Would you buy a used car from a Chicago celebrity?
Sure, there's Oprah who (with the exception of the early missteps in the whole Frey debacle) speaks with the force of prophecy and Joan Cusack (doesn't it seem like she has some sort of facial tic?), but are Chicago celebrities really as earnest and, well, Midwestern, as our coastal brethren seem to believe?
New York Magazine says New York celebrities aren't very trustworthy at all.
March 8 is Blog Against Sexism Day.
Personally, I'll also plan to blog against sexism on March 9. But, by the 10th, I'll be back to trafficking in outmoded gender stereotypes.
During Khrushchev’s and Nixon’s “kitchen debate,� Khrushchev needled Nixon by asking, “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.�
Khrushchev might have been describing the modern American wedding registry.
But, even more, there's the revelation that those super-expensive appliances (Viking, Subzero, et al.) actually rate lower in quality than the ones we just put in our kitchen. (We generally went with the second-cheapest options, figuring there was no reason to be overly frugal.)
And, best of all, writer Christine Rosen reports that only 42-percent of households make even one hot meal per day at home. This made me feel like I might be about as domestic as the average American -- thrilling for me, but probably bad news for everyone else. And their children.
When Lovie Smith moved to Lake Forest, he asked around to find the best breakfast place and the best hot dog stand in town. He's still working on the hot dog question, but he's settled on a favorite spot for breakfast: Egg Harbor on Western Avenue, just across from the train station.
"I'm a Southerner," he says jovially. "You've got to have a big breakfast."
And so, without glancing at the menu, he orders up some scrambled eggs with cheese, sausage, hash brown potatoes, wheat toast with strawberry jam and a large orange juice.
I'm hoping the presence of all that food will help Smith forget that my notebook and tape recorder are on the table. Because I really want to get him out of postgame press conference mode.
As it is, he's giving me all the standard NFL head coach comments: "progress is being made," the team is "a super group," "next season, we'll take another step," Chicago has "the best fans in the country," and, oh yes, regarding bad athlete behavior, "we had a few incidents this year."
But Smith, 47, loosens up a bit when I ask him about his Southern background, growing up in Big Sandy, Texas, right in the heart of "Friday Night Lights" football-as-religion territory.
Parents 'never missed a game'
Being surrounded by that kind of intensity, even as a high school player, was good preparation for Chicago Bears football, he says. And his Texas childhood prepared him for his current job in another way, too: he learned to hate the Green Bay Packers.
"Green Bay," he says, with something that might pass for a snarl were he not incredibly well-mannered. "They beat my Cowboys in the Ice Bowl. Never forgot that."
He also never forgot the lessons of his parents, who were relentlessly supportive of their talented middle child.
"They never missed a game," he says. "And they waited up at home to talk through it afterwards. Never once did they tell me I'd done anything wrong. It was always positive, always praise."
Smith, who is one of five siblings, was one of those kids who takes on a certain maturity very early.
"My father struggled with a lot of things," he says. "He was an alcoholic when I was coming up."
So Smith remembers feeling like he had to be the man of the house sometimes, and he still remembers the time when his mistake -- being a little too rough when tightening a thermostat valve -- meant the family car was out of commission indefinitely.
"You don't have time to feel sorry for yourself," he remembers being told. "It was just, 'Start walking.'"
That attitude -- "when there's a storm, people want to see you calm" -- has carried Smith through the vagaries of a professional sports career.
"It's what allowed me to get out of Big Sandy," he says, and then corrects himself because there is a part of him that hasn't fully left that small town behind. "No, that's not the way to say it, [it's] what allowed me to grow in my profession."
'I couldn't have had a better dad'
He says he's only recently passed the point of thinking of his father, who got sober when Smith was in college and passed away in 1996, on a daily basis.
"But, sometimes," he says quietly, "you do feel him behind you. ... I couldn't have had a better dad."
He remembers, with something like amazement, that "Friday nights, he always cleaned up for my [high school football] games."
Smith himself has only missed two of his youngest son Miles' games at Lake Forest High School, but, with his two other boys, "I'm ashamed to say I've missed whole seasons."
When he does attend, he says, "I cheer when something good happens," and, in contrast to some of the more intense suburban parents, "that's all you'll hear out of me."
'We're so different'
Smith admits to some initial trepidation about having his son attend Lake Forest High School. When the Smiths, a biracial family, first moved here, they sent Miles to Loyola Academy.
"Lake Forest, bunch of rich kids, that's what you hear," Smith says, adding that he has quickly come to enjoy the small-town environment and that Miles has a great group of friends at the local high school, where he transferred after growing frustrated with the commute to Loyola.
For this smooth adjustment, and basically all things family-related, Smith gives full credit to his wife, Mary Ann, a Des Plaines native, whom he met on a blind date as a senior in college.
"We're so different," he says. "And I'm not talking about the obvious black/white thing. I mean culturally, she's a Chicago city girl. I'm from the sticks."
But somehow, they've lasted for 25 years.
"She's very patient," he says simply. But then, when he thinks about it, he decides there's something more to it. Because "patient" sounds too passive.
"You go down to Soldier Field, and there's 60,000 people there, and you can hear her voice over them all," he says, his voice full of wonder and love. He is often soft-spoken, but he is rarely this emotional.
Smith is the kind of guy for whom the word "man" means something quite specific.
Whether speaking of himself ("People don't usually say critical things when they approach me. I'm not 5-foot-8, 140 pounds. And I'm a man") or about his players ("I'm dealing with men. I'd like to treat them like men") or his staff ("They're men. Most of them are family men; they've got a job to do"), he uses the term to embody something traditional, something strong and tough.
He doesn't like it when I pick up the check.
Still, he seems to have enjoyed our nearly two-hour-long breakfast and the chance it's given him to talk about things that don't always come up at press conferences.
"I've had a storybook life, you could say," he tells me, in all sincerity.
He's wanted to be a coach since the fifth grade. He didn't imagine he'd ever make it to the NFL, but his mother, whom he describes as "one of those ladies who maybe has more of a direct line to God," had a dream that her boy would be an NFL head coach one day. She told him about it when he took his first college coaching job.
There will come a point in your life when you will have to do some renovation.
I'm not talking about some deep, metaphorical reconstruction of the soul. I mean a literal tear-out-the-old-cabinets, replace-them-with-new-ones, repaint-the-walls, refinish-the-floors and buy-new-appliances kind of renovation.
There are certain people who enjoy this sort of thing, who really like having a "project" in their lives, and who, when they are not personally involved in remodeling things, will watch television shows about other people remodeling.
I am not one of those people.
And I'm not married to one of those people, either. This should have been perfectly obvious to me when I met his three brothers, each of whom lives in a house with at least one unfinished room. Unfinished for years.
It seemed to me that the best way to avoid this fate -- dust, noise and asymmetry being pretty much my three least favorite things in life -- was never to start remodeling.
So we made a newlywed life plan that specifically excluded remodeling projects. My place was sublet without so much as a fresh coat of paint. His place -- now ours -- could be sold in a couple of years, we decided, as a sort of blank slate for other people's remodeling ambitions. And we would buy a new place only when we found one that required no modification.
I really liked this plan.
In my enthusiasm, it is possible that I never determined his feelings about it. In truth, I didn't think they mattered very much, since his tendency toward inertia can generally be counted upon to prevail against all other inclinations, such as his enthusiasm for the assembly and disassembly of household objects.
And it did seem reasonable to believe that the whole inertia thing would work in my favor, if only just this once.
How do you say 'bad idea'?
For reasons that are still not quite clear, the word "kitchen" started appearing on my husband's to-do list back in December.
Probably the topic came up among his friends and someone used the phrase "return on investment." Those words seem to evoke the same reaction in him that, oddly, both "semi-annual sale" and "starving orphans" do in me. Still, it didn't strike me as an irresistible force/immovable object situation. Inertia, like paper covering rock, beats shopping every time.
Then Mykola, the incredible Ukrainian handyman, came into our lives. And, suddenly, all things seemed possible.
"We could have him install some new cabinets," my husband said with the kind of enthusiasm you know, as a spouse, you are required to support.
I tried not to imagine all the complications that would surround this, beginning with the selection of the cabinets and continuing through their installation by a non-English speaker with whom we communicate primarily by calling our Ukrainian cleaning lady on her cell phone and having her translate as we pass our phone back and forth.
I dealt with my anxiety by telling myself that we would never get past the shopping stage.
Blame it on the meatballs
A couple of weeks later, I was on a food-related outing to Ikea when my friend Judy (who enjoys the white chocolate mousse cake in the cafe there, almost as much as I enjoy the meatballs) pointed out that they sold perfectly nice kitchen cabinets at very reasonable prices. Emboldened by a slight lingonberry buzz, I decided to check them out.
The center of the kitchen department at Ikea is not, as one might expect, a big display of cabinet doors and counters and such -- these samples are relatively small and sort of off to one side. Instead, the main attraction is a bank of computers loaded with their "kitchen planner tool" software.
"Wow," I said, sitting down in front of a flat screen monitor, "I could really get into this."
The software -- similar packages, not affiliated with any particular store, are available online -- allows you to re-create, blueprint style, your kitchen as it exists now, with doors, windows, appliances, cabinets and counters. Then you can click-and-drag your old stuff out and replace it with new. There's even a 3D view, so you can see what the newly fabulous kitchen would look like from, say, inside the cabinet above your sink.
After only a few minutes, though, I realized I couldn't get very far with the exercise, since I hadn't committed the exact dimensions of my dishwasher to memory. Still, I was enamored enough of the clicking-and-dragging that I mentioned it to my husband when I got home.
He promptly downloaded it to his laptop and, his engineer brain quickly snapping to attention, began measuring every inch of our kitchen.
The new cabinets should arrive in a few weeks. And the disruption, he promises, will only last for 10 days or so.
There's a great story in today's paper about research into the sex lives of older people. Apparently, guys in their 50s are more satisfied than men in their 30s and 40s.
Is that really "are more satisfied" or is that "have finally lowered their standards"?
This story, reprinted here from Salon.com, was all over the place this morning:
James Bond can't drive a stick: The filming of the new James Bond film, "Casino Royale," hasn't been going at all smoothly. The new Bond, Daniel Craig, had his two front teeth knocked out during the shooting of a fight scene recently, and now it has come to light that he can't drive the Aston Martin to be used in the movie because it has a manual shift -- and Craig can only drive an automatic one. Hardcore 007 fans, who protested loudly when the blond Craig was hired for the role, have now banded together to call for an international boycott of the film with a Web site called CraigNotBond.com: "Join the Casino Royale Boycott now, and you'll be taking the first steps towards bringing back the James Bond we know and love!" Ex-Bond Pierce Brosnan weighed in on behalf of his replacement at the premiere of "The Matador" in London on Tuesday, saying, "I think Daniel is a very fine actor. These are rocky waters, but I think he will have the last laugh." [N.Y. Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times (Zwecker), BBC News]
I've always felt a little ashamed that I can't drive a stick shift. (There was one brief, horrible afternoon when my husband tried to teach me so I could drive his car. Ultimately, selling the car and buying one we both could drive was a far better, and less tearful, solution.)
But, sexist as this is, I always sort of assumed that all guys could do it. (Especially European men!) Isn't this just required guy knowledge, passed on, with how to open a bottle of wine, how to operate a gas grill and how to quickly divide up a restaurant check?
What kind of a loser is this Daniel Craig, anyway?
Slate editor Jack Shafer says it's because they want to look younger. But doesn't dark hair actually make most faces look younger, or at least less washed-out?
That's been my philosophy, anyway, ever since I started coloring my rapidly-graying (thanks for the great genes, Dad) hair at age 20.
The only thing that troubles me about the whole situation is that, like Donald Rumsfeld, I have no real exit strategy. I mean, I continue to throw money at the problem but, at some point -- with luck -- I'll actually arrive at an age when having silver hair makes sense. What do I do then? Look like a skunk while it grows out? Shave my head and let it grow back in?
Where is Colin Powell when you really need him? There must be a doctrine for this.
You have to be a pretty serious geek to listen to a public radio debate between Republican gubernatorial primary candidates. But I think there's probably a whole other word for a person who misses the public radio broadcast and then, the next day, downloads the audio file to listen to on her (OK, my) iPod.
Whatever coolness points I lost, though, were well worth this hearing this question, posed to Andy Martin by the Daily Herald's Eric Krol:
"Mr. Martin, in your life, you've been sentenced to 12 yeaqrs for mail fraud only to see the conviction later overturned. You've been banned from filing frivolous lawsuits without court permission in several states. The Illinois Supreme Court once refused to grant you a law license, citing a military psychiatric examination that said you were paranoid and have delusions of grandeur and you once referred to a federal bankruptcy judge as a 'crooked slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.' Why should any voter take you seriously?"
Maybe not all of us. But lots of people I know. Or maybe it was just me.
The Enron trial resumes today (check out this Houston Chronicle site for everything you ever wanted to know about the case). At issue is whether officials in the company's Internet division continued to make optimistic public statements about company performance even though they knew it was falling apart.
While I don't have a lot of sympathy for Skilling and company, it does strike me that pretty much everyone who was ever involved in an Internet company did the same thing. We knew it was all going to hell, but we tried to hold on for as long as we could. And, as a manager at a late-90's tech start-up company, I certainly put on a not-quite-honest happy face for my employees every day. And I always wondered how my boss, the CEO, managed to keep himself quite so positive. (Probably the Christian soft rock he listened to in the car. But that's another story.)
Anyway, it seems like kind of a slippery slope to go after managers for putting a positive spin on how a business is doing.
So I'm expanding my multimedia empire and breaking into this new-fangled technology called TV. You can watch my (slightly shaky) debut as a "commentator" (think Andy Rooney without the crazy eyebrows) tonight on WTTW's Chicago Tonight.
The commentary comes at the very end of the show, but, really, you should watch the whole thing. And, if you care to, let them know what you think on the show's message boards.
I'll be there on Tuesday nights until they drag me off with one of those giant hooks from backstage.
I have to say that, while I'm very excited about this new gig, I'm not sure I totally fit in with the public tv crowd. I mean, I'd like to. It's pretty much the only TV I watch, other than some local morning news and the Daily Show, so these should be my people.
But I noticed, as I was walking in to the studio the other day, wearing sunglasses, a black pants suit, high-heeled boots and carrying the beautiful and obscenely-expensive-even-though-bought-at-the-outlet black leather bag that I "helped" my husband buy me for Christmas (he might not know what he paid for it), two women happened to be walking out. Both were in long skirts (courdoroy and denim, I believe) and were carrying WTTW tote bags.
"Maybe I don't belong here," I thought to myself, but then quickly decided that no, quite the contrary, this might be the greatest place on earth for me to be, since it could be the one spot on the planet where I could be the hippest person around who isn't an intern.
I feel guilty for even thinking these might-I-be-too-cool-for-this-school thoughts, especially since everyone there is so damn nice. I guess I just like to imagine that Carol Marin secretly hates me for being such an un-serious journalist, so it frustrates me that she's always so polite and encouraging whenever I run into her.
I mean, she kicked up such a huge fuss about Jerry Springer doing commentary at the end of a news broadcast, you'd think she might be at least mildly offended by my snarky presence.
My primary leisure time activity of late has been losing myself in my copy of The Complete New Yorker DVD collection. So far, I've developed a big(ger) crush on John Updike, discovered that I am way too amused by the cartoons of the 1950s. (Two very proper Chanel-suited ladies are walking down a city street and pass by a bohemian chick sporting jeans, a black turtleneck and ironed-flat hair. One of the Chanel ladies sniffs to the other, "Well, I'm certainly glad I'm not an individual.")
I'm not sure there is any way this can be viewed as a productive use of my time, but it is infinitely more pleasant than, say, answering my husband's questions as he fills out our first joint tax return. (Him: How much did you pay in state taxes last year? Me: Whatever they took out of my paychecks.)
Fueled by such denial, I had a deliciously fabulous long weekend, beginning with (if I do say so myself) an absolutely rocking birthday party for my just-turning-12 "little sister" and wrapping up with the lemon biscotti and honeybush tea I'm enjoying even as I write this. I love my job like crazy, but taking three full days off from it was surprisingly wonderful. It's enough to move me to renounce my usual "no holidays" policy and start taking them all the time. In theory, my work should be better (although, sadly, not Updike quality) this week because I'm so relaxed and recharged. Right?
