Shaky Danny

  I had been sail boarding with my friends in Lake Michigan with little success. Being male, we used our backs rather than our brains. We took turns wrestling the board while the rest of us considered the futility of our meaningless existence on the beach. In the 80’s Chicago winters were extreme enough to push me into the Caribbean. Going for two weeks meant I paid less in air fare. This also meant that the resort boards were unused over the weekend, when everyone else was in transit. In fairness to my friends, Lake Michigan is choppier and less buoyant than the ocean. By now I knew to paddle out to deep water and fall off the board, rather than on the board. Standing on the board, holding the line connected to the boom where it joins the mast, I reckoned the wind direction and maneuvered the sail to the opposite side. I wasn’t going to let the sail push me off again. I gently lifted the sail slightly out of the water. The water fell out of the uplifted hollow mast. The mast and...

I felt the cold water go down the back of my shorty wet suit. I should pay someone else to do this. Do my work outs, sleep with my wife…Why do I always get sick on vacation? If you can’t equalize your ears at the surface, then you can’t equalize your ears. Holding my nose through my mask, I equalized my ears. As I descended, I felt pressure on my ears. Don’t force your ears. Ascended to where my ears where clear, equalized again. Up and down until I reached 40 feet. At the ledge I crossed my legs and by inflating and deflating my buoyancy compensator was able to reach the state where I raised and lowered slightly with my breathing. Crossing my legs kept me from compensating with my feet. Over the edge I dropped to 80 feet facing the wall. I took my mask off and rinsed my eyes in the ocean. Put my mask back on, cleared it, checked my depth. 120 feet, not good. Went back up to 80 feet. Elmers’s watersports had set me up with lenses in my mask. I was on an Elmer trip to Bonaire. Bonaire...

  I wrote this shortly after the Democratic Convention: This recent convention solidified five deficiencies of the Democratic Party. Rather than addressing these well-known criticisms, the liberal elite, the party owned them with a nice helping of Jingo. One is their use of the term middle class. Looking down from the upper I suppose what they see is the middle class. I wrote about class in my book, Another Data Processing Book. In US land we have nine classes, a tic tac toe board, upper, middle and lower both ways: Upper upper Middle upper Lower upper Upper middle Middle middle Lower middle Upper lower Middle lower Lower lower     Most of us are middle-lower and lower-lower. There is a big bulb at the bottom with a long tail stretching out into the distance. Somewhere on that tail you can parse out a small segment that contains the population middle-middle. We aren’t ...

  According to their web site, 2024, at University of Chicago 43% of the teachers are professors. This is better than most schools. By third or fourth year an undergraduate will be taking instruction from a professor. Again, the site says the average pay of a professor at University of Chicago is $165,000. Nonetheless, most tuition money does not go to instruction. At the old Columbia College in Chicago graduation was a great shame. Nowadays Columbia is more collegiate. It used to be more vocational.   The instructors were professionals in their fields. Graduation meant you hadn’t been hired. If schools are training professionals, their graduation rate should suffer, just as in sports. Conversely why take training from people who can’t find work? Corporate training can be adversarial: how would you train your competition? I propose a new form of institution. Rather than a degree I propose an open transcript. Everyone can see your grades. Enrolling in the Co-operative Colle...

  A ridiculous amount of effort is spent criticizing Hillary Clinton’s character. When elections are that close, every infraction is magnified. There is a much simpler material explanation. It is pathetic how cheap Congress is. Most of their time is spent on phone banks raising money. There was a moment when it looked like Chicago’s alderman Vrdolyak would be sent to Congress. Imagine: -This is a billion-dollar appropriation? I get more than this for a zoning variance. Occasionally money rains on Washington. World War II was cost plus. Johnson unleashed Taiwan. When Nixon made the China deal, they had so much cash they were shoving it into filing cabinets. Reaganauts were Nixon wannabes. Bush Sr. held up the Saudis for Kuwait. Hillary Clinton was queen. She shook down healthcare so hard their teeth rattled. Everyone in Washington should love Hillary Clinton. The Saudis had to sit down, and Ross Perot complained about the service. Insurance and Pharmacy were in a bidding war t...

  Back when Chicago had winters, I once dragged myself through the slush into a travel agency and said: -Get me out of here. I hate to travel. There is some remarkable geology. In Lacrosse Wisconsin there are bluffs. There is a fun mix of prosaic and profane seeing people living on and around the bluffs. There are also the plaques. In Pennsylvania there is mention of Jumonville. George Washington at the age of twenty murdered Jumonville causing the French and Indian War which lead to the Seven Years’ War, which lead to our revolution. The revolution was not popular, ask the Tories, who respected the king, paid their debts, and opposed slavery.  The Evanston Illinois light house, built in 1873 after the North was freed of the South’s hatred of boondoggle. Why of all the stretches of sand along Lake Michigan was the light house built here? The light house was an emotional reaction to the sinking of the Lady Elgin in 1860. In Milwaukee there is a wonderful plaque explaini...

Brandon Johnson has just been elected mayor of Chicago. Except Byrne we have always elected lawyers, even prosecutors, in the hope that they would avoid indictment. So far, they have. Johnson is the first schoolteacher. As a teacher Johnson is trying to approach crime from a Confucious perspective, systemically. Here are some obvious concerns: A court clerk just made the mistake of self-publishing a book about a recent case. In general police, prosecutors, judges and even clerks should be cautious publicly expressing opinions that could be thrown back at them, endangering testimony, and convictions. It is unfortunate that people closest to issues are precisely the ones constrained from public discussion. Police are not screened for clerical aptitude. Clerical tasks are a major part of police work, especially investigations. Back in the 90’s the federal government confronted domestic violence. Their solution was the development of a form that must be filed if the husband was not arr...

  In Another Data Processing Book I have an essay on affirmative action. I also have a blog entry In Defense of Privilege . In light of recent events, I am revisiting them here. Most people seem to believe that affirmative action meant that we simply instituted quotas. Affirmative action law was passed by whites. If you could demonstrate merit, and not very strictly, you didn’t have to have quotas. So, case by case, company by company, school by school, it was proven in a court of law that they had legacy, employees’ kids, preferences, that they did not select on merit. They had quotas and now the question was how big those quotas should be. This maximized work for the lawyers. That is why there are law firms devoted to civil rights law. Current arguments against quotas have a misplaced notion of fairness The arguments of the time focused on institutional autonomy. They used phrases like “academic integrity”. Invariably these institutions receive federal money. They recognize ...

  Christine asked: -Why is Canada burning? Without hesitation I responded: -Lumber companies planted the wrong trees and it got warm. Seems glib, but in this case my cynicism was correct. If you go out on Google Earth, it is clear that the arboreal, original Canadian forest did not burn. Lumber companies proffer all sorts of rationalizations. Whatever they say, it didn’t work. If they take refuge in regulation, consider the Exxon Valdez. Exxon Mobil went into court and said that Alaska did not require double wall tankers. Everyone laughed because the reason for that was because Exxon had lobbied against it. Covering North America in soot is a lot worse than dumping oil on beaches. Lumber companies have no refuge. This is their game. They ran it. Lumber companies don’t own all the land, but they did the cutting. They didn’t know it was getting warmer? The cutover areas flamed. Arboreal sometimes burns, not like this. Please prevent these boobies from planting trees. Th...

Small segments can have disproportionate influence in politics. Lenin’s conscious cadre works. The reality TV segment awakened the fascist segment and the Russians. Brexit and Trump satisfy the agenda of ending their respective empires. Republicans threatened to use the debt ceiling to bring down the empire. Because they were upset that Alfred Doolittle, the undeserving poor, was in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The Republicans were mad at all sorts of things, they coalesced on their antipathy towards Doolittle. As Doolittle points out in My Fair Lady , being poor doesn’t improve character. We all have a Doolittle in the family. Our families Doolittle hates welfare. He qualified for disability. He has Multiple Sclerosis from dealing crack. So, he can’t work, except for the side job disassembling cars. You can’t live on just disability. Doolittle is a good son; he got his parents on disability as well. Take Ella. This was a while ago. Ella started as Ella Fitzgerald...

Roller Derby was the most popular show on television. Then advertisers realized the demographic had no money. Hill Street Blues had lousy ratings but the demographic was management. Now they can target ads to individuals rather than shows. But the current marketing is pathetic. Given all the individual demographic that advertisers have I should be soft putty in their hands. Instead, they parrot my own history back at me. Why tell me about a site I have already visited or a product I have just purchased? Tell me something I don’t know. Amazon tries. “If you like this, you might consider that”. If I were an advertiser, I would want to screen out the people who know about me. When Harold Washington, mayoral candidate, was passing in front of the CO-OP grocery store, the bagger yelled to him: -Harold, go somewhere they don’t know you. Washington was smart enough to listen. When I see poorly targeted ads, I suspect the company is bad at everything else. There is a fine line between re...

Many people in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, are installing sewer valves for their homes. Some years back we had an impressive deluge and this is a reaction. Your stack or stand pipe may drain directly out to the street sewer. Putting a check valve or flapper in the way means that when the system hits load those houses refuse service and the overall pressure on the system will increase precisely at the time it is stressed. If you don’t have a flap then super tough on you, the effluent has to go somewhere. A product that creates its market. Once everyone has flaps there should be popped flaps or broken pipes. Flaps are necessary on flood plains. As flood plain construction is common it is difficult for other municipalities, such as Oak Park, to deny their use. Chicago used to require a basement floor drain. You were expected to share your suffering with your neighbors. Most people have their stack drain into their own sewer that then drains into the street sewer. This is a nice fea...

  One of the questions of mathematics is are we uncovering the ideal structure of reality or creating language. Yes. [i] I think of mathematics as a collection of tools or techniques. Socrates argued that all knowledge is innate. He took a young slave boy and interrogated him as to a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Since the boy kept agreeing with Socrates, he must have known of this proof already. Socrates described a right triangle, then showed a square constructed from 4 of these identical triangles, then set the area of the square to the areas of the 4 triangles and the square contained in them. Then he solved for the Pythagorean theorem. Socrates was in the impossible position of arguing for ethics and logic in a polytheistic world, surrounded by the arbitrary gods. By proving that a slave had the same innate knowledge as the rest of us he was calling into question slavery. Euclid hated this proof of the Pythagorean theorem. The proof requires that you already know w...

There is no recording of this. There was no videotape. It was Chicago. I think I was four years old, which would put this at 1956. A group of kids from the Neighborhood Club, that was the name, went to be on television. I had never seen a television.   Lee Phillips was the producer. There was a bear act. The trainer grabbed me out of the group of kids to ride behind the bear on a scooter. The bear had silver curly hair. I didn’t smell anything. I held onto the big massive wall of curly hair. There were extremely bright lights. I squinted at the cameras and looked away. I wondered what the cameras were. I waved to the kids. Then the dog showed up. The dog perched its paws on my shoulders while we rode around in a circle. The dog’s big head was next to mine; I could smell the dog.   I didn’t know from bears or scooters, but I was afraid of dogs.   Perhaps the bear was affected by my fear because it roared, which also startled me. I had a feeling like: -uh oh ...

I thought of this term while visiting Indianapolis and seeing their library and a nearby church converted to residential. Mullet refers to a hairstyle that is: -business in the front and party in back. A mullet is a type of catfish. Mullet head is a derogatory word implying poor and therefore stupid. This word became associated with the hairstyle a few decades ago. While I claim credit for Chicago Facade, peeling the facade off an old building then pasting it on a new one to satisfy nostalgia, the Mullet Architecture term already exists. Examples given are Frank Lloyd Wright’s Winslow house in River Forest and modernist houses built in Nazi Germany which maintained a severe front. I am extending the term to Mullet houses that meet the requirements of historic districts while allowing large family rooms and kitchens. This type of restoration arises from envy of the Ranch styles with their dramatic living/dining and open kitchen areas. People living in Craftsman, Victori...

I doubt that most of you still read newspapers. This Sunday we read the Tribune in bed while drinking coffee.  Christine did have her laptop, which she used to plan our bike trip.  Then she spoiled the day by dragging me bicycling in the forest preserves. It is not surprising that the Tribune has endorsed Rauner a Republican for the position of governor over Quinn a Democrat.  It would be remarkable if they had chosen the opposite.  The Tribune has always been a Republican paper.  I suspect that their decision has far more to do with association than ideology or tradition.  Their justification for the decision is that they regard Rauner as the more subversive candidate; that he will: -Shake things up. Illinois recently suffered another governor embarrassment when it was determined that we had elected a flat out crook. The embarrassment was that while Blagojevich was eager to sell, he didn’t have anything worth buying.  That is how irrelevant the...

Trip Advisor recently picked The Art Institute of Chicago as its best museum . I like museums that have a flavor of subversion to them.  The worst museum in the world might be Epcot Center.  It doesn’t claim museum status but it is supposed to represent Future World, sort of a perpetual exposition. There is nothing subversive about Epcot. Drained of content it is nothing more than a people containment facility, which may well represent their view of the future. My current favorite is the  Door County Historical Museum  in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin. It is jammed with the usual historical knickknacks. They have a discussion of fish boils. There is also a fascinating wildlife diorama constructed by a true obsessive. In the middle of the museum is a leftover jail cell with the key.  While I was there a girl locked her little brother in it. What little girl hasn’t wished to do that?  That is what a museum is for. My favorite exhibit is the  Mathematica Ex...

At the end of 1971 the draft had ended and my school no longer had any ethical reason to keep me and I flunked out.  At the beginning of 1972 I obtained employment as a medical records clerk at University of Chicago Hospitals.  The mother of a girlfriend quit her job as an admitting clerk in the hospital and recommended me as a replacement. So part way through 1972 I became the night admitting clerk working from midnight to 8 in the morning at Chicago Lying In, the obstetrics and gynecology hospital at University of Chicago Hospitals. Termination of pregnancy was illegal and every few weeks I would admit from one to three emergency patients for botched abortions.  I suppose the illegal operation would do all its patients on those particular evenings.  After a few months it dawned on me that those I admitted were the ones who had made it to the emergency room and if there were these many botched procedures there must be others who had not made it to the emergency r...

In second grade our teacher Ms. Bowers introduced us to Cantor’s diagonal proofs.  You are already familiar with this, of course.  The rational numbers, the fractions, are listed with 1/1, ½, 1/3… on the top row, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1… in the first column and the diagonals always equal to 1: 1/1, 2/2, 3/3… and all the fractions in between. Then Cantor counts them by going up and down diagonally, zig-zagging between them.  All the second graders accepted that.  Then she showed us that the real numbers, say all the real numbers between .0000… and .9999…., were uncountable because no matter which way we listed them, she could generate a new one by going down the diagonal going on to infinity and generating a new one.  Cantor liked diagonals. I may have lost some of you.  I think the reason we got this as second graders is because we knew that if Ms. Bowers was explaining this to us, it couldn’t be that complicated.  But adults believe that this stuff should be...