For Those Of You Despairing, A Little Hope

Here's a couple of camera phone shots of stickers on cars in Chicago that I saw in the last couple of days. Remember-- this is the midwest...





I doubt you'll be surprised to hear that the second one was on a car parked outside the library when my stepdaughter and I went there late this afternoon.

Oh, Yeah, That's Okay Then

Earlier today, I glanced at a New York Times online headline:

Justice Department Asked to Investigate Tejada

I wondered what the hell problem they had with Tex-Mex music, which I happen to love. Then I realized it said Tejada, not Tejano. Miguel Tejada, the baseball player who's suspected of using steroids. Doh.

In the words of Miss Emily Litella, "Never mind."

Fear of Algebra

Yesterday, I started my Chemistry 201 class, the next step in my long journey to eventually get a Pharmacy degree. I'd had to talk to a counselor to get out of the prerequisite-- either Chemistry 121 or a basic math course. I'd had both, nearly 30 years ago. In fact I'd sweated through ten semester hours of Calculus as a freshman at North Central College in 1979 and 1980.

In order to check to see if we were really ready for the class, our teacher put six algebra problems on the board. Suddenly, after a 30 year absence, algebra reappeared in my life.

Surprisingly, it all came back to me. Thankfully, the kid sitting next to me was a math major, and with a few kind reminders from him, I was able to do all six problems.

We took a break and spent the rest of the first day of class choosing a lab station and checking in our drawerful of lab equipment. The professor also checked that we knew how to safely light a bunsen burner.

The class was fascinating. The ages, genders and ethnicities were mixed. I'm pretty sure that at 46 I'm the oldest guy there. But there was an enthusiasm and sense of the future that was fun to be part of. Sunday night, I'd had a lot of anxiety about the class. Yesterday, though, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be.

Winston Smith, the Peter Principle and the Threat of Talent

Back in 1997, I got a call from my old friend Mark. He was going on an interview for a web design job. He told me he didn't think he'd take it, but he'd told them he had a friend who might be interested. That friend was me.

Mark had roped me into doing web design about a year before that. No matter that I had no training or knowledge of how to do it. He gave me a sheet of codes and taught me how to pull up "View Source" from the toolbar in Netscape, which allowed you to view the code of a web page (it still does). Before I knew it, he was paying me 25 bucks an hour to do work for him.

We went to the interview. Sure enough, he begged off on the job, but I took it. It was all the way in Oakbrook Terrace. That meant getting the clutch fixed on my 1987 Toyota Tercel. It was well worth it, though; the pay was $35 an hour. And I desperately needed the money. I was engaged in the biggest fight of my life. My son's mother had tried to cut off my relationship with him in order to "punish" me for leaving her. I had been taking out credit card advances in order to pay for a lawyer. Suddenly, I was making more money than I ever made in my life.

I worked at a workstation that belonged to the son of the president of the software company I was working for. The son was doing a college internship for college graduation. And when you're doing your internship for dad's company, guess what? You don't have to bother showing up for work. I actually met him only once, when he dropped by to get something out of his desk.

I did have an officemate. Jeff N. was a quiet kid who'd grown up in the suburbs. He was an interesting guy. His hobby was snow sculpturing-- making sculptures out of snow. He'd come in 2nd or 3rd in a state competion. He was very, very intelligent.

Our boss there was a lady named Kathy L. She was a case study in the Peter Principle; that people rise in organizations until they reach their level of incompetence. They can't move forward and won't be demoted, so slowly, positions fill with people who can't do their jobs. Kathy had been the editor of the company newsletter, until the company had discontinued it. The decision was made to have her run the company website-- never mind that she didn't know HTML from Shinola.

She loved to have meetings. Meeting after meeting after meeting. Often, I sat for an hour or two waiting, surfing the net, making a ridiculous amount of money while she had a meeting with the regular staff discussing things that had already been discussed or simply didn't need discussing. Often, she just held court, bragging about her 14 hour workdays-- workdays that were easily 50-75% wasted time.

Since I was a hired gun, I just kept my head low. I badly needed this money. Had it not been for that job, there's a good chance that I would have had to give in and settle for less than joint custody of my son. Yet another thing I'm forever indebted to my late friend Mark for. But Jeff was another story. He could barely conceal his contempt for Kathy and her rank incompetence.

One day, he asked my opinion on something. He explained to me that branding is important, and that it's especially important in a product that is invisible-- like computer software. He pointed out Microsoft makes sure to put a sticker saying "Powered by Microsoft" on every computer that carries its software. Intel also puts stickers on computers. He proposed a sticker for the software company to put on computers. He showed me three or four designs he'd come up with, and asked me which one I thought was best. He was going to go to Kathy with his idea.

While I was there, Jeff got a poor review. This was preposterous-- Jeff was great at his job. Clearly, Kathy was threatened by him. I kept in touch with Jeff for some time by email after my time as a hired gun was done. Within six months, Jeff was fired.

Remember in the book 1984-- Winston Smith's officemate is a guy who is working on Newspeak. The guy was intelligent, talented, and, Winston realized, doomed. He was too intelligent, despite his usefulness to the government. Sure enough, one day he is "disappeared."

Years later, it dawned on me, that the day Kathy decided she was going to get rid of Jeff was the day he went to her with the idea of the stickers. He was, she realized, intelligent, talented, and a total threat to a talentless hack like her.

A Sign Of The Times

Yesterday, I picked up both the Chicago Reader and the New City Journal, another "free" newspaper here in Chicago. What I saw shocked me. It wasn't the content, though; it was the size of both papers.

Recently, the Reader went to a tabloid format. They'd already reduced the number of sections from four to three a few years ago, when they had their old format. Back in the day, the Reader was a thick paper, full of ads, personals, etc. This is not the case.





I pick up a Reader every couple of weeks. When I was a young single guy, picking up a Reader was a Thursday tradition. You'd check out where bands were playing, read music reviews, maybe even look through the "Matches." Even just a few years ago, Kim and I met through the Matches, though we did it online.

The newspaper business is in trouble. Recently, Cincinnati joined the many US cities that only have only one major newspaper. My friend Larry, who works for the Hartford Courant, told me that they keep attriting positions down without replacing people, meaning a bigger and bigger workload for him. The Chicago Tribune was recently sold, and a lot of people think that Sam Zell may have been foolish to buy it. And the Sun-Times laid off a bunch of people in the last week.

I have trouble believing that we're looking at the beginning of the end of newspapers. But there's a shift going on. People in advertising have trouble selling ads-- why, the potential customer asks, should they pay for an ad when they can advertise free on Craigslist?

Zell has talked about newspapers needing to develop new means of revenue. What this means remains to be seen. He's succeeded in all of his other endeavors; I hope he saves the Tribune.

For my part, as much as I read news online-- I probably spent an equal amount of time every day reading the paper and online versions of the New York Times (I subscribe to the New York Times)-- I can't imagine a day when I don't want to have the newspaper in front of me while I eat my breakfast. I hope that the people who run newspapers can figure something out.

A Weary Friday Random Ten

This week my kids went back to school. I got a break-- I don't go back until Monday. I've got Chemistry 201 and Biology 122 this semester. It'll be ten semester hours-- I'm creeping up to a full-time class load.

In the mean time, I've got a cold that's kicking my ass, and I'm looking forward to relaxing tonight with a glass of red wine and a movie with Kim.



1. This Land Is Your Land- Woody Guthrie
2. (Get A) Grip On Yourself- The Stranglers
3. Marrakesh Express- Crosby, Stills and Nash
4. Machine Gun- Jimi Hendrix
5. Welcome To Paradise- Front 242
6. Big Balls- AC/DC
7. Treatment Bound- The Replacements
8. Just Another Nervous Wreck- Supertramp
9. Don't Fear The Reaper- Blue Oyster Cult
10. New York State Of Mind- Billy Joel

Notes:
1. As I've gotten older, I'm struck by what a beautiful and patriotic song this is.
2. This is the one with the line "But the money's no good...." For years, I only heard this one in clubs or at parties and had no idea who did it. It's on the No Thanks! collection of '70's punk.
3. I played the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album nearly every day in high school. Still sounds great.
4. This is a long song, done with "The Band of Gypsies"-- Billy Cox and Buddy Miles.
5. This was another one I heard a million times in clubs and had no idea what the name of the song or group was until I heard it on Comcast Cable's New Wave station.
6. The social pages say I've got the greatest balls of all.
7. The Replacements are tied with REM as my favorite eighties band. I've mentioned before that I was at their last show on July 4, 1991 in Grant Park.
8. Okay, so Supertramp's a guilty pleasure. Sue me.
9. "I want you to explore the space of the room with the cowbell!"
10. I know/It's only Billy Joel/But I like it....

What's That Sound?

It's the sound of me doing the Happy Dance.

Kim and I have CNN on right now, to catch the returns from the New Hampshire primaries.

What am I so happy about?

First, dirtbag Rudy Guliani is fighting with joke candidate Ron Paul for fourth place, with 8 or 9 percent. Remember a few months ago when pundits had annointed Guliani as the Republican candidate?

I guess having been mayor of New York City on 9/11 wasn't enough, was it? I guess, in the end, substance trumps imagery. At least sometimes.

But the icing on the cake is that Fred Thompson, whom pundits had also annointed as the Republican candidate, has fewer than a thousand votes. I think Elvis got more write-in votes than that today in New Hampshire.

Taking Care of the Tags, Part II

The newly-married (sorry ladies) Frank Simarco tagged me with the Seven Little Things About Myself tag recently.

1. I have owned two Ted Nugent albums in my life-- his first, self-titled album Ted Nugent ( the one with "Stranglehold" and "Just What The Doctor Ordered") and Free-For-All. Hey, we all have our dark secrets. It was the seventies and I was in high school. And besides, he lost me at Cat Scratch Fever. That album sucked.

2. After a summer spent starving due to bad financial circumstances (1982), I swore never to let anybody go hungry. To this day, when I get panhandled, I offer to buy a meal, and have never, ever turned down a request to buy food, and never will. And I never give money. Hey, I can barely afford to buy my own cheap wine.


3. I once paid a guy five bucks to help me and a group of my friends roll a huge boulder behind an SUV parked on Addison Avenue in Chicago. As you might predict, the hour was late and there was tippling involved.

It seemed really funny at the time.

4. I'm not a big sweet-eater, but I would trade one of my kidneys for chocolate-covered cherries. Fortunately, my son is aware of this and usually gets them for me for my birthday and Christmas every year, and still have both of my kidneys.

5. I nearly voted for a Republican once. In the 1990 election, Republican Illinois governor candidate Jim Edgar bucked his own party, which was in the process of trying to stack the Supreme Court with anti-choice candidates, and declared himself emphatically pro-choice. The Democratic candidate, Neil Hartigan, for whatever reason, waffled on the issue. Edgar was always a moderate within his party, and it didn't hurt that he'd gone to my college.

I never got a chance to make the decision; a construction job I was working at that day went overtime and I didn't get to the polling place in time to vote. It's one of the few times since 1984 that I didn't vote.

Edgar won that election, even without my vote. And I've never even been tempted to vote for a Republican since then.

6. One of my favorite movies is True Believer, which starred James Woods, Robert Downey, Jr. and Kurtwood Smith. Everything about it-- the story, the performances, the cinematography-- just grab me. I've never met anyone who even put it in their top ten. I've watched it easily twenty times.

7. I lived for the Monkees' television show when I was a kid. I wanted to be Mike Nesmith, hat and all.

Unfortunately, my dreams of rock and roll stardom are fading away as I slide into middle age. Unless, of course, Monica lets me do guest vocals on Heart and Soul on her upcoming R and B remake of Huey Lewis and the News' classic Sports album. I might have a chance then.