Dessert: Carrot Cake
Carrot Cake Ice Cream | Cocoa Puffs | Orange Carrot Caramel

I find the Cocoa Puffs in the dessert entree quite intriguing. As a kid I was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. I doubt Cocoa Puffs made the list of the most healthy 150 foods. Perhaps if you wrapped them in Swiss chard and placed them on an antioxidant flapjack it would make it.

The thirteen story building Sertus wants to build has shown Oak Park that it has no way to stop developers from building ill-omened, unlucky projects. In the current environment, developers can build any bodeful edifice, jinxed office complex, or cursed condo they want.

The village could prevent such hoodoo development if it hired consultants who have expertise in wanga architecture. These consultants could point out the star-crossed aspects of proposed developments and help the planning commission devise zoning ordinances that would disallow inauspicious developments, like the Sertus thirteen story building.

A feng shui consultant could fulfill this role for the village. Feng shui people understand bad luck and baneful building practices.

Feng shui is a Chinese system of laws that direct the arrangement and orientation of living spaces in relation to the flow of energy called chi. Feng shui consultants try to balance the elements in a living space and create harmony by minimizing the unfavorable effects of chi and maximizing its favorable effects.

Oak Park has never given consideration to the principles of feng shui, no thought to the aspects of chi flow or elemental balance or the application of bagua. If it had paid attention to its chi, it could have made the village a real chi chi place. However, when it comes to feng shui, the village doesn’t know its ying from its yang. It probably has become so unbalanced with respect to its chi flow its citizens are suffering profound negative psychological effects. No wonder the village has so many POOPERs (Pissed Off Oak Parkers).

If the village had hired feng shui consultants, it could have prevented the construction of Whiteco. They would explain that feng shui discourages the use of white because of its association to death. In China, people are buried in white.

A feng shui expert would see right away the problem with thirteen stories in the Sertus proposal. First, 13 is unlucky because the lunar calendar has thirteen months. Second, four is the unluckiest number in feng shui because four spoken in Cantonese sounds like death; and if you add the two digits in 13 (1+3), you get 4 so the Sertus building not only has the unluckiest number in Western Civilization, it also has the unluckiest number in the most populous civilization on the planet, a double hoodo whammy.

A feng shui expert would advise Oak Park that it can mitigate an unlucky number by inscribing a circle around it. For example, drawing a circle around a house number with a 4 or 13 negates the ill effect. A building with thirteen stories becomes more problematic. You would need to construct a ring around the entire thirteenth story. This would give the building a Disney Tomorrowland or Frank Gehry appearance, depending on the curvature, the materials of the circle, and the amount of money expended on it. Cheapo circle equals Tommorrowland-like; quantum extortionate type circle equals Frank Gehry-like.

If developers wanted something less than a Disney look, the feng shui expert would advise them to tie a ribbon around the thirteenth story or perhaps a giant dandy hatband.

Sertus Capital Partners LLC intends to develop the corner of Lake and Forest in Oak Park with a building of thirteen stories, which leads me to ask the question, “What in God’s holy bejeesus is going on at Sertus?” Of all the numbers in the universe from zero to infinity, they chose, as the height of their building, the unluckiest number in Western Civilization.

People so fear the number thirteen they refuse to reside at an address with the number thirteen or live on a thirteenth floor. For this reason, developers construct buildings that lack a thirteenth floor.

I have always wondered how buildings missing a floor can stand erect. In a building greater than fourteen floors, why doesn’t the fourteenth floor collapse onto the twelfth floor? It doesn’t make sense to me, but I never did very well in physics in school. I went to a school with a lot of genius nerd palookas. For laughs, they would order their robots to pick me up and throw me down the stairwell to the gym to see whether I would descend at the same rate as a falling object. From this experience, I soon concluded physics is not my kind of sport.

It took some bodacious audacity for Sertus to come up with a building of thirteen stories. Why would people want to buy a condo in a building of thirteen stories and increase their chances for misfortune by a rendezvous with hoodoo? Think about the ramifications of owning a condo there. You will never win a lottery. You will always get called for jury duty. You will become the subject of random searches in airports and random audits by the Internal Revenue Service, and for God’s sake, don’t ever play Russian roulette.

In selecting this dubious number for their building, Sertus also has dismissed a segment of the marketplace: triskaidekaphobes, those who have a morbid fear of the number 13. No triskaidekaphobe in his right mind will buy a condo in the Sertus building.

I don’t know how much of the market is made up of triskaidekaphobes. I suspect it’s a significant number with all the paranoia around. We live in a time of suicidal maniacs, who want to fly jumbo jets into high rise buildings just so they can have fifty or so virgins in heaven. Think of that. Men will commit suicide to sleep with women who have no sexual experience.

If you don’t think paranoia isn’t rising, just look at Vice-President Dick Cheney. He’s become so wigged out he has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to keep him under constant surveillance. Every morning he reads the raw intelligence of his classified report just to check up on himself.

Later, he takes a black marking pen and runs it over every sentence of the report, “lowlighting” and obscuring every letter and punctuation mark so that no one from the National Archives will ever be able to read it. His Secret Service detail often hears crazed cackling oozing from his office as he conducts his “lowlighting” late into the night.

In his One View piece in the Wednesday Journal, Paul Hamer believes Oak Park should look to Hinsdale, the so-called “teardown capital” as a model for downtown Oak Park. I find this a curious choice. Hinsdale and Oak Park seem incongruous, like pro and con, topsy and turvy or vice and versa.

In their housing policies, for instance, you couldn’t find a more opposite village to Oak Park than Hinsdale . Those Hinsdalians love home demolition. Since 1986, new homes have replaced about a third of Hinsdale’s housing stock, an average of 72 a year.

However, in Oak Park people love houses. People don’t want to tear any of them down. They love houses here so much you couldn’t even tear down an evil house like the one in Amityville Horror or Hill House from The Haunting no matter how many people they possessed.

You would have preservationists here organizing to stop the demolition of an evil house. These preservationists would admit evil houses have a few problems, such as killing people; nevertheless, they would still demand their salvation on the grounds their oldness outweighs their homicidal tendency.

They would say the evil houses are not evil but misunderstood. Their evil results from improper and unhistorical renovations that instill feelings of low self-esteem in the houses. They would call on the village to purchase the evil houses, exorcise them with non-polluting methods, so-called “ecofriendly exorcisms,” then remodel them to landmark historical specifications.

In Oak Park, only the complaints of neighbors can cause the village government to approve the demolition of an evil house. Neighbors would become very upset if an evil house starts oozing green slime from the walls, and it flows out into yards and covers their landscaping (if the green slime stinks, it will have the entire block in an uproar); or if an eerie Pee Wee Herman voice emanates from the house, yelling profanity or support for the war in Iraq at people as they walk down the sidewalk, that also would compel the neighbors to call for its demolition.

This would cause two of the most powerful forces in Oak Park, historical preservationists and angry neighbors, to collide, and as they battle, each side would become possessed by the controversy of evil house demolition.

Only a compromise would solve the dispute and end the controversy. A compromise might consist of tearing down just the second story of a of a multistory evil house or just its first story, leaving the upper levels intact.

However, each side would refuse accede to a compromise as they fall deeper into the possession of the controversy. In time, it would take complete control over their minds, and their raucous bickering would raise the numbers of Pissed Off Oak Parkers (POOPERS) in the village to rise to unprecedented levels.

The village trustees then would need to hire exorcists to dispossess the controversy from the angry neighbors and preservationists before a smegma of toxic POOPER vitriol envelops the village, leaving unpissed Oak Parkers (UNPOOPERS) to hunker down in their homes and wait out the exorcism, all the while wishing they would live somewhere else, like Hinsdale.

Fortunately for the village, it has never become easier in the history of humankind to disgrace someone. We have the Internet which provides us with an entire cyberspace to express our indignation at something. You can hardly make five clicks on the web without coming across a link to some bitter blogger or an ihate website like ihatemen, ihatewomen, ihateclowns, ihatecilantro, ihatemyself, ihatehate.

These ihate sites offer members a place to describe their loathing through the posting of stories, links, quotes, and music, enabling them to vent, rant, and expound to the depths of their hostility.

The village could use the concept of these ihate sites and put up its own site called www.oakparkers_who_don’t_shovel_ their_walks_really_suck.org. On the website, the village would post the addresses and the names of property owners who still have snow on their sidewalks after twenty-four hours. It also would have a members section to allow POOPERs to post comments and write vitriolic messages in capital letters as:

HEY MR. BLANK-BLANK SO AND SO AT 122 N. HARVEY!!! BECAUSE OF THE SNOW ON THE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF YOUR #$@%@!#&* HOUSE MY SON COULD FALL AND DISFIGURE HIS PINKY FINGER. HE MIGHT NEVER FULFILL HIS DREAM TO ATTEND THE JULLIARD ACADEMY AND STUDY THE ACCORDIAN!!!!

PISSED OFF POOPER

After a time, the ignominy effect of this website could overturn the ethos of sidewalk snow clearing in Oak Park. The average Oak Oak Parker would consider it unthinkable not to shovel the snow. It would become a basic morality.

The snow clearing imperative would become so ingrained in Oak Park it would become a campaign issue in the village elections. Oak Parkers could never expect to win elected positions unless they could prove they shoveled their walk. The first question asked of them at a forum or caucus would be “Do you shovel your walk?”, and candidates would reply, “Not only do I shovel my walk, but I take a paint removal gun and melt all the shards of snow and ice the shovel doesn’t clear and then vacuum up the standing water droplets with a commercial wetvac. Then I spray pine-scented air freshener all over the concrete.”

In the village you could hear conversations as this:

POOPER 1. I ran into Blank-Blank So and So the other day. Do you know him?

POOPER 2. Oh everyone knows him. How can you forget someone with a name like Blank-Blank So and So?

POOPER 1. He told me he’s just been named a member to the District 200 Community Caucus and the Lowell Literary Society.

POOPER 2. Really. Maybe they should know he doesn’t shovel his sidewalk.

POOPER 1. (flabbergasted) Oh my god. I would have never thought.

POOPER 2. Yes, it’s true. I saw his house on oakparkers_who_don’t_ shovel_ their_ walk_really_suck.org.

POOPER 1. And to think. My kid nearly had a playdate with one of his kids. Oh, I feel woozy. Is there a Frank Lloyd Wright chair near that I can fall into?

I didn’t have time to conduct any scientific polls so I did the next best thing. I flipped a coin with heads meaning a tight race and tails meaning not a tight race, also called by political scientists a floppy race. The coin I tossed came up heads. I then confirmed the coin toss with one round of eenie meenie meinie mo and a Magic Eight Ball. When I asked the Magic Eight Ball if the coin toss were accurate, it replied, “Hey, sounds good to me.”

Acrimony has crept into the rhetoric of the three slates of candidates, the NLP, the VCA, and the Citizens for Progressive Action, which for acronym’s sake comes to CPA, making it seem like a party of accountants. They are blaming each other for Whiteco, the DTOP TIF, the Colt Building, and general downtown malaise.

I have come to the conclusion all the slates and their acronyms share culpability for the downtown predicament. For example, the VMA has the responsibility for the Colt Building put-call agreement, the NLP/VCA for halting downtown development with its Colt Building rescue fixation. I don’t know the percentage of blame one could assign to each slate. For that, I’d have to consult a Magic Eight Ball. Nevertheless, they’ve all made busty contributions.

How do these slates of candidates distinguish themselves from one another when they all have their dippers in the same moonshine? They need a defining issue, one that represents the ideals and essence of Oak Park. That issue is the plight of Chief Illiniwek. The University of Illinois has kicked him out, and the Chief has danced his last dance. He is homeless and unemployed.

Some time ago I called on Oak Park to take up the Chief’s cause and offer him a home or a wigwam here in Oak Park as the University of Illinois considered his status. Sadly, no one in or running for the village government listened to my plea. If one of the slates had done as I advised, it would have a defining issue for this election.

Chief Illiniwek could really help the slate that takes up his cause. His misfortune embodies all issues dear to Oak Park: homelessness, diversity, unemployment, discrimination, minority status, the Fighting Illini, and screaming. Voters in Oak Park who care about these issues, especially screaming, would vote for the slate that supports the Chief.

The Chief could also help his supporting slate in its election campaign. He could heckle opposing candidates with war whoops as they try to make political speeches. At campaign rallies for his supporters he could face paint kids with war paint, well maybe not war paint. The word war unsettles people here. He would need to use dynamic-conflict-resolution paint.

Perhaps the Chief’s supporters can make a campaign promise to buy him a building near Austin and Roosevelt as a home. They can work to convert it to an Indian reservation with a sacred religious site, including a vortex. On top of the vortex, the village could build the Chief Illiniwek Casino, providing much needed tax revenue for the village, spiritual fulfillment or Oak Parkers, and an anchor for development in a depressed area.

Nowak has a unique style of conversation. When she met Shipman in a parking lot, she sprayed her with pepper spray. Lachrymatory agents like pepper spray and tear gas are an effective way to get someone’s attention but they make conversation very difficult. You can’t talk to someone very well who is writhing in pain on the ground or running away. Perhaps, if Shipman had worn a gas mask, they could have carried on a conversation. Even Nowak believed she made a mistake with the pepper spray. When asked by a detective if she thought the pepper spray was going to help her speak with Ms. Shipman, she replied, “That was stupid.”

Fortunately, like all good astronauts, she had a backup for the pepper spray in case it didn’t work: an air pistol. She said she wanted to use the air pistol to “entice” Shipman into a conversation.

Nowak also brought along a rope, a steel mallet, a knife, rubber tubing, latex gloves, and garbage bags. I suppose she meant to use these items as topics of conversation. In case the conversation came to an uncomfortable pause, she could say, “Look at this swell steel mallet I have here.”

I wished I had never heard about this incident. From it, I learned astronauts wear diapers in space, although NASA doesn’t call them diapers. It calls them a Maximum Absorbency Garment or a (MAG) for acronym’s sake. I understand why astronauts wear them. What bothers me is how they get rid of them. I mean when they are orbiting the earth how do they get rid of their MAGS?

Knowing human beings as I do, I think they just put the MAGs in a garbage bag and are thrown out to float around with the rest of the junk humans leave there like old satellites, rocket boosters, exhausted fuel tanks. I don’t know how this started. When scientists first realized space is a vacuum, perhaps they thought it would Hoover up anything thrown away in it.

Now, we probably have a bunch of poop-filled nappies floating around above us just waiting to fall back into the atmosphere. Gravity really sucks sometimes.

I know the physicists will say I shouldn’t worry. MAGs will burn up upon entry in the atmosphere so you won’t have astronaut nappy crap falling on you.

I don’t care if it’s burned up nappy crap I still don’t want it falling on me. I’d rather have something like Skylab or the new space station fall on me than burned up astronaut nappy crap.

Since the Nowak story came out I can’t go outside without the frets and dithers. I keep thinking burned up microscopic astronaut nappy crap is raining down on me. I might start taking an umbrella with me or wear some kind of anti-MAG-garment (AMAGG) whenever I go outside to protect me from cosmic feculance.

The Reverend Ted Haggard has announced he wants to leave Colorado and move to Iowa or Missouri. A board member of his former church said, “He needs to get somewhere he can get the wound healed.”

If Rev. Ted wants healing, he should move to Oak Park, Illinois not Iowa or Missouri.

For those who don’t know Rev. Ted, he’s the Colorado minister who quit his ministry when he became confused about his sexuality. However, he now no longer feels confused, for he just announced that, after only three weeks of counseling, he has become “completely heterosexual.” Before his counseling, Rev. Ted was only half a heterosexual. Although he had a wife and kids, he paid a male prostitute cash to get to know him in the biblical sense.

Rev. Ted used the sodomitic version of biblical sense.

It seems Rev. Ted needs post-counseling spiritual therapy to complete his rehabilitation, which is not unusual. If your body suffers some physical dysfunction, the treatment often consists of physiotherapy like exercise and muscle stimulation. In the case of Rev. Ted, he underwent counseling for his psychic dysfunction as the first part of his treatment but, to complete his rehabilitation, he needs spiritual therapy. He needs his psyche stimulated and his conscious exercised.

Iowa might won’t offer much stimulation or exercise for Rev. Ted. The preparation for the Iowa Caucuses already has started. Presidential wannabes are already flooding the state. Once their tubthumping pontification starts Rev. Ted won’t have the ability to hear the voice of his own conscious. It will drown in the swampy smegma of TV political ads. He can’t exercise his conscious if he can’t hear the sound of his own voice because he has no way to hear or measure the guilt expressed in it.

Missouri is a worse place for Rev. Ted’s spiritual therapy. It’s an anti-homosexual friendly state. Missouri bans same sex marriage. The current Speaker of the House wants to pass a ban against homosexual acts. “That life,” he says, “can lead to some problems.”

Missouri will only comfort his sex-addicted psyche. Comfort has no stimulation. Effective stimulation involves provocation. Rev. Ted needs to live in a gay-accommodating friendly community like Oak Park to get the needed stimulation and exercise for his rehabilitation.

Oak Park will provoke his psyche in many ways. The village has a domestic partnership registry. The village government has a human rights ordinance that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Human Dignity Policy of the The Oak Park River Forest High School protects lesbian, gay and bisexual faculty, staff and students from discrimination based upon sexual orientation. The Oak Park Gay and Lesbian Assoication (OPALGA) plays a prominent role in the community. Gays and lesbians have become part of the village government. In Oak Park, Rev. Ted will see gay people living in blissful co-habitation. He will see gay parents happily raising kids, which will really limber up his psyche.

Once Rev. Ted has lived in Oak Park for several months without any homosexual relapse, he can move on to an even more stimulating environment: Boystown in Chicago. If he can live in this gay mecca of the Midwest for several months without hiring a gay prostitute or having a boyfriend, or shacking up with a Buster Beauhunk, he will have successfully completed his rehabilitation and healed his “wound.”

According to the crime report in the Wednesday Journal,

A man in his 20s, who had been thrown out of the White Hen Pantry, 7991 Lake St., the night of Jan. 26 for trying to steal candy, came back later and pointed a “shiny object” at the front window just before it broke.

When I read this, I asked myself how could pointing a “shiny object” at a window break it? Ahhh I concluded. The man disintegrated the glass. His “shiny object” was a directed energy weapon like a ray gun, a laser blaster, a plasma pistol or a portable photon beam cannon.

I thought the only man who could possess such a weapon works for Vice-President Cheney in his Office of Presidential Anti-Missile Defense Systems, a subprogram of National Missile Defense. The researchers in this secret program are attempting to create a personal particle beam weapon, and they carry out their work in a large walk-in closet of Cheney’s office.

The Vice-President believes the President and Vice- President need their own personal ray guns to protect the office of the Presidency from terrorists and people who ask too many questions about Cheney’s lesbian daughter. The Vice-President would also like one for quail hunting.

Cheney is said to keep a prototype of this weapon in his desk drawer and shows it to visiting gun lobbyists and leaders of the NRA. They moan in awe at the sight of the futuristic weapon and ask, with delectable envy dripping from their oozy voices, “Dang Vice, where can I get one of those?”

However, it seems unlikely that the culprit who broke the window at White Hen works in the office of the Vice- President. If one of the researchers wanted candy, they could just eat some of the tons of leftover jelly beans Ronald Reagan donated, upon his leaving office, to the executive branch as a token of his appreciation.

The only other so-called “person” who would have a ray gun is an alien, and I don’t mean some illegal immigrant from Mexico. I mean a true-on, X-Files, card-carrying alien from outer space.

Therefore, we must have an alien meandering through Oak Park with a ray gun. Maybe he lives here. Maybe he’s a homeowner. You may scoff at this thought. You may wonder how can an alien buy a house in Oak Park. Just consider, if an alien can afford a ray gun and a spaceship to transport him here, he can afford to buy a house in Oak Park. He might not be able to afford to live here because of the property taxes, but he could afford at least to buy here.

If he is a homeowner, what will he think when his first property tax installment comes in the mail? He disintegrated a window over some petty candy. When he sees what he must pay in property taxes, he might take that “shiny object” of his and vaporize the OPRF High School Board of Education, the village hall, and the office of District 97 in that order.

Does the village of Oak Park have a plan to address aliens and their ray guns?

We can only hope so.

Some might disagree with using poet-playwrights as development consultants. They don’t know anything about zoning variance, setbacks, mixed use development, R2, C1 or RFPs. They know only about metaphors, blank verse, idylls, and jongleurs. They would think the acronym TIF is just an expression you can rhyme with whiff.

I don’t have a problem with poet-playwrights as development consultants. The advice they offer costs very little, the price of a book usually, or free if you borrow the book from the library.

The village could have saved itself gobs of cash on consultants and achieved the same result on downtown development if it had used the poet-playwright Samuel Becket as its development consultant. Becket, a playwright of the theater of the absurd, wrote in Waiting for Godot:

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go. (They do not move.)

The advice of a poet-playwright lacks the specifications and cost figures that a report a consultant writes, but what do expect for free advice? Poet-playwrights compensate for the lack of facts and data in their work with their capacity for distraction.

For example, Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan:

Lady Windermere: Are all men bad?
Duchess of Berwick: Oh all of them my dear, all of them, without exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.

In A Woman of No Importance, Wilde wrote:

Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die, they go to Paris.

Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go?

Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.

After reading these passages, Oak Park trustees would cease brooding over things like the maximum height of condos. Instead, the women on the board would wonder whether they are bad or good Americans and should they save money for tickets to Paris or America as part of their retirement; whereas, the men on the board would kick back, put their feet up on the table, and wallow in frolic because they don’t need to answer these questions. They become bad automatically and go to America.

You must exercise caution when using poet-playwrights as consultants. When Trustee Gockel cited Shakespeare in his vote on Marion Street, he quoted Brutus as he convinced Cassius, his collaborator, to position their armies at Philippi and there fight the Second Triumvirate of Mark Antony and Octavian. At Philippi, Brutus’s army got thumped and, realizing he would become a prisoner, Brutus had a subordinate hold out a sword while he ran into it, killing himself. It wasn’t the running that killed him but the impaling. I hope the opening of Marion Street turns out better for Oak Park than Phillippi did for Brutus.