The latest salvo in the endless assault on "Kumbaya" comes in a TV commercial for Bazooka bubble gum that began airing this month.    (click icon to play) :

Smarmy, 20-ish bearded dude with hair down to his shoulders, wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and head scarf and sitting at a campfire with a guitar on his knee: Hi kids, welcome to Camp Chippewa. And let's all sing "Kumbaya."

Contemptuous campers, rhythmically: We don't want no "Kumbaya,"  All we want is bubble-gum! Bazooka-zooka bubble gum.

The Heights, a rap group, suddenly appearing: Bubble-gum! Bazooka-zooka bubble gum! Some gum!

Poor "Kumbaya."

Its title has become synonymous with sappy, saccharine naiveté and peace-`n'-love,  all-join-hands Pollyannaism that afflicts the starry-eyed. I've used the metaphor myself, even though I know it's a cliché that unfairly maligns a stirring and storied piece of music.

"Kumbaya" - also commonly spelled "Kumbayah" and  "Kum-Ba-Yah"- is a glorious song, really. That's how it got popular enough to become a cliché in the first place.

The stately melody invites harmonies and is as simple as the words to the refrain: "Kumbaya, my Lord, Kumbaya" repeated three times. Then "Oh, Lord, Kumbaya."

Its origins are in dispute. Some folk historians say it started as "Come By Here," a 1930s-era composition by New York City clergyman Martin Frey.  Missionaries took it to Africa, where natives pronounced the title,  "Kum Ba Yah."

Others say the song originated far earlier among the Gullah people-- African-Americans living in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia-and that "Kum Ba Yah" is "Come By Here" in their dialect.

Either way, the song had cross-cultural bonafides that lifted it out of the ordinary when it appeared on the scene during the folk boom of the 1950s and 1960s.   It's gentle call for divine presence struck a spiritual but non-sectarian tone.

The Weavers, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and many others covered "Kumbaya," and it turned out to be perfect for campfires, hootenannies and guitar masses (giving rise to the expression, "Kumbaya Catholics").  Perhaps too perfect.

Chicago folklorist Paul Tyler says that the song "became banal at the hands of non-African-American camp counselors and church youth workers--include me in that number--who stripped it of any rhythmic integrity."  (more from Tyler below)

The stately melody turned into vanilla dirge. And, in the backlash, "Kumbaya" came to represent shallow goodwill based on nothing more profound than the humdrum gerunds that differentiate the verses ("someone's sleeping, Lord..." "someone's praying, Lord..." and so on)

Plug the word into a news database and dozens of knowing references a month to "Kumbaya," many using it as an adjective (a "kubayah speech," "the kumbaya approach," "those kumbaya" moments) as well as repeated imaginary descriptions of disputing parties joining hands to sing, well, you know.

RightWingStuff.com sells T-shirts and other products featuring a cartoon of a drill sergeant grabbing a long-haired peace protester around the neck and shouting, "Kiss my kumbaya, hippie!"

This makes it difficult to sing the song without irony and to find its authentic and deeply satisfying groove. "Kumbaya" so easily becomes a parody of itself that, in real life, folkies and camp counselors now avoid it, too.

If you sing it, you must be clear that it's only to make fun of those who sing it -- a deep hole for a little song to find itself in. 

The teen target audience for the Bazooka TV commercial - it's one of a set of quick-take, hip-hop spots -- is probably mystified by the allusion, though the camp counselor's get-up telegraphs that "Kumbaya," whatever it is, is old and dorky.

Can anyone resurrect this song? Not a newspaper columnist, that's for sure.

"Kumbaya" needs a pop interpreter with a huge voice, a soulful arranger and the guts to challenge some 40 years of patronizing mockery. Norah Jones? Bruce Springsteen? Kanye West?

Like the gum, it's something to chew on.

Notes, references and other views below:

What's my problem? Glad you asked, Jon Yates.

But first, happy anniversary.  Your twice-weekly Tribune column, "What's Your Problem,"  debuted a year ago Thursday, and your look back today is a fine reminder of all the woes you've alleviated for readers who were otherwise at the ends of their ropes.  The idea, as you put it in your very first column:

Occasionally set aside a small piece of newspaper real estate to put the heat on lousy landlords, to out unresponsive utilities, to pressure bad businesses and unresponsive government agencies.

The threat of your spotlight illuminating their unfriendly and unhelpful practices has often been enough to get bureaucrats and business owners busy doing the right thing. It's a great use of the power of this pulpit we have, though I'm sure it's frustrating to you how little of the incompetence, indolence, indifference and sleaze you can actually address.

But that's not my problem. My problem is not with the column, of course, which is in the finest traditions of our craft,  but with the corporate and governmental culture that stamps out fires when the alarm sounds, but seldom exhibits sufficient determination to prevent the fires in the first place.

The usual WYP column goes something like this: Citizen/reader has a beef. Goes through channels. Gets nowhere. Tries again. Gets nowhere.  Finally contacts you. You check it out, reach the people in charge and their response amounts to a sheepish or sometimes begrudging, "Gee, sorry, we'll fix that citizen/reader's problem."

Happy ending?  Yes, for the citizen/reader.  But what I'd like to see is a response from the ultimatelly responsible party that shares our indignation; a response that not only contains a garment-rending apology, but  promises to discipline the underlings responsible for not solving the problem in the normal way, that vows to read the riot act to others in the chain of command and that pledges to reform practices so that no citizen ever runs into the same brick wall again.

It's all well and good that businesses and public agencies fear the newspaper and the pitiless dissections of Jon Yates and his competitors.  But my problem is that I'm not seeing everyone up and down the line  in these businesses and agencies fearing the wrath of those at the top of the organization whose commitment to public service and satisfaction is unquestioned.

Olympic gold-medal speedskater Shani Davis' Web site has posted the response below to my commentary on his behavior last February (and this follow up).

I don't know (or care) when this was posted or who "drcool" is. But it came to my attention when someone identifying herself as Davis' mother wrote to my mother the other day -- copy to me -- to drag her into it. The response attributed to me is accurate and reflects  great restraint on my part, don't you think?

UPDATE: Now there's even more!

Our front-page story today,"DNA test prompts 3rd trial in slaying,"concerns a criminal case I've been following for 13 years. Since that time, public awareness of the flaws in our justice system and particularly the deeply malignant problem of false confessions has changed the way nearly everyone looks at cases like this.

Here's a brief recap and short argument:

WTTW Ch. 11 provided a transcript of a panel discussion held Monday evening on the "Chicago Tonight" program with moderator Carol Marin, Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley, County Commissioner and Republican candidate for Cook County board president Tony Peraica and Chicago Ald. Todd Stroger (8th), the Democratic candidate for Cook County board president. 

The following excerpts deal only with Todd "I know nossink!" Stroger's answers to Marin's questions.

I'm frequently a critic of law enforcement -- jes doin' m' job -- but 11 days ago I decided to come to the defense of Colorado authorities involved in the JonBenet Ramsey case with a blog/column item headlined "Presumed competent."

My charitable idea was that the investigators and prosecutors who were making quite a big deal over ultra-creepy suspect John Mark Karr simply had to know more than the radio talk show hosts, tabloid private eyes and ranting citizens who were pooh-poohing the very idea that Karr was involved in the 1996 slaying. I wrote:

I'm presuming that there's something  powerfully corroborative -- something that has not leaked out -- that, while it may not prove Karr's admission is genuine, will strongly vindicate the decision to arrest him.

Guess not. It turns out that this was an "arrest first, evidence later" bit of high-profile bungling led by Boulder DA Mary Lacy who's now trying to justify her actions by citing a concern for the schoolchildren of Thailand.

Steve Rhodes is among those blaming the media for the circus, while Phil Rosenthal takes the "no apologies" tack. Today, Rosenthal writes:

There was always the implicit assumption that authorities couldn't possibly be so stupid as to press ahead, reviving a case that had been a thorn in its side for years but was starting to fade from public consciousness, without having a case of some sort. Except, it seems, they were.

(Here is a selection of Monday morning quarterback quotes from others)

The final analysis will be that what we had here was a failure to communicate-- that Mary Lacy and other law enforcement officials involved in the decision to pursue the Karr angle were never candid about how speculative their interest was and how utterly non-existent their evidence was outside of Karr's own fantasy-fueled confession.

Willingly, to be sure, but the media were misled by the "we know something we're not telling" posture of Team Lacy, a posture there was no need for them to adopt.

I, for one, bit on this intimation. Now I have a mouthful of crow feathers as I return to my critical skepticism, already in progress.

Today, most of the embarrassment and shame falls squarely onto the poor shoulders of Skokie resident Mardin Azad Amin.

The 29-year-old native of Iraq has become the subject of worldwide ridicule for an incident earlier this month in which authorities allege that he blurted out a bomb threat while passing through a security checkpoint at O'Hare International Airport in an ill-advised attempt to hide from his mother that he was carrying a marital aid in his knapsack.

"Embarrassed traveler tries to pass off sex aid as bomb," was the headline in the Scotsman (Britain).

"Embarrassed into terrorism," bannered The Washington Post.

"This guy's mom must be scary," chortled the headline writers at the Orlando Sentinel.

"Man tells security penis pump is bomb," said The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia).

"No, That's Not a Penis Pump, Mom. Really," read the headline in more than two dozen U.S. papers.

The snarkiest dig came atop Amin's tale as told in the Toronto Sun: "Penis pump? On trip with mom!?"

Har.

But sooner or later the embarrassment and shame are likely to fall on the airport security officials and prosecutors and judge in Cook County who, in consort, are pressing on with felony disorderly conduct charges against Amin that could land him in prison for three years.

Why?

The Great J-Blogger Showdown of `06 was a bit of a bust Saturday afternoon when Sun-Times columnist Debra Pickett withdrew from the panel Friday citing an aching back.

With rain threatening, I took the twins to see "Barnyard: The Original Party Animals" early yesterday afternoon:  It's not bad as far as animated, talking-animal coming-of-age movies go (the first observer here feels it's little more than "The Lion King" in a rural setting), but what caught my eye from the very first and distracted me throughout is that the main characters -- Ben and his son, Otis -- are male cows with udders.

I'm no sodbuster, and even I know that male cows, as it were, are called bulls (steers when they're neutered) and don't have udders (teats).

Many critics have noted this oddity, at least in passing. Carina Chocano of the LA Times wrote:

I understand that realism is not the main goal in an animated movie about anthropomorphized farm animals, but, seriously, what's with the male cows in "Barnyard"? Did the bovine gender confusion at the heart of the story give no one pause at Paramount or Nickelodeon?  ....all I can say for sure is that in writer-director Steve Oedekerk's bizarre computer-animated universe, "female cows" are required to wear hair accessories in order to differentiate themselves from "male cows," with whom they unaccountably share secondary sex characteristics.... (all are)  in unfortunate possession of protuberant udders that look like rubber toilet plungers with four wobbly cocktail weenies attached.

Our Michael Phillips wrote,

The real news about "Barnyard" is that its male "cows" (no such thing; cows are female) are running around with guy udders. Outrage is running rampant on the Internet Movie Database... A representative comment found on the site's "Barnyard" thread: "I can put up with plenty in movies but putting udders on bulls just ain't right." Or: "It just makes me think that the people making the film are morons and it bothers me far more than cars with tongues for example." So it won't be held up as farm-savvy in any respect at a 4-H meeting.

Little tiny horns and a smooth undercarriage would have said "bull," no problem.  And it's hard to believe that this suggestion wasn't made and adopted early in the production process.

Either you are of the "Fine with me. Fantasies are supposed to violate nearly every law of nature and physics" school of thought, or you are of the "I object! Even fantasies should to conform to a consistent internal logic" school of thought. (Cast your vote now)

I'm in the latter camp. The animals in this romp can talk, drive, play musical instruments and on and on. That's fine. We suspend disbelief because these abilities and characteristics are necessary to drive the plot or at least consistent with the other abilities of the characters.

But the udders on bulls are weird, unnecessary and therefore jarring -- think of, say, the Harry Potter character wearing a ballerina costume throughout the Potter movies for no apparent reason. 

Just because it's make-believe doesn't mean it gets to be udderly absurd.

• Somehow I've got to work this into the Songs of Good Cheer program this year: Answer me Jesus --"Wiser than an ordinary Magic 8 Ball!   Jesus offers 20 different answers to help you choose the righteous path. Ask a question and turn him over the answer you seek magically appears. Your personal Jesus will respond with wisdom such as `Have faith,' `Yes my child,'  or `Sinner.'  (hat tip, J-Walk)

• "Spoyler alert: If ye haue nat yet sene the performaunce of 'Serpentes on a Shippe,' rede nat of the romaunce, for it doth telle of the manye suprises and straunge eventes that happen in the course of the storye"  is an example of what you'll find at Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog.

• Tom Roeser writes, "I’ve been kicking around politics in this state for 42 years and have served professionally in Minnesota for eleven years before that…a total of 53 years…and let me tell you: This year’s state Republican campaign is the absolute worst I have ever seen in two states going back more than a half-century."

• I could solve the Rubik's cube in 20 seconds one-handed, like this guy, I just choose not to:

• Improv Everywhere and the Home Depot Slo-Mo, a prank involving 225 people: "We would synchronize our watches and then walk over to Home Depot and shop. At exactly 4:15 we would all begin moving in slow motion. We'd do that for five minutes, and then shop normally for five minutes as if nothing had happened. At exactly 4:25 we would all freeze in place for five minutes. When that was over we would go back to normal and eventually leave the store."  (via Austin Mayor)

• OK, smart guy. If a person from Hawaii is a Hawaiian and a person from Michigan is a Michigander, what is a person from Massachusetts? From Connecticut? From Maine? (Hint, not "Maniac"). Click here for all 50 answers.

• "Have you ever been in a situation where you wished your cell phone would ring? Maybe you wanted to look extra important or popular on that hot date. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to escape from an unpleasant meeting. With The Popularity Dialer, you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times)."  Yet so many of us have our phones on vibrate most of the time, can't a person looking for an excuse to escape from a social situation simply suddenly startle, reach into his pocket and say, "Excuse me, I have a call"?

•Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?)

• Here's how you and I are probably different. I have very fond memories of Mr. Beveridge's Maggot, and I love to watch these videos (short version; long version). Most people don't believe me, but it's way more fun than perhaps it first appears. One of the problems with my life is that it doesn't have enough maggots in it.

•Speaking of movie clips, here is a YouTube of the deleted "Jitterbug" scene from "The Wizard of Oz."

• Google is now offering Writely, a free, Web-based word processing program that allows for easy collaboration and sharing as well as remote storage. It looks like an excellent, though stripped down version of Word, but that's after taking it out for just a short spin.  I'd be interested in reviews from anyone who has given it a real test.  Benefits? Drawbacks?

• For incoming college freshmen, "Bar codes have always been on everything, from library cards and snail mail to retail items" is among the items on Beloit colleges most recent perennial Mindset List. It will be another 9 years before this list will include "They will have never known an August without a Mindset List."

• "Baby, Give Me a Kiss --The man behind the `Girls Gone Wild' soft-porn empire lets Claire Hoffman (of the LA Times) into his world, for better or worse." (link)

• Do you enjoy those little free, time-wasting flash games? Good Experience Games is a blog devoted to them.

• Charles Schulz meets Sam Peckinpah by way of Itchy and Scratchy in "Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown," a Google video (cartoon violence warning). 

• Boing-Boing  offers another reason to hate and fear TiVo: It's not just a simple recording device. It's all up in your business. A previous reason to hate TiVo is that it is pushing hard to force the Dish Network to disable all its PVRs.

• Metafilter offers a webliography on "The Art of the Con."

• The Old Town School of Folk Music Songbook: Volume One CD featuring Steve Rosen and many other great local artists will be released soon on the Bloodshot Records label. The CD will include an extensive booklet by folklorist Paul Tyler. Steve and Paul are part of our Songs of Good Cheer ensemble.

• Speaking of traditional music, look below for a few music videos I've collected lately.

Louis, Louis, Oh No, We Gotta Go...headline on the Chicagoist item about the announced closing of the Carson Pirie Scott State Street store, which is housed in a classic building by architect Louis Sullivan.

Am I alone in wondering if there's something insidious in the perpetual aggression and hysteria in any given five hours' worth of, say, Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants"? Even SpongeBob's ardent fans have to admit the vibe is nightmarish. Nobody gets along. They're all undermining each other. "Glengarry Glen Ross" depicted a healthier working environment than the Krusty Krab.... Michael Phillips

Will all planets please step forward? Not so fast Pluto...from a new t-shirt on sale here.

I could put on a montage of sheep bleats and get better ratings... Charlie Kendall, operations manager of  KKZR-FM in Little Rock, Ark., on why he dumped Mancow Muller's syndicated broadcast.

I hate this meddlin' Chicago nanny city, too. Cracking down on neighborhood taverns, power sweeping downtown sidewalks, shutting down newsstands and putting pushcarts out of business, forcing wrought-iron fences on business owners . . . oh, wait, those are all campaigns of Mayor Richard M. Daley. I guess it's different when Daddy Mayor intrudes in our lives, as opposed to his unruly children on the City Council.....Steve Rhodes on Daley's screechy critcism of the foie gras ban

Links to blog items excerpted or highlighted in Sunday's print version of "Change of Subject,"  available on newsstands starting late Saturday morning. Each post contains a comments area.  

•  The birthright-citizenship debate

• Bekoso bekiso bekaso and other measures of a person

• Smoking is the new spitting

•  Hustler casino 

Why is the 7-year-old son of Elivra Arellano  a U.S. citizen?

Because even though she is an illegal immigrant still defying a deportation order by holing up in a West Side church, he was born here. And the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

From this answer, though, comes three other, related questions.

First,  does that hedgy clause "..and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" in the middle of this otherwise unambiguous declaration mean that it still applies to illegal immigrants?

Second, did those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868 intend for it to cover children born to those who were illegally in the country?

And finally, clauses and amendments aside, is this time-honored practice still a good idea?

My fellow liberals are familiar with this style of probing the Constitution when it comes to guns:

A main argument of gun-control advocates is that the stilted introductory clause in the 2nd Amendment, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state," drastically limits the application of the next clause, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." 

And even if it doesn't, they argue, the Founders were all about muskets and flintlock pistols, and surely never intended this guarantee to apply to the rapid-fire, deadly-accurate weaponry available today.

But they don't seem nearly as engaged with probing the 14th Amendment. Even asking the three questions above is likely to prompt a left winger to brand you a nativist and immigrant hayta', (CQ) though Arellano's high-profile standoff with U.S. Immigration and Customs officials and her attempt to play her son's citizenship as a trump card brings them right to mind.

Republican-led efforts to repeal so-called "birthright citizenship" either by amending the constitution or passing a law that will invite the Supreme Court to re-interpret the 14th Amendment have become perennial failure in Congress.  And the backers always start, of course, with resounding "no!" answers to the above three questions.

My argument here is not that they are right or wrong, but that the questions themselves are worthy of serious consideration.  And to advance that view I've  created a robust -- love that word! --  webliography of links to commentaries, news articles, research and court opinions that will prepare you well to argue either side.

I snapped this pic' of a billboard in Los Angeles while on vacation recently. Nothing says good wholesome entertainment better than a picture of Larry Flynt playing blackjack.

So just remember, casino foes: It could be worse.

A Jewish friend -- former rabbinical student, actually -- recently introduced me to a catchy and true Hebrew expression from the Talmud that goes something like this:

Bekoso, bekiso, bekaso

Sometimes the order of the three words is different and the spelling can vary depending on who's doing the transliteration, but this is certainly close enough for blog work.

It is a list of the major areas in which a person's character is tested and revealed.

Bekoso -- (b'KOH-soh) by his cup, or metaphorically, how he or she behaves when drunk.   

Bekiso -- (b'KEE-soh) by his pocket, or metaphorically, how he or she manages money.

Bekaso-- (b'KAH-soh) by his temper; how he or she acts when angry.

These are good.  The common thread seems to be impulse control, which in turn connected strongly to the ability to delay gratification and take the long view of life -- excellent qualities. I will link to and excerpt from some Web discussions about them below.

But first:  What other key tests of character have you found to be valid?

I'll name two.  The first is how a person treats a server -- literally a waiter or waitress but metaphorically anyone who is at least for the moment in a socially subservient role.

The second is how a person behaves on the golf course.  Does he or she cheat? Respond with the requisite grace and good humor to the inevitable disappointments and failures?

Beservo, begolfo.

I realize that our friends downriver at the Sun-Times need to find catchy, water-cooler-worthy stories for their front page in order to drive street sales.

And I acknowledge that they often have what a friend refers to as good radar for pop cultural pheonomena that get people reading and talking.

But today they went positively Weekly World News on us, devoting nearly half their front page to a photo of a suburban Burbank woman holding up a turtle on whose belly she imagines she sees the image of the Virgin Mary (left: detail from the S-T cover photo).

Inside, a 650-word story package ("Holy shell? Family sees Mary's image on turtle") plays this idea relatively straight and uncritically -- for example, no quotes from turtle experts comparing these markings to markings found on similar turtles.

This moment in Chicago journalism needs to be commemorated by an expression similar to the expression "jump the shark" used to refer to the moment when television shows tries so hard to innovate that the desperation alone signals a decline in quality.

I suggest "show the turtle,"  as in "Zorn's blog really showed the turtle when he devoted 2,100 words to his day at the celebrity golf outing."

Now, some might say, wait a minute, didn't the Tribune run a 550-word article last month from Salem, Wisconsin, headlined "Holy gator! Pet is no crock; A Wisconsin reptile has `GOD' on its side. Experts say the markings look authentic, but any meaning is strictly in the eye of the beholder"?

Yes. But that miracle was for real. And it was not on the front page. And...

In a recent column written from a Chicago City Council meeting I referenced "the daffy discursions of aldermanic rodeo clown Burt Natarus (42nd), whose featured one-liners--`dog doo is the caviar of rats!' he declared again Wednesday--don't do justice to the sustained, persistent and ultimately tedious absurdity he adds to the proceedings."

Well Natarus called my voice mail and left this rejoinder:

I have stood your criticisms for many many years, and quite frankly I don’t regard you as being very innovative or humorous. The fact of the matter is  that dog doo is a cause of rats. And rats are a very, very important problem in terms of eradications and keeping my ward clean. I have the cleanest ward in the city….And

Ideally, of course, the Case of the Missing iPod would never even have made the newspapers,  much less the docket in civil court.

Still, here we are.   One Naperville 14-year-old is suing another Naperville 14-year old in DuPage County over a missing (presumed stolen)  portable music player.

And only the lawyers and pundits who swoop in hungrily when others are troubled are truly happy about it.

As has been reported in the media here and on blogs as far away as India and the Netherlands  ("14-jarig meisje klaagt vriendin aan om iPod") Shannon Derrik lent her friend Stephanie Eick her brand new, $300 iPod Nano for a few minutes on their last day of 8th grade last June.

Below is a selection of Internet sources on various sides of the question whether a child born within the boundaries of the United States ought to be considered a citizen:

The  day we arrived in Southern California on our recent vacation, the LA Times carried the intriguing story that the Santa Monica  City Council had just voted to ban outdoor smoking on the Third Street Promenade, "as well as at outdoor cafes, automated teller machines, movie ticket lines and farmers markets throughout the city."

Because the ordinance would also prohibit smoking within 20 feet of the entrances to public buildings, it would also effectively mean that pedestrians could not light up on sidewalks in any of the city's business districts, including Montana Avenue and Main Street.

Santa Monica's planned action comes several months after (the city of) Calabasas made national headlines by effectively banning smoking in most public areas....

The immediate catalyst for the proposed ban was a February report by the California Air Resources Board that classified secondhand smoke as a "toxic air contaminant." The report was the first to focus primarily on outdoor secondhand smoke in California.  (Zorn note--the recent U.S. Surgeon General's report made a similarly strong point)

State environmental health regulators have found that secondhand smoke causes premature births, breast cancer and other deadly illnesses and respiratory diseases.

The board's report followed several federal government studies that established secondhand smoke not only as a carcinogen but also as a cause of heart disease and other serious health problems among nonsmokers, especially children.

The story quoted Santa Monica City Councilwoman Pam O'Connor, the only vote against the proposal, as calling it "a back-door attempt to prohibit smoking."

   Which I don't think is true. Yet. For now I think it's an attempt to drive smoking deep, deep underground -- into homes and private cars -- where it will become an addiction so difficult to sustain and so reviled that outlawing it altogether will be easy.

"No smoking" signs will become quaint artifacts, like those "No spitting" signs from 100 years ago that curio dealers sell.

We stayed several days in neighboring Venice, and I was interested to see that the outdoor farmer's market there prohibited smoking. The photo of the sign to that effect  includes a Zorn twin for scale.

We may see similar signs soon in Naperville, as that suburb seems headed toward enacting a ban on smoking at "outdoor fairs" as well as most indoor public smoking.

My question for the click-lectorate is, How long before all public smoking -- including outdoor smoking -- is banned in Chicago?  I'm saying 10 years, tops.

UPDATE -- Midday host Chip Franklin of WBAL-AM in Baltimore, inspired by this posting, has created his own, wackier poll on this issue.

OK, I'll bite on this one.

Our story today, "Women, thou shalt not teach Sunday school here" tells of a Watertown, N.Y. Baptist church that bounced a female Sunday school teacher based on their newly literal interpretation of 1 Timothy:2 --Paul's first epistle to Timothy in the New Testament --specifically the passage that reads:

(Women should) adorn themselves in decent apparel, with modesty and sobriety, not with curled hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly raiment. But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. Let a woman learn in silence with all subjection. For I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived; but the woman, being deceived, transgressed. (Wesley translation)

My belief system neither requires me to take seriously this view of women or even to explain why modern Christians should feel free to disregard it. 

If yours does, how do you do it?

Today's story, "Cicadas coming; your memories wanted"  about the Lake County Forest Preserve asking residents for memories of the last time the 17-year cicadas emerged put me in a nostalgic mood.

The last time these insects appeared, I wrote this:

In "Full-blown case over 1 little iPod," my colleage Art Barnum lays out an intriguing yet, it seems to me, slam-dunk court battle in DuPage County.

The story goes that Aurora middle-school student Stephanie Eick asked to borrow her classmate Shannon Derrick's iPod one day last June:

Shannon agreed to let her use it, then left the room for a few minutes. When Stephanie finished listening, she reportedly placed the iPod on Shannon's desk, but Shannon says that when she returned, the iPod wasn't there.

  Armchair judges? Stephanie owes Shannon for the iPod, right? When you borrow something, you have an obligation to return it it safely, not just leave it lying around where you hope the owner will reclaim it.

This isn't just a moral truth, it seems to me, but a legal one.

If such an obligation weren't legally enforceable, you'd see hundreds of people a day saying, "I paid my car loan off in full! I left an envelope with the cash in it stuck in the front door of the bank early this morning!"

Neil Steinberg, who devoted nearly his entire column to this yesterday, doesn't agree on the legal point:

(Stephanie) isn't an iPod protection service. She had no legal obligation to safeguard her friend's iPod beyond her minimal return to the vacant desk, if even that. The Eicks are legally right...

Any lawyers or armchair lawyers out there want to analyze this one for us?

University of Colorado journalism professor Michael Tracey...,the producer of three documentaries on the JonBenet case, is motivated, he says, by the desire to show how overblown the coverage is: "I don't regard JonBenet's murder as an important story." He is publicizing it to demonstrate its insignificance and to illustrate what is wrong with American journalism. Now, there's a dedicated ironist for you: He spends all this time illustrating what a trivial subject he has!.... James R. Kincaid in Little Miss Sunshine-- America's obsession with JonBenet Ramsey (Slate).

Congrats to my fellow Trib blogger Maureen "The Watcher" Ryan, who yesterday was named the newspaper's TV critic. This marks a well deserved promotion from TV writer. (Here is the memo to the staff)

Speaking of the tube, Ryan's predecessor, Internet Critic Steve Johnson, is today engaging the "Name your desert island TV shows" notion floated yesterday in the Land of Linkin'. Add your list of five to his comments thread.

 Here's a cause that should be easy for me to champion.

Alstory Simon, convicted of shooting to death a young couple in 1982, is asking a Cook County judge to reopen his case in part because he says his defense attorney had a serious conflict of interest.

Several readers have written to ask me if I will withdraw my generous commentary the other day giving the benefit of the doubt to Colorado authorities who have arrested John Mark Karr in connection with the 1996 slaying of JonBenet Ramsey in light of this Denver Post story.

It was only after the warrant was issued that investigators started asking questions that would form the basis of a successful homicide prosecution... For example, it wasn't until Wednesday morning, after Karr was in Thai custody, that a representative of Boulder District Atty. Mary Lacy's office called Hamilton County, Ala., schools to seek a handwriting sample of Karr for comparison with the ransom note left by JonBenet's killer. ...Karr's ex-wife and children also weren't contacted to see if they could provide an alibi for Karr's whereabouts at the time of JonBenet's murder.

My answer is that if I'd known Friday what was in the Post story Sunday, I would not have written that blog item. It now seems much more likely than it did to me Friday that the descendants of Barney Fife are in charge in Boulder, and that this arrest will replace the arrest of security guard Richard Jewell in the Atlanta Olympic bombing atop the list of  high-profile law enforcement blunders.

But since I'm now all but alone out there in having voiced confidence that there's more to the case against Karr than meets the eye, I might as well stick to it. 

From today's Jeff Long story, "McHenry pulls plug on mascot merriment."

Angie ZXUH -- she uses all capital letters in her last name -- said a survey found that 77 percent of her 421 new customers last year came into her office on Elm Street because of her Statue of Liberty mascot.

She pronounces it "Zee-ex-you-aitch."

OK. And from here on,  I will use all extra-large letters in my last name: Address correspondence to  Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune.

But really. I'm all for people being addressed how they want to be addressed and companies having their choice of brand names.  But when it comes to punctuation issues --  exclamation marks, all caps, no caps, missing spaces, custom typefaces, people who legally change their names to Internet addresses that end in .com and the like -- I draw the line and think the media should, too.

Not just Angie Zxuh. I'm talking to you, K.D. Lang, Yahoo, Ebay, My Space, Price Waterhouse Coopers and ...

In an appearance last Thursday, veteran stand-up comic Tom Dreesen remembered his first "celebrity golf" outing back in the 1970s.

Just before tee-time, he met up with another member of the foursome to which he'd been assigned. The man introduced himself.

"I'm Tom Dreesen," said Tom Dreesen.

"I wonder who our celebrity is going to be," said the man. "Last year, it was a guy I'd never heard of!"

At this punch line I kept my eyes on Dreesen, not daring to turn to my left to see what I feared would be knowing glances exchanged between the three guys who'd been assigned to me earlier that day at a celebrity golf outing in North Barrington.

•  Blogger Tom McMahon entertains the question, "If you could watch only 5 TV shows for the rest of your life, what would they be?" (via J-Walk).  It's unclear to me whether this hypothetical question assumes one is watching the same re-runs over and over again or, since we're dealing in fantasy, if it assumes that new episodes are being generated. (Certainly "Freaks and Geeks,"  "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "Arrested Development" would be on my list if they hadn't had such short runs). Either way I suppose "The Simpsons" has to make the list.  My other four -- "Law & Order," "The Daily Show,"  "Seinfeld" and "Jeopardy!"  Yours?

•  Speaking of "Jeopardy!" here is a huge online archive of questions and answers (or, rather, answers and questions) from the program.

•  And speaking of "Monty Python," below, from YouTube, the Three Bruce's Philosopher's drinking song from "Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl." Click to play.

•  Tom Cruise = So I'm Cuter is just one highlight from the  online Anagram Hall of Fame

•  Candy Addict decided to compile a list of the Top 10 grossest candy varieties ever. No. 1 is Lick Your Wounds Candy Scabs. The rest of the list is here.

•  Football rules changes for 2006: College and pro. I'm cheered to see that several of them are aimed at shortening game times, which, especially in college, are absurd. A news story from USA Today quotes  Oregon coach Mike Bellotti. "I am appalled at the rule changes. They are major and very severe and will change the game as we know it."

•  The iPod Playlist Generator makes useless images like this:

•  Time Magazine's "50 Coolest Websites" does not include "Change of Subject."  The fix was in.

•  Why is this little flash game so hard? Bounce the virtual ping pong ball on the virtual paddle. Seems easy. I can't get past 15 unless I simply don't touch the mouse, in which case the ball seems to want to bounce forever.

•  Dan Curry's "Reverse Spin" mines this nugget: "You don’t hear Rod Blagojevich talk about it, especially in front of African-American audiences, but he worked against the election of Harold Washington for Chicago Mayor as a campaign aide of Fast Eddie Vrdolyak."

•  Intelligent re-design: "If you were God, what would you reasonably do differently to make this a better world with less suffering?"

•  Medill News Service reports: A "report released Tuesday by the Living Wage Coalition, an umbrella group of 35 organizations pushing for minimum wage increases, showed Target Corp. has received $9.9 million of taxpayer money to open stores in Chicago."

•  "Alan Keyes (says) embryonic stem-cell research is the moral equivalent of Nazi medical experiments on the inmates of death camps during World War II."  Link via Archpundit.

•  In case you feel the need for an extensive refresher:  Court TV's Crime Library recap of the JonBenet Ramsey murder.

I have no clue what’s going on in this Ramsey case thing, other than perhaps this: John Mark Karr is a dark angel sent from hell to prove that watching cable news is a total waste of time....Nancy Nall

If Patsy (Ramsey) had been less viscerally creepy—instead of a pageant queen who seemed to be living vicariously through her tricked-out daughter—and if both parents’ demeanors had been slightly more in keeping with what we expect from the grief-stricken middle class, the Ramseys might not have lost the national media at “hello.”....Dahlia Lithwick

(JonBenet Ramsey) was torturously trained to prance and preen like a blue-ribbon pony. At an age when ordinary girls are learning to walk, this champion baby was taught to sashay like a miniature dime-store tart.... She danced like a dream. And dressed like a grown hooker. She was unnaturally old for her age. And above all, fiercely sexy. Did her parents really think no one else noticed?....Andrea Peyser

The president claims that freedom is God’s gift to humanity (but) I see little evidence in the Bible that God advocated the democratic government that we are bringing to (or imposing on) Iraq, not to mention the gender quotas that we fixed for the Iraqi National Assembly. The Bible seems to be relatively easy about slavery, patriarchy, and despotic tribal leadership; its concerns lie elsewhere. And if the freedom that we have created in the West is indeed God’s gift, it sure took a long time for us to open it. If it turns out that our conception of political freedom is in fact a human creation growing out of very specific cultural soil, that may explain why it is not blossoming forth as we expected it to following the invasion of Iraq....Heather MacDonald in the National Review Online

The fall contest between (Ald. Todd) Stroger and Cook County Commissioner Anthony Peraica shapes up to be as snippy as the governor's race. It will go something like this: Stroger: My name is Stroger. Peraica: His name is Stroger...Carol Marin

I know it is erroneous of me to imagine that the Quaker Oatmeal factory is staffed by a bunch of Quaker Oatmeal Guy clones in hats and knee-breeches, but would that it were so...Mimi Smartypants

You cannot bring a simple bottle of water onto a commercial airliner, even when all parties -- including the security screener -- agree that it is just a bottle of water. You can, however, board with a Dell laptop -- the battery of which has been known to explode and burst into flames...Austin Mayor