12/25/2016
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Xmas

Hot Air

Christmas Present

The only thing I’ve ever really wanted for Christmas (besides a transistor radio when I was eight years old) was a Cubs World Series victory.

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Hoop Nightmares

Way back a quarter of a century ago, I was lucky enough to be assigned to write perhaps the first piece in the nation about a film documentary that’d just been wrapped, a sports thing called Hoop Dreams.

My editor at The 3rd Coast,* a small arts and culture magazine, told me she’d heard about a trio of local filmmakers who’d tailed a couple of inner-city kids, basketball phenoms, through their four-year high school careers. They’d resisted the temptations of gangs and drugs, they struggled to overcome their woefully inadequate elementary school educations, they battled to remain academically eligible at the private, parochial high school that’d recruited them (one of them flunked out and had to go to public school), and they at last made it to graduation. The film ended as they packed up and left their public housing homes to go to college. It was as though they’d survived hell and had earned a second chance at life.

[ * Big Mike Note: Not to be confused with the renowned Third Coast literary journal.]

Hoop Dreams became one of the most lauded sports docs in history. Roger Ebert called it the film of the decade. It  spawned subsequent generations of films and filmmakers, using hand-held cameras, tracing the lives of sports figures great and small, delving into their personal lives and revealing the humanity behind their facades. Hoop Dreams was called last week in the New York Times, “The first truly great sports documentary.” Its director, Steve James, went on to become one of filmdom’s most renowned documentary director/producers.

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ESPN’s award-winning sports doc series, 30 for 30, for the most part, is simply Hoop Dreams done again and again, only with different stars on different teams in different cities facing different challenges.

So, Joe Nocera’s NYT piece on some of Hoop Dreams‘s peripheral characters’ subsequent lives caught my eye. Gun play, Nocera writes, wasn’t given a second thought when James and his partners shot Hoop Dreams. This, even though the year 1991 in Chi. was far more dangerous, in terms of gun deaths, than is 2016. Yet, Chi.’s streets are viewed today as shooting galleries. Nocera posits that’s due to the random nature of the killing now. In the ’80s and ’90s, say he and his sources, gang-bangers shot to kill each other for turf (read: business) reasons. Today, Nocera writes, “people can be killed over the tiniest slights, including insults on social media.”

Social media and guns. They define this holy land — from its White House to its toughest streets — in the year of somebody’s lord, 2016.

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Words Can Kill You

Be thankful rages, fads, manias, and other mini-psychopathies fall out of fashion. For instance, the following words, phrases, and concepts are no longer part of the common parlance:

Twerk

Pwn

YOLO

Bling

I know, right?

Cray-cray

Totes

Whatevs

Not (Mike Myers’ mortal sin)

Empower

This (in all but its strictly denotative senses)

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Only This

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This:

giphy

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Brah (in all its permutations)

This isn’t rocket science

Om nom nom

Life hack

Skill set

Kale (not that kale doesn’t exist anymore but it’s no longer the answer to every problem confronting humankind)

On the flip side, here are some idioms of idiocy, awkward and inapt usages, and cutesy-poo utterances still in vogue that I want permanently barred — on penalty of death — in all public and private discourse:

It is what it is

I’m sorry if…, & I’m not a racist but…, & No offense but…

I can’t even

Disrupt (in the business jargon sense)

Impact (as a verb, plus its cousin impactful)

I could care less (I blame Phil Donahue for popularizing this)

Can’t we all just get along? (no, we can’t — especially now — because sometimes we shouldn’t)

Mansplaining (if you don’t like a guy talking loudly and unjustifiably authoritatively, then speak up and tell him to STFU)

STFU

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My Yule Tradition

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12/23/2016
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A Sure Thing

Hot Air: Business Ethics

I’m in the process of noodling ways to get the Charlotte Zietlow book out on the streets and into your hands.

To refresh your memory, Charlotte and I have been working on her memoir since the summer of 2014. It’s a swell story and there’s no doubt this town’d scarf up several million copies of it. That’d work out to something on the order of 37.5 copies for every woman, man, and child in this throbbing megalopolis. Hey, why not? Y’gotta be optimistic when you embark on a biz deal.

The publishing racket is a hellish minefield on which author(s) can be certain to lose at least one limb. That goes for both the traditional and the self- varieties. My task right now is to figure out a way for us to lose as few of our body parts as possible.

There are scads of outfits just dying to help Charlotte and me publish our book. Of course, they all charge cascading fees for their services, the vast majority of which are hidden until that very moment we’ve gone too far to say, Jeez, I never expected that. I don’t think I want to do it.

It’s like the undertaker promising it’ll cost you $7500 for a funeral but, when the day comes, he casually mentions it’ll cost an extra couple of G’s to dig the hole.

It’s not that certain publishers are sharpies, it’s just that…, um…, come to think of it, they are.

Charlotte has proven she knows how to navigate the waters of business. Her Goods, Inc. kitchen products shop — since sold and renamed Goods for Cooks — has been a Bloomington institution for some forty years now. She knows the ins & outs of spending dough and making it. I, OTOH, am likely to sink the ship before it even leaves the dock. I am an artiste, not an entrepreneur.

Between the two of us, we know a passel of  local folks with deep pockets. I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and said, “Why don’t you ask so-and-so to finance the book? You’re friends. S/he loves Charlotte. Go ask, her/him!”

Ironclad logic — especially when the advice giver isn’t going to be doing the begging.

People lean on pals, relatives, and acquaintances all the time for business seed money. Every once in a great while a pal, relative, or acquaintance unbelts. Hell, the genesis fable of pretty much every successful start-up includes the part where Aunt Jennie forked over a wad and, next thing anybody knew, she’d become a wealthy stockholder.

Of course, nobody tells the sad tale about Uncle Frank whose $10,000 investment in his nephew’s cupcake cafe disappeared faster than, well, his nephew did. The erstwhile cupcake peddler ain’t running around his new town telling all. And Uncle Frank’s mum about it all as well. You think he’s dying to tell everybody what a sucker he was?

It occurs to me that people who borrow money from pals or relatives so they can start-up a business care far more about their businesses ideas than their pals and relatives. I knew a couple who put the touch on pretty much every one of their relatives and friends so the two could open a grab-and-go coffee shop near the el station. Some of their loved ones threw bundles of cash their way. The coffee shop never even made it to its first anniversary. As it became clear to all concerned that the ship was going under, several of the relatives said to the couple, “I think I want my money back.”

Teehee. Apparently, they were unclear on the concept of investing in a start-up. Last I heard, the relatives and former-proprietors haven’t spoken without lawyers at their sides for years.

See, I think about potential outcomes like that. I suppose everybody holding out a hat does. But a lot of people value their dreams more than they value peace around the Thanksgiving table.

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“Say, I’ve got this great idea for a…”

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Is my dream of getting Charlotte’s memoir out in the world worth risking friends and kin? Answer: No.

You have to be willing to break some eggs to make your cupcakes. Same with Aunt Jenny and Uncle Frank’s hearts to make your dream cafe a reality. So, if you’ve read this far, maybe a little nervously, thinking I was f’inta put my arm around your shoulder and say, “Y’know, I’ve always been able to count on you…,” worry no more.

I’ll do the worrying around here, thank you.

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How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying

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12/22/2016
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Hola

Hot Air: House & Home

Got a late start into the outside world yesterday because I wanted to vacuum and dust. I’d been wanting to get at the tasks for a while and then The Loved One looked at me sidelong the night before and so I knew the hour was nigh.

In any case, I thought about the term “housework.” For whatever reason, housework has come to be defined as those things you do around your place to keep it clean and orderly. In other words, to maintain it as a pleasant home.

Yet, “homework” is defined as studying and paper-writing and other nonsense your school teachers wanted you to do away from the actual school itself — preferably at your house.

An aside: Early on I decided I would never do “homework,” reasoning that I’d given my teachers a good six or so hours a day in the classroom and that ought to have been good enough for them. I figured my away-from-class time would be better spent drawing pictures, studying astronomy and baseball statistics, and reading the newspaper, the encyclopedia, and books. My grades, of course, suffered greatly for it, but I never cared. Ma and Daddy-o cared tons, though, and regularly tried to come up with ways to get me to do “homework.” I always came up with ways around it.

Anyway, I propose swapping names for the respective tasks. Sweeping and mopping and cleaning out the oven and refrigerator, etc. should be called “homework” while laboring over algebra problems and writing term papers should be known as “housework.”

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Housework?

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Who’s with me?

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Tough Job

I ran into retired big shot Hollywood director David Anspaugh at Saturday’s closing night performance of “Home” at the Bloomington Playwrights Project. He’s slated to direct the BPP’s next production, “Row After Row,” opening January 27. The dark comedy follows the exploits of a female Civil War re-enactor.

Speaking of that bizarre gang of nostalgia obsessives, I highly recommend Tony Horwitz’ book on them, Confederates in the Attic. It’s fun and informative, the highest praise I can give to a tome.

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Young Anspaugh Behind The Camera

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Anyway, Anspaugh was busy congratulating star Francesca Sobrer (my guest on last week’s Big Talk, and the rest of the “Home” cast. When he finished, I sidled up to him for the latest dope. Turns out he’s feeling the pressure, following such a tough act. “Home” co-directors Chad Rabinowitz and David Sheehan pulled off their decade-hopping tale without a hitch. “I told Chad I was mad at him,” Anspaugh said. “He set the bar too high for me.”

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The New Boss

Best of luck to my pal Emily Jackson as she takes the reins of the WFHB board of directors. EJ was elected board president at this month’s end-of-the-year confab. She’s a dynamite drummer and a small businesswoman and has been spinning platters for the community radio station for more than a decade.

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Emily Jackson

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The current leadership team at Firehouse Broadcasting signals a new era on 4th Street, one that harkens back to the glory days of Chad Carrothers. That’s a good thing. ‘FHB has been a refreshing alternative to the auto-tune pap spewed out by the few commercial broadcasters within reach of our local receivers. It’s also been a fab talent feeder for the likes of WFIU, WFYI and other NPR affiliates as far afield as the Rocky Mountains.

I’m happy to have been associated with the station since I arrived in this town back in the fall of 2009.

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Whys & Wherefores

Yet another observation about — what else? — the ascension of L’il Duce.

Everybody’s scratching their heads over why so many Hispanics voted for our nation’s incoming greed-monkey-in-chief, considering his demonizations of Mexicans. What people forget is Latinos (the more appropriate appellation for Central & South Americans and Caribbeans) are not at all a monolithic club. In fact, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, for instance, very often ought not to be invited to the same fiesta. It’s a good bet Duce‘s Mexican insults put him in good stead with scads of non-Mex Latinos.

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Spanish Harlem

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12/21/2016
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News Hound

Hot Air: Same As The Old

So, there’s been an embargo in Chez Big Mike re: NPR’s Morning Edition. See, the radio news magazine has been a constant in whatever crib I’ve occupied for a good 30 years now. Every single morning, I’ve tuned to whatever NPR affiliate in whatever city I’ve lived in to catch the latest dope about town, about this holy land, and about the world.

There’ve been WBEZ in Chi., WFPL in Louisville, and now WFIU here in this sprawling megalopolis. I’ve even adopted the various booth announcers as members of my family, as it were. As I told Annie Corrigan once, hers is the first voice I hear every morning. It’s as though we’re married. She smiled at me even as she cocked her head like a pooch that’d heard some bizarre sound.

In any case, I hadn’t listened to WFIU since November 9 this annum, the reason being I couldn’t bear hearing the phrase “president-elect Trump,” especially after already having to endure nausea and vomiting on a daily basis earlier in the year. Oh, I kept on reading my New York Times every day, sure. I had to keep up with events. But being hammered away with reminders that we’d elected that man so early in the AM — before I even took my first sip of life-giving joe — would be a form of torture.

I knew by and by I’d come back around to my morning tradition. And today happened to be that day. I decided, hell, I’ve got get back into the swing of things. The son of a bitch is the president — I have to be a big man about it. So I switched on the kitchen radio.

Whaddya think was the first thing I heard? By god in heaven I swear it’s true — it was an interview with L’il Duce‘s trusted consigliere, Newt Friggin’ Gingrich.

newt-gingrich

He’s Ba-a-a-a-ack!

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Newton Lerory McPherson of Harrisburg Pennsylvania.

Huh?

Bet you didn’t know that. The Georgia Beetch was spawned at Harrisburg Hospital midway through WWII. His mother was a 16-year-old who was impregnated by some 19 y.o. dude who apparently took a powder within days of shotgun marrying Newt’s ma. She soon re-married, to some career Army guy named Gingrich, and there you go. The Gingriches moved to Georgia when Daddy-o G was stationed at Ft. Benning. The rest is Republican history.

The author of the Contract with America basically described L’il Duce as a stand-up comic whose punchlines the audience shouldn’t take as gospel.

You know, just what we need in these perilous times.

Anyway, I plan to tune in to WFIU again tomorrow at sunrise. It turns out I’m a bigger man than I ever thought I’d be. Hell, we’ll all have to pull ourselves up to maximum height over the next four years.

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He Dropped His Wallet?

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, as loyal Pencillistas well know. The vast majority of governmental leaders, corporate CEOs, think tank navel-gazers, and advocates and activists for this cause or that are no less a collection of boobs and self-interested slobs than any other random sampling of the population. That any of them could come together in secret and plot out world-shaking schemes or choreograph media coverage or even predict how the citizenry will react to any of their machinations is clearly and absolutely the provenance of feverish espionage novelists alone.

Still, I cocked my head like the aforementioned puzzled hound when I heard this morning that investigators in Germany had found some kind of an ID doc in the cab of that truck that’d been driven through the Christmas crowd in Berlin Monday.

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Really? An ID? And, oh — natch — it’s for some Tunisian dude, Tunisia being a sufficiently exotic, other-sounding locale.

So, here are your possibilities:

  1. With ISIS claiming credit for the Christmas market smash-up, the operative who gave it the gas as well as his puppet-masters are the dumbest-assed conspirators this side of Dick Cheney and his purported crew of airliner hijackers
  2. The German coppers think we’re all idiots and will fall for any translucent bushwa that pins the blame on a Muslim
  3. The report is wrong

I’ve got to say, Door No. 2 makes a lot of sense because a huge percentage of us is hot to trot for blaming any and all atrocities on those stinkin’ Ay-rabs, even the ones who come from countries that aren’t technically Ay-rab but, who cares, they’re all Ay-rab out that way anyway, aren’t they?

Plus, yeah, we are all idiots.

My real pick is No. 4: The planet is crawling with no-good lunatic jerks, a few of whom every once in a while get behind the wheel of a monster semi, get their hands on several tons of explosive fertilizer, or who weasel their way into airliner pilot school with the idea of committing a super-bad world-order-changing crime.

There are more than seven billion of us members of Homo Sapiens sapiens running around this globe. Say one in a million is deranged enough to think his brilliant, dramatic, mad scientist caper will bend the world to his vision and you have a grand total of some seven thousand such psychopaths walking amongst us on any given day.

Yeesh. That’ll teach me to listen to radio news in the morning.

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On The Radio

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12/20/2016
1 Comment
Light

Hot Air: Memento

So, I was cleaning off my garage/office desk last night (which act, BTW, merits a banner headline all its own) when I came upon this:

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Yeah, it’s the reminder card I got last January, telling me to go to my first radiation session. And, as you can see, it also prompts me to return every single day thereafter (except weekends). I did that for a total of six weeks. A month and a half. Every day getting fried in the neck, jaw, and proximal collarbone areas. Getting more RADs (or what in the hell ever they call the units of DNA-killing waves that would — it was hoped — shrink or destroy altogether the malignant nodes that’d been found in my neck) than any sane person would subject her/himself to. And kill my taste buds and my salivary glands, sear and grotesquely thicken the mucous membrane at the base of my tongue, in my throat, and even partially down my esophagus. And cause me to bleed, writhe in pain, almost drown in phlegm, push me past the brink of starvation and dehydration, lose a quarter of my body mass, and, thus far, never again really taste my homemade spaghetti sauce.

The Nat’l Cancer Institute, on its Radiation Therapy for Cancer page, tells us:

… [R]adiation therapy can also damage normal cells, leading to side effects.

Hah! Can. As in, Well, maybe, y’know, if things don’t work out precisely as your team of nuclear physicists and oncologists planned. That was one of the things that irked me most about the all the propaganda I was given, purportedly to fully inform me about what I was willingly stepping into. In the photographs, all the nurses, techs, specialists, and the rest grinned like loons as they positioned patients to get their daily dose of an otherwise screamingly unhealthy beam of radiation. Oh, and the patients were grinning too, the poor saps.

All those side effects may happen. Sort of like, if you’re thinking of going out drag racing while it’s 28 degrees and there’s a slick coat of ice on the pavement, you may want to consider the possibility — just the possibility — that you’ll skid into a telephone pole. Maybe.

That’s why I fully appreciated Dr. Fred Wu, my radiation oncologist, telling me minutes after I met him, “This is gonna be hell.”

You don’t grin in hell. You can hardly even crack a smile.

Anyway, the sudden appearance of this card last night really shook me up. Not as much as I was shaken the day I was first handed it. I recall thinking then, “This is it. No way I can rationalize or talk my way out of this jam.”

Funny, the first thing I thought last night as I held the card once again for the first time in some nine months — after I wiped away a couple of tears, I must confess — was, “Dang, mang, there oughtta be a flashing beacon attached to this.” Or a skull and crossbones on it. At the very least, one of those air raid shelter symbols from the ’50s. Something to at least hint at the crazy goddamned reality of what was to come.

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And, for chrissakes: “Thank you for adjusting your time/schedule for this day.” Honestly? As if I’d sat back and weighed going for a massage and then a light lunch with a pal rather than submit myself to the seemingly endless, debilitating treatment without which I’d die horribly. Hey, sure, you’re welcome. I did it to accommodate you — I’m that kind of a guy.

We love to lie to ourselves, don’t we?

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Daylight Saves My Sanity Time

Ah, at long last. Today’s the last day of this planet’s axial lean away from the sun, otherwise known as Fall. Yep. Tomorrow’s the winter solstice, huzzah!

To be almost precise, solstice will occur at a quarter to six tomorrow morning.

That means for the next couple of months I’ll be watching the official daily sunset times so as to confirm that, yes, the days are getting longer. And then, maybe three weeks from tomorrow, I’ll eyeball an actual sunset and think, “Oh yeah, baby! You can really tell!”

The optimist within me — and, yeah, there really is a teaspoonful of those Panglossian genes distributed randomly throughout my cells — can find precious hope in the sun setting at 5:44pm rather than 5:27pm.

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Sun King

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12/19/2016
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Peaks & Valleys

Hot Air: E-Day

So, today’s the day L’il Duce is elected President of the United States of America.

Officially.

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I’m going to have to keep writing out versions of that line again and again because every fiber of my being wants to believe it’s not true. Here, let me try it again:

Donald J. Trump will be elected President of the United States of America.

Officially.

Today.

By the “Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State[s] may be entitled in the Congress” as delineated in Article Two, clause 2 of the Constitution of the United States of America.

Really.

In this, the second to last week of the year 2016, I can now report that this soon-to-be past annum brought me two spectacularly, fantastically, superbly, nearly orgasmically great happenings and two disgusting, hork-from-the-bottom-of-my-gut, rotten, perilous to life and limb happenings. I mean, how often does a year throw that much roller coaster at a human being?

This one did. To wit:

  1. I began chemoradiation treatment for squamous cell carcinoma producing numerous malignant nodes in my neck
  2. I got through the above and am now in remission
  3. My beloved Chicago Cubs won their first World Series title in my lifetime and, for that matter, in 108 years
  4. Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States of America

If there is a god — what a freak.

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Women

The Loved One and I went to a party last night, a bon voyage thing for a woman who’s embarking on an around-the-world trip that’ll last about a year. She’s shipping out in early January. And she’s doing it alone — something, quite frankly, I don’t know if I’d have the guts to do.

She’s part of a gang of local females who are — to a woman — strong, ambitious, successful, focused, and disciplined. There are a half dozen or so of them, more if we include those who come and go. The party was held at the house of one of them, a big shot prof at IU. The rest of the gang is involved in a wide variety of rackets here in Bloomington, ranging from law to medicine, from education to manufacturing, and more. Again, to a woman, they work hard — and they play hard.

It struck me that women were the center of the party, which is rare indeed. Most parties are dominated by males. Guys tell the jokes; guys pick the music; guys’ voices drown out women’s; and if a debate breaks out, guys are at the lead on both sides.

This party though was decidedly and refreshingly female. Funny thing is, had everybody’s gender been somehow masked, you wouldn’t have been able to tell if it were women or men at the forefront of the proceedings. It wasn’t as though the party was all chit-chat about the latest hot sales at Forever 21 or Aeropostale, about how dreamy Benedict Cumberbatch is, the hottest colors in Deborah Lippman’s gel lab pro line, or even that super easy new mashed potato twist recipe.

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The genders were pretty much evenly represented. Going by sheer numbers, the men could have dominated, as they so normally and yawningly do. But these women were alive, babies. They spoke whenever they felt like it. They drank booze and laughed and offered their opinions, they danced and pranked, they they picked the music — hell, they ran the show.

So, no matter how bummed I am about

Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America

his ascension to power, it is to be hoped, is a temporal thing, a passing quirk in our history, an embarrassing slip of flatulence at a sit-down dinner. Women, though, have now reached heights only dreamed of back when my older sisters were young moms and my mother was was still signing her Christmas cards Mrs. Joseph J. Glab. That, to be sure, is forever.

It is to be hoped.

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You Don’t Own Me

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12/16/2016
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March Forth

Hot Air: Our Popular President

Scope this:

1

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So, some 46 percent of the populace thinks Barack Obama will rank in the upper half among his predecessors as he prepares to leave office next month. That’s right, acc’d’g to Pew Research, 18 percent think he’ll be seen as an “outstanding” prez and 28 percent consider him “above average.”

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Above Average

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And, as we gird our loins for the L’il Duce reign of error, a mere 27 percent think Obama stinks.

This baffles the bejesus out of me. An overwhelming majority of the citizenry of this holy land considers Obama to be at least average as the big boss of this mixed-up, messed-up democratic republic with strong overtones of corporate oligarchy and a dash of neo-fascism tossed in for flavor. That dash, natch, was added by L’il Duce, who has pledged to erase everything BHO has done during his four years at the wheel.

Makes sense, considering we elected the anti-Obama, that our nation’s sisteren and brethren would view him as a boob to rival Pres. Merkin Muffley, no? Then again, nothing makes any sense anymore, inlcuding the fact that L’il Duce lost the vote by something approaching 3 million, a fact I promise to hammer on relentlessly for the next four years.

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Muffley

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Junk

Mark your calendars: the Bloomington performance of “The Junky’s Christmas” will air on Yael Ksander’s Cafe Indiana on WFIU a couple of times immediately preceding the yule holiday.

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William S. Burroughs, Shooting Heroin

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First, it’ll be on the NPR affiliate’s HD channel, WFIU-2, 101.9, Friday, December 23rd, at 7pm and then again on Christmas Eve the next morning at 7, on the main channel, 103.7.

The performance was recorded earlier this month at the Back Door and was presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington, the Burroughs Century, Ltd., and Wounded Galaxies. Stars of the show included Tony Brewer, Chris Rall, Shayne Laughter, and other friends of The Pencil. Catch it — or be the worse for missing it.

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Kamala Karma

Y’know, if it wasn’t for the fact that prosecutors as a gang make me itchy, I’d be all in on Kamala Harris for president in 2020.

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California Senator-Elect Harris

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Hell, I just may be able to overcome my itchiness by then.

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Free Relief

The Moral: pick fights you can win.

Four Dayton, Ohio high schooler in 1969 started something called the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. It’s a forgotten era now but by 1970 there were some 50,000 pay toilets in this holy land. Public restrooms at airports, department stores, restaurants, gas stations and countless other locales had locked stall doors. To get inside for desperately needed relief, you had to drop a nickel or a dime into a little slot. This state of affairs was especially onerous to women because at least men’s rooms had free stand-up urinals whereas our sisteren had to scrounge around for coins no mater what number they had to do.

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The Ohio high schoolers decided to do something about it all so they started up their advocacy group. “Pay toilets,” they said, “are an unethical infringement on basic human rights.” Believe it or not, their plaint struck a chord across the nation. Apparently, you could institute a de facto set of laws denying basic rights to people whose skin was the wrong color, you could execute a pointless, unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, you could devote billions of dollars to a globe-threatening nuclear arsenal, and you could foul the land, sea, and air, but if you demanded a dime from everybody who needed to drop the kids off at the lake, why, there’d be hell to pay.

One of the Ohio high schoolers moved away to attend the University of Chicago, from which place he choreographed a movement to rid O’Hare Int’l Airport of its pay toilets. Three years later, Chicago became the first city in the nation to ban all pay toilets within the city limits.

By 1980, pay toilets had virtually disappeared from the American landscape.

That kid, Steve Froikin, explained why his grass-roots effort worked: “This was a manageable thing we could take on, and it was fun.”

Key word: Manageable. As Sun Tzu advised, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

For the next four years, we’ll be fighting a war against L’il Duce and his forces of darkness. We’re thrashing about, honking and screaming, naturally. But we’re going to have to start strategizing sooner rather than later. How do we chip away at the new administration? How do we win battles against it in order to ultimately win the war?

To borrow a phrase from baseball, We can’t try to hit a grand slam home run when nobody’s on base.

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Let’s Play Post Office

Along those lines, the Hoosier State’s own Michael Martone, author of scads of books and editor of even more, urges us to mail more letters. Loads more letters.

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Martone

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It’s a political act, implies he. Martone goes on:

Many of you are doing simple actions of resistance and protest…. May I suggest you use the Postal Service?

… I believe that conservative forces have long wanted to close the post office or privatize it for profit….

… [T]he PO is staffed by a large public service union. It hires a great number of veterans. It reflects the nation’s demographics and serves as a bank of last resort for people without the means to transfer money or maintain a checking account.

… So I ask you not to buy a stamp but a book of stamps and send a letter to a representative, yes, but also to each other….

… It is a quick action.

 

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Act Of Resistance

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Mailing a letter is a tiny little thing, but it’s a spit in the eye of the forces that want to monetize each and every act we undertake, including how we chit-chat with each other. Corps. like Apple, Google, Verizon, and the like want to charge us for our every utterance — and our incoming “businessman” president is all for it.

As far as I’m concerned, putting a price on our conversations is as odious as charging every woman a dime just so she can tap a kidney.

So, I’m with Michael Martone:  “Use the mail. Use the mail. Use the mail. Use the mail.”

 

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Big Talk

Here’s the link to yesterday’s Big Talk with my guest, actor and drama teacher Francesca Sobrer.

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Beware, the sound quality stinks. I’ve been tweaking my and my guests’ mic positionings and even playing musical chairs in relation to the mic stands but, frustratingly, yesterday’s effort was one of my worst in terms of audio quality.

The good news is, I think I’ve got a solution to the problem — something I’ll try out this afternoon when I interview newspaper distributor Jack Dopp. The Dopp Big Talk won’t air until January 12th as WFHB’s Daily Local News goes into its annual end-of-the-year tradition, a three-week recap of everything that happened in 2016.

If you’re patient, you’ll soon be able to hear the nearly-unedited original interview I did with Sobrer here. You can also catch in the same place all the Big Talk-ers I’ve had on since 2014, including cartoonist Nate Powell, who illustrated civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis’s March series of graphic novels and who, coincidentally enough, happens to be submitting to a magazine interview just across the room from me in this communications colossus’s back office, Hopscotch Coffee, as I type this.

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12/15/2016
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Use Your Head

Hot Air: Big Science

I got all jazzed up when I learned Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be appearing at the IU Auditorium in March, next year. I immediately clicked to the box office and was prepared to cop a couple of ducats.

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Tyson

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Screech! went the brakes.

The lowest price ticket, presumably in the balcony, as distant from the stage as the Earth is from Alpha Centauri, is $68.50. That’d mean I’d be shelling out about a yard and a half for the pair (for The Loved One & me), just to hear him say that which we’ve already heard a bazillion times from him.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy. He’s one of my ten fave Americans. But, dang mang, that’s a lot of juice for a lecture. And that juice is gonna remain in my coconut shell, dig?

Does that make me a cheapskate?

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The Technosphere

Ready for some trivia? Okay, go: scientists at the University of Leicester have estimated the “technosphere,” that is, everything humankind has ever made (and destroyed or thrown away) — all our buildings, cars, dining room tables, copies of People magazine, surgical scalpels, boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal, and all the rest of the crap we simply have to have — now weighs 30 trillion tons.

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Part Of The Technosphere

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That’s 6 x 1015 (or 60,000,000,000,000,000) lbs. That’s a lot of crap.

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…Let’s Kill All The Scientists

Speaking of science, one day, a long, long time ago, we gobbled up news like this:

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Now we suffer through this:

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This is, BTW, a real headline from breitbart.com. Browning is a gun brand, so the head advises readers to grab their firearms of that make and, presumably, shoot dead any learned professional who mentions one of the steps of the scientific method. And the entire line itself is an homage to an infamous quip from a play, “Schlageter,” written by Hanns Johst to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday in 1933. Here’s the dialogue that “inspired” the breitbart.com head:

THIEMANN: … And the last thing I’ll stand for is ideas to get the better of me! I know that rubbish from ’18 …, fraternity, equality, …, freedom …, beauty and dignity! You gotta use the right bait to hook ’em. And then, you’re right in the middle of a parley and they say: Hands up! You’re disarmed…, you republican voting swine!—No, let ’em keep their good distance with their whole ideological kettle of fish … I shoot with live ammunition! When I hear the word culture …, I release the safety on my Browning!”

SCHLAGETER: What a thing to say!

THIEMANN: It hits the mark! You can be sure of that.

SCHLAGETER: You’ve got a hair trigger.

Delightful, no? Breitbart.com, of course, is the post-fact era house organ of the incoming administration. The online disinformation outfit was, until recently, chaired by Steve Bannon, who is now the president-elect’s Senior Counselor.

Still being cautious about calling L’il Duce and his followers what they really are?

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Political Science

My party — the party I’m thisfar from quitting — is fast becoming an afterthought, in large part because it projects a weak, aimless, hand-wringing, minutiae-obsessed image. Nobody wants a leader defined by those qualities. (OTOH, Hillary Clinton did beat L’il Duce by nearly three million votes, so there’s that.)

Anyway, I dug up an old line the other day that perfectly applies to the one-time party of the people (but is no longer): Now is not the time to hide but the time to strike. That is, if you’ve got the muscle, use it. And the Dems in a lot of ways still have muscle, even if a lot of it is going soft.

California’s got muscle and it’s a reliably blue state. If it stood alone as a sovereign nation, It’d at least be one of the second tier economic powerhouses of the planet. L’il Duce‘s new cabinet is anti-science. Some of his acolytes even want NASA to get out of the Circling the Earth to Keep an Eye On Climate Change biz. They want the operation to focus solely on exploring other worlds where, presumably, astronauts will find non-billionaire, differently-colored beings whom we can exploit and crush, as has been our wont since the Nina-, Pinta-, and Santa Maria-nauts first arrived on these shores. So, the Golden State’s big boss is flexing his muscle.

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Brown, With His Dukes Up

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Hauzzah! At last!

Dem Gov. Jerry Brown told the American Geophysical Union the other day:

… if Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite. We’re going to collect that data!

Oooh, baby, I love that guy. He knows — now’s the time to strike.

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12/13/2016
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Boffo

Hot Air: Driving You To Drink

Dig: I know there are plots and cabals afoot here and across the globe. It’s in the nature of human beings to gather together and strategize how to fleece and/or jam their heels into the collective necks of the rest of their sisteren and brethren. But the micro-second I hear or read the words “connect the dots” my eyes, ears, and brain turn off.

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Big Talk, Big Type

This week’s Big Talk‘ll be boffo, I’m tellin’ ya. I had beloved actor and drama teacher Francesca Sobrer (pronounced SUE-bray) in the studio yesterday afternoon, recording this week’s feature that’ll air Thursday at 5:45pm on WFHB 91.3.

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Sobrer

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And, hey, my big story on Bloomington’s drinking water is finally out on the Limestone Post.

Funny, LP publisher Ron Eid assigned me the story way back early last winter, just after I’d gotten the news about My Olive Pit™. I told him and editorial boss Lynae Sowinski I’d write the piece in between chemotherapy and radiation sessions. “Don’t worry,” I said, “you’ll get it in a couple of weeks.”

Shows what in the hell I knew then. I turned the article in last month and, at last, it’s out in the world. So, pour yourself a cool, refreshing glass of B-town tap water and settle in for a good read, okay? Okay.

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Godless Gadfly

Now comes news via Neil Steinberg that professional atheist Rob Sherman has been killed in a plane crash.

I did a lengthy profile of Sherman in the Chicago Reader, dated July 5, 1990. I’d spent a good amount of time with him and his then-little boy Ricky. The gist of my story was the relationship between godless daddy-o and kid. I’d always been a bit of a fan of Sherman in his efforts to get suburban Chicago towns to stop erecting crucifixes and creches on municipal property — his reasoning being, simply, the separation of church and state.

One town near the Wisconsin border, Zion, had a huge crucifix painted on its massive water tower, visually proclaiming for miles its Christianist slant. One night in the spring of 1986, Sherman attended a Zion village council meeting for the purpose of asking the group to look into the constitutionality of the cross image as part of the town’s ID. It was a simple request and the council agreed to do so. But Sherman had notified reporters from all the area’s newspapers and radio and television stations, quite a few of whom showed up. Lo and behold, the Chicago NBC O&O, Channel 5, led with the story that night and the Arlington Daily Herald had it on page one the next morning.

Sherman discovered a welcoming committee at the next Zion council meeting. I wrote:

The Zion council chambers were filled with over 400 angry citizens, several hooded members of the KKK, and reporters from the dailies and dozens of community papers. Deborah Norville, too, Sherman adds proudly. Police officers with dogs in tow floated around the perimeter looking for signs of impending mayhem.

Sherman found his life’s calling that night. He went on to become a top dog in the Illinois Chapter of American Atheists and a nationwide spokesperson for the godless. I admired Sherman for his dedication, for his refusal to bow before the powers that be, for his guts in challenging that most precious of our human fancies. But, it wasn’t easy admiring him, as Neil Steinberg’s headline in his blog post this AM posits clearly and coarsely:

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“It was easier,” Steinberg led, “to sympathize with Rob Sherman’s cause than to sympathize with Rob Sherman.”

Sherman loved speaking in sound bites: god is make-believe, life after death is a fantasy, I am the Jesse Jackson of atheists, and so on. Sadly, neither atheism nor the separation of church and state was ever the story; Rob Sherman was.

I’d written the Sherman profile in my normal breezy, smart-assed style. An example:

Sherman is here to explain to housewives in Morton Grove and farmers in Winnebago County why he wants to destroy the Boy Scouts. It’s a tough sell, of course, because for years Sherman and his cohorts have been trying to stop people from praying in schools, from erecting creches in village squares, from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, from worshiping, for Christ’s sake!

Of course, he by no means intended to destroy the Boy Scouts, to stop people from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or even to worship, for Christ’s or anybody else’s sake. But that’s how his opponents painted him. That subtlety, though, escaped Sherman. After the profile appeared, he invited me to appear on his television show. Our phone conversation was friendly. I expected the appearance to be a mutual back-scratching.

It wasn’t. The minute the red light flashed on, Sherman tore into me. He accused me of doing a hatchet job on him. He speculated that I was in league with politicians, law enforcement officials, and high muckety-mucks from all the major churches out to destroy him. He claimed there were nearly 200 inaccuracies in my story. (Hell, I doubt if there were nearly 200 assertions in toto in the story.)

Sherman, sadly, was paranoid. Descriptively, that is, as opposed to diagnostically — just in case he’s up in heaven, as we speak, taking notes about inaccuracies herein.

Funny thing is, in battle you need assholes on your side. How lucky this holy land was to have Patton on its side during World War II, for example. By philosophical inclination, he’d have been more comfortable commanding several dozen Wermacht divisions. Sherman was the atheists’ Patton.

He ran for public office a couple of times — for Buffalo Grove village clerk once and another time for US Congress from Illinois’ 5th District. Last month he announced he’d run again for Congress as the Green Party candidate for Illinois’ 12th District seat in Congress in the 2018 election.

This past weekend, while flying alone in his small plane, Sherman crashed into a field near Marengo, Illinois. He died at the scene, apparently.

Is Rob Sherman no more or is his eternal soul is now facing god? When he was alive, he swore he knew the answer.

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12/12/2016
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Stuff & Nonsense

Hot Air: Watching History

This quote making the rounds…

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… is utter bullshit. Il Duce (not to be confused with L’il Duce) never said any such thing.

Too bad. I wish he had. It’d be so perfect today.

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Revenge

Either the people who run Rainbow Bakery are among the lousiest, lying-est, reprobate bosses for hundreds of miles around or some bratty kids let their grief drive them to…, well, bratty behavior.

Them’s your choices.

The background: Rainbow is one of our town’s beloved local businesses. They’re as crunchy and kumbaya as a for-profit business can be so they fit into B-town better than a hand in a glove. A couple of old Soma Coffee vets, Taylor and Jerico, are longtime employees. The place bakes up vegan pastries et al that are served at the back office of this communications colossus, Hopscotch Coffee. Owners Lisa Dorazewski and Matt Tobey describe their staff thusly:

We are artists, musicians, poets, comedians, cat ladies, independent publishers, feminists, circuit wizards, linguists, professional humans….

And their customers:

We graciously serve a spectrum of customers – families, kiddos with allergies, students, artists, coffee fiends, townie regulars, vegan bloggers, seasoned hoosiers, golden ladies.

All in all, Rainbow purportedly is everything Bloomington wants in its citizens and entrepreneurs. That is, unless Dorazewski and Tobey are pathological liars and tyrants in sheep’s clothing.

A group calling itself the Feral Pines Revenge Coven has claimed responsibility for vandalizing Rainbow’s physical plant. As a result, the bakery has not produced its usual output of goods for days now. Check out FPRC’s manifesto here.

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Glue Attack

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To recap, a trans person named Feral Pines used to work at Rainbow. The FPRC claims Pines had been badly mistreated on the job, to wit:

  • “[S]he suffered daily emotional abuse at the hands of her bosses….”
  • Pines “was paid a shitty training wage for the entire time she worked there.”
  • Pines suffered an “emotional breakdown,” partly as a result of her mistreatement
  • Pines was fired, coldly, and left penniless with no chance of collecting unemployment.

The abuse, claims FPRC, came about in part because Pines was trans.

It turns out Feral Pines lost her life in the fire at Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire ten days ago.

FPRC writes in It’s Going Down (a blog for radical hell-raisers):

We will not accept this. We have lived for too long in this town keeping our mouths shut as our friends are exploited by punk bosses. We are asked to pretend that a business is “part of the community” if the capitalists who own it put out some shitty, nasally folk punk record back in the day. This stops now.

Rainbow Bakery fucked with the Troll Queen, and now they will pay. This bit of sabotage is only a taste of what is to come for you goofy-ass muppet motherfuckers. We are going to destroy your business. Nothing will fucking stop us.

If true, these charges are dynamite. They throw everything the Rainbow gang stands for into  a stinking shitpile.

Other local businesses are running scared now. One biz has instructed its employees not to talk about the incident, probably for fear of inciting the FPRC or anyone else like them.

I offer any or all the members of the Feral Pines Revenge Coven the opportunity to state their case, unedited, more specifically in this space. I want proof of your charges.

Then we can argue whether your action was warranted, even if the charges are true. And I’d be just as happy to host that debate here.

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TV’s Frank Speaks…, Uh, Frankly

Former Mystery Science Theater 3000 funnyman Frank Connif has turned his attention of late to politics. Here’s his take on the burgeoning Russia-gaming-the-election scandal:

Don’t give me that “Hillary was a bad candidate” bullshit. Real-life Bond villains plotted against her and she still got the most votes.

ptqb

TV’s Frank

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He’s right and he’s wrong — Hillary was a bad candidate inasmuch as the hatred she engendered was fatal. It wasn’t her fault; it was the fault of the haters, natch. Still, if your product makes too many customers want to hork, you’d better get out of the restaurant business.

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Break The Chain

Oh yeah, as I typed yesterday, we’ve done it a million times ourselves:

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That doesn’t mean, though, we should sit by idly and let it happen to us. Sound unfair? It is. Tough.

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Talking. Big.

Here’s the link for this past Thursday’s Big Talk with restoration architect Cindy Brubaker. And go here for the slightly-edited original interview with her.

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BTW: Cindy’ll be the subject of my next Big Mike’s B-town column in the Limestone Post. I’ll link to that just as soon as it’s published. Y’know, like, I gotta write it first, see?

This afternoon, it’s back into the studio again as I grill actor and drama teacher Francesca Sobrer. Tune in Thursday at 5:45pm to WFHB 91.3 for this week’s Big Talk.

You wanna know something? I dig doing this stuff!

[ALERT: The WFHB News Dept. will be running its annual end-of-year best stories compilation every weekday for three weeks beginning a week from today, Monday, the 19th. That means there’ll be no Big Talks after Thursday’s edition until January 12th. That doesn’t mean the Pencil’s going away. so even though you get a respite from my voice, you’ll still have to endure my keyboard ramblings. Good luck.]

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And Finally…

Re: The constant barrage of soc. med. posts pointing out every single laughable, cryable, head-scratching, rage-inducing appointment L’il Duce makes, every brainless, witless pronouncement he utters, and every wrong-headed policy he trumpets, is wearing awfully thin.

Dig: We’re all standing here looking at the forest. For months, we’ve known we were going to take a field trip to look at the forest. We’ve read books and articles and seen videos and docs about the forest. What in the hell good does it do us to keep pointing and saying “Look, another tree!”

The forest is rotting and it’s on fire. The more important  topic should be: What are we going to do about it?

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