Category: Chicago

Earlier in the fall, I had a whole list of notes for an essay grousing about how I was going to avoid watching football this year. It was motivated in part by watching the kids practicing in the park up the street in the hot August weather and feeling miserable for them. I was also lucky enough to watch one of my baseball teams make it to the World Series (although who showed up on the field is still a mystery), so my sports fix lasted almost up until Halloween.

Among my anti-pigskin arguments were that it’s pathetic to spend much time cheering a local team of pro millionaires when they have no connection with the city, enjoy ridiculously short and painful careers, and have had their jocks sniffed by writers, fans and groupies since they were 15 years old. The owners are so beneath contempt, with their talk about “a public trust” in ownership as they leech public money for everything from traffic policing to new stadiums, that they don’t merit mention. To put it in Oprah-style talk, how much is a fan investing in this relationship, and how much could he/she possibly expect to get back?

But my main argument was, if a guy is paying attention to more than one professional sport, he is wasting his life. And I still believe that.

But oh, there is something about a winning season with the Chicago Bears. Somehow the City That Works (intermittently, haphazardly and sinfully better for some than others) seems to work better when the Bears are winning. There are flags, hats, car stickers everywhere, and somehow the regalia doesn’t reek of marketing and zombified consumerism, at least not entirely. Everyone even remotely interested in sports around here loves a winning Bears season. It’s a combination of history and civic self-perception (everyone likes to feel like a Grabowsky once in a while), or maybe just a diversion as the winter months kick in. But this place must be a football town, because the Bears are simply unavoidable these days.

This doesn’t mean that my arguments against football are invalid. I’d dissuade any boy I know from playing it, because for all the talk about teamwork, there are a hell of a lot more unsung kids playing the line or riding the bench than there are making star plays. And the dripping machismo that surrounds the games and broadcasts? I feel like a pansy just watching the car commercials. Doesn’t it look like a whole lot of overcompensation is going on? I predict an apocalyptic homosexual orgy will break out both in the stands and on the field during one of the next three Super Bowls.

But all that being said, I’m sneaking in Bears games too (to a skilled TIVO browser like myself, the game can be watched in less than an hour, and without the inane patter of the announcers), when my wife and kids will let me. I sometimes have to beg for the time in a Kramden-esque bluff—you know, “I work hard all week, and I have earned the right to watch a little football”—but that’s as macho as it gets. Yesterday, while the Bears-Vikings game was going on in 15 degree weather, I was downtown ice skating with the family by the Bean and having a stupendous time. Then we went home, made chili, bought a Christmas tree that was so frozen you could have mailed it without wrapping, and then I watched the game in the comfort of my basement. It was a perfect, frozen winter day.

And truthfully, I probably wouldn’t be having so much fun if the Bears didn’t have that fight song that’s so damn catchy. (You can hear it played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Wikipedia HERE.)

Why, yes, indeed. Thank you to me for welcoming me back into my bosom. I just can’t thank me enough for my warmth and generosity.

So I go off to Deutschland with the Frau and Kindern, and what do you think happens? The whole world goes to Hammond in a handbasket. And I’m not talking about Israel and Hezbollah, even though we vacationers missed that conflict entirely, I’m not talking about the looming threat of Iran as a nuclear power, although today’s NYTimes points out that no one in the intelligence community (the ones who do the spying and the number-cruching) thinks that the danger is imminent. I’m not talking about heat waves, gas prices, or any of that stuff.

No. Here’s what I’m talking about: I come back to the bosom of the States and see that Chicago has indeed, as they have threatened to do for some months now, instituted a ban on foie gras. Can you believe it? What will I have with my biscotti in the morning now?

That Chicago, the erstwhile hog-butcher to the world, the place that legendarily learned to use everything in the pig but the squeal, would suddenly get all soft on us and knuckle under to the goose lobby just makes the mind reel. Do those alderman realize that by enlarging the livers of geese to 10 times the normal size, we actually have to kill 90% fewer birds for the same amount of liver (which is loaded with vitamins, BTW)? No, they don’t bother themselves with little details like that.

But it’s heartening to realize that human nature is still the same, and this city’s up-yours attitude is still strong. Many restaurants and diners who ordinarily wouldn’t touch foie gras now feel the urge–the compulsion–to eat it, on everything from pizza to cornbread. Yeseterday’s Tribune has an article about it.

And the best hot dog restaurant in the city–fabulous Hot Doug’s–is leading the fight for foie gras-furters.

A less publicized but long-standing protest continued at Hot Doug’s, where proprietor Doug Sohn offered three variations of a foie gras-laced sausage despite the prohibition. In April he named the foie gras and sauternes duck sausage (with green apple mustard and goat cheese) “The Joe Moore” in honor of the proposal’s sponsor.

As the joint’s slogan goes, “There are no two finer words in the English language than ‘Encased Meats’, my friend.”

Yes, me, welcome back.

Just west of downtown Chicago is the Blommer Chocolate Company, maker of specialty chocolate and cocoa to other manufacturers and snack bakers. When the wind is blowing right, downtown and River North used to be permeated with a calming, enjoyable, not-too-sweet smell of chocolate being rendered from cacao beans.

Who doesn’t love the smell of fresh chocolate cooking? Apparently some doofus in a converted loft nearby doesn’t, because that doofus has successfully sicced the EPA on the factory. He wasn’t complaining about the smell (probably because that was a known condition when the doofus bought his little exposed brick party pad, and therefore not actionable). His complaint to the EPA was the particulate the factory put into the air. Maybe the cocoa was dusting all the Crate & Barrel furniture this doofus had filled his place with, or clogging up the DVD player in his rad home theater system.

Well, whatever the reason, the EPA has cited the Blommer company and forced it to clean up. Now the factory will install extra filters that will eliminate both the particulate and the smell. Now, the doofus can quit worrying about getting cocoa lung, and start worrying about how he’ll have no friends when word gets out that he was the Slugworth who brought to an end that nice occasional aroma that was such a pleasant surprise.

These kinds of stories grow like weeds around Chicago’s industrial neighborhoods. Factories and plants—you know, places that actually employ people and pay taxes—are trying to stay in the city, and Joe and Stacee Timeshare move in down the block in a renovated loft space and start harassing the factory because it actually emits a smell or a noise or has trucks driving up to it at odd hours. Well, sorry, Joe and Stacee, they were there first, so shut the F up. There are few enough places in the city where people without a college education can earn a decent wage, and they don’t need you whiners making their lives difficult. Go find another place to live, or move back to Kenosha. Chicago’s already lost most of its candy-making capacity—how many of you knew it was once the candy manufacturing champ in America? So who knows how long Blommer will stick around if they have to put up with these squealing infants?

Went to the disappointing Sox game last night. Can’t believe they couldn’t knock in the winning run for THREE INNINGS IN A ROW. But what knocked me out was how intense the fans were. Intense, and almost prescient, because a huge number of them left after the ninth inning with the score tied. And it was barely 9:15 at the time. Hey, we had a first grader with us, and he sat through the whole painful thing.

There’s a lot of talk about the diff between Sox fans and Cubs fans. The former are supposed to be the true baseball aficioadoes, while the latter are disinterested drunks on the company plastic, old ladies and children.

But I couldn’t believe the booing going on last night, at a team that while choking, is still in a pennant race. Isn’t there some middle ground between the heated, pointed heckling of Sox fans (a tough love thing) and the mushy adoration that Cub fans slather over their “boys”, win or lose? (Didn’t Saul Bellow mention some affection like that, “amorphous potato love” or something?)

It was just embarrassing that only about one-quarter or less of the Sox fans stuck around til the end.