Mondays with Mike is back! It’s–about the time I thought I’d get back in the Mondays rhythm, life happened and, well, apologies for the absence.

There’s a backlog of blog ideas, but for today, I’m going to stick with something that maybe has been going on for a while but I’ve just noticed: The proliferation of weird sports.

I kinda thought it had peaked around Covid lockdown when ESPN, desperate for any live content, began broadcasting the American Cornhole League. Now, I prefer calling it bags, but whatever. Anyway, two Cornhole players stood, with surgical masks, side by side and battled it out. I guess I was desperate, too.

Of course, all the major sports have been back for awhile. And that’s plenty—especially football, which is seeming more and more like an all-year thing. But lately I’ve noticed three new sports that one channel or another sees fit to broadcast. One of them is called kick volleyball (also known a Sepak Trakow. Although it’s hard to visualize if you haven’t seen it, it’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s like volleyball except it uses a smaller ball and players don’t use hands, they use feet. Here’s a sample of some highlights from an international match:

I have to say, they pull off some remarkable plays, kind of soccer, volleyball, and acrobatics all in one. There’s also a beach version called footvolley:

Next, we all remember tag, right? You’re “it” until you tag another person, who is then “it.” Little did I ever think as a kid playing tag with neighbor kids that there would one day be a professional tag league. It’s called World Chase Tag and while the whole “tag” thing is the basis, it involves an obstacle course. Once again, you kind of have to see it:

But wait, there’s more! I present to you, the PFC Pillow Fight Championship.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Here in Chicago, tomorrow is a primary election. There are candidates for judges and state’s attorney and property tax board of reviews and, oh yeah, President. The elections with judges always require some research about who’s been approved by the Chicago Bar Association and, depending on your point of view, endorsed by the advocacy group of your choice. I’m still figuring out my choices.

That’s especially true of a referendum on the ballot regarding what’s been tagged as “The Mansion Tax.” It’s a proposal to increase the transfer tax on real estate transactions of $1 million or more. The transaction fee for sales under $1 million will actually decrease.

The ballot proposal is called “Bring Chicago Home,” as the (ideally) increased revenue from the act will be devoted to increasing funding for affordable housing and services for the unhoused.

I originally thought it was a no-brainer but am less sanguine now. For one, I don’t have a ton of confidence in Mayor Brandon Johnson, at least based on what I’ve seen thus far in his term. For two, he and the city council won’t pass  a plan that explicitly spells out how and where any increased revenue will be spent until after the referendum—and that is troubling. (Illinoisans remember that  decades ago when the Lotto was being promoted, we were promised that all of the lottery proceeds would go to education.)

For three, a similar measure has been something of a disaster in LA (so far). That’s owed partly to the phenomenon where the high-end real estate market froze up after a flurry of activity in advance because there are legal challenges and some people are holding off selling, hoping that it gets repealed.

I’ve found a bunch of stuff about how luxury real estate got hit and how people dodged it (Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg sold their places before the act went into effect). I really don’t care about a minuscule bit of pain for that sector.

I’m more concerned about any backfires from unintended consequences. My biggest concerns locally is that the $1 million threshold will include some relatively modest multifamily rental properties. That whole “mansion tax” thing is great propaganda but lots of relatively small rental building transactions will get hit. And that’s not a good way to make housing more available.

And the commercial real estate market is already pretty bad here post covid—in LA, the prices of commercial buildings took another hit with the transfer tax increase.

Those and other commercial properties then are appraised lower, and then you have less of a commercial tax base, and that could lead toward ultimately costing more of our sub-million dollar home taxpayers footing the bill on their annual property tax bills. (According to Crain’s Chicago Business, commercial properties are a disproportionate number of the properties sold over $1 million, at a ratio of 9-to-1.)

Which would, in my view, make it a shell game. If the revenues were spent wisely and it made a permanent positive difference to the plight of the unhoused, I can live with the shell game I guess.

All that said it’s a coin toss because I’m at that point where I say, “Well, it might not work but we have to do something.”

But it might not be until I’m at the polls that I decide.

Under the heading of unimportant, I mentioned in an earlier post that I got a kitchen range with an induction cooktop. I have been asked by at least one person how I liked it, so I’m going to bore you all.

I love it.

Boiling water is like a parlor trick. I measured 4-1/2 cups of water for a recipe, and it boiled in just over a minute. Stuff comes up to heat faster than any gas stove I’ve had, and it cools faster than turning off a flame

It’s freaking magic.

It does require adjustment, because you know, it gets hot faster and gets cool faster. Mise en place is not a nicety, it’s a demand. But the cooktop doesn’t really get hot so it’s easy to clean.

And, I can boil water in no time—did I say that?

I had to get rid of two pots that don’t work with induction but they weren’t great, so that’s not a negative. But there is one—a Swiss Diamond no-stick pan—that’s killing me.

But I’ll get over it.

Two days ago our friend Ruth drove my Seeing Eye dog Luna and me to the Admiral At the Lake, a retirement community where I lead memoir-writing classes every Wednesday. I wasn’t there this time to lead a writing class, though: we were there to answer questions from third-graders who attend Goudy Elementary, a Public school for children of immigrants that is located near the Admiral in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

My group’s graduation picture from the January class, 2020. I’m so lucky I got matched with Luna before the pandemic.

The third graders are part of a Friday “reading buddies” program at The Admiral, and on certain Fridays the third grade teachers and their students walk from Goudy Elementary to the Admiral so each third-grader can read out loud to an assigned Admiral resident, their “reading buddy.”

Luna and I were invited there last Friday because the third-graders had all read my children’s book “Safe & Sound” and they wanted to meet me. I gave a short presentation to explain how Luna had to go to the Seeing Eye School to learn to lead me around safely, and each child was encouraged to ask me a question when it was their turn.

Every single child told me their name, then introduced their question a la, “Hello, my name is Sunil, and here’s my question…”. I made a point to repeat each question so the Reading Buddies in the audience could hear them, too. Some examples:

-How do you know what you are wearing?
-How does your dog know where he’s going?
-Is there one place you go with your dog every day?
-Did any dog inspire Luna to help you?
-How do you lock the door?
-How do you come up with ideas of what to write?
-How old is your dog?
-How do you cook?
-How do you find the doorknob?
-How old are you?
-Did anything scary ever happen to you when you were with your dog?
-How do you grab things? How do you find them?
-You said you had five Seeing Eye dogs – which one is your favorite?

Dora, Hanni, Harper, Whitney…you’d think it’d be hard to choose, but for me this question is easy to answer. “Whichever dog is working with me right now is always my favorite,” I told them.

“So right now Luna is my favorite.”

The kids really were very, very well-behaved. The afternoon was delightful, everyone had a chance to participate and our interaction wasn’t limited to the most vocal in the group. Each one got a turn to ask their question.

Their reward? I took Luna’s harness off and invited them to pet her when it came time to head outside and walk back to Goudy Elementary. The Admiral had provided cookies for everyone, and the kids saw to it that our friend Ruth got a few on her way out. Everybody won!

Maybe it’s just people of my age who are seeing these things, but there seems to be a spurt of TV ads for various prescription drugs that are mini-musicals. This one, for Jardiance, is probably the most musical-like of these jaunty ads:

Jardiance is one of those drugs for type 2 diabetics that is also being used for weight loss. There must be something about lowering one’s A1C (at test that produces a measure of blood sugar control over time) that really makes people want to get up and dance—for Ozempic ads set characters in motion to some pretty annoying ear-worm music:

On one hand, it’s kind of cool that A1C knowledge is going mainstream—I first learned about it when Beth and I started going out decades ago. Back then it was newish and kind of a novelty and had we mentioned it to friends, we would’ve been greeted by blank stares.

On the other hand, I can’t help but see an incongruity between a serious, chronic condition and the urge to get up and dance. (Some non-prescription drugs, maybe.) I kinda feel like Eli Lilly strikes a more appropriate tone with its ad for its type 2 drug Mounjaro.

Apart from wondering what the meetings about naming these drugs must have been like, I can’t help but also wonder how much they cost to produce, and worse yet, the ad spends these companies make to get them on screens so often. In addition, they all tout their weight loss potential, and you just know that we’re eventually going to learn about how that’s a bad idea (that is, taking it expressly for weight loss and not type 2 diabetes) long after the horse is out of the barn.

In a pretty wealthy nation where lots of people have no health care (save for emergency room visits) or inadequate care and bad insurance coverage, the song and dance is hard to stomach.