Quick! Where’s the tuxedo? Did you call the caterers? Chicago psychologist Kate Wachs advises the desperately seeking single, “Be as happy as you can–which is quite happy, actually–while being a single person. Enjoy each day as if it were your last ‘single’ day, and as if you are about to be married tomorrow.” Sounds a bit hectic.
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“The state Department of Conservation has announced plans to give away 165,000 white pine seedlings to Illinois’ third-graders,” writes James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Times (January 25-31). “Ordinarily I would protest on grounds that the only living thing that ought to be entrusted to a third-grader is a cold virus. In this case however it is not altogether a bad thing that ninety-nine out of 100 of the seedlings will die. The white pine is a useful tree in a windbreak (it is largely for that purpose that the state grows them by the million) and can be an acceptable ‘specimen’ tree in a large yard. But the white pine is hardly the ideal city tree. In Illinois it will reach fifty to eighty feet tall at maturity and spread more than twenty feet at its base. Forestry officials in Chicago for that reason have asked DOC to give third-graders in that city something a little less rambunctious.”
Why do the Western media worship Gorbachev? Because they’re lazy, according to Susan J. Douglas in In These Times (January 24-30). “Finally they have a Soviet leader who fits the American newsroom definition of what a world leader and media personality should be”–spontaneous, polished, intelligent, not defensive. “Such a man readily provides leads and news pegs, and with the media inflation of him to gargantuan proportions, they don’t have to worry about writing stories about the faceless little people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who are so much harder to categorize and cover.”
The hothouse effect in architecture? “For most of a century,” writes Edward Keegan in Inland Architect (January/February 1990), “Chicago architecture has been based on a dramatic dare–that by fostering a closed and ceaselessly incestuous architectural culture it could force an unbounded creativity in hothouse conditions. Chicago architects have worn their provinciality on their sleeves and it has led to both their glorious triumphs and dismal failures.”
