The Electron Pencil

Lifesaver?

The great pleasure of doing Big Talk is meeting some of the most wonderful and fascinating people in town. Cristian Medina is one of them. He’s a research scientist at the Indiana Geological and Water Survey where he and his colleagues are trying to figure out ways to lasso the carbon dioxide gas produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Medina et al hope to scrub the gas, turn it into a pure stream and maybe — just maybe — inject it into the subsurface of the Earth where it can be stored in reservoirs in sedimentary rock layers.

Cristian Medina

Medina admits this solution isn’t the best one — hell, there may be unforeseen side effects should the scheme ever go into practice — but, for pity’s sake, something’s got to be done to stop the ongoing baking of the atmosphere. An even better solution, Medina says, would be an all-out effort to get our energy fix from renewable sources like the sun, the wind, and geothermal. But even a dreamer like Medina is savvy enough to know we’re not going to make that commitment any time soon so we’d better figure out an alternative remedy now, before St. Paul, Minnesota, turns into Nairobi, Kenya.

Besides trying to save the rest of us from cooking ourselves to death, Medina, a native of Chile, is a tireless volunteer around town, pitching in at WFHB where he used to be host of ¡Hola Bloomington!; showing up weekly at Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, and serving as president of the Bloomington Indiana Scholastic Chess Club. Dang mang, he even used to cook up big pots of food and lug them over to People’s Park and Seminary Square to help feed the homeless. And that ain’t all he’s been up to hereabouts since his arrival a little more than ten years ago.

My advice to you is click on over to the podcast of yesterday’s Big Talk for my interview with him. I’m telling you, these Big Talks are just the tonic to counteract all the bad news  we who haven’t drunk the Li’l Duce Kool-Aid™ have had to endure the last couple of years. Even better, click on this link for my written profile of him in the Limestone Post.

And why should I even be telling you about the Post piece? You oughtta be reading the online mag regularly in the first place, dig?

▼

Hacking Their Way To Freedom

Did you catch this one the other day?

The guy who came up with the old Virginia Slims ad slogan, You’ve come a long way, baby!, died last month. Those of us of d’un certain âge remember those hip, kicky cigarette ads celebrating the modern female who, by golly, could smoke as many daily packs as any man, damn it!

The adman’s name was Pat Martin and he worked for the Leo Burnett agency in Chicago. He penned the line 50 years ago, in 1968, that landmark year. The message may seem weirdly antediluvian today but you have to keep in mind that women, even well into the 20th Century, could be jailed for dragging on a square in public.

Adman Pat Martin

Considering the fact that our traditionally male-dominated society has, for millennia, relegated females to one of two categories — mother or whore — breaking rules and having sex long have been two prime avenues for our sisters to demonstrate something akin to self-determination. And puffing on a slender smoke from a pastel pack surely was a liberating experience, a breaking of the rules, for many women in those benighted times.

Sure, yeah, we now know cig smoking is one of the worst sins a human can commit against her/himself. That fact was sort-of known back in ’68; the Surgeon General’s Warning was only four years old at that point. Common sense will tell you that inhaling the smoke from a burning substance on an hourly-or-more basis will surely bode ill for your overall health but smoking was still seen as a statement of adulthood, of legal majority, a half century ago. Women rightly figured if it was okay for men to walk around all day enshrouded in a nicotine fog why couldn’t they?

Not all assertions of personhood or liberty are pure and above critique. My sis, for one, took to dragging on a Virginia Slim now and again around 1970, a time when she was discovering her own independence, her own agency. I wouldn’t say the act turned her into an Eleanor Roosevelt or Malala Yousafzai but the Slim and the puffing thereon were things she could call her own. Prior to that, she neither owned nor was anything other than what a certain patriarchy had conferred upon her.

▲

Politics

Shocker: Rahm Emanuel opts out of the 2019 mayoral election in Chicago.

Non-shocker: A “senior official” in President Gag’s admin. penned an anonymous op/ed in the New York Times this week revealing many high-ranking people working for the current president are standing on their heads trying to protect our holy land from…, well, him.

Emanuel (with wife Amy Rule) announces he’s out.

Then again: Emanuel had to realize he was dead, politically, when he screwed up the city’s response to the Laquan McDonald execution. By stonewalling and obfuscating he lost in the snap of a finger the black vote in my beloved hometown. Nobody becomes mayor in The Third City w/o the black vote.

“Coward” or selfless protector of the nation?

Then again, Deux: Some people are saying the anonymous “senior official” should have the gumption and moral center simply to quit. The op/ed writer wants to remain incognito, presumably, because s/he wants to keep her/his job. Perhaps I’m Pollyanna but isn’t it possible that this person honestly and truly wants to do some little bit to hold the crumbling democratic/republic together? Simply quitting just means Li’l Duce can fill the vacancy with someone who doesn’t care about trivialities like the rule of law, diplomacy, prudence, decency, America’s highest aspirations, etc. — in other words, someone just like himself.

▼

Politicians

I detest it when people say all politicians are crooked or self-centered. That’s a self-aggrandizing statement. See, the person’s really saying: I’m on to them and I’m so much better than they are.

To which I respond: No you’re not and no you’re not.

I’ve met too many pols in my day who truly want to serve the public and whose grounding is both ethical and compassionate.

Barge (L) & Yoder.

I had a couple of them on Big Talk yesterday — Monroe County Commissioner Amanda Barge and Monroe County Council member Shelli Yoder. They’re the founders of the now-annual Opioid Summit here in Monroe County. They’ve been bending over backward for several months putting this years gathering together. Barge & Yoder claim a significant triumph already in the wake of last year’s inaugural event: thanks to the the 2017 Summit call for easier access to naloxone in Monroe County, they say, the number of overdose deaths hereabouts has dropped dramatically.

Click on over to hear my chat with Barge & Yoder.

▲

I still don’t know precisely how I feel right now, having begun to pull away from (mostly-)daily posting on this global communications colossus. A brief glance at my menu of past posts shows I only chimed in four times in August. It’s not exactly a divorce, so let’s call it a trial separation.

I’m not looking for any long-term relationships with other websites right now. In fact, I’m not even considering casual encounters with other blogs at the moment.

So, whither The Pencil? Search me. I just know I was getting burned out on the political civil war of words that public discourse has become in this second decade of the 21st Cent. And how many ways can I express my sheer bafflement over the election of a crass, disturbed, unlikeable, nativist, supremacist, greed monkey, reality game show host-emeritus as our Dear Leader?

Next?

I do find I have tons o’time to do other penning these days and that’s good. And Charlotte Zietlow and I are making bang-up progress on the book of her life we’ve been slaving over for four years now. We may actually publish an honest-to-gosh hard copy sometime before the the USA goes the way of the old USSR, which eventuality may or may not be right around the corner, historically speaking.

Big Talk is still happening, of course. Matter of fact, a fellow of impeccable rep. around these parts — a litterateur and man-who-knows-others — yesterday AM compared me as an interviewer to Charlie Rose (to my great advantage, I’ll have you know). Make sure to tune in to WFHB, 91.3 FM, every Thursday at 5:30pm or come here every Friday for the link to the previous day’s podcast.

The Loved One and I are soldiering our individual ways through a series of annoying and almost-debilitating aches and pains these days, proving once again that as we Homo Sapiens age we may become more comfortable with our hearts and minds but our bodies sure go all to hell.

Times change. F’rinstance, one of the eternal standbys of my youth, a cultural and economic touchstone of this great nation, Sears, is for all intents and purposes lying on its death bed, what with last month’s announced closing of the co.’s last store in Chicagoland. Sears, when I was about 11 or so, was essentially the center of the universe. Except for gasoline, prescription drugs, and one or two other things, every single solitary thing an American citizen (or even a temporary visitor from the likes of Uganda) could need could be gotten at Sears. Mine was located at North and Harlem, at the extreme western edge of Chi. The old Mercury Theater was just half a block to the west, the place where I saw my first film breast — that of actress Carrie Snodgrass (whose then-promising career, apparently, was cut short by the birth of a son  who had cerebral palsy; the kid’s father was Neil Young) in the otherwise forgettable Diary of a Mad Housewife. At the time the external gland in question made its appearance, I fretted mightily that the rest of the audience (ten, maybe 11 people at most) could hear my heavy breathing so I stifled my respirations to the point, I then worried, I might pass out.

The North & Harlem Store.

But, yeah, Sears. Everybody and her/his sib. bought jeans there, and dress pants, shoes, socks, slips, wigs, cosmetics, tools, washing machines, furs, vacuum cleaners, Cub Power bumper stickers (I copped a good half dozen of them with my saved allowance in the summer of 1969) and even records. I bought, IIRC, my first album there, the “Hair” original Broadway cast soundtrack. My mother went to work at that Sears in about 1967. She sold wigs and then furs — or was is vice versa? In any case, for the next decade and a half, pretty much every Xmas and b-day gift given by her to my daddy-o, me and my bro. & sis.’s, and one of her many grandkids came in a Sears box. She got a 25 percent discount, so natch.

Now, Sears stores are mostly gone.

Not that The Pencil, like Sears, is going under. Let’s look at the unfolding events herein as an evolution. Who knows what this rant machine can become? Time, as Jeeves so often counseled Bertie, will tell.

Wise Words.

▼

Read, Right?

Books I’m reading right now, have just finished, or are on the nightstand waiting for me to finish reading something else:

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, by Neil de Grasse Tyson

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carré

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

It occurs to me: I used to read a heck of a lot more when I was riding the el or bus downtown a few days a week. Public transportation just might have been one of the publishing industry’s greatest boons beginning in the late 19th Century and extending well into the last one.

The Blue Line Stop at Damen.

▲