Computer-generated stuff

It was only a matter of time before a fractal showed up here... Care for some Muzak with that?

Ice

[So that my Mom doesn't have a heart attack, I should preface this by saying that this is a work of fiction. It didn't really happen. At least not quite like I tell it below.]

It's starting to feel like winter. If you live within Chicago's city limits, you'll need a warm coat. In the suburbs, where one only needs to traverse the distance between the car and the shopping mall entrance, you might be able get by without one, albeit uncomfortably.



I bought my warm coat two winters ago. Thusly armed, I shook my fist at the winter sky and cried out: "Ha! Bring it on! The most frigid of arctic airmasses will have no effect on me!"

The following Sunday, on a cold and gloomy afternoon, I boldly set out for the lakefront to test the insulating properties of my new purchase. It had snowed earlier in the day and was still overcast. I set off about 3:30, later than I had hoped. I had scarcely an hour before dusk.

As I emerged from the Lake Shore Drive pedestrian underpass, I could see that on a day such as this, the lakefront was not a popular destination. I looked north from Foster Beach and could see only one other person, a photographer with his tripod. He was about a half mile distant, near the north end of the seawall.

I proceeded north until I reached the end of the seawall and then descended the steps to its edge. I looked down at the water where it lapped at the seawall six feet below me and was mesmerized.

The water was filled with small chunks of ice, and atop the ice were little heaps of fresh snow. As a wave began to lift the ice, the snow would darken as it filled with water like a sponge. The water was near freezing, so it did not melt the snow. Then, as the wave crested, the water would drain out, and the snow would take on a luminous blue color.

I stood there staring at this, motionless, unconcerned by the passage of time. When I looked up, it was definitely darker than before. I could see the photographer was now down by Foster Beach. I had been aware of a man and his dog passing by at one point, but they were nowhere to be seen now. I decided to head home.

One step, and the ground seemed to spin and rise up toward me very quickly. I found myself prostrate and sliding slowly but inexorably toward the edge of the seawall, at the mercy of my momentum and of gravity. I stopped just at the edge. It was quiet. The only sounds I could hear were of my breath against my scarf and the gentle splashing of the water against the seawall.

Very carefully, I crawled to safety on all fours. The snow had been pushed aside as I slid, and it revealed a sheet of glass-slick ice underneath. I had been standing on this ice the whole time and had been unaware of the danger.

In a city of three million, I had found myself alone, with no one to call to for help. I kept thinking about how things might have turned out, had I been a little less lucky. From my own point of view, the end would have come quickly. Beyond that, how long would it have been before I was missed? It was such a stupid thing; might people think I had done it intentionally?

Troubled by these thoughts, I began to shiver despite the warmth of my new coat. I made my way back to rejoin the living, stopping for coffee along the way.

Why I am losing my mind

I could probably get in some trouble for posting this.

In order to improve morale, the company I work for came up with what they call "BeeTee desk-top dolls." Here is what they look like:



BeeTee is a plastic weeble-like tchotchke about six inches tall. As they say, it is a "fun reminder that ... we're doing well and we're smiling about it." Whee! According to the announcement, you need to fill out a coupon to request one, but I guess they didn't have enough takers. They ended up coming around and putting one on each desk, whether you wanted one or not.

Today there was a new announcement about BeeTee in our Monday Morning Update e-mail:



It begins: "[BeeTee] desk-top doll for internal use only." I spent the rest of the morning wondering in which orifice they wanted me to insert it. No, seriously -- it looks like they're saying that BeeTee is confidential property of the company. It's also kind of embarrassing.

I used to work with a recent immigrant from the former Soviet Union. He told me that one of the strangest things he noticed about America was how familiar it felt to work for a large corporation. It was surprisingly like living in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, to motivate the workers, they'd give out little busts of Lenin or red banners emblazoned with the hammer and sickle motif. Here they give out BeeTees... To paraphrase Marx: "To each, what nobody needs."

A Taste of Silence

I live half a mile from the eye of the storm known as A Taste of Heaven. I guess it was about two weeks ago that The New York Times published an article about this little sign they posted that reads:

Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven.

Actually, the Chicago Tribune published a story almost two months earlier, but the issue didn't reach critical mass until it made it to the pages of the NYT.

As for what I think, I support the owner. It's his restaurant, and he makes the rules. Yes, the restaurant serves pastries and ice cream, which kids like. But I, too, like pastries and ice cream, and what's more, I always use my indoor voice.

If anyone is seriously trying to stage a boycott, it doesn't seem to be hurting business. I haven't been in there in the past two weeks, but I hear they've been drawing such a crowd that, ironically, it's noisier in there than ever. So where in Andersonville can you go to eat in peace? Plenty of places.

I've written about Sweet Occasions, a bakery/cafe that recently opened up. My sister says they make the best quiche. Huey's (also mentioned in the above link) is a good place to get a hot dog or hamburger. Neither of these places is necessarily quiet, but at least they're good alternatives to A Taste of Heaven until the furor dies down. If you want quiet, try Urban Epicure, which has a nice little cafe area.

Broadway update

This spring I did an informal survey of Broadway between Foster (5200N) and Bryn Mawr (5600N). Since then, there have been some encouraging developmeents.

I had noted that the 5318 storefront was vacant. I think it might have been a discount cigarette store (?) previously. AJ's Grill should be opening in that spot any day now. It'll have to be pretty good to compete with Huey's in Andersonville.

I had described the Balmoral Building, at the southeast corner of Broadway and Balmoral, as vacant and poorly maintained. It appears to have been taken over by the owners of the Chinese grocery just to its south. The entire building is being renovated, and I've heard rumors that they will turn it into an Asian restaurant.

Work is in progress at 5433-37. I had previously included this property as part of the North Side Cleaners and Dyers building, but this is incorrect. 5433-37 is a separate, single-story building. The front facade has been restored to bring out the roof-line inscription: "Lincoln Hand Laundry." It has new windows, and a for-lease sign has been posted.

Construction on 5439-41 looks to be complete, and they are looking for a business to occupy the ground floor.

A used bookstore named Kate the Great's Book Emporium has opened up at 5550. I went in there and took a look around. They keep it nice and tidy in there, and they have a good selection of books. I bought a copy of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, which it seems like everyone has read but me.

Coincidences

Thirty years ago today, the Arthur M. Anderson lost contact with the doomed SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which was damaged in a storm and soon sank with all its crew near the eastern end of Lake Superior. In WGN's Weather Center Blog, Chicago weatherman Tom Skilling posted an entry late last night about the Edmund Fitzgerald's sinking. Tom Skilling's brother is Jeff Skilling, former CEO of Enron. While Enron was cooking the books, the firm that was auditing their finances was the Chicago accounting firm Arthur Andersen -- no relation to Arthur M. Anderson. The freighter Arthur M. Anderson is, as far as I know, still afloat. Arthur Andersen the accounting firm sank in the summer of 2002.

Speaking of CEOs, the Edmund Fitzgerald was named after a former CEO of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance of Milwaukee, WI. Edmund Fitzgerald was apparently no relation of former U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL), a strong critic of Enron, or of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was recommended to his post by Peter Fitzgerald. Peter and Patrick? -- not related.

The Governator's bad day

Back in May I nearly collided with Arnold Schwarzenegger on Michigan Avenue. I later found out what he was doing in town and wrote about it. A few weeks later, he paid Chicago another visit, and I wrote about that, too.

I'm not sure about the purpose of Arnold's second trip, but on his first trip, it was reported that he had raised $3 million for his ballot initiatives. The money likely came from conservative business interests -- like this Heartland group I've written about. (N.B. I have no data on who contributed what.)

Arnold spent more than $7 million of his own money, plus millions more that he'd raised, to promote his initiatives. Just running the election cost California taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

Not one of his ballot initiatives passed in yesterday's elections. Not one. I hope he at least enjoyed his stay in Chicago.

We do not torture

That's what the President said yesterday. Phew! That's a relief! A while back, I wrote about torture, and happily, it seems I was mistaken.

Oh wait... There are some people who aren't buying it. Might Dear Leader have, er, misspoke? See, if you define a term narrowly enough, you can always claim it doesn't apply to you. But that's bullshit, as Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says:

First the administration defined torture so narrowly that torture according to them was not torture... And now that the administration has broadened the definition again it still insists on employing coercive interrogation techniques that constitute torture -- water boarding is a method they employ -- they claim it merely amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment -- but the world knows it is torture.

Back in June there was a brouhaha in which Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), on the Senate floor, denounced such treatment as characteristic of oppressive regimes. The message was lost, however, when he made an unfortunate comparison to the Nazis.

One other comparison he made was to the gulags of the former Soviet Union. As we've learned in the past few days, this was comparison was also unfortunate -- unfortunate because it turns out our CIA has been operating actual gulags in former Communist Bloc countries. I should mention that I haven't come across any reports of how prisoners have been treated at these "black sites," but the fact that they operate outside the law or any sort of external scrutiny is worrisome. A little light needs to shine on these places.

ChicagoBloggers

I have not been doing a good job of updating the blog lately. Since the band concert last week, I've been busy catching up on other stuff. I spent a good part of this past weekend planting bulbs squirrel food in the yard.

A while back I sent a request to ChicagoBloggers to be added to their list of blogs. I thought I'd hear from them or something, but nothing happened. Months went by. Now I find out my site is listed there. Here's the graphic for my CTA line, which I might decide to add to my sidebar:



You might be asking, "'This is grand?' What is that supposed to mean???" Here's my theory...

On the 'L' trains, when you approach a stop, an automated voice comes on the P.A. to announce the name of the stop. If you take the Red Line down to the Grand Avenue stop, it'll say, "This is Grand." This theory, however, runs into trouble when you consider that all the graphics, for all the train lines, say the same thing, even though only the Red Line and the Blue Line have stops at Grand Avenue.