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Bellingham Roundabout By Bob Sanders

Buoyed by the success of roundabouts in Cordata and increasingly aware of impressive traffic slowdowns on the Guide Meridian at

Squalicum Parkway

and

Birchwood Avenue

traffic lights, the Bellingham City Council has unanimously expressed interest in a super roundabout.

Described as being peanut shaped, the likely project-to-be appears to have a lot going for it.  Unanimity by the Council on a project with a $5 million price tag is not easy to come by these days.  Already there have been jocular references to the “peanut roundabout” and the Bellingham Herald recently reported that a much smaller companion roundabout, to be located 500 feet west on Squalicum, is now being called the “unsalted version.”  Public scorn may be just around the corner.

What the roundabout needs is some beguiling panache, a creative step forward, if you will to deep six disdain replacing it with mystique.

Warning flags went up when I heard that descriptive phrase “peanut shaped.”  Can’t you just hear hip ‘hamsters, not content with calling Guide Meridian “The Guide,” referencing the unique roundabout as “The Peanut” as in “to get to St. Joseph Hospital, you come south on The Guide, then take The Peanut about a mile to what eventually takes you left  to Birchwood and the hospital.  Nothing to it on The Peanut.”

Who needs The Peanut, anyway?  Peanut identification in the Fourth Corner is a mistake for any number of reasons.  In the first place, what is the connection between

Bellingham

and peanuts?  Planters Peanuts, Mr. Peanut, the late jazz musician “Peanuts” Hucko (were he alive) and Jimmy Carter might like the association, but let’s be realistic.  A Peanut Roundabout could be a perfect fit for Godforsaken,

Georgia

or Nowhere,

North Carolina

but, hey, this is the Fourth Corner where we think Hooters before Hoody’s.  Further, legume worship already is in shuckingly good hands in

Ashburn

,

Georgia

, a bastion of goober reverence where the world’s tallest homage to the groundpea, a 20 ft. monument, is located.   

Lest this situation get out of hand, there is a solution to the obvious problem.  Let’s render in-operative all references to peanut shape, The Peanut and The Unsalted Peanut and replace them with a bold concept: Number 8.

Tied to the concept is the good fortune attached to the number.  Recall the opening of the Beijing Olympics on

8/8/08

, an inauguration determined by the significance of the number 8 in Chinese culture. 

Further, in this age of corporate steamrolling, let’s make some money for

Bellingham

and our Soon-to-Be Incredibly Famous No. 8 Roundabout.  Let’s sell naming rights to a member of Corporate

America

.  Let’s honor No. 8, just like major league baseball does to ball parks.  If

Houston

can have its

Minute

 

Maid

 

Park

and Seattle Safeco Field, let’s create for the betterment of

Bellingham

a nonpareil natural: The Super Motel 8 Roundabout.

Selling naming rights to

Bellingham

’s Soon-to-Be Incredibly Famous Motel 8 Roundabout will bring largesse to reduced city coffers and result in the first of many Motel 8s as

Bellingham

becomes a hotbed of Fourth Corner motel development.  The first of two circles in the roundabout is the perfect place for a Motel 8 flagship operation.

Such a coup should work a positive effect on

Bellingham

’s money shortfall, already the source of intense bleating by Mayor Dan Pike and the City Council.  A microcosm of those monetary shortages lie a couple of miles north of the future home of The Soon-To-Be Incredibly Famous Super Motel 8 Roundabout, if you’ll pardon the slight narrative detour.  That would be in Cordata, recently awarded Cordata Park, the neighborhood’s one and only and a long time coming.  While the park exists in name, there is nothing on the City’s drawing boards for the next six years to make the park possible by extending

Horton Rd.

--the park’s only entrance opportunity where a close-by parking lot is planned. This tale of disappointment brings to mind further delineation of Catch 22 under the sub heading of: Details, Details. 

Ah, then, what to do about the other zero’s far ranging possibilities?  Think, for example, of

8/8/08

in

Palm Springs

,

CA

and round-the-clock marriages at City Hall among the matrimonially -inclined who dealt themselves in on the date’s good fortune. The Soon-To-Be Incredibly Famous Super Motel 8 Roundabout might very well include a Forever 8/8/08 Wedding Chapel where calendars and clocks never change except when 9/9/09, 10/10/10, 11/11/11 and 12/12/12 roll around.   

And, for those inclined to feel that Cooperstown, New York is too far away to travel for reassurance that baseball is truly America’s great pastime, the Soon-To-Be Incredibly Famous Super Motel 8 Roundabout’s vast properties might include a Fourth Corner Wing of the Hall of Fame featuring inductees who once wore number 8.  Among them are Joe Morgan, Cal Ripkin, Carl Yastremski and Yogi Berra, the latter famous for rules of the road observations including: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it” and “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re driving because you might not get there.”

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Eternal Skybox By Bob Sanders

Die-hard Chicago Cubs fans, hoping for their first World Series title in 100 years, now know they can at least be buried in a Wrigley Field look-alike when they do.

“Beyond the Vines,” an internment location at Bohemian National Cemetery on the Windy City’s Northwest Side, will provide “eternal skyboxes,” otherwise called urns for those who have moved on from the deliriousness of Cubs mania. 

A key factor in the bereavement process, announced at the recent ground breaking ceremony, will be an ivy-covered memorial wall--some 14 feet high and 35 feet long. Featured will be a stained glass window created to remind observers of Wrigley’s green scoreboard. Prices range from $5,000 for the home run burial with single, double and triple options costing less. Thus far, the subject of concession stands has not been introduced. All this should attract the attention of filmmaker Oliver Stone who has made much  out of less. 

Word of the Wrigley miniature brings to mind one of Hollywood’s largely forgotten films giving one the kind of pause suggesting that, perhaps, memories of “The Loved One” entered into the creation of “Beyond the Vines.” 

“The Loved One,” produced in 1965, is largely a send-up of the funeral business and, as it was promoted, offers something to offend everyone. The film succeeds in no small measure thanks to writers Terry Southern (“Dr. Strangelove”) and Christopher Isherwood whose inspired lunacy was based upon Evelyn Waugh’s novel. Directed by Tony Richardson, “The Loved One” explores bizarre marketing aspects of the funeral business with a remarkable cast including Liberace as a creepy casket salesman, Rod Steiger as cosmetician “Mr. Joyboy” and Jonathan Winters in twin roles.  Winters plays the Blessed Reverend Wilbur Glenworthy of Whispering Glades and his brother, Harry Glenworthy of Happier Hunting Grounds Pet Cemetery. 

There are secondary targets in “The Loved One” including the Los Angeles British movie colony’s John Gielgud, wickedly sardonic as Robert Morse’s uncle, providing biting insight. Robert Morley is corrosively condescending as the colony’s leader and it is by way of Gielgud’s suicide that we learn of the offensive practitioners of the death trade.  

Whispering Glades is a take-off on Forest Lawn, a Southern California institution where countless film celebrities are buried. It is owned by the Blessed Reverend who has better plans for his real estate: an old-folks home with a dependable turnover. He also schemes to free up his land by sending Loved Ones into space for eternal orbiting, a subject whose obvious progression is thankfully interred as plot development.

Commercial sham and vulgarity are the coinage of the Blessed Reverend’s realm with its denizens offering Gladespeak--cleverly disguised jargon uttered in false reverential fashion by mortuary minions including sleek women called “comforters” who minister to the “waiting ones.” One of the comforters provides love interest of a sort beyond the film’s title.   Anjanette Comer, as Aimee Thanatogenos, is decidedly dippy and falls in love with poet Morse (Dennis Barlow) who gives every indication he would be deeply challenged by the slightest suggestion of sexual aggressiveness on Comer’s part.

Steiger, superb as “Joyboy,” the chief embalmer whose epicene flutter is beyond hideous, has a mother (played by Ayllene Gibbons) with an eating disorder. I will not attempt to describe what she does to the contents of a refrigerator.

“The Loved One” came out of Waugh’s disappointing experiences in Hollywood where he had been summoned to do a film treatment of his best-selling “Brideshead Revisited.”  People who should have known better finally realized the book is about Catholicism (“Oh, I thought YOU read it”) and Waugh was sent packing but not before compiling material for “The Loved One.”

It’s quite likely inspiration for the film was the result not only of “The Loved One” but, also, two non-fiction books about the mortuary business: Jessica Mitford’s “American Way of Death” and “High Cost of Dying” by Ruth Mulvey Harmer. Both were published two years before Richardson’s film was released to very mixed reviews. 

With Hollywood now cranking out re-make films seemingly eye blinks apart, “The Loved One” in new drag should offer compelling opportunities 43 years later by way of Chicago cemetery real estate providing fan fulfillment “Beyond the Vines.” It’s also a perfect title for a film about a family torn asunder by split loyalty to Chicago major league baseball teams, the Cubs and White Sox , who battle for World Series inclusion. A Cubs fan, one of two brothers, dies as a result of being hit by a game winning home run ball while sitting in Wrigley’s left field bleachers. This, as Alfred Hitchcock would point out, is the McGuffin of the piece. The faux Wrigley Field burial ground, to the redo what Whispering Glades is to “The Loved One,” is owned by Stetson Frickert; we’ll bring back Jonathan Winters to play not only Stetson but Earl Avarice, Cubs owner. The film, as with the original, will give us two penetrating looks at society: the baseball business and its new-found cousin: eternal peace for die-hard Cubs fans. And, yes, Woody Allen should play Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig.

As a-former Wrigley Bleacher Bum with sufficient awareness of mortal coil departures, I feel eminently qualified to write “Beyond the Vines.”  However, I’ll not reveal any more of my plot for obvious reasons.

Ready when you are, Mr. Stone.

Mike Royko By Bob Sanders

 There’s a book about Rupert Murdoch coming out in December likely to capture a lot of attention. “The Man Who Owns the News” by Michael Wolff should register high on the New York Times best seller list if only because the media baron apparently hammers one of his employees: FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly. At least that’s what the author suggests in Vanity Fair’s October issue although there isn’t one Murdoch quote to back up the claim.

Without question, there’s a captivating charm about Murdoch’s taking a shot at O’Reilly while the highly clamorous no spin fellow is still employed by the Australian. It may be a matter of role reversal with Murdoch finally tiring of being the hittee and not the hitter. Murdoch is one of those media poobahs inclined to acquire sudden disenchantment with underlings who, following firings, put their feelings into columns, articles and books. The largely justifiable castigation of Murdoch is something of a blood sport though falling short of the visceral pleasures of Bush bashing. The 77 year-old Murdoch, defiant about the advancing years and married to a gregarious wife one-half his age, appears to be changing his modus operandi having decided to get in the first lick or whatever it is that Aussies call a sucker punch.

The late Chicago columnist Mike Royko once found himself working for Murdoch and it didn’t sit well with the wickedly funny guy who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1972. That was six years before his paper, the Chicago Daily News, folded after which he moved to a sister publication, the Sun-Times. Royko’s sensitivities were offended in 1983 when Murdoch purchased the paper and the columnist began writing about the indignities of working for what he referred to as “The Alien.” It was not long afterward that Royko crossed the street for the Chicago Tribune, a move I had made three years earlier.

Royko had it all journalistically; he could spot a phony a bar length away and had an innate sense about what was important to the reader. He may have been at his best writing about some poor soul beleaguered by numbing and mysterious bureaucratic forces engineered by a fool; either that or in the failings of the fabulously futile Chicago Cubs.

When Royko wrote about sports, he was also the best sports writer in town and there have been some outstanding ones. He went after bigots and was an early champion of civil rights. During 38 years of observing Chicago’s human condition, he wrote a breathtaking five columns a week most of that time.

I met Royko in 1968 shortly after arriving in Chicago for employment by Playboy Enterprises. One of my indelible memories is of an inaugural round of golf at what I had named The Brute, a  Robert Bruce Harris-designed course of extreme frustration at the Lake Geneva (WI) Playboy Club-Hotel. Midway through the shotgun start, Royko picked up his ball on the 16^th green and headed for his car deciding to forego what followed, one of Hugh Hefner’s better parties.

A private (read shy) person, Royko intensely disliked parties except small ones where he knew everyone. He took some of his best shots at pomposity. One of his “culinary” columns, written when wine snobbery was at its zenith, had to do with proper reaction when offered a cork by a sommelier. “Salt it lightly,” he wrote, “and eat it. This will cleanse the palate.”

While journalists can be a contentious bunch, there was universal approval of Royko. His Pulitzer was additional proof that you had to read him to find out what was happening in Chicago. He had a monstrous appetite for rogues and hypocrites.  Councilmen on the take were red meat for him.

Back then Royko hung out at the Billy Goat Tavern and played a lot of 16-inch softball, a sports aberration as peculiar to Chicago as whiffle ball behind bars in St. Louis.

Having in hand an advance Royko column about a bureaucratic attempt to put gloves on all players (the columnist was against such sissy stuff), I alerted the media that Mike was pitching for his beloved Daily News team that late afternoon on a Grant Park field. He pretended to abhor media attention, but I always felt he enjoyed the coverage.

Royko loved playing softball and once was requested to put together a media all-star team to play Cook County Jail inmates.  Royko’s team was decisively defeated and over a beer explained the loss to film critic Roger Ebert: “I was nervous. I never pitched to an ax murderer before.”

After the Daily News folded in 1978, he moved his column to the Sun-Times where he continued to write about human stupidity, big-shot pomposity and corruption, petty and worse. He was writing some of his best stuff when Murdoch’s bought the Sun-Times and the columnist moved to the Tribune where syndication of his work by Tribune Media Services eventually exceeded more than 600 papers. 

Royko and the Tribune, once owned by arch-conservative Col. Robert R. McCormick, were in many ways an awkward fit. During the four years I observed him at the newspaper, it was akin to envisioning Royko’s alter ego, Slats Grobnik, seated at a classy bar or wearing a tuxedo. Royko died an old 64 on April 29, 1997 of a brain aneurysm leaving Chicago a lesser place.

Among my possessions is a copy of a Royko letter written April 8, 1976 on Chicago Daily News letterhead. It is addressed to Father Andrew Greeley, the controversial priest and author then writing a column for the Tribune. Greeley had objected to what he felt was Royko’s having been on the “Today” show “much of election morning” while Mike, indeed, was viewed something like seven minutes.

Royko’s letter (carbon copies to major Tribune editors including editor-in-chief Clayton Kirkpatrick) began: “Look, you pious little asshole, why don’t you get your facts straight just once in a while” and then soared to greater literary heights referring to the man , whose priestly duties were at odds with his authorship of sexy novels, as “you thin-lipped, constipated, quivery twerp.” Greeley today is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and a weekly columnist for the Sun-Times.

At this writing, there are two collections of Royko columns. Published by the University of Chicago Press, they are wildly funny, sad, and always to the point. They are culled from more than 7,000 columns--further evidence that Jimmy Breslin was right. Royko was “the best journalist of his time.” The second book, “For the Love of Mike,” has a particularly good forward by Roger Ebert who suggests that Chicago newspapers, owning copyrights on the columns, should reprint them one at a time.

Just as San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was a must read in that city, so, too, was Royko in Chicago. Maybe the best take on him was made by the late Art Buchwald who commented: “Royko has always been an angry man, but he’s so funny that his anger isn’t obnoxious.”

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John McCain As Reformer? By Bob Sanders

Many years ago in the rough and tumble of Chicago politics, there was an alderman by the name of Mathias “Paddy” Bauler. Paramount among his 43^rd Ward charms was directness toward voters regarding the thievery attendant to his civic duty performance. In 1955, the saloonkeeper/politician  danced a celebratory jig when Richard J. Daley defeated the do-gooders. His jig was accompanied by an observation deeply understood in the Windy City: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.”

With so much attention being paid Sarah Palin’s nomination as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, it appears another distraction has been achieved in a political season of “hey-looky-there.” With the Nation’s voters either totally captivated by the Alaska governor (call it diva time in 10 minutes) or questioning of her fitness for office, a cataclysm of sorts would, otherwise, have hit the Republican Party. It was delivered by John McCain as he accepted his party’s nomination for the Presidency. While offering his best speech so far, McCain’s words and phrases of reform were given little attention. Somehow, Palin as the distracter extraordinaire trumps all other considerations. At least for now.

McCain, as reformer of his party, is not much of a stretch. In truth, it’s what a maverick is capable of doing and McCain was that in spades when running against George Bush in 2000. A couple of things happened in South Carolina as the Republican primary reached a make or break stage. Bush dirty tricksters discovered McCain and his wife had adopted a daughter in Africa. The color of her skin and TV commercials  making no mention of adoption wrote sayonara to the McCain candidacy. It was Willie Horton all over again.

How does a Republican presidential candidate, aware of Bush’s immense unpopularity and the profound need to disassociate himself on every level, manage to throw his arm around the man who destroyed McCain’s 2000 chances in a way that even pragmatic Paddy Bauler would likely have found reprehensible?

McCain has to be very careful how he sells himself to voters as he does a high wire act. While such across-the-aisle acceptance speech phrases as “the way we respond to disasters” resonates with independent voters, McCain has to keep telling himself that evangelicals comprise 35 per cent of the electorate with 48 percent of declared Republicans who believe Bush remains on the right track and continues to guide us honorably. Democratic evangelicals number 25 per cent. Bush true believers also are the people who probably didn’t cotton to McCain’s suggesting that the U.S. “should stop leaving our country’s problems to some unluckier generation.” Acknowledging this country as imperfect is difficult to swallow for the true believers, inclined to feel that people who don’t wear the American flag in a button hole or on a blouse is, somehow, lacking in patriotism.

McCain’s acceptance speech calling for reform of both Washington and the Republican Party probably hit acceptance among the middle when he said: “We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption.” The far right seems to be very selective when it comes to sin. Bill Clinton’s sexual escapade in the White House and all that followed suggests fornication and lying about it is worse than Bush’s start of a war of many outrages including the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans.

The Arizona Senator also got in a good anti-Bush lick by calling for “a new standard for transparency and accountability.” McCain really took it to Bush on that one. If there is one word that best describes Bush/Cheney, it’s secrecy. One wonders if a Democratic speech writer will do something with Bush/Cheney & Co being no accounts because they have no “accountability.” Scratch that. Democrats are, for some inexplicable reason, incapable of piling on Bush while offering teeth-clenched contempt yet leaving the heavy lifting to bloggers.

My McCain speech notes (he never mentioned Bush by name) included a reference to how, under a McCain/Palin management, “we are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don’t like us very much.” Once again, McCain rapped the present White House although political neophytes know one of the reasons countries don’t like us is because we don’t talk to them.

While the pundits, taken by surprise at McCain’s Hail Mary pass in choosing Palin, were inclined to dismiss her, it becomes increasingly obvious that her being on the ticket will do two things: appeal to the far right and enable McCain to cleverly disassociate himself from Bush. McCain’s target is the middle and, as usual, that’s where the major battle is being fought.

Paddy Bauler’s rebuke to Chicago reformers had a firm foundation. While Goo Goos (New Yorkese near the end of the 19^th Century for Good Government Clubs) had momentary success in defeating New York’s Tammany Hall, the movement’s re-visit never had a chance in Chicago. Bauler’s description of them was “guys in black suits and narrow ties.” Styles change but John McCain knows how far he can tailor material in preaching reform. He also knows, as journalist Finley Peter Dunne so succinctly put it, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”A terrific book about Chicago corruption is by the late columnist Mike Royko who revived Goo Goos in  “Boss,” a highly accurate, funny and obdurate in its telling of the story of Richard J. Daley’s rise to power in 1955 and Paddy Bauler’s role (he was an alderman 1933-67) in it.   

We’ll take a look at Royko next time out.

Money Honey and The Guv By Bob Sanders

For many years, the City News Bureau of Chicago was a training ground for eventual luminaries including Mike Royko, Kurt Vonnegut, Seymour Hersh and cartoonist Herblock. The fledgling journalists who passed through its doors were in the process of acquiring a commonality necessary in arriving at the truth. It’s called skepticism and a reminder of that vital trait was contained on a sign prominently displayed to all who toiled there. The sign read: If your Mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

I sensed skepticism on the part of NBC broadcast properties when one of its own, Maria Bartiromo of CNBC, scored what in early evaluations was believed to be an impressive “get,” current journalese for scoop. My skepticism antenna went on alert when her interview of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the surprise Republican vice-presidential nominee, was announced. It was a significant story and certainly an un-likely one. In spite of the story’s value and its exclusivity apparently developed by CNBC’s “Money Honey,” the rest of the Peacock Network took it no further than headline mentions and promotional spots indicating the one-hour interview would be seen last Friday night (August 29) on CNBC at 7 p.m. Pacific Time. The reluctance to rally around the synergistic flagpole was strange.

Even more strange was the interview plus skimpy details of Bartiromo’s get.  In terms of the chronology of it, the Money Honey says she came back from a vacation and immediately set out for Alaska with a crew to do a story about oil. While there, she picked off an impromptu interview of Gov. Palin. That was Monday (August 23) and she had a follow-up conversation with the guv two days later. Those two interviews appear to more than equal the total time Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has spoken with her while plowing through a short list of possibilities in search of a ticket mate. Among them were Mitt Romney, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Palin was the longest of long-shots and a shocker to a lot of Republicans, charmed by her pro-life stance yet terrified by the heartbeat away aspect of McCain’s decision, a Hail Mary pass if ever there was one. 

The Palin interview by Bartiromo five days before being aired was mostly about oil but, after all, that was why she took a film crew to Alaska. The coincidental adjunct (FOX News must be furious) put Bartiromo in the guv’s office and on the North Slope where we learned the candidate-to-be likes moosebergers, knows how to fire a gun, calls her husband First Dude and is capable of more blather about Alaskan oil and gas than one could ever believe exists. 

The scene in the governor’s office offered slender insight into her relationship with oil companies and charges that she is in their hip pocket, a subject not alluded to in Bartiromo’s questions.  It was while looking out upon the Anchorage skyline if, indeed, it can be so described, that Palin rather giddily observed, “my next door neighbor is Conoco Philllips right there and their sky scraper is what I look at outside my window.”  

That’s as revealing as Bartiromo’s interview got. The rest was Larry King softball time with Money Honey lobbing the kind of questions that further endear her to the oil companies.

Bartiromo has had other brushes with the environment having scored a $5 million endorsement that would have given her a three-hour programming block hosting an ecosystem show on the Sundance Channel. The money was put up by Todd Thompson, at the time CEO of Citigroup’s Wealth Management Unit. Thompson, married and with whom Bartiromo was canoodling, was fired when he bumped a bunch of Citigroup lawyers from a Hong Kong to New York company jet flight. Thompson’s rationale was that he wanted to be alone on the flight with Bartiromo, married last time we checked, to Jonathan Steinberg, son of disgraced financier Saul Steinberg. 

Whatever reportorial skills the Wall Street reporter possesses were of no help when she failed to pursue the Troopergate scandal currently bedeviling the governor although officialdom misbehavior is nothing new for Alaska. The scandal involves an investigation into a family feud and whether or not the state’s top public safety official was fired by the governor because the official would not terminate a state trooper, the ex-husband of Palin’s sister. While this may sound like Hatfields and McCoys stuff, it’s serious business in Anchorage and, as they say, the talk of the town going back to 2005 origins. To add to the investigation’s folk lore, a moose was shot by the trooper, an indiscretion of some import and complexity to the guv since moose advocacy (read hunt them) helped get her elected. 

As it is turning out, Troopergate may be tepid material as the Palin saga develops one surprise after another including Baby Gate and the pregnancy of the guv’s un-married 17-year-old daughter. It’s all reminiscent of a soap opera.  So let’s call it “As the Stomach Turns.” 

And let’s not forget the reporting of Maria Bartiromo, the first to report from Alaska about Gov. Sarah Palin while missing the bigger story. While  Bartiromo has a copyright on her Money Honey tag, her gushing exclusive about  Palin might well result in a new Wall Street identification: Oil Goil.

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