See Ken. See Ken Trainor. See Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest columnist with great idea for the Obama camp: Blame Bush!
Why didn’t they think of that before?
Tag: Oak Park
Job-killer
In hard times, union hardball has no traction:
With one of its two elementary schools crippled by a stalled construction project, the school board of River Forest Elementary School District 90 voted this morning to cancel a union contract and bring in a non-union company to finish the job.
Look. The working man is not just the union member, who in this case is killing jobs for himself and his brothers and sisters. When will they ever learn?
Thing is, this school board depends not a whit on labor money.
Tales from the sauna
I’m sitting there, guy comes in all togged out for handball. I think, so? he does the sauna that way. Doesn’t shower, as the sign on the “Y” wall says. I have it wrong. He drops his ball on the grate, comes back, gets it later. I take notice, he says it warms the ball up, makes it livelier.
That was a few days ago. Today another guy comes in naked but with a bulky gym bag. He begins to put his handball clothes on, I get it, say, Headin’ for the courts? Yep, he changes here to get warmed up, he explains.
Makes sense. Sauna warms up ball and player. On with the games!
Asking a question at Irving School
I rang the village president’s bell last night, unwittingly. Discussion was of widening Eisenhower vs. extending the Blue Line. 50 or so in audience at Irving School, prez in audience with his two small kids. I asked cost over the decades of the Austin Blvd. bottleneck (where four lanes each way become three) — the cost to us, I explained, the metropolitan area.
Up popped prez (David Pope) asking for time. You’re the prez, said speaker, a transportation expert and former village trustee, ceding the space. Prez stood facing us and gave 5-10 minutes to rebutting a metro-area argument because it ignores special needs of the Austin community to the east and Bellwood, Maywood, and other towns to the west, some with economic development plans on which widening the Ike would put a kibosh.
At one point he looked over at his two kids and with a word quieted them down. I hadn’t realized he had kids with him and at first thought he was making like the Jesuit in Cincinnati who stopped his sermon in the university chapel to ask a woman to remove her crying baby. (Later, chastised privately by a father of five, he admitted he’d been wrong. And later became provincial!)
Elise Pope with David
At another point, one of the prez’s two came up and wrapped her arms around his legs, then, holding on with one hand, circumambulated him several times. Didn’t faze him. He continued, expanding on his main point by stating his preference for extending rapid transit, including to Oak Brook, with its many jobs (he said how many, but I forget), currently inaccessible to non-auto-owning residents of those towns — who presumably would remain unaffected by metro-area economic benefits maybe tied to a widening.
The transportation expert had argued against its making much difference anyhow, taking the question seriously on its face. But it had been enough for the Prez that I raised the concept of metro-area benefit, as if metro can take care of itself and it’s up to Oak Park and others to care for the economic also-rans — Austin, Maywood, etc.
We are at the heart of something here, the belief that direct relief of, special attention to, a segment will help the segment and will do no harm to the whole. It’s a belief felt wholeheartedly by some, even after decades of special attention that has produced no results for the segments — consider academic-gap programs in the schools and continuing economic malaise in the face of government aid and stimulus programs — and have one way or another been a drain on the economy and well-being of the whole, including the very segments we are talking about.
I had no idea what I was about to stir up in the mind and heart of the village prez (whose fatherly instincts and behavior I greatly admire, by the way) when I asked the cost to the metro area. But he apparently identified my question as signalling an approach to, even a philosophy of, how to achieve the best for the most which runs counter to prevailing concepts that call for special treatment. It did, but it still deserves an answer.
(WBBM-AM’s Bob Roberts has coverage of an earlier part of the meeting, with discussion of rapid transit-Blue Line extension vs. widening of Eisenhower, or even in conjunction with widening it.)
It happened on Austin Blvd.
Got shot and stabbed the other day at West Sub. I.e., got frozen with a local and had my squamous cell carcinoma excised by an expert plastic man. Felt a tug and twinge here and there, but was out on the street in an hour or so walking down Ontario. No problem.
My mother called it a “thing.” Had a “thing” removed, she explained, unwilling to dignify it further. Having a college education, I must do so.
So I look it up and read in Wikipedia and find this:
Squamous cell carcinoma is the second most common cancer of the skin (after basal cell carcinoma but more common than melanoma). It usually occurs in areas exposed to the sun.
Like my upper right cheek, q.v. if you’re in the vicinity. Quod vide, “have a look,” for the (tragically) Latin-deprived.
Sunlight exposure and immunosuppression are risk factors for SCC of the skin with chronic sun exposure being the strongest environmental risk factor.
Conundrum: sunshine gives me Vitamin D, currently a hot vitamin, but also maybe SCC.
Now. What if Doc couldn’t get all my SCC? I had to wait a half hour for the lab to decide that, lying on my bed of comfort. What if I lived where single-payer rules — Canada, UK? — and though covered could not get care and had to wait till my cheek was exploding?
I would have to check in with my detachment philosophy. This would be my father’s “A hundred years from now, nobody will know the difference,” which he applied to minor irritations, followed in my experience with Ignatius Loyola’s requiring 15 minutes to accept a hypothetical disolution of his Society of Jesus (Jesuits).
That’s right. The great man said it would take him 15 minutes. To accept the crushing loss of his life’s work. It’s what he preached, of course, variously known as detachment, indifference, abandonment (to Divine Providence), and other Stoic virtues.
Two Holy Thursdays
Had a very good one-two punch Holy Thursday., with attendance first at my Tridentine-mass church, where some 125 or so people huddled in a church that is really a chapel for the potentially long and boring service that turned out rather good and second at my neighborhood RC church, cathedral-like and all Gothic, where I had the same experience.
It helped that I came late to the mainstreamer, missing the ridiculous foot-washing (and no doubt, ahem, problematic sermon) but catching the guts of it — offertory to end of mass — in church with six or seven hundred people. The culmination was the parade of the Host back and forth up and down aisles, people genuflecting as the main priest carried it past them in their pews. I had the feeling of that drama that comes when the great man passes the crowd massed at the curbs, waving, little kids held up to see, etc.
This was a good solid boost to faith. Music fit the situation, etc. We were all with it, a churchful of attentive, even (quietly) enthusiastic people. It didn’t hurt any that the priest on parade is a Jesuit I have known since we were novices together in 1950 and, more important, that he is a transparent guy without apparent agenda except to do the work of the moment.
Walked out of there with a sense of having been at worship that works, to use a largely Unitarian expression with wide usage elsewhere, as in this Lutheran publication with the essay fascinatingly titled, “’Blended Worship That Works’ or Cuisinart Worship That Sucks,” which I will have to read. I attribute my reaction in good part to my few-hours-earlier experience in the severe, almost puritanical atmosphere of the tridentine-mass service, with its overriding sense of the importance of doing things right in matters large and small.
This tridentine service is serious worship, sans fooling around, improvising, or indulging in casual manner. And the sermon goes with it. Not a scolding word in it, but a matter-of-fact discussion of how worshipers are to respond to the mysteries. He was instructed by “holy mother the church” not only in rubrics for this mass but also in the content of his sermon, the preacher-pastor said.
So he talked about the priesthood and only tangentially noted the current bad situation, making a point that has been made countless times, that one of the original 12 turned out bad. He also noted that the current situation gives an opening for critics of the pope who don’t like the way he does things anyway. (It’s occurred to me not that the current situation does not stink but that a John 23rd, lovable and permissive, would not be the same target for mediums around the Western world.)
In any case, the tridentine service supplies something that’s missing in the relatively new liturgy, that is, beginning in the 70s, and not just in the organized nature of foot washing on Holy Thursday, done with dispatch and strictly by the celebrant of a dozen men who are parishioners and not a dragged-out, chaotic affair such as extends the service too much. It supplies a seriousness and an objectivity about what’s happening.
Current liturgy, on the other hand, is therapeutic. Our neighborhood mainstream preacher on Friday night, for instance, was at pains to say the day was “not a downer,” that we die daily (implying that we should not fear death, I think: it was metaphor city in that obfuscatory sermon), that we have crosses enough to bear in daily life. I agree with much of it that I could understand, but the good-natured morale-boosting of it all is thin gruel that insufficiently nourishes people.
Nonetheless, it was nice on Thursday to experience the two kinds of Catholic worship back to back, with good results at lease on one day of the holy triduum. Now for midnight mass tridentine-style.
OPRF’s Weninger in SC
OPRF’s Supt. Weninger in South Carolina:
Today, the seven-member [Asheville-area] board must [begin to] decide who among the three [candidates] – a cerebral Midwesterner, a thoughtful South Carolinian and an engaging Georgian – will be their top choice. [italics added]
Next week the decision. Weninger:
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At Wednesday’s public forum, Weninger addressed a long-standing concern among Richland 2 personnel that an outsider would alter community and culture that already exist in the district.
. . . this is the first time in decades that a board is looking to outside leadership.
He explained the name:
For sure, Weninger is not a Southerner, noting his name, Attila, was given him by his Hungarian immigrant father.
But he said his parents’ story of coming to America fueled in him the sense that he could live anyplace in the country and be comfortable.
“I think I can be comfortable in Columbia. I really feel as if I belong to this country,” said Weninger, who described his leadership style as “situational.”
His style “has got to accommodate the culture,” he said, adding that he’d been brought to Oak Park to “make change.”
That ended in controversy with the board refusing to extend another three-year contract.
“My work is not done,” Weninger said. “I want to leave my kids a legacy because as an immigrant’s son, that is very important to me.”
OPRF's Weninger in SC
OPRF’s Supt. Weninger in South Carolina:
Today, the seven-member [Asheville-area] board must [begin to] decide who among the three [candidates] – a cerebral Midwesterner, a thoughtful South Carolinian and an engaging Georgian – will be their top choice. [italics added]
Next week the decision. Weninger:
if ($(‘#story_assets’).length == 0 && $(‘#assets_ad #yahoo_300x250_ipbtf div’).length == 0) {
$(‘#assets_ad’).hide ();
}
At Wednesday’s public forum, Weninger addressed a long-standing concern among Richland 2 personnel that an outsider would alter community and culture that already exist in the district.
. . . this is the first time in decades that a board is looking to outside leadership.
He explained the name:
For sure, Weninger is not a Southerner, noting his name, Attila, was given him by his Hungarian immigrant father.
But he said his parents’ story of coming to America fueled in him the sense that he could live anyplace in the country and be comfortable.
“I think I can be comfortable in Columbia. I really feel as if I belong to this country,” said Weninger, who described his leadership style as “situational.”
His style “has got to accommodate the culture,” he said, adding that he’d been brought to Oak Park to “make change.”
That ended in controversy with the board refusing to extend another three-year contract.
“My work is not done,” Weninger said. “I want to leave my kids a legacy because as an immigrant’s son, that is very important to me.”
Sullivan for mayor!
Former Oak Parker Sid Sullivan is running for mayor of Columbia MO. He and his wife Joan, recently married, “established roots for the first time” in Oak Park in 1975.
Sullivan worked for the Circuit Court of Cook County for 12 years. He later joined the private sector in 1988 when he took a job with Roche Diagnostic Systems, a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche, earning a master’s degree in business administration along the way.
Sid was preceded in politics by his wife.
In 1994 she ran for . . . county commission[er] . . . in Cook County . . . She says she finished second in the race and came close to unseating the incumbent. In 1996 she ran for U.S. Congress in a crowded field that included Danny Davis, who won the election and still represents Illinois’ 7th District.
Sid’s platform reflects his Oak Park-ness. He favors:
• Complete transparency in all city departments [which no man dare gainsay]
• Job opportunities for all [ditto, but where does the city come in?]
• An empowered and responsive city council [not now empowered?]
• Adequate shelter for Columbia’s homeless residents [a la PADS?]
• Neighborhood planning that creates a sense of community [Oak Park!]
• Humane treatment for animals [local issue here?]
Columbia? It’s
the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and the largest city in Mid-Missouri.[6] With an estimated population of 100,733 in 2008,[7] it is the principal municipality of the Columbia Metropolitan Area, a region of 164,283 residents.
vs. OP, with 50G or so, by the way.
Trip down academic lane: Boccacio vs. Chaucer vs. church
At Dominican U in RF last night, Robert Hanning from Columbia U. on confession in the middle ages. Title led me to expect a socio-cultural explication but he was about close reading of Bocaccio and Chaucer.
I found the former heavy-handed in his slashing attack on church practice, producing cartoon characters — opera boffo? — none of them credible or noteworthy. The latter — dear Geoffrey — produced memorable people and made same points with relative understatement. Subtlety, thy name is not an Italian one.
Considered a q. during post-lecture q&a, where was holy mother church during all this? Besides indexing Bocaccio. But H. was not attuned to that, or seemed not to be, or had simply ruled that out a la monograph-style, not to mention journal-ready text with references and attributions right and left.
Appropriate, in that he was keynoting a joint meeting of the Illinois Medieval Assn. and the Midwest body of medievalists, this in DU’s near spanking-new Parmer Hall on west side of burgeoned if not still burgeoning campus.
From which I exited on Thatcher, by the way, using the easement much disputed by tree-huggers and forest preservers. The trees did not cry out at me as I hung a left and headed south.
A nice evening, for $10 that included a sip of wine and bite of something beforehand, sitting and watching medievalists chatter in clumps. A look at the ivory tower, you might say, without prejudice.
But I had to think about what Ezra Pound would say, he who moved ever in the mainstream of (literary and other) life and preferred jumping to (fascinating, engaging) conclusions. Takes all kinds.
Blithe Spirit 