016.
It took another five years.
But he finally made it. And I found it beautiful. I thought I knew Vonnegut’s life story—Indiana childhood, prisoner of war, Chicago reporter who learned to write tight—but this brought him to life in a new way. It makes you feel him, feel the depths of an ordinary man who happened as well to be extraordinary.
The film has gotten mostly good reviews, though some critics wished Weide hadn’t put himself in the story as much as he did. I get that criticism, but also get why he did it. Weide’s love and reverence are one lens on Vonnegut’s life.
It’s available for streaming on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Apple TV and other places. Here is a link to the trailer. It was well worth the $6.99.
Above all, it’s Vonnegut’s story, the story of a man who left a mark few writers do. It’s a movie about the complexities and loneliness of writing; the vitality of family; the long tail of war; the confusion of fame; the fine line between laughing and crying. — Mary Schmich
Minced Words
Jon Greenberg, founding editor and senior columnist at The Athletic drops in for a special sports segment on this week’s “Mincing Rascals” podcast. He, host John Williams and panelists Brandon Pope, Lisa Donovan, Jon Hansen and I discuss the NFL’s overtime rules and the prospect of “robo-umps” in Major League Baseball.
The regular panel also mulls over the resignation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the GOP’s emphasis on crime in the 2022 race for Illinois governor, and the practice of sharing passwords for online streaming services.
Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. Or if you’re still not into this new-fangled podcast thing, you can now listen to an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. Saturday nights on WGN-AM 720.
Become a paid subscriber to the Picayune Sentinel to read the “Meet the Rascals” interview with Heather Cherone in Tuesday’s Picayune Extra.
Re: Tweets
This week’s nominees for Tweet of the Week:
Times when you should compare yourself to a Holocaust victim: 1) You are a Holocaust victim. That’s it. That’s the list. — @PalmerReport
Influencers would go away if influenceables would stop being that. — @EmissaryKerry
Idea: The Great British Bake Off. But you pair every contestant with a 3-year-old who really wants to help. — @abgutman
I’d make a great cartoon character because I would be perfectly happy wearing the same outfit for the rest of my life. — @RancherNikki
Love is blind, but lust is bereft of every sense. — @nova_Corpse
Me: We have a problem, they're out of hot dogs. Her: That's OK, I’m vegan. ME: OK, we have two problems. — @clichedout
CAVEMAN: Wanna go hunting with me? WIFE: Can I bring my sister? CAVEMAN: No, she'd be a third wheel. WIFE: A what? CAVEMAN: Never mind. Just something I'm working on. — @UncleDuke1969
“Everyone knows that the Senate never confirms a Supreme Court Justice in the Chinese Year of the Tiger.” (Mitch McConnell) — @BettyBowers
Accidentally delete one audiobook and you never hear the end of it. — @AndyAndyField
DoorDash has the unique ability to make me feel fat, lazy, and bad with money all in one transaction. — @AshleyAlready
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Happy 68th anniversary, Jens and Fran
On Jan. 28, 1954, my parents were married in Bloomington, Ind. They’ve been through a lot lately but remain an inspiration. On the occasion of their 60th I wrote:
The longer I've been married and the longer I've observed my folks, the more I've come to believe that of all the elements that go into a lasting marriage — love, shared values, patience, loyalty — the most important is respect.
That sounds formal, I know. But I'm talking about the sort of regard that exceeds mere affection and attraction. Respect is the capacity not just to admire your spouse's talents and other fine qualities but also to act in ways that nurture those qualities. It's to consider your spouse a valued consultant on matters great and small. It's about deference, not obedience; about appreciation, not honor; about give and take, not sacrifice.
Saturday will mark the 37th anniversary of the day I met Johanna. So let the festivities begin!
Today’s Tune
My old pal Pete, one of my college housemates, checked in recently from Chattanooga, Tenn., where he and his wife had stopped over on a meandering, post-retirement car trip. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been,” he wrote, “but it’s a pretty terrific place.”
I have been. Johanna and I stopped there for lunch last winter on our way to Savannah and I agreed that it was very nice. But I offered one correction, suggesting he refer to the town as “Chattanoogie” in keeping with the lyrics of several old-time songs, notably “Smoke Behind the Clouds” as performed here with great verve by the Bucking Mules:
The fiddler is Joseph Decosimo of Durham, N.C. He’s no Sylvia Pine, but I could listen to his clever improvisations all day.
The Traditional Tune Archive says “Smoke Behind the Clouds” is a "genuine regional favorite of southeastern Tennessee fiddlers” and appears to date back to the late 1800s. If the sexism in the lyrics bothers you, Tui (Jake Blount and former Chicagoan Libby Weitnauer) released a gender-switched version in 2019.
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I never read you much in The Tribune but I love reading every word of The Picayune! Your discussion with the transgender lawyer was great. Thank you for asking questions that many of us are wondering about.
I am a voracious reader, and once upon a time, an English teacher. The pandemic has crushed my fiction reading ( too busy reading epidemiology studies) and I’m trying to jump back in, too. One book I expected to love, and didn’t, was The Midnight Library by Haig. So selfishly, I would love to get your take on it. It would help me to gauge if my brain has short circuited.
I never read you much in The Tribune but I love reading every word of The Picayune! Your discussion with the transgender lawyer was great. Thank you for asking questions that many of us are wondering about.
I am a voracious reader, and once upon a time, an English teacher. The pandemic has crushed my fiction reading ( too busy reading epidemiology studies) and I’m trying to jump back in, too. One book I expected to love, and didn’t, was The Midnight Library by Haig. So selfishly, I would love to get your take on it. It would help me to gauge if my brain has short circuited.