Bribed With a Tuber

Illinois politics have cast a big shadow this year, so I suppose it's an auspicious time to write about the Chicago politician known as “Bathhouse John.”

Properly known as John Coughlin, he started his 45-year career as a Chicago city council member in 1892. In his city district, Bathhouse John represented Chicago's most impressive array of gamblers, bar-keeps, prostitutes, pimps, and safecrackers.

John (right) was colorful in personality and raiment, commonly wearing bright green waistcoats, hand embroidered shirts with hand-embroidered zoo animals, and pants that came in colors like “gas-house blue.”

Bathtub John’s constant companion was his sidekick and crony Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna (left). The two of them were variously known as the “Lords of the Levee” and the “Gray Wolves,” and together they controlled both the police and gangsters like Al Capone. (Below, a detail from a 1908 Chicago Tribune cartoon titled “Grand March at Bathhouse John's Ball.”)
How crooked were these guys? Bathhouse John once strongly objected to a newspaper article because it incorrectly identified his birthplace. The same article described John as a thief. He did not dispute that part. Even worse, in his office, Johns kept sacks of bread and potatoes to hand out to visiting voters. (Yay! I was bribed with a tuber!)

Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink would ride to the horse-racing track in the front seat of John’s limousine because the back seat was often filled with feed for John’s horses. The steeds had names like Official, Sub-Committee, and Honored Sir.

But best of all, Bathhouse John liked to write songs, including the lovely tune, “Ode to a Bowl of Soup.” (Seriously. Oh, and about that nickname: Bathhouse John had once worked as a masseur, or a “rubber” in the parlance of the day, in a Turkish bath.)

My sources are here.

The Greatest Photograph of the 20th Century

An obituary in the New York Times for comic artist Bill Elder (1921-2008) featured this, the greatest photograph of the 20th century.
The 1939 photo shows future MAD magazine writer/artists Bill Elder (above right) and Al Jaffe. The two schlubs are seemingly just clowning around in their Brooklyn high school cafeteria. But there’s something more here than mere comic perfection. Elder and Jaffe grew up during the Depression, an era when law dictated that every American be photographed in somber mien (right).

And yet here’s these two goofballs.

Elder and Jaffe could have gone into dry cleaning or retail, but they were destined to be comic artists. In that capacity, Elder squeezed an astounding density of humorous details into his illustrations, like this one from his 1954 MAD piece, “Restaurant!” (Full page layout below.)

Elder was also the artist who began wedging funny doodles in the marginalia of each page of MAD. His sophomoric humor was so charmingly unfettered that it leads me right back to that photo at the top. Now those are two unfettered kids. God love 'em.

“Sniff sniff. I made a stinky!”

Sorry for that blog heading, but that’s a direct quote from Baby Alive Learns to Potty (picture below). Although you’re probably familiar with dolls equipped with facsimiles of working digestive systems, this one’s a wee bit different.

Unlike the posterior posers of the past, Baby Alive is more… alive. First, you can feed her realistic bananas or green beans. Second, Baby Alive will often “hold it” until an unpredictable exit time. The little scamp might make a mess anywhere! Finally, after going, Baby Alive will proudly exclaim about her bathroom accomplishments… just like a real person.

Beavers have a pretty high-fiber diet, so after they eat their food (tree bark), the beaver digests it and then poops out what looks like a gelatin/oatmeal mix. What next? The beaver then eats its poop and digests it a second time. When it comes out this time, it looks like sawdust. Sawdust!

I mention this because the first Baby Alive-ish doll I saw was some decades ago. The problem wasn’t that you fed the baby and it pooped. The problem was that you then saved the doll’s poop, because that was going to be its next meal. While I doubt this process encouraged kids to engage in coprophagy (the eating of one’s own poop), it was an unfortunate process to observe. (A debate over whether dolls like this [whose contemporaries include Potty Patty, Potty Scotty, and the Mommy Real Loving Baby Gotta Go Doll] are in any way educational can be found here.)

Pick Your Torture: Stinging Nettles or Rappers Without Rhythm

“The man who publishes a book without an index ought to be d***ed ten miles beyond hell, where the devil himself cannot get for stinging nettles.”

John Baynes (1758-87)

This salty quote came to mind when it was brought to my attention that The Big Book of Boy Stuff's index is less than useful, inasmuch as there isn't one. This is a source of sadness for me, primarily because of the stinging nettles. To help make amends, I share this video from the late 1980s put out by the Southern Food Brokerage.

The intro is hopelessly lame, but things get really interesting at :34 seconds in.

According to possibly spurious research, this promotional video was intended as a riff on the Chicago Bears “Super Bowl Shuffle.” The salespeople featured served as middlemen selling food products to retail outlets. I'm not here to give a rebuttal to that. I'm just here to do the... never mind.

Addendum: I've stumbled across this passage on the ease of making a book index from Miguel de Cervantes' classic, Don Quixote:

And for the citation of so many authors, ‘tis the easiest thing in nature. Find out one of these books with an alphabetical index, and without any farther ceremony, remove it verbatim into your own ... there are fools enough to be thus drawn into an opinion of the work; at least, such a flourishing train of attendants will give your book a fashionable air, and recommend it for sale.

German Soccer Fashion, circa 1975

At 28 seconds in, you'll think you've lost your mind.

Conveying Fibs in a Volley of Oaths, Part II

In my previous post, I shared some of the impressions that Dr. Alexander Hamilton had of his fellow Americans as he traveled the Northeast in the 1740s.

One difficulty Hamilton faced was how local customs changed from one area to the next. For example, in Albany, New York, Hamilton found that when he met women, they expected to be kissed in the European style. Hamilton unkindly remarked, “This might almost pass for a penance, for the generality of the women here . . . are remarkably ugly.”

As to language, the good doctor found that he could barely understand many of his fellow colonists. In New York, Hamilton’s innkeeper had this to say about cooking:

“As to cuikry, I defaa ony French cuik to ding me, bot a haggis is a dish I wadna tak the trouble to mak. Look ye, gentlemen, there was anes a Frenchman axed his frind to denner. His frind axed him ‘What ha’ ye gotten till eat?’ ‘Four an’ twanty legs of mutton,’ quo’ he, ‘a’ sae differently cuiked that ye winna ken whilk is whilk.’”

Wait, I think I get it— No, I really don't.

Other adventures include the time Hamilton met a man with “buttons as large as a turnip,” and the time when Hamilton was napping beneath a willow tree and he had an encounter with a cow: “I was waked by a cow that was eating my handkerchief which I had put under my head. I pursued her for some time before I recovered it.”

So in reading Hamilton’s account, one finds that his fellow eighteenth-century Americans were variously funny, tough, wild, prejudiced, crude, pushy or shy, and rather greedy. For a different perspective, let’s look at what people from other countries thought of early Americans. In 1827, an Englishwoman named Frances Trollope moved to the United States. To document her culture shock, she wrote a book titled Domestic Manners of the Americans.

It was a pretty bad Manners. Trollope could forgive Americans for cursing and spitting all the time. She could have maybe gotten over how smug, preachy, and full of strong opinions they were. And while she was shocked at how avidly they grubbed for money, she could stomach it. But the Englishwoman would not stand for hypocrisy. As she put it:

“You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. You will see them one hour lecturing [on] the rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil [Native Americans], whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties.”

Ouch. Famed novelist Charles Dickens toured the states not long after Trollope published, and he was struck at how Americans seemed to always view themselves the social equals of anyone, actual merits notwithstanding. In his American Notes for General Circulation (1842), the author (who was renowned for his warm-hearted charity) really let us have it:

“Their demeanour is invariably morose, sullen, clownish, and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humour, vivacity or the capacity for enjoyment.”

When an author as renowned for his kindess as Dickens conveys insults in a volley of vituperation, there is only one possible response: Zinger!

My sources are here.

Conveying Fibs in a Volley of Oaths, Part I

“Were these colonies left to themselves tomorrow, America would be a mere shambles of blood and confusion.”
—James Otis, revolutionary from Massachusetts, 1765

Benjamin Franklin once described a group of typical Americans as “little better than Dunces and Blockheads.”

Harsh? Perhaps, but most early Americans were earthy, hardworking people; in 1830, farmers made up about 70 percent of the total United States population. (This was a time when livestock made an excellent birthday gift.) For a snapshot of these forefolks, let’s check in with Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712-1756). He's not the Alexander Hamilton shot by Aaron Burr, but rather a physician who traveled throughout the Northeast in the 1740s.

Hamilton kept a journal of his journeys in which he carefully described the manners of the people met. This was published in 1744 as Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton. In it, Hamilton relates that one landlady heated up leftover clams in a bedpan. Oh my. And in taverns and coffee shops, he found many Americans who spoke so loudly they “spit in one’s face at three or four foot’s distance.” (Star-mangled manners?)

One thing that is clear in reading Hamilton's account is the interesting demographic mix to be found in cities. In Philadelphia, he described sitting down at a tavern’s great table to dine with a motley crew of twenty-five other guests:

"There were Scots, English, Dutch, Germans, and Irish; there were Roman Catholicks, Church men, Presbyterians, Quakers, Newlightmen, Methodists, Seventh day men, Moravians, Anabaptists, and one Jew."

As for entertainment, a seventy-five-year old man performed for Hamilton by jumping on his bum “without touching the floor with any other part of his body. Then he turned and did the same upon his belly.”

As he toured about, Hamilton was amazed by the attention people paid to a simple traveler like himself. Both Greenwich Village and Providence, Rhode Island, were full of bumpkins who stared with open mouths. The people “were as simple and awkward as sheep, and so wild that they would not appear in open view but kept peeping at me from behind doors, chests, and benches.”

But not everyone was shy. Hamilton was most offended by the bigmouths he met on his journey. At every turn, the doctor ran into brash know-it-alls, ignorant clods, and, most annoying, liars and cheats. In Pennsylvania, he wrote, a person “will tell a lie with a sanctified, solemn face; a Marylander, perhaps, will convey his fib in a volley of oaths.” Just like today!
(My sources are here.)

A Pleasant Day for a Ride

Did I mention it's been a bit snowy in Portland? Behold the Bakfiets (bahk-feets), a Dutch cargo-bike with a marine-grade plywood box. The name literally means “box bike.” (One Bakfiets, two Bakfietsen.)

So anyway, it's a wheelbarrow with pedals.

While Ruby the Pound Hound will ride inside it, she prefers running alongside to bark warnings at the pedestrians, sledders, and cars that I pass.

Top photo by Robert Rowzee.

The Kallikantzaroi: Underground Carbo-Loaders

While Christmas elves seem to have the potential for mischievousness, they’re not even in the same league as the Greek holiday goblins known as the Kallikantzaroi.

John Tomkinson (author of Haunted Greece) writes that the Kallikantzaroi live underground most of the year, carbo-loading on worms, snakes, and frogs. The legendary Greek goblins then hold their annual above-ground rampage between December 25th and January 6th. Tomkinson writes:

“The Kallikantzaroi cause mischief, they intimidate people, urinate in flowerbeds, spoil food, tip things over and break furniture.”

Heck, forget the elves, even the Green Goblin looks like a wuss when matched up against those kind of Yule-tide shenanigans. In this Der Spiegel article, the director of the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre says that the Kallikantzaroi are still popular throughout Greece today, but people are not as frightened of them as they once were.

This is partially because there are ways to keep the Kallikantzaroi at bay— burning an old shoe is one technique. (Actually, they might work on more groups than the Kallikantzaroi.) In fact, Greek police might want to try that shoe trick out; tear gas and riot sticks certainly haven’t quelled the mayhem that’s been taking place in Greece over the last two weeks.

Who Wants a Screaming Monkey Wreath?

Did you know the New York Times website ran a little something that included The Pocket Guide to Mischief? Cool. My work is not generally mentioned in the same breath as J. M. Coetzee’s.

The image was part of a slideshow dedicated to— well, here, I’ll just let Rachel Harris explain:

"[O]nce in a while, when we’re pulling the endless books and press releases from publishers out of envelopes, out plops a little item of some sort. In fact, of every sort. From tennis balls to whoopee cushions, we’ve seen it all. Collectors call this kind of stuff 'literary ephemera,' and some of it is quite collectible. But not much of it."

Hey, do I detect a dismissive tone there? Watch it Harris, I'm an expert prankster (left).

Hey, while I’m at the New York Times, I see there’s a piece on other “gifts” that could be misconstrued as unwelcome. Jeff Snoonian (left) bought himself and his brother matching blue velour jumpsuits. This ensemble is accented with pinkie rings. Total cost: $90. Other memorable (and cheap!) gift ideas include:

• a screaming-monkey wreath
• a needlepoint outhouse
• a toilet-plunger lamp
• an annual Chia Pet (every year, a new one!)

(Hey, want to know what I really want? An Annoy-a-tron!)

Burritos for Books

It’s been snowy and icy in the Pacific Northwest this week, making this the least auspicious time of the year to go jump in a lake.

So that’s what 12 Seattle-are poets did. (Above, one poet lost her glasses.) But before leaping into the frosty arms of Green Lake each plunging poet did a recital of his or her own work. One was a certain Dr. Clinton Bliss, who rhapsodized, “The coronary arteries tighten up and cut the blood flow. If there already has been a narrowing of the arteries, it could precipitate heart attack or arrhythmia."

Oh, my bad, that’s the doctor describing vasoplasm, a potentially fatal reaction of the body after it's subjected to extreme cold. Bliss's actual poem was about a polar bear “swimming, skimming bottom, bubbles beating time.”
This surreality (above, VW's riff on Magritte) was especially welcome after receiving two sobering messages yesterday. The first was a forward from this blog regarding Portland independent bookseller Broadway Books. Below, the owner's son writes:

"This store is my mother's passion and she's been an outstanding success in her endeavors [for nearly 20 years].... my father told me that business this winter season at my mom's store had been incredibly bleak. So much so that the future of the store could possibly be in jeopardy....

To help publicize the store's plight, this devoted son will buy a burrito for anyone who can show a receipt from the store for over $50. (Man, I dropped $75 there the other month! Why didn't I wait?)

UPDATE, 1/22/09: Broadway Books survived, and 25 people took advantage of the burrito offer.

On the heels of this news came this posting from Around the Sun that two other local indies, Twenty-Third Avenue Books and In Other Words Women’s Books and Resources are in dire financial straits. The latter store needs to raise $11,000 by the end of December, and the former's website states that they're toast “UNLESS we can find a buyer, an angel investor, or somehow rally the community to SAVE OUR SHOP!”

UPDATE, 1/22/09: In Other Words Survived. Twenty-Third Avenue Books did not.

While these are Portland businesses, stores worldwide are having a tough go of it. So if you’re planning on buying books for the holidays, opt for your local independents. Not only does your dollar has a far greater impact there, it may well stave off a bookstore’s vasoplasm.

Human Piñatas and Rejection

I'm fascinated by advertising's better efforts even as I scorn the vast majority of ads. Walt Whitman felt the same way when he wrote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Anyway, I want to give credit where it’s due, so kudos to the creative team that concocted this Skittles ad.

Bill Shapiro (whose previous project was Other People's Love Letters) has sent out a call for writers who've been treated like human piñatas. That is, he wants their literary rejection letters. The cream of the rejected crop will be collected into a book: Other People's Rejection Letters. (The book will be large. It will contain multitudes.)

Writing in the Guardian, former editor Jean Hannah reveals that she rejected about 1,000 book proposals when she was in publishing. She fears that this new book will overlook the art of the rejection letter in favor of gratuitously pleasing material. Hannah notes:

“[W]riting rejection letters is a delicate skill... For it is not easy to achieve and balance the two central goals of a truly accomplished rejection letter: trying not to make the writer feel distraught whilst also discouraging him or her from ever contacting you ever again…. what I really wanted to write was, "Dear 'Writer', Please throw your laptop out of the window and never go near it again because this typescript is a shocking abuse of a perfectly good and innocent alphabet."

Guardian reader Mike Petty comments that his favorite rejection was, “Your work is so finely wrought and so divinely inspired that it would expose the rest of our output as the shallow nonsense that it is, leading to loss of face and a catastrophic fall in company morale, so we are reluctantly forced to return your manuscript to you.”

Without checking my own rejection slips (a trauma I'll avoid today, thank you), I'll tack on that also frustrating are editors who inform you that while THIS project of yours isn’t quite right, please keep them informed of your next great idea. This encouragement ("They like me!") leads one to immediately submit another proposal, which also ALMOST makes the cut but doesn’t… and so on. It’s almost enough to make one switch to decaf.

But in case you're feeling like a human piñata, let's end on an upbeat note: This very kind (uplifting, even!) form rejection letter (not mine!) from the literary magazine zyzzyva.

Singing Pickles

Note the other pickles' reactions after Baby Dill gets chomped.

AdGabber

"Oatmeal Sucks!" (repeat as needed)

The sports teams at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. are known as… the Friends. That’s not very intimidating, but it’s a Quaker school, so it makes sense. And Sidwell’s Friends keep it real— they're not above a little friendly trash-chanting.

At a recent high school basketball game against city rival Maret, the Sidwell supporters chanted “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” This taunting referred to the fact that both Malia and Sasha Obama will be attending Sidwell next year. The Obama's runner-up school? Maret.

As reported by the Washington City Paper, Maret supporters were not amused by the chants, which were "insulting and incendiary” according to one parent. I suppose, though it can only hurt as much as one lets it. Perhaps it’s better to have a sense of humor about being excluded?

Anyway, what I liked was the Maret rooting section’s response to the Quakers' incendiary chanting of the President-Elect's surname:

“Oatmeal sucks! 

Oatmeal sucks!”

Sidwell won the game. Some people get everything.