Out of The Loop

A Sticker Situation

2012-02-09T11:51:00.002-06:00

There's been a big uproar the last few days over what were to be Chicago's new city vehicle stickers. The theme for this year's design is "Chicago's Heroes" and young people from the city were encouraged last year to submit artwork that honors the city's first responders; firefighters, cops, EMTs.

A 15 year old kid named Herbert Pulgar won the contest to design, and it was announced last Thursday that Herbert had won $1000 savings bond after more than 18,000 people voted for his design in December.

As soon as the winning artwork was unveiled, the blog "Detective Shaved Longcock", a popular spot for Chicago cops to post, raised some concern over the design. According to the folks at Shaved, little Herbert's design was a hidden tribute to one of Chicago's more notorious street gangs, the Maniac Latin Disciples. (It's been somewhat humorous to watch the local media try to explain the name of the blog which first raised the possibility that Herbert's design was coded gang-speak.)

As a sometimes reader of Detective Shaved Longcock, and a guy who has frequent interaction with Chicago's police (for business reasons) I can say that there are certain racist elements to DSL as well as the police force in general. Some who comment to posts use words like nigger and spick, and the blog itself has some posts up that can only be described as racial, if not flat-out racist. It's not unusual for members of the force to categorize the city by neighborhoods, and the predominant race of the people who live in those neighborhoods. It's also a common practice for the cops to label certain neighborhoods as controlled by this gang or that gang. A turf thing. If you ask the cops why they speak in such generalities they look at you as if you are completely detached from the reality of Chicago.

Gangs. We has 'em.

Anyway, back to little Herbert's design. It's a heart comprised of Chicago's blue and white striped flag, the red stars, and a view of the city's skyline. Reaching skyward from the heart are four hands of different colors, and above them are the hats of Chicago police, Chicago firefighters, and the paramedic symbol.

According to Herbert, it was those people who saved his life when he was rescued from a fire at 4 years old.

According to Shaved Longcock, he's the son of a known gangster, and Herbert himself has had something of a troubled youth. They point to the hand gestures in Herbert's drawing and claim that it's the "pitchfork" sign (thumb/index/middle finger) that gets flashed on MLD turf. (No word if they think Herbert's depiction of the Hancock Building is really flipping us all the bird.) The heart and pitchfork logo is often a tag used by the gang to announce their turf to rivals who wonder about boundaries. Posted at the blog are pictures of Herbert sporting a red bandana around his face, a MLD trademark, and another picture of him exhaling a smoky mouthful of something as he squints at the camera.

I'm not sure exactly who makes decisions on this sort of shit, but City Clerk Sharon Mendoza, who initially called Herbert a "rock star" when his artwork was selected as the winner (by a panel of people which included 10 Chicago cops), has now backpedaled. The City Clerk's office issued a statement saying that Mendoza was shocked to hear the "rumor" floated at Detective Shaved Longcock about Herbert's drawing carrying a hidden gang message, and launched an investigation.

It was announced this morning that Herbert Pulgar's winning design has been pulled as the new city vehicle sticker, and the submission made by Caitlin Henehan, a senior from Resurrection High School has taken its place. Caitlin's design is sort of a super-hero thing that shows...well, here,...

Herbert Pulgar was interviewed by Chicago's ABC7 after Mendoza's decision was announced and he was understandably upset. He cried his ass off, and explained that his artwork was about peace and love and Chicago's finest first responders, and has nothing to do with gangs.

The cops at Shaved Longcock are equally happy with the selection of Caitlin's work, and see it as a big improvement over something drawn by a brown kid who may or may not be affiliated with the Maniac Latin Disciples. Nice white Catholic girl beats a Hispanic punk every time with the cops here.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has kept pretty mum on the issue, but that won't last long. Rahm's got pretty strong opinions about offensive hand gestures.

WOW! I coulda had a G8

2012-01-12T13:38:00.008-06:00

It was announced today that portions of Chicago will be on lockdown during the G8 Nato Summit, to be held May 19-21. By "lockdown" I mean that people in cars will not be able to travel on certain streets, nor will parking be allowed in what NBC is calling "scores of parking spots" along some of the Loop's streets. Unclear so far on which streets, but a "large security perimeter" will be encircling McCormick Place, where the conferences will be held.

The reason for the vagueness at this point? The United States Secret Service won't release the information until April 21. No mystery why they don't reveal, but these are issues that need to be addressed.

For starters, we're talking serious adjustment for a large number of people here. Drive into the Loop on any given day and you'll see streets lined on both sides with parked cars for as far as the eye can see. If you drive along Washington for instance, heading east from the Kennedy Expressway, not only are there parked cars lining the entire parade route, but there are Public Parking entrances on both sides of every block that lead to 10 story parking structures.

Those enormous lots fill up very often. Depending on which streets the SS decides to close, we could be talking "no room at the Inn" at practically every one of these lots when those who were chased off the street come looking for a place to spend the day. I wouldn't call it a perfect stasis down there but the city's parking capacity and the demand for parking spots is always teetering right there. Some days no problem finding a spot,...some days you circle for blocks looking for a lot with available space. The people who park in the street are usually down there very early, and so high rise parking is usually the only option when you hit the Loop at 8:30 AM.

Now, with closures and parking bans in effect for this fucking G8/Nato deal, the early birds will just use the high rise lots instead of the streets, and those who normally drive up 6 stories to park every day are going to be shit-out-of-luck. The G8 Committee, by way of spokeswoman Jennifer Martinez says the committee has agreed to foot the tab for lost parking revenue which is something like $6 per hour.....per parking spot. (Weird isn't it? A small slab of concrete makes 6 bucks an hour, even the spots in front of the unemployment office.)

Actually, most of the really sweet street parking spots around the Daley Center and City Hall are reserved for police vehicles, City of Chicago employee vehicles, limos, and Rahm's Rolls Royce but that's a rant for another day.

And don't think for a second that the parking ban will only be in effect for 3 days. The SS will want barriers, barricades, police lines, parking blockages and what-not in effect for at least a week before the fun begins, and maybe more than that. They'll have bomb sniffing pooches going through every garage in the city. Soon enough we'll be seeing the distinctive blue-glow of the welders as they seal up the manhole covers, suddenly mailboxes will vanish from street corners, strange silhouettes will begin to appear on rooftops overlooking LaSalle Street, and little men with tiny binoculars will take their places as spotters for the other little men with tiny sniper rifles. Every window in every office building within blocks of the SS determined route from Loop hotels to McCormick Place will be under surveillance so don't even think about doing the old "hey world look at how incredibly big my dick is!" flasher stunt.

Lockdown.

I hate the sound of that fucking word, especially when it's used in my hometown. For a few weeks in May, this city is going to be a police state. Two City Council committees will meet next week to vote on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's G8/Nato Summit proposals. They'll decide if we should suspend normal spending rules and allow money to be spent on what-the-fuck-ever-we-feel-like-at-121 N. LaSalle.

They'll also vote on Rahm's proposal to allow Chicago Police Superintendent Garry O'Connor to deputize temporary muscle to deal with unruly citizens.

And there will be unruly citizens. One group plans to march from the Daley Center to McCormick Place on the 19th. That'll perhaps take them through Grant Park. Why am I positive that's the way they'll go? Ya just know they're NOT going to avoid Grant Park, for symbolic reasons if nothing else. And besides, it is the more scenic way to march if you're going to McCormick Place. You can look north and see the Married With Children Buckingham Fountain, you can walk south on Michigan Ave. past Spearman and Bowman and the Hilton and Balbo and all that other Democratic National Convention 1968-ish stuff.

Over on the left of the vehicle, you can see the large clearing where our current president Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech to 400,000 in November, 2008. And over there is Mike Royko's softball field.

But unlike '68, this isn't just a Richard J Daley/ James Conlisk Chicago Op. Black helicopters and men who talk to their wrists will be here too. SS will be everywhere, and I would expect security personnel from other countries to be accompanying their dignifuckintaries. This is Michelle Obama's hometown, and Maui Jim certainly doesn't want any fuck-ups when the whole world's watching this time. If that means turning Chicago into a place more like 1975 Moscow, so be it. The fucking circus is coming to town, and Jennifer Martinez says that when it's all over, the event will not have cost the taxpayers a dime.

Yeah, sure, right, okay, uh-huh.

"The police aren't here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder."~ RJD

***************************************************

UPDATE: At Thursday's (today's) City Council meeting, several Aldermen used strong language to attack Mayor Emanuel's G8/Nato Summit proposals.

Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward)- “It’s an affront to the right to free speech. Government is telling you what you can write on a sign, who’s allowed to carry those signs and what kind of [sound] amplification you can use. For every 100 people, you have to have a parade marshal.At least after `68, Chicago has always been a city that has done very well with protests. Police have been excellent at handling protests over the last few years. This seems like pushing the table backwards. I understand you have serious international actors coming into town and there needs to be restrictions. But we can’t let it go over the top. They can’t be things that stop people from expressing their right to free speech. ”

Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th Ward)-“I don’t want protesters to get a criminal record just on the basis of protesting and exercising their constitutional rights, I don’t want people to be unnecessarily impeded for what they naturally do every day. This is a bustling city. People do have schedules and agendas to keep. I want people to live as normal a life as they possibly can when the G-8 comes."

Ald. Michelle Smith (43rd Ward)-“Public parks are closed until 6 a.m. We have joggers who go out earlier than that. The fines seem very high. As people who were around in the `60’s, we didn’t face those kinds of fines to protest the war in Vietnam.A lot of the regulations seem a bit excessive and I hope the administration is open to compromise on them. We have a really well-trained police force. They did very well with the Occupy Chicago protesters. We can showcase Chicago to the world, yet preserve free expression.”

Also today, the city announced that the Coalition Against the NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda has been granted their permit for a march on May 19 from Daley Plaza to Indiana and 23rd.

Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel said today that the city is working with the Secret Service “to establish an official protest area, where the City will provide sound amplification equipment, portable toilets, and other resources for protestors who wish to use it.”

An official protest area! Oh yeah, that's got "winning idea" written all over it.

Hair

2012-01-09T14:06:00.000-06:00

I haven't really put much time into writing anything worth blogging about lately. Went and checked my stats on a whim and was surprised to find that I was still getting 15-20 page views a day. Fascinated, I opened up the "visitor activity" log to see what these folks were reading. What jumped off the screen at me first were all these flag icons next to the visitors. British flags, Brazilian flags, Canada, Singapore, South Africa, Honduras, Ecuador, Egypt.... What the fuck are these farrrreigners looking at?

Bald.

Men (I'm assuming they're men) from all over the world are reading my post about baldness, partial baldness, possible shaving my head to go with the full baldness look, and of course mocking Carlos Boozer from the Bulls who has a full beard with a bald dome. Imagine having a full head of thick hair....and shaving it off voluntarily. Shit's fucked up I tell ya.)

It's not just visitors from around the world who are reading my Bald post, there are some Yanks who also pop in, but the array of flags from other countries shows quite clearly that men from all over the world are really fucked up in their heads because they think they're fucked up on top of their heads.

What is it in human beings that is so obsessed with this patch of hair (or lack of it) on top of our heads? Consider the billions of dollars spent every year on hair care. Shampoos, conditioners, rinses, Grecian formulas, hair coloring, uncoloring, cutting, trimming, styling, shaping & changing...

When did this start? I see old pictures of my dad and his buddies from the 1960s and they were all pretty much sporting the part-on-one-side standard Dick Van Dyke style.

I acknowledge that the el feminitos have always spent more time (and money) styling and maintaining their dos, but I can't imagine my mom's generation taking hair-care to the extreme that we've reached, and so this hair obsession must have started sometime in the 70s.

Somewhere along the line here, we have begun to pay way too much attention to something that grows out of our bodies. When I consider hair in its most basic form, it's really sort of unpleasant which is probably why they call it "unsightly hair." On the one hand, we pour hot wax on part of our body to get rid of the shit because who the fuck wants hair down there? On the other hand, the exact same follicles are squirting out these long strands of fine vellus or thick stuff that is made mainly of the protein keratin, becomes such an obsession that we stop and look at our own reflections in store windows.

Some guys are so tormented by a lack of the shit on top of their heads (said to be caused by an excess amount of testosterone you fucking morons) that they spend thousands of dollars on weaves, plugs, transplants and worst of all....fucking toupees.

Maybe I shouldn't be wondering when we became this obsessed over something as basic as a patch of hair on top of our heads, and instead I should wonder why. I use the first person plural pronoun, although frankly I don't belong in this group. I spend about 1 minute and 9 seconds a day screwing around with my hair but I am a member of this society, and as such I feel it's my duty to get to the bottom of this. Who in the hell decided that our hair is so fucking important?

After much consideration I've decided that I blame the same people Carlin blamed for most of the ills of modern society.

Joplin

2012-01-05T21:26:00.002-06:00

G8 & NATO

2012-01-04T21:03:00.001-06:00

They're coming to town from May 15-22. The meetings are going to be held at McCormick Place, which is roughly at Roosevelt Rd. & Lake Michigan.

Leading up to this global event, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has proposed a few changes to the way things are normally done around here. First of all, he wants to be able to purchase “goods, work or services” needed to host the event without City Council approval.

Now right there we have a problem. Same problem we'd have had if Richie Daley had succeeded in landing the 2016 Summer Olympics. Graft. Payoffs. Kickbacks. Sweetheart deals. Money grubbing pig-whores feeding at the trough without any oversight. (Not that there's an alderman who would have raised a stink but still....ya know...let's pretend we have some scruples Rahm. City Council not in your pocket yet?)

At the same time Emanuel was proposing that idea to the City Council, he also suggested making a few changes in the way protesters are to be treated by the great City of Chicago. They include: higher fines for resisting arrest; added surveillance cameras; parks and beaches closed until 6 a.m. instead of the current 4a.m. opening; sweeping parade restrictions and higher fees for those events. Rahm also wants to give Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy the authority to “deputize law enforcement personnel” and reach cooperative agreements with state, federal and local law enforcement agencies.

Last month Mayor Emanuel said that all of these measures were temporary, and were a one-time deal for this G8-Nato business. Turns out that's not true. The contract thing is temporary,...limited time offer for the pig-whores to feed at the trough of graft.....but not the other part. The added fines and the battlefield deputizing part. Turns out those changes are to be permanent.

A group calling itself the Coalition Against the NATO G-8 War and Poverty Agenda, is slamming Emanuel for what they're calling blatant lies. They're pissed off that Rahm tried to shrug these changes off as temporary, and in the process ratcheting up the power of police during protests. Forever.

Emanuel is now claiming he misspoke when he said the changes were all temporary, and that indeed he did only mean the pig-whore contract feeding frenzy of graft. In clarifying, Rahm said that the changes in police powers are long overdue, and are merely intended to bring Chicago into the 21st century.

One of the changes deals with me resisting or obstructing a police officer, as well as helping another protester escape police. That'll cost me a cool grand now. The minimum fine for being a pain in the ass to cops during a parade or protest is now $200. It used to be $25. At one point yesterday, Emanuel actually referred to these as "fees" rather than fines, which I found and still find hilarious.

"Loud noise, amplified sound or music" will now only be legal between 8a.m. & 10 p.m.

That might be a problem. See, Andy Thayer and his Coalition Against the NATO G-8 War and Poverty Agenda are planning a massive protest march on May 19th. Now I've seen some video from other G8 summit protests, and I'm worried frankly. They make loud noise, and they amplify sound,..on purpose. Fuses are short with these people in the first place.

Their permit request hasn't yet been granted, but I assure you these people are going to march on May 19th.

Their current plan, according to Thayer, is to start the march at....you can't make this shit up...Richard J Daley Plaza. You remember him right? The Boss? Shoot to kill? The Battle of Michigan Ave.? 1968?

And they plan to march all the way over to McCormick Place where the conferences will still be in session. I'm not sure which way the Coalition protest marchers plan to take, but if they head straight east from the Daley Center, and then head a little south, they can march right through Grant Park!

This has got global news story written all over it. The whole world's watching!, again. It's a fucking riot waiting to happen, and this may be Rahm Emanuel's first real test as our mayor. Stay tuned.

Monument Valley

2012-01-01T21:06:00.003-06:00

I wish I could set my camera to monochrome. Ya know, just to add the John Ford feeling....

In Memoriam

2011-12-18T23:00:00.001-06:00

I got your letter today
And I miss you all so much, here
I can't wait to see you all
And I'm counting the days, dear
I still believe that there's gold
At the end of the world
And I'll come home
To Illinois
On the day after tomorrow

~Tom Waits~

Capt. Ryan A. Beaupre

Age: 30
Sex: M
Hometown: Bloomington, Ill.
Branch: Marines

March 20, 2003: CH-46E helicopter crash in Kuwait.
Location: Iraq

Pvt. Jonathan L. Gifford

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Decatur/Macon, Ill.
Branch: Marines

March 23, 2003: Killed during operations on outskirts of Nasiriyah.
Location: Iraq

Cpl. Evan T. James

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: LaHarpe, Ill.
Branch: Marine Reserves

March 24, 2003: Drowned while swimming across canal in southeastern Iraq to set up armed cover for a water purification team.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Brandon J. Rowe

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Roscoe, Ill.
Branch: Army

March 31, 2003: Shot under his arm by enemy artillery near Najaf.
Location: Najaf, Iraq

1st Sgt. Edward Smith

Age: 38
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Marines

April 05, 2003: Died in Doha, Qatar from wounds suffered from Iraqi mortar fire in central Iraq
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Lincoln D. Hollinsaid

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Malden, Ill.
Branch: Army

April 07, 2003: A crane he was driving over a berm in Iraq was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
Location: Iraq

Cpl. Jakub Henryk Kowalik

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Schaumburg, Ill.
Branch: Marines

May 12, 2003: Unexploded ordnance detonated while being handled.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Nicholas B. Kleiboeker

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Irvington, Ill.
Branch: Marines

May 13, 2003: The munitions bunker he was working in caught fire and exploded.
Location: Iraq

1st Lt. Timothy Louis Ryan

Age: 30
Sex: M
Hometown: Aurora, Ill.
Branch: Marines

May 19, 2003: CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter that went down shortly after takeoff in the Shatt Hillah Canal.
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Andrew R. Pokorny

Age: 30
Sex: M
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 13, 2003: On the way back from patrol, Pokorny's M113 armored personnel carrier, threw a track causing the vehicle to roll over.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Cory A. Hubbell

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Urbana, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 26, 2003:
Location: Iraq

Pfc. Brandon Ramsey

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Calumet City, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

August 08, 2003: Pfc. Ramsey was killed when the vehicle he was in rolled over while chasing a suspicious vehicle. Ramsey was taking part in a convoy escort mission.
Location: Iraq

Pvt. Matthew D. Bush

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: East Alton, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 08, 2003: A fellow soldier tried to wake Bush and noticed he was not breathing.
Location: Iraq

Pfc. Christopher A. Sisson

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Oak Park, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 02, 2003: Pfc. Sisson died when the UH-60 helicopter he was in flipped and crashed on take off.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Ryan G. Carlock

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Macomb, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 09, 2003: Killed when the fuel truck he was riding in was attacked northwest of Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

1st Lt. Brian D. Slavenas

Age: 30
Sex: M
Hometown: Genoa, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

November 02, 2003: Killed when insurgents shot down a CH-47 Chinook helicopter in Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Spec. John R. Sullivan

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Countryside, Ill.
Branch: Army

November 15, 2003: Killed when two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters crashed in Mosul.
Location: Iraq

Spec. William D. Dusenbery

Age: 30
Sex: M
Hometown: Fairview Heights, Ill.
Branch: Army

November 15, 2003: Killed when two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters crashed in Mosul.
Location: Iraq

Pvt. Scott M. Tyrrell

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Sterling, Ill.
Branch: Army

November 20, 2003: Died at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio after being wounded in a Tikrit fire on Nov. 14, 2003. His unit was destroying an ammunition cache when a fire started.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Uday Singh

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Lake Forest, Ill.
Branch: Army

December 01, 2003: Killed while on patrol in Habbaniyah.
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Michael J. Sutter

Age: 28
Sex: M
Hometown: Tinley Parl, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

December 26, 2003: Killed in Baqubah when a makeshift bomb he was trying to disarm exploded.
Location: Iraq

Sgt. Ivory L. Phipps

Age: 44
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

March 17, 2004: Killed in a mortar attack in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Pfc. Geoffery S. Morris

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Gurnee, Ill.
Branch: Marines

April 04, 2004: Killed when his Humvee was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Cpl. Forest J. Jostes

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Albion, Ill.
Branch: Army

April 04, 2004: Killed when their units were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Lance Cpl. Phillip E. Frank

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Elk Grove, Ill.
Branch: Marines

April 08, 2004: Killed by small-arms fire in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Pfc. Gregory R. Goodrich

Age: 37
Sex: M
Hometown: Bartonville, Ill.
Branch: Army Reserves

April 09, 2004: Killed when his convoy came under attack on a highway between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Torrey L. Gray

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Patoka, Ill.
Branch: Marines

April 11, 2004: Killed by hostile fire in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Pfc. Shawn C. Edwards

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Bensenville, Ill.
Branch: Army

April 23, 2004: Killed when his convoy was hit by a makeshift bomb in Samarra.
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Oscar D. Vargas-Medina

Age: 32
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 01, 2004: Killed when their convoy was attacked in Amarah.
Location: Iraq

Capt. John E. Tipton

Age: 32
Sex: M
Hometown: Granite City, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 02, 2004: Killed in an explosion in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Staff Sgt. William D. Chaney

Age: 59
Sex: M
Hometown: Schaumburg, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

May 18, 2004: Died from surgery complications in Landstuhl, Germany after he was evacuated for a medical condition.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Jeremy L. Ridlen

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Paris, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

May 23, 2004: Killed by small-arms fire during an ambush on his convoy in Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Maj. Paul R. Syverson III

Age: 32
Sex: M
Hometown: Lake Zurich, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 16, 2004: Killed by a mortar attack when mortar rounds hit his camp in Balad.
Location: Iraq

1st Sgt. Ernest E. Utt

Age: 38
Sex: M
Hometown: Hammond, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 27, 2004: Killed during a rocket attack in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Sgt. Christopher A. Wagener

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Fairview Heights, Ill.
Branch: Army

July 01, 2004: Killed when his convoy hit a landmine in Mosul.
Location: Iraq

Pfc. Collier E. Barcus

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: McHenry, Ill.
Branch: Army

July 08, 2004: Killed during a mortar attack on the Iraqi National Guard Headquarters in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Pfc. Torry D. Harris

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

July 13, 2004: Died of non-combat related injuries in Tikrit.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Jonathan W. Collins

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Crystal Lake, Ill.
Branch: Marines

August 08, 2004: Killed during an attack in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Cpl. Christopher Belchik

Age: 30
Sex: M
Hometown: Alton, Ill.
Branch: Marines

August 22, 2004: Killed by enemy action in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Spec. Charles L. Neeley

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Mattoon, Ill.
Branch: Army Reserves

August 25, 2004: Killed when his tractor-trailer rolled over as he attempted to access a pontoon bridge in Tikrit.
Location: Iraq

Sgt. Shawna M. Morrison

Age: 26
Sex: F
Hometown: Champaign, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

September 05, 2004: Killed during a mortar attack in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Spec. Charles R. Lamb

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Casey, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

September 05, 2004: Killed during a mortar attack in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Lance Cpl. Drew M. Uhles

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: DuQuoin, Ill.
Branch: Marines

September 15, 2004: Killed by enemy action in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Sgt. Benjamin K. Smith

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Carterville, Ill.
Branch: Marines

September 22, 2004: Killed by enemy action in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

2nd Lt. Ryan Leduc

Age: 28
Sex: M
Hometown: Pana, Ill.
Branch: Marines

September 24, 2004:
Location: Iraq

Sgt. Jack T. Hennessy

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 01, 2004: Killed at his checkpoint in Baghdad by small-arms fire.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Spec. Jessica L. Cawvey

Age: 21
Sex: F
Hometown: Normal, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

October 06, 2004: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near her convoy vehicle in Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Jaime Moreno

Age: 28
Sex: M
Hometown: Round Lake Beach, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 13, 2004: Died of injuries sustained on Oct. 12 when a makeshift bomb exploded near their patrol vehicle in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Lance Cpl. Branden P. Ramey

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Belvidere, Ill.
Branch: Marine Reserves

November 08, 2004: Killed by enemy action in Babil province.
Location: Babil, Iraq

Cpl. Joshua D. Palmer

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Blandinsville, Ill.
Branch: Marines

November 08, 2004: Killed in a vehicle accident in Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Nicholas D. Larson

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Wheaton, Ill.
Branch: Marines

November 09, 2004: Killed during the U.S. assault on Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Sgt. David M. Caruso

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.
Branch: Marines

November 09, 2004: Killed during the U.S. assault on Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Aaron C. Pickering

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Marion, Ill.
Branch: Marines

November 10, 2004: Killed during the U.S. assault on Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Cpl. Peter J. Giannopoulos

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Inverness, Ill.
Branch: Marines

November 11, 2004: Killed by enemy action in Babil Province.
Location: Babil, Iraq

Cpl. Matthew A. Wyatt

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Millstadt, Ill.
Branch: Marines

December 03, 2004: Killed by enemy action in Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Donald B. Farmer

Age: 33
Sex: M
Hometown: Zion, Ill.
Branch: Army

December 19, 2004: Killed when a vehicle struck them in Shuaybah, Kuwait.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Neil D. Petsche

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Lena, Ill.
Branch: Marines

December 21, 2004: Died due to injuries received in a vehicle accident in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Lance Cpl. Hector Ramos

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Aurora, Ill.
Branch: Marines

January 26, 2005: Killed when a Marine Corps transport helicopter crashed during a sandstorm near Rutbah.
Location: Iraq

Cpl. Nathaniel K. Moore

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Champaign, Ill.
Branch: Marines

January 26, 2005: Killed when a Marine Corps transport helicopter crashed during a sandstorm near Rutbah.
Location: Iraq

Cpl. Jonathan S. Beatty

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Streator, Ill.
Branch: Marines

January 27, 2005: Killed by hostile action in Babil province.
Location: Babil, Iraq

Cpl. Christopher E. Zimny

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Glenview, Ill.
Branch: Marines

January 31, 2005: Kill during a security operation in Babil province.
Location: Babil, Iraq

Lance Cpl. Sean P. Maher

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Grays Lake, Ill.
Branch: Marines

February 02, 2005: Killed by hostile action in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Sgt. Jessica M. Housby

Age: 23
Sex: F
Hometown: Rock Island, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

February 09, 2005: Killed when a roadside bomb exploded near her convoy in Route Golden, Iraq.
Location: Iraq

Cpl. Kevin M. Clarke

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Tinley Park, Ill.
Branch: Marines

February 19, 2005: Killed by hostile action in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Cpl. John T. Olson

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Elk Grove Village, Ill.
Branch: Marines

February 21, 2005: Killed by hostile action in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Spec. Jacob C. Palmatier

Age: 29
Sex: M
Hometown: Springfield, Ill.
Branch: Army

February 24, 2005: Killed by a roadside blast in Muqdadiyah.
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Daniel G. Gresham

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Lincoln, Ill.
Branch: Army

February 24, 2005: Killed by a makeshift bomb while responding to an earlier detonation in Camp Wilson.
Location: Iraq

2nd Lt. Richard B. Gienau

Age: 29
Sex: M
Hometown: Peoria, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

February 27, 2005: Killed in a roadside bomb blast in Ramadi.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Adriana N. Salem

Age: 21
Sex: F
Hometown: Elk Grove, Ill.
Branch: Army

March 04, 2005: Killed when her vehicle rolled over in Remagen.
Location: Iraq

Sgt. Kenneth L. Ridgley

Age: 30
Sex: M
Hometown: Olney, Ill.
Branch: Army

March 30, 2005: Killed during an attack in Mosul.
Location: Iraq

Pfc. Wyatt D. Eisenhauer

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Pinckneyville, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 19, 2005: Killed during an escort mission when a makeshift bomb exploded on a bridge in Mahmudiyah.
Location: Iraq

Pfc. Jeffrey R. Wallace

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Hoopeston, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 24, 2005: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near their Humvee.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Brian M. Romines

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Simpson, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

June 06, 2005: Killed by a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Petty Officer 1st Class Thomas C. Hull

Age: 41
Sex: M
Hometown: Princeton, Ill.
Branch: Navy

August 02, 2005: Died on board the USS Nimitz in the Arabian Gulf after being medically evacuated to the carrier for a non-combat related incident.
Location: Iraq

Gunnery Sgt. Terry W. Ball Jr.

Age: 36
Sex: M
Hometown: East Peoria, Ill.
Branch: Marines

August 05, 2005: Died from wounds received June 12 while conduting combat operations against enemy forces at Karmah.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Miguel Carrasquillo

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: River Grove, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 09, 2005: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his military vehicle.
Location: Iraq

1st Lt. David L. Giaimo

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Waukegan, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 12, 2005: Killed when his Humvee hit a land mine in Tikrit.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Jeffrey A. Williams

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Warrenville, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 05, 2005: Killed when a makeshift bomb detonated near his combat patrol in Tal Afar.
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Gary R. Harper Jr.

Age: 29
Sex: M
Hometown: Virden, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 09, 2005: Killed when his reconnaissance mission was attacked by enemy forces in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Spec. James T. Grijalva

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Burbank, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

October 12, 2005: Died of a non-combat related injury in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

1st Lt. Debra A. Banaszak

Age: 35
Sex: F
Hometown: Bloomington, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

October 28, 2005: Died at Camp Victory, Kuwait from non-combat related injuries.
Location: Iraq

Staff Sgt. Kyle B. Wehrly

Age: 28
Sex: M
Hometown: Galesburg, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

November 03, 2005: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his Humvee during patrol operations in Ashraf.
Location: Iraq

Sgt. Joshua A. Terando

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Morris, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

November 10, 2005: Killed when his M1 Abrams tank was attacked by enemy forces using small arms fire in Khalidiyah.
Location: Iraq

Pvt. Christopher M. Alcozer

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: DeKalb, Ill.
Branch: Army

November 19, 2005: Killed when his unit was attacked by enemy forces using small arms fire and grenades in Mosul.
Location: Iraq

Sgt. 1st Class Eric P. Pearrow

Age: 40
Sex: M
Hometown: Peoria, Ill.
Branch: Army

November 24, 2005: Died when his Abrams tank accidentally rolled over into a canal in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Sgt. Grzegorz Jakoniuk

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Schiller Park, Ill.
Branch: Army

November 30, 2005: Died from non-combat related injuries in Taji.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Andrew G. Patten

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Byron, Ill.
Branch: Marines

December 01, 2005: Killed by a makeshift bomb while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Adam W. Kaiser

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.
Branch: Marines

December 01, 2005: Killed by a makeshift bomb while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Brian A. Wright

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Keensburg, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

December 06, 2005: Killed when his Humvee struck a mine during combat operations in Ramadi.
Location: Iraq

Sgt. 1st Class Shawn C. Dostie

Age: 32
Sex: M
Hometown: Granite City, Ill.
Branch: Army

December 30, 2005: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his Humvee during patrol operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Lance Cpl. Jonathan K. Price

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Woodlawn, Ill.
Branch: Marines

January 13, 2006: Died from wounds received as a result of enemy small arms fire while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Ar Ramadi.
Location: Iraq

Pfc. Sean T. Cardelli

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Downers Grove, Ill.
Branch: Marines

February 01, 2006: Killed by enemy small arms fire while conducting combat operations near Fallujah.
Location: Iraq

Lance Cpl. Philip J. Martini

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Lansing, Ill.
Branch: Marines

April 08, 2006: Died of a gunshot wound while conducting combat operations in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Sgt. Edward G. Davis III

Age: 31
Sex: M
Hometown: Antioch, Ill.
Branch: Marines

April 28, 2006: Died while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Spec. Ronald W. Gebur

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Delavan, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 13, 2006: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his Humvee during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Capt. Shane R. Mahaffee

Age: 36
Sex: M
Hometown: Gurnee, Ill.
Branch: Army Reserves

May 15, 2006: Died in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, from wounds sustained on May 5, when a makeshift bomb exploded near his Humvee during combat patrol operations in Al Hillah.
Location: Iraq

Pfc. Caleb A. Lufkin

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Knoxville, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 25, 2006: Died at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., from injuries sustained on May 4, when a makeshift bomb exploded near his RG-31 Mine Protected Vehicle during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Cpl. Ryan J. Cummings

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Streamwood, Ill.
Branch: Marines

June 03, 2006: Died from wounds received while conducting combat operations in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Petty Officer 1st Class Gary T. Rovinski

Age: 44
Sex: M
Hometown: Roseville, Ill.
Branch: Navy

June 05, 2006: Killed as a result of enemy action when his Humvee was struck by a makeshift bomb in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

Sgt. Sirlou C. Cuaresma

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 21, 2006: Died of a non-combat related cause in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Cpl. Ryan J. Buckley

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Nokomis, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 23, 2006: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his Humvee during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Staff Sgt. Mario J. Bievre

Age: 34
Sex: M
Hometown: Glendale Heights, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 23, 2006: Killed when an makeshift bomb exploded near his Humvee during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

Sgt. Bradley H. Beste

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 04, 2006: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his Humvee while conducting combat operations in Ramadi.

Sgt. Steven P. Mennemeyer

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Granite City, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 08, 2006: Died when his UH-60 Blackhawk crashed into a lake in Rutbah.
Location: Iraq

Spec. Kristofer C. Walker

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Creve Coeur, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 02, 2006: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his vehicle in Taji.
Location: Iraq

�

Spec. George R. Obourn Jr.

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Creve Coeur, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 04, 2006: Killed after being attacked by enemy forces using small arms fire and other weapons in Taji.
Location: Iraq

�

Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Hines

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Olney, Ill.
Branch: Marine Reserves

October 15, 2006: Killed while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Pvt. Edwardo J. Lopez

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Aurora, Ill.
Branch: Marines

October 19, 2006: Killed while conducting combat operations in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Sgt. Thomas M. Gilbert

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Downer's Grove, Ill.
Branch: Marine Reserves

October 25, 2006: Killed while conducting combat operations in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Sgt. Kraig D. Foyteck

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Skokie, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 30, 2006: Killed when his unit came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Pfc. William R. Newgard

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Arlington Heights, Ill.
Branch: Army

December 29, 2006: Killed when a makeshift bomb detonated near his vehicle during combat operations.
Location: Iraq

�

Sr. Airman Daniel B. Miller Jr.

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Galesburg, Ill.
Branch: Air Force

January 07, 2007: Killed by a vehicle-borne makeshift bomb in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Petty Officer 1st Class Jennifer A. Valdivia

Age: 27
Sex: F
Hometown: Cambridge, Ill.
Branch: Navy

January 16, 2007: Died from a non-combat related incident in Bahrain.
Location: Iraq

�

Capt. Kevin C. Landeck

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Wheaton, Ill.
Branch: Army

February 02, 2007: Killed when a makeshift bomb detonated near his vehicle in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Sgt. Pedro J. Colon

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Cicero, Ill.
Branch: Army

February 19, 2007: Killed when his unit came under attack by enemy forces using multiple weapons in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Staff Sgt. Paul M. Latourney

Age: 28
Sex: M
Hometown: Roselle, Ill.
Branch: Army

March 02, 2007: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his vehicle while on combat patrol in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Lance Cpl. Raymond J. Holzhauer

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Dwight, Ill.
Branch: Marines

March 15, 2007: Died from a non-hostile incident in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Pfc. Lucas V. Starcevich

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Canton, Ill.
Branch: Army

April 16, 2007: Killed when the vehicle he was in struck a makeshift bomb in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Lance Cpl. Jesse D. Delatorre

Age: 29
Sex: M
Hometown: Aurora, Ill.
Branch: Marines

April 16, 2007: Killed while conducting combat operations in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Pvt. Cole E. Spencer

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Gays, Ill.
Branch: Army

April 28, 2007: Killed when his vehicle was struck with a makeshift bomb and small arms fire during combat operations in Salman Pak.
Location: Iraq

�

Lance Cpl. Benjamin D. Desilets

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Elmwood, Ill.
Branch: Marines

May 22, 2007: Killed while conducting combat operations in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Sgt. Nicholas R. Walsh

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Millstadt, Ill.
Branch: Marines

May 26, 2007: Killed while conducting combat operations in Anbar Province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Spec. Francis M. Trussel Jr.

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Lincoln, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 26, 2007: Killed in Tahrir when a makeshift bomb exploded near his position.
Location: Iraq

�

Pfc. Robert A. Liggett

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Urbana, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 29, 2007: Died in a non-combat related incident in Rustamiyah.
Location: Iraq

�

Spec. Jeremiah D. Costello

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Carlinville, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 02, 2007: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near their vehicle.
Location: Iraq

�

Pfc. Jacob T. Tracy

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Palestine, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 18, 2007: Died June 18 in Balad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when a makeshift bomb exploded near his vehicle June 17 in Baghdad, Iraq.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Sgt. Eric A. Lill

Age: 28
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

July 06, 2007: Killed when a makeshift bomb exploded near his vehicle during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Spec. Justin O. Penrod

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Mahomet, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 11, 2007: Killed by a makeshift bomb in Arab Jabour.
Location: Iraq

�

Sgt. Andrew W. Lancaster

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Stockton, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 11, 2007: Killed by a makeshift bomb in Arab Jabour.
Location: Iraq

�

Pfc. Omar E. Torres

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 22, 2007: Killed by a makeshift bomb detonated near his unit during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Cpl. Phillip J. Brodnick

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: New Lenox, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 22, 2007: Died in a helicopter crash in Multaka.
Location: Iraq

�

Pvt. Randol S. Shelton

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Schiller Park, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 04, 2007: Killed by a makeshift bomb in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Spec. Keith A. Nurnberg

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: McHenry, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 05, 2007: Killed when insurgents attacked his unit during combat operations in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Sgt. Nickolas Lee Hopper

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Montrose, Ill.
Branch: Marines

September 08, 2007: Killed while supporting combat operations in Anbar province.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Master Sgt. Thomas A. Crowell

Age: 36
Sex: M
Hometown: O'Fallon, Ill.
Branch: Air Force

November 01, 2007: Killed by a makeshift bomb in Balad Air Base.
Location: Iraq

�

Sgt. Joseph M. Vanek

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Elmhurst, Ill.
Branch: Army

November 12, 2007: Killed when enemy forces attacked his unit using small arms fire in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Spec. Ashley Sietsema

Age: 20
Sex: F
Hometown: Melrose Park, Ill.
Branch: Army National Guard

November 12, 2007: Killed in a vehicle accident in Kuwait City, Kuwait.
Location: Iraq

�

Cpl. Allen C. Roberts

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Arcola, Ill.
Branch: Marines

November 28, 2007: Died in a vehicle accident near Al Asad.
Location: Iraq

�

Pvt. Dewayne L. White

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Country Club Hills, Ill.
Branch: Army

December 04, 2007: Killed when his vehicle encountered a makeshift bomb in Baiji.
Location: Iraq

�

Pfc. Phillip J. Pannier

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Washburn, Ill.
Branch: Army

January 08, 2008: Killed during combat operations in Samarra.
Location: Iraq

�

Pfc. Danny L. Kimme

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Fisher, Ill.
Branch: Army

January 16, 2008: Killed in Balad when attacked by grenade and small arms fire during combat operations.
Location: Iraq

�

1st Lt. David E. Schultz

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Blue Island, Ill.
Branch: Army

January 31, 2008: Killed when the Convoy Support Center at Scania was attacked by indirect enemy fire.
Location: Iraq

�

Cpl. Albert Bitton

Age: 20
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

February 20, 2008: Died Feb. 20 in Baghdad, from wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered a makeshift bomb on Feb. 19.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Pfc. Shane D. Penley

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Sauk Village, Ill.
Branch: Army

April 06, 2008: Died from wounds suffered while on duty at a guard post at Patrol Base Copper.
Location: Iraq

�

Sgt. Blake W. Evans

Age: 24
Sex: M
Hometown: Rockford, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 25, 2008: Killed when his vehicle encountered an a makeshift bomb in the Al Jazeera Desert.
Location: Iraq

�

Cpl. Adam T. McKiski

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Cherry Valley, Ill.
Branch: Marines

August 07, 2008: Killed while supporting combat operations in Anbar province, Iraq.
Location: Anbar, Iraq

�

Cpl. James M. Hale

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.
Branch: Army

August 13, 2008: Killed when his vehicle encountered a makeshift bomb in Baghdad.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Pfc. Leonard J. Gulczynski I

Age: 19
Sex: M
Hometown: Carol Stream, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 17, 2008: Died in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained when his vehicle was involved in an accident.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Spec. Jamel A. Bryant

Age: 22
Sex: M
Hometown: Belleville, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 27, 2008: Died Sept. 27 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained in a vehicle accident while on patrol.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Spec. Christopher A. Bartkiewicz

Age: 25
Sex: M
Hometown: Dunfermline, Ill.
Branch: Army

September 30, 2008: Died Sept. 30 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his dismounted patrol using small arms fire.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Staff Sgt. Roberto Andrade Jr.

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

January 18, 2009: Died in Baghdad of wounds suffered when a makeshift bomb struck his vehicle.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Sgt. James M. Dorsey

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Beardstown, Ill.
Branch: Army

February 08, 2009: Died in Kamaliyah, Iraq, in a non-combat related incident.
Location: Iraq

�

Spec. Omar M. Albrak

Age: 21
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 09, 2009: Died in Baghdad, of injuries sustained during a motor vehicle accident.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Spec. David A. Schaefer Jr.

Age: 27
Sex: M
Hometown: Belleville, Ill.
Branch: Army

May 16, 2009: Killed when a makeshift bomb denoted near his unit.
Location: Iraq

�

Cpl. Casey L. Hills

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Salem, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 24, 2009: Killed during a vehicle roll-over.
Location: Iraq

�

Maj. David L. Audo

Age: 35
Sex: M
Hometown: Saint Joseph, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 27, 2009: Died in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Petty Officer 2nd Class Brian M. Patton

Age: 37
Sex: M
Hometown: Freeport, Ill.
Branch: Navy

November 19, 2009: Died in Kuwait in a non-combat accident.
Location: Iraq

�

Sgt. Michael P. Bartley

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Barnhill, Ill.
Branch: Army

January 15, 2011: Died in Mosul, Iraq, of wounds suffered when an Iraqi soldier from the unit with which they were training shot them with small arms fire.
Location: Iraq

�

Pfc. Michael C. Olivieri

Age: 26
Sex: M
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Branch: Army

June 06, 2011: Died in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with indirect fire.
Location: Baghdad, Iraq

�

Sgt. 1st Class David G. Robinson

Age: 23
Sex: M
Hometown: Winthrop Harbor, Ill.
Branch: Army

October 25, 2011: Died Oct. 25 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Location: Iraq

Ruth

2011-12-10T14:11:00.000-06:00

She was probably the most frail looking person I ever met. Had to be 90 pounds max. Her skin was like tissue paper and I could see the blue blood coursing through the veins on the backs of her bony hands. Every time she moved it seemed as if none of the parts were working correctly, so the slight hunchback almost seemed necessary to complete the image.

While we sat in her Edgebrook kitchen and talked, she made me coffee in one of those great old percolators with the glass bubble on top of the lid. I'm sure it's just my imagination, but for some reason her coffee tasted better than other people's coffee.

Pinky out was a must because she served the brew in these delicate little cups made of porcelain so thin you could see through it. The whole house was just great. The appliances were all 1950s stuff. Gas stove. Refrigerator was actually rounded on top, and the freezer door was a half-oval. The kitchen table had that stainless steel banding around the edge, and that gray speckle on white linoleum top. I love joints like that. Remind me of my yoot.

I'm sure she figured me for another young, aggressive, got-no-time for smalltalk salesman, because every time she started to get off point, ...replacing her windows, ...she tsk tsk tsked at herself and asked "what were we talking about?"

It was likely my camping experience that did the trick in loosening her up. When the regular gurgling of the coffee pot, and the aroma of that ambrosia reached us at the kitchen table she looked across the room as if planning a 5 minute production.

I told her I'd get it, and before she could warn me I was back at the table with the coffee pot in hand. With one finger on top of the little glass gurgle bubble, just like with my camping coffee pot, I poured her a cup, and then filled my own.

Why did that make her suddenly seem to relax? I didn't get the impression that she was overly nervous up to that point, but she almost seemed like she wanted to hurry things along for my sake.

"Just like my camping percolator. Why is it that coffee tastes better out of these things?"

"Anticipation. You smell the coffee before you drink it. Your taste buds know coffee is on the way. Like leaves on the trees turning up before a rainstorm."

And people wonder why I like the old timers so much.

Cubs fan. I love when the little old ladies are sports fans. Having grown up a Cub fan, and not yet having bailed on that moribund outfit, we had plenty to rehash. I told her of watching from the bleachers as Will Clark and the Giants destroyed the Cubs 11-3 at Wrigley in the 1989 NLCS. She remembered practically every inning. She also thought Will Clark was quite handsome. Not Mark Grace though. She thought Grace looked like a "dandy." (Apparently a dandy was what guys my age called a "pretty boy.")

She was absolutely terrific. Knew stats and players from when I was a little guy. When I told her that Billy Williams was my all-time favorite Cub she seemed quite pleased, and we both agreed that Roberto Clemente had been someone special. For some untold reason, she hated Leo Durocher with a passion, which I found humorous.

As is often the case, I had a hard time getting back on point myself. The old man was back at the office, and he wanted to go home. Couldn't do that while I was out yapping up baseball with Ruth, but tough shit I figured. We sat and talked about everything except windows for about a half hour until at one point she looked out the patio door....

"I really must replace these windows. It's going to be a cold winter," she said with way too much certainty. She motioned out the door. "Look."

There, standing at the edge of her patio, near where the shrubs separate it from the yard, was a squirrel.

"What? The squirrel?"

"Yes. Look at how fat he is."

She was right. That squirrel was so fucking fat that his little legs barely reached the ground. An absolute porker. I'm serious, that squirrel was almost perfectly round. Picture Veruca Salt after the blueberry incident. A good wind would have sent it rolling across the concrete like a beach ball.

"What does that have to do with a cold winter?"

I wish I could describe the look she gave me. Sort of a mixture of pity and surprise. Whereas most guys in my position might have written her off as a senile old bird, I could just tell she was onto something with this ridiculously fat squirrel.

"It's only November, and he's ready."

"You think he can tell how cold the winter is going to be in advance?"

"Of course he can Michael. He lives out there."

It's been about 15 years since I had that discussion with Ruth, and ever since then I've paid special attention to the squirrels.

One nice development in that time has been the apparent migration to Park Ridge of the black squirrels of Evanston. About 20 years earlier, I'd moved from Naperville to Evanston so I could live near my then-girlfriend, who was attending Northwestern. We, uh...sorry Mr. Madden, ..I lived in a studio apartment at the corner of Maple Ave and Dempster Street. One of those great 1920s courtyard buildings with huge radiators, high ceilings, and the little blue and white hexagonal bathroom tiles.

There was an old guy who lived in a garden apartment who'd walk around the neighborhood, using a cane for assistance. One morning, right after I moved in, I noticed him standing in front of the building making a toot toot toot toot sound. After a minute or so, I saw a squirrel approach the old dodger. A black squirrel. I'd never seen a black squirrel before.

"Hey honey, we have black squirrels."

And then, the squirrel ran right up the old guy's cane, and in one motion took the nut that he had been offering in the same hand that held the cane handle. I shit you not.

"Hey honey. The black squirrels are trained to do tricks."

Now that's 31 years ago, and in the interim I've gotten my own apartment again. No more roommates. It's this great old 1920s building in Park Ridge, with big radiators, high ceilings, and those little hexagonal white and blue bathroom tiles.....

Where was I? Oh yeah, the squirrels...

Within the last 5 years or so, our town has attracted these black squirrels. Never used to see them anyplace except the North Shore, but now they're here. So I've been watching them too, looking to see how fat they get before winter, like my friend Ruth taught me.

You can usually tell around Thanksgiving. They start looking a little puffy around Halloween, and if they stay about that same size we're probably looking at an average winter vis a vis how shitty and snowy and miserably gray it gets from December to March.

Now, this morning, it's cold. Unusually cold for December 10th. High teens overnight, and 20s during the day today. It's supposed to warm back up tomorrow, and stay in the 30s and maybe even the low 40s through the beginning of next week.

I usually vary my route to work, so as I left my apartment to drive the two miles to my office today, I decided on Wisner St. That's the street Hillary Rodham used to live on. Wisner and Elm. Nice house.

Just north of there, a block south of Sibley, I noticed one of these black squirrels approaching a large oak tree. Now he was a good 75 feet away so I couldn't at first ascertain his level of rotundity. He didn't seem to be laboring to move, and yet when he reached the base of the oak he didn't just run up the trunk like the Evanston squirrel had done with the old guy's cane. He paused.

By that point I was close enough to see him clearly. I'm not sure exactly how he had gotten across the yard to be honest about it. Up close, I could barely differentiate between his head and his torso. The only way I knew which end was which was the tail, which was twitching as he attempted to crane his neck and look up the tree. Fat ass squirrel. Puffy. Like Costanza in the big down jacket.

I don't know what the absurdly fat black squirrel did about that tree this morning, as I had to get to work. But, it's clearly going to be a cold Chicago winter this year.

A little Frank Lloyd Wright

2011-07-19T12:54:00.002-05:00

Death is not an option

2011-07-01T10:11:00.000-05:00

John Wayne Gacy, who was from Waterloo, IA by the way, was the 100th person to be put to death by the State of Illinois.

Between 1928 and 1962, Illinois electrocuted 98 people. Prior to 1928, the killing was done by the counties. Then, because of various Supreme Court cases like Robinson v California in 1962, and Furman v Georgia in 1972, Illinois temporarily stopped State Sponsored Ends of Lives. The Supremes got reversed in Gregg v Georgia 1976, and in 1977 Illinois was back in the business.

Between '28-'62 we used the aforementioned high voltage, high amps method. In 1977 we decided to use the far more humane lethal injection when killing our convicted murderers. I thought that was nice, and a long way from the 1878 Wilkerson v Utah ruling which stated (if memory serves) that Utah couldn't draw and quarter, publicly dissect, or burn convicts alive. Firing squad OK. 'Sup Utah! I think those were 8th and 14th Amendment rulings but don't try quoting me on that or I'll plead too-lazy-to-Google. (Maybe just 8th and the 14th stuff came later so let me just issue a peremptory blow me Fritz.)

Since Capital Punishment was reinstated, Illinois has put 12 men to death. No women.

Charles Walker

John Wayne Gacy

Hernando Williams

James P. Free, Jr

Girvies Davis

Charles Albanese

George Del Vecchio

Raymond Lee Stewart

Walter Stewart (no relation)

Durlyn Edmonds

Lloyd Wayne Hampton

& Andrew Kokoraleis

Kokoraleis was the last one, in March 1999. A particularly vile piece of work, he and his buddies were known as The Chicago Rippers. A Satanic cult, they used to rape, torture, and then murder their victims, all women, the number of whom is suspected to be 18.

Noteworthy was their trademark of cutting off one breast from each of their victims, masturbating into the wound, and passing the severed breast around so each member could eat some of it. Their leader was a creature named Robin Gecht, who as it turns out used to do work for Pogo the Clown, AKA John Wayne Gacy.

The Ripper Crew, as they were also called, and Kokoraleis in particular were largely responsible for my strong advocacy of the death penalty but the real poster boy for me was Gacy.

When the wife was in law school, the debates were intense. I was often involved because unlike my wife, and most of the Northwestern Law students (and profs...yes I'm looking at you Larry Marshall, and you too David Protess) ...I wasn't appalled at the notion of executing the sickos.

They tried and tried to convince me that singling out the sickos as my examples was a weak form of debate, and yet when I'd ask "Does it bother you that we're going to put John Wayne Gacy to death?" they'd stop and think hard. I heard things like "I'll be glad when Gacy's dead, but I don't think the state should kill him. He should die in prison. He'll never kill another person, so why do you (me) want him dead so badly?"

And I'd say,...because of Timothy McCoy, John Butkovitch, Darrell Sampson, Randall Reffett, Sam Stapleton, Michael Bonnin, William Carroll, Rick Johnston, Kenneth Parker, Michael Marino, Gregory Godzik, John Szyc, Jon Prestidge, Matthew Bowman, Robert Gilroy, John Mowery, Russell Nelson, Robert Winch, Tommy Boling, David Talsma, William Kindred, Timothy O'Rourke, Frank Landingin, James Mazzara, Robert Piest, and 8 others who were unidentifiable. Some of whom were cut into chunks and buried in the walls of his fucking basement.

It's because of those dead guys, I'd say. Justice needs to be swift and severe. I don't want to share air with that fucking monster for another minute.

"Ah, so it's about you!" I'd hear, and they'd nod at each other solemnly, knowingly. Fuckin' law students.

For personal reasons, I followed closely the cases of Alejandro Hernandez, Rolando Cruz (both wrongfully convicted) and Brian Dugan, who was later convicted of the same crime of which Hernandez Cruz were originally charged.

And I followed the career path of David Protess, a Northwestern University journalism professor. Protess was largely responsible, along with a few other people I know, for the Medill Innocence Project. In tandem with the legal team from the Center for Wrongful Convictions, these folks came up with at least 15 different cases of men on death row who were, allegedly innocent.

For some time, I've had some suspicions about Protess, as well as the whole gang down at the Innocence Project. I won't go into details, but suffice to say I found questionable the lengths to which the group was willing to go. Northwestern found some inconsistencies between what Protess said they were doing, and what others were claiming, and so they launched an internal investigation. It was centered around an email that Potess has sent to defense counsel for a guy named Anthony McKinney. McKinney's been locked up for 31 years, and IP says they've got the wrong guy.

In detailing his communication with McKinney's lawyers, Protess said that he was playing it right down the middle, and was revealing any findings his team had uncovered to the prosecution as well.

Turns out that wasn't quite the truth, and when Medill Dean of Journalism John Levine compared the email copy Protess gave him it contained info that was not included in the email that he, Protess, had sent to the prosecution. He was immediately suspended, his popular class on wrongful conviction stuff was shitcanned, and he began holding meetings in secret locations with his students while he awaited the final ruling from NU. That ruling came a couple of months ago when David Protess was dismissed as a professor at Northwestern University.

Whether I cared for Protess or his tactics or not, there's something about that team of his, and their findings that started me on the road to reconsidering my position of capital punishment. 15 cases of men being wrongfully sentenced to death. (thank God we finally figured out how that deoxyribonucleic acid stuff really works.)

That's more than the number of men Illinois has executed since capital punishment was brought back in '77.

With a couple of hundred people being sent to Death Row in that time, we're talking damned near 10% and that's just the ones the Innocence Project could prove. And so, it turns out that the students at Northwestern Law were right back in 1987. It is about me, sort of, and by me I mean us. I could have lived the same life with John Wayne Gacy (Waterloo, IA) not being executed. Same with Ripper Guy. Their executions don't bother me as there was 0% doubt about their guilt but they aren't the only ones we've offed.

10 other guys have been injected lethally since '77, and who knows what their stories were?

It's just too much responsibility for our State to accept, and the system is so fucked up that the likelihood that one of them, or some of the others on Death Row, are there wrongfully was too high to proceed the way we were going. On March 9, when Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law a permanent ban on executions in Illinois I was good with his decision. It's the right thing to do. Not that the idea of killing a John Wayne Gacy bugs my conscience now, because it doesn't.

The problem for me isn't one of conscience about executing murderers per se, it's the uncertainty. If we can't be absolutely certain someone is guilty, and there is enormous evidence that we've fucked up on several occasions by sentencing the wrong people to death, then we don't belong in the killing business. Life without parole is punishment enough.

Well today, at 12:00AM July 1, 2011...the new law took effect.

Illinois will no longer execute people.

A Concert in The Park

2011-06-25T13:48:00.001-05:00

Last night we kicked off our Concert in The Park Series. I've really come to love these Friday nights in Hodges Park. The sensational Park Ridge Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the awesome Barbara Shubert, puts on 7 or 8 of these things every summer, and they've been doing it for 51 years now. (not Barbara, she was probably a toddler like me when they first started back in 1960.)

It's no more than 200 yards from my front door (& windows.) The first year I moved in, which was 2006, I had no idea they put these concerts on. Moved in in April, and by chance I had my windows open one June evening and heard what sounded like a string section tuning up. Living alone, I imagine I looked pretty funny stopping dead in my tracks as I walked across the creaky old hardwood floor (which I love) and cocking my ear toward the front of the apartment. I was thinking ...what the fuck was that?...when I heard kettle drums suddenly begin rolling.

Threw on some clothes (to avoid arrest) and went downstairs. Out the front door and almost ran over an old couple walking by with their folding chairs and little Igloo cooler. They were everywhere, the old timers. Golf hat wearing old coots, happily walking along chatting with little old ladies dressed up for a picnic. They were all walking to the west, and so I followed the parade.

And the music got louder.

Crossing the Metra tracks to the south, we made our may to Hodges Park which sits in the central section of Park Ridge.

By the way, Park Ridge is an old railroad town if you hadn't guessed or didn't already know that. The original heart of town, the shops, the cops, the fire dept.,the Union Pacific/Northwestern- Metra Station, City Hall,...it's all right out my front door. I live on the 2nd floor of a building whose 1st floor is retail space.

It's an old building, built in 1908, and can be seen with the twin white posts sticking up from the facade in the background of this picture someone took of the Park Ridge train station. Fuckin' train freaks. Gotta love 'em. I lived on Burlington Ave in Brookfield from 1996-2005 with the Burlington Northern/ Santa Fe tracks out my front door, and now here. 15 years of living on the tracks has taught me there are lots of railroad aficionados out there. They loves them some railroads. My grandfather Walter Kenney spent 50 years working for the Illinois Central, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with my coincidental choices of residencse. I'm not a train freak dammit, all of those people are!

Now there's some sprawl and a second shopping district to the north which is more heavily trafficked than the old section. They're working to change that, and to re-vitalize the old downtown area. Trader Joe's is a block west in a new "Uptown" development that has brought some shoppers back.

But, back in 2006 I had no real knowledge of the history of my adopted home town despite 30 years of working on the homes here. What can I say, spend your days working in a place and you don't necessarily learn much about the history of it. As I followed these old fogies into Hodges Park I realized the park was half-filled with people. It's a pretty big park, with these enormous old catalpa trees lining the perimeter. I'd guess there were 500-750 people or so.

Beyond them, on the steps of City Hall, I could make out people moving about. They were carrying large objects, like cellos and harps and tubas.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I stopped dead in my tracks a second time. My jaw dropped.

We're having a concert!! I fucking love concerts!

I stopped one of these cheerful senior citizens and asked what's going on.

"What's the deal here? A concert?"

"Oh yes. You haven't been to one here before?"

"No ma'am. Do they do this often?"

"Every Friday." she said smiling at my delight.

"They do? I just moved in over there! This is fantastic. They do this every Friday?"

"Until mid-August. 8 or 9 concerts."

"You are kidding me. Oh, this is wonderful."

"Well, they move the concert to the high school for the 4th of July so they can accompany the fireworks."

"They're outside on the steps of City Hall. What if it rains?"

"They stop playing of course. Some of those instruments are quite old and valuable."

I'm standing there watching this string section taking their seats, chatting with this wonderful woman and thinking ...Oh I'm all over this. This is part of my new Park Ridge routine. I'm going to like this place.

The park was filling quickly with Park ridge residents of all shapes, sizes and ages.

Couples with strollers, toddlers weaving around in the grass being chased by parents doubled over like Groucho, skateboard punks, and the aforementioned veterans. Some of them had already set out the blankets with chairs on the hem, lanterns, candles, bottles of wine...

Bottles of wine?

Ran back across the tracks to my apartment, grabbed my Coleman folding camp chair with cup-holder/armrests, and a bottle of chianti.

That was 5 years ago now.

Oh, and the delightful woman I first spoke with is Marilyn. She's 71 now, and a widow. I occasionally find her under my, sorry, her catalpa tree by the WWI Monument. She doesn't show up every week like she did before Lou died. Doesn't care for the Big Band stuff or the Broadway Showtunes Night. Lou loved that shit so she tagged along. She's terrific, and ...she's been coming to these concerts since that first year, which would have made her 20 at the time. (I don't actually ask her, I'm guessing that part.)

I've come to love these concerts, and I really hate when it rains on Friday night.

Riding the Stacks

2011-05-26T11:05:00.000-05:00

Want to see the coolest 36:49 video you've ever watched?

They call it "Riding the Stacks" when you go up on a shuttle because of the way the solid rocket boosters are assembled. Like stacking one soda can on top of another on top of another on top of another, until you have a long cylinder. (no ends on the cans of course.) Riding the Stacks.

When you watch NASA.tv , they usually show you the view from a camera mounted on one of the SRBs, pointing back toward the earth. Once they reach the point where the SRBs separate, they usually go to a ground tracking station and give you the telescopic camera view until the shuttle is too faint to see. Then it's back to the camera mounted on the external fuel tank, and they usually stay with that until the EFT is jettisoned, and the shuttle is in low orbit. End of show.

Well, this video gives you a somewhat different perspective. If you can stay patient during the 30 seconds or so after SRB separation, what you get is absolutely awesome, and ....you get multiple angles.

Gabby Giffords was at the Cape to see her husband Mark Kelly ride the stacks of Endeavour. Here's the view from the stacks.

Joplin

2011-05-23T11:14:00.002-05:00

Wanderlust + a fear of flying= Road trips.

And that's good thing because I love driving, and I love seeing my country from down here on the ground.

For the last 2 years, in December, I've driven to the Grand Canyon. I'm already making my plans for this year. Yesterday morning I was looking at my Rand McNally 2011 Road Atlas, which now bears the tell-tale blue fine point Sharpie lines of my most recent trip. It's a duplicate of the route I took in '09, and will take again this winter. It's a great trip, and there's something about driving 3500 miles in the week between Christmas and New Years that just strikes one of those chords inside me.

Traffic is light leaving Chicago on Christmas Eve, which allows me to cover all of Illinois and Missouri. Oklahoma and Texas are a breeze on Christmas Day, and Tucumcari, NM to Flagstaff,AZ on the 26th has become one of my favorite 550 mile runs. Absolutely breathtaking. The reverse commute, believe it or not, feels somewhat different. It's the same damn roads, the same towns, and yet when traveling east it just feels different. Maybe it just because I'm heading for home.

US 55 leads to St. Louis. There, you grab US 44 and cut diagonally across Missouri, northeast to southwest. Then comes the stretch from Tulsa to OKC, where you catch US 40, and you head straight west. That road will take you to LA if you stay on long enough. As you make your way west, you are repeatedly reminded of the history of our country by the "Route 66" signs that pop up on the frontage roads that run alongside the modern interstate. Prior to the Eisenhower Interstate System, Rte 66 was the only way to travel from Chicago to LA. Well, there were other ways you could go, but 66 was the route of choice. The Mother Road.

For the last 2 years, my layover on Christmas Eve and on New Years Eve for the return has been Joplin, MO.

US 44, Range Line Road exit, gas station at the bottom of the ramp to top off for tomorrow morning, liquor store on the left, next to a Macs, my hotel 3 blocks west just short of the Rte 66 Historic Business District. Fred & Red's is a landmark, as is Dale's Historic 66 Barber Shop.

Bonnie & Clyde hid in Joplin in 1933 for a few weeks until the locals tipped the cops. After a gunfight that left 2 cops dead, Bonnie & Clyde escaped. But, they left their camera behind and the Joplin Globe published the pictures it contained, some of the most recognizable pictures of the crime duo ever taken.Joplin was booming at the turn of the 20th century. Railroads and mining. In the early 1900s, Joplin was a metropolis compared to other towns along 66. That changed when the Ike Interstate System replaced 66. Time she marches, eh?

The place has this heartland vibe happening that is impossible to describe. You take one look at Joplin and you just know there's a Dairy Queen somewhere with a bunch of Joplin High School kids hanging out there on hot summer nights. I love Joplin, and I've only spent 4 nights of my life there. Christmas Eve twice, New Years Eve twice.

Knuckle Tattoos checked me into my hotel again this year. His name is Rob, but Knuckle Tattoos just fits better. Last year I was a little taken back by the guy working the front desk, but appearances can be deceiving and that's certainly the case with Knuckle Tattoos.They can't be from prison. There's no way that guy has done time. So why the hell would anybody pound ink into their knuckles? Oh well, to each their own.

"Hi, I'm here to check in. I have a reservation. Name's Kenney."

"Welcome back Mr. Kenney. I see you've requested a ground floor room, smoking, with internet access."

"Right."

"You're on the west side of the hotel, and you might be able to pick up the signal from the coffee shop. It's a hot spot."

"Oh, well thanks Rob. How about we try that first, and if I need the card I'll come back."

"Good plan."

"Liquor store across the street open on Christmas Eve?"

"Open on Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day until 5."

"I'll be gone in the morning. Heading for the Grand Canyon. 1200 miles to go."

"That's a beautiful drive. You should have light traffic too because of the holidays."

"That's the plan my friend."

"Good plan. Want to leave a wake-up?"

"No thanks, I travel with a clock."

"Well you have a good night Mr. Kenney, and a Merry Christmas."

"Thanks Rob."

I don't know why exactly, but there's something about physically visiting a place, even briefly, that makes it part of the mosaic. It becomes a part of my life. That's the deal with Joplin and me. Can't say I really know anyone there, but the mere mention of the town, all 50,000 residents, evokes a feeling of familiarity. Feel like I've come to know the place and the people.

As I was watching the Bulls game last night, with Twitter up on the netbook, I saw the NYT break a story that broke my heart. "Tornado rips through Joplin, MO. 12 confirmed dead." Oh fuck. I thought of Rob Knuckles.

And this morning, I scoured the internet for updates. 89 people killed, and that number may rise. Jesus Christ. An article from HuffPo caught my eye. Randy Turner, English teacher from Joplin High School. High school gone. Hospital trashed. Between 50-75% of the entire town damaged. A swath of destruction 6 miles long and almost a mile wide. That pretty much covers the town. The photos are gruesome, and I'm sure that as the stories start emerging from the rubble, I'm going to feel like someone stabbed me in the throat again, like I did last night and again this morning.

My Friend Richard Feynman

2011-05-14T12:18:00.002-05:00

"You can always recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity."- Richard P Feynman

Stanford's Leonard Susskind works on things like string theory, quantum mechanics and cosmology, field theory,...ya know, the easy As. The blow-off classes you took to complete your Bachelor of Science degree.

Here's Susskind talking about his friend Richard Feynman for TED.

Ronghild

2011-05-06T12:47:00.000-05:00

So I take a contract to work on this house, Ronghild's house, on the northwest side. Referral from the neighbor across the street. Signed the deal 3 weeks ago, and finished the work yesterday afternoon. My guy calls me and tells me the customer can't find her checkbook.

$2000 balance due.

Can't find her checkbook.
Tearing the house apart,...still can't find her checkbook.

Two beautiful new fiberglass doors, stained light oak inside to match Ronghild's floors, and white outside to match her windows. Sweet ODL nickel caming in her insulated glass units (tempered glass by law), and really nice Schlage satin nickel hardware.

So I tell my guy to call it a day, and to tell Ronghild that I'll stop by this morning to grab a check.

Did I mention she's 96 years old?

Yeah, Ronghild's 96 and so the misplaced checkbook didn't trigger the usual alarms that go off when some underwater douchebag tries to get me to fix up his McMansion on a deferred payment plan to be worked out by the fuckin' bankruptcy court. The old timers always pay their bills. Always.

And being 96, I guess "tearing the house apart" might be a bit strong. Carefully, methodically, slowly going through every drawer in the house is more like it. Ronghild's hearing isn't so good either, which is why she didn't know the smoke detector battery needed to be replaced the day I sat down to talk business with her.

It's not that the PEEP it was bothering me so much as PEEP I wanted to make sure that PEEP Ronghild had a functioning smoke alarm PEEP in her house.

So while I'm swapping the battery out of her smoke detector, and selling her these two doors, we get to talking about her name. It's Norwegian. And I tell her that she's the 2nd Ronghild I've ever known of, and the other is Keith Colburn's wife on the Wizard. (crab boat on Deadliest Catch) Ronghild, "call me Ronnie" tells me she watches Deadliest Catch all the time because she knows a lot of the guys on the fleet are Norwegian.

She watches with the volume on her TV turned way up of course, and so I'm sitting there picturing this 96 year old Norwegian lady tuned in to Discovery and cranking the volume up as Bon Jovi's Dead or Alive starts blasting and I kinda got a case of the giggles. I had to step outside under the excuse that I needed to go to my car, and got it out of my system.

Ronghild also watches Ice Road Truckers and Gold Rush Alaska.

Great story, and the kind that reminds me of why I like what I do for a living. Imagine a 96 year old woman dropping 3K on some doors, just because she wants new doors. She came to America in 1927, which I guess made her 12 years old or so. Spent her entire life in that same house and watched as the city grew up around her. A seamstress. The old timers are an absolute treasure trove of cool trivia about the neighborhoods, the politicians, the local businesses that have long since moved on. She can't drive now so she takes the bus everywhere. She told me about taking the bus to go see her tax guy a few days before I met her.

96 year old people shouldn't have to do that. The IRS should come to her house, pick her up, and drive her to the tax guy, wait, and then take her back home. She was pissed off that they moved down to Addison and whatever when they used to be right down the street next to the "grocer."

I love the old timers...they use words like grocer.

So I waited until about 9 before calling Ronghild this morning. No answer. And no answer again a half hour later. I think I started to get a little worried around 10. I called the neighbors across the street, the ones who'd referred me to Ronghild, to ask them if they'd check in on her. Make sure she's OK.

For about 10 minutes I sat at my desk thinking bad things. Bad thoughts. Unwanted, but immutable. What if she's...ya know...dead? That's when business guy had an argument with human being guy. Actually, human being guy was doing most of the talking. It's not about the 2K, is it? You like the old broad, just admit it. You're worried. So shut the fuck up about your stupid money and...

The neighbor calls. Ronghild's fine, she's sitting in the kitchen doing her crossword puzzle. Waiting for me to call. C'mon down and get the check, she found her checkbook two minutes after the guys left, and would I give her an estimate for some Leaf Guard gutters for the house and garage?

Just got back to the office, with another contract for her gutters. She loves her new doors.

Oh and, she didn't hear the phone ringing because sometimes she doesn't hear the phone ringing.

When the Levee Breaks

2011-04-30T20:47:00.002-05:00

Cairo (pronounced CARE-o, alt Chicago mocking pron. KAY-row) is the southernmost town in Illinois. If you're aware of the term "spit of land" it applies to Cairo. It sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and is surrounded by levees.

When river travel was the way to go, Cairo was a hopping little town. Twain mentions it in Huck Finn, and in fact Cairo was the intended original destination for Jim and Huck as they fled up the Ohio.

It is the home of Fort Defiance, which was commanded by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War and was an important supply station for Union troops during the war. As the 20th century arrived, the town was doing well economically and the population reached over 15,000.

But there were issues in Cairo, racial issues, that stretched from the beginning of the century til the end.

Many in that part of Illinois were sympathetic to the Confederate cause, and supported segregation into the new century. There were lynchings, like that of Will James in 1909. And 60 years later, the racial tension and threat of violence was such that the National Guard was called into Cairo. A civil rights group called Cairo United Front led a boycott of white-owned businesses in Cairo that crippled the local economy, and it has yet to recover.

Currently, Cairo is the home to under 3,000 residents. Unemployment is high, more than half the children under 18 are living below the poverty level, and crime is a problem due to a reduced police budget. The town, despite being listed all over the National Historic Register, has become run-down. Buildings, abandoned years ago, have trees growing in them. Homes are boarded up. Businesses same. Very depressed, and sad.

The levees around Cairo rise 64 feet, which is roughly 4 feet higher than the current level of the Mississippi. The Army Corp of Engineers were brought in to inspect the levees, and they're reporting that despite the 4 feet of leeway the levees are "bubbling up" , indicating that they're failing from within.

Last week, plans were put in place to blow a hole in the levee down-river a bit, and allow approximately 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland to be flooded. The State of Missouri has been tying the move up in court for the last few days while the citizens of Cairo have busied themselves by sandbagging. In some cases, the water is lapping at their front porches. Front lawns submerged.

Earlier today, a judge gave the Army to OK to proceed, and Missouri's Attorney General, Chris Koster, said he's going to take his case to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.

That may be, but the Army's plan is to blow the thing...maybe as I type this. The National Weather Service says that the crested river (assumin' no more rain and the creek don't rise) should begin to recede by Tuesday, while the Army is concerned that the levees can't stand 3 days of max-pressure like that.

Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois are in favor of the levee blast, and the flooding of 130,000 acres of prime Missouri farmland. Things are getting very tense down there folks.

On Wednesday, Missouri's Republican House Speaker Steve Tilley said that he'd rather see Cairo washed away than see a flood of his state's farmland. Tilley said "Have you been to Cairo? Okay, then you know what I'm sayin' then." He subsequently apologized for his insensitive remarks.

Cairo's Mayor, Judson Childs helped ease the tension by saying that if the levee isn't blown, Cairo,IL will become "the next 9th Ward of New Orleans."

Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down South
They go no work to do,
If you don't know about Chicago.

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.

All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
Thinkin' about me baby and my happy home.
Going, going to Chicago... Going to Chicago... Sorry but I can't take you...
Going down... going down now... going down....

Friends of Rahm

2011-04-23T15:01:00.001-05:00

Recent reports have put a price of $880,000 on Rahm Emanuel's legal battle over his residency in Chicago. Or, for purposes of comparison, approximate the same amount of money he'll earn in his 6 years as our new mayor. That's $880K of his own money, and I'm not sure how much was spent by those who challenged Rahm.

Some might question why a man would spend $880,000 fighting to get a job that will pay him about the same amount of money over a 6 year span. Seems like a wash, right? And thus a net loss, since I'm pretty sure Rahm Emanuel would have done better than break-even financially in his career AHOCOSJ (after his Obama's chief of staff job. It's an unwieldy acronym. Working on it.)

Love of Da Great City uh Chicago I'm sure.

What other reason could there be?

Rahm's said he's not in it for the money, that it's been his dream job since he was a lad chopping off his own bird. And now his dream has come true. He gets to sit on the 5th Floor at 121 N. LaSalle and oversee the operations of this great city.

His predecessor, Richard M. Daley, was a retard whose financial sensibilities rival those of Gary Busey.

Rahm is looking at a checkbook that's $500+million overdrawn for 2011, and a City Council that isn't in the bag.

He's already cozying up to Fast Eddie Burke, chairman of the powerful city finance committee. It wasn't two months ago that Rahm was talking about cutting Burke's police security detail, and there were rumblings that a "Clash of the Titans" was imminent with Mayor Emanuel poised to strip Burke of his powerhouse job. Well, Fast Eddie can relax, Rahm has come to his senses and has decided that Burke gets to keep shaking the Tree of Influence.

But the City Council is a problem for Rahm. Several of Daley's old cronies are out, which means an entirely new blueprint of graft will need to be drawn with patronage jobs, kickbacks, payoffs, and no-bid 24-9 contracts dangling in the balance.

In a recent moment of apparent madness, Rahm proposed cutting the City Council itself in half!

Rahm said he was just thinking outside the box when he asked the 50 Aldermen what they thought of cutting the number of Aldermen to 25. When reached for comment, 25 Aldermen who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity said "Hey fuck that idea. That's too far outside the box. Tell Rahm we like the box." Rahm said he was just spitballing potential ways to save money, but I'm thinking he might have been trying to keep his friends close and his enemies out of the picture completely. Easier to manage 25 crooked Aldermen than 50, and maybe if the cards fell right he could gerrymander his way into a rubber stamp City Council. Oh well, Rahm will have to try to herd 50 cats.

Then there's the matter of the unions. Rahm's not a big fan of government unions. Chicago is a city of influential government unions. If Rahm has any ideas about pulling a Walker Gambit and playing hardball with Chicago's teachers, firefighters, or police he's in for a very rude awakening. Said it before and now again, we'll make the protests in Madison look like a picnic in Sheboygan.

He's inherited a huge mess.

And into all of this strolls Rahm Emanuel, acting like he's got a plan.

Why on earth would anyone want this job?

I don't want to give the impression that Rahm's an unpopular guy. He's got lots of friends.

Take Barack Obama for instance, and his new Chief of Staff Bill Daley. Rahm's certainly got some pull in Washington, which may pay off. I know he's got friends in Hollywood, by way of his brother.

A guy named Haim Saban from Beverly Hills, CA (and from Fox Family Network) contributed $300,000. A woman named Cheryl Saban, also from Beverly Hills tossed in $100,000 followed by another $100,000 from that Haim Saban guy again. I wonder if they're related. (probably, they list the same Wishire Ave. address)

That would explain why a Mr. David Geffen from Beverly Hills, CA gave Rahm $100K last October. And a Mr. Steven Spielberg, from Los Angeles kicked in $75K. Oh and, Mr. Jeffrey Katzenberg tossed in $25K

There's $25,000 from a Mr. Steve Jobs, and another $25,000 from a Laurene Powell who also goes by the name Laurene Jobs. They're in the computer business.

A group calling themselves "Friends of Rahm," who live in PO Box 101124 in Chicago,IL "transferred in" a click over $1.1million.

It's not just the big bucks that are flowing to Rahm. A guy named Michael Dorf from 16 Vestry St. in New York, NY sent $16 to Rahm in March, which was after Rahm had already won the mayoral race. Rahm's friends are very enthused about him having the big chair.

There is one contribution that puzzles me....just 2 days before Christmas, a check for $50,000, and listing a return address of 725 5th Ave. New York, NY. That one came from a Mr. Donald Trump, who if I'm not mistaken is considering running for president as a Republican. Not only that, I seem to recall reading that Mr. Trump is suspicious of Barack Obama's citizenship. That's Rahm's old boss! And yet, for some reason, Trump felt the need to give 50 grand to Rahm Emanuel.

I wonder what they all think they're buying with their LINK to Rahm.

Sauganash

2011-03-20T17:55:00.021-05:00

If you look at a map of Chicago, you'll quickly figure out that it's set up like a grid. A sheet of graph paper. A marvelous thing when you're a limo driver in a hurry, as the numbering system for addresses is the purest form of simplicity. State and Madison is 0 North and 0 West and the entire city fans out from that point with numbers increasing as you move away from the center of the city.

On the northwest side, where I've worked for the better part of 35 years, there are exceptions to the foolproof method of self-location.

Diagonals.

Elston Ave., Milwaukee Ave., and Caldwell Ave. all cut northwest through the heart of the grid.

I've always been fascinated with Chicago history, and the diagonals.

I was curious as to why the anal-retentive city planners (and yes I'm looking at you Daniel Burnham) would ruin an otherwise perfect blending of form and function.

In the late 1820s, a young man came to Chicago from Detroit. The son of an Irish-Scot father and a Pottawatomie mother (some say Mohawk), he was known as Sauganash. Educated at The Jesuit School in Detroit, he spoke French, English, and his mother's native Pottawatomie.

He was befriended by one of the original Chicago merchants, Mark Beaubien. Beaubien himself was the son of a French father and Pottawatomie mother, which may have contributed to their friendship (Beaubien Street in the Loop is just east of Michigan Ave. and is about three blocks long. Most people here have no idea who it's named after but that's another post.)

That area of Chicago was the heart of a small Indian village back in 1820, when Sauganash came rolling into town. Perhaps Indian village is a stretch, but the Ottawa, Pottawatomie, Chippewa and leftover Black Hawks were much more numerous than the newly arrived white folk, and within the city there was ongoing intercourse between settlers and native Americans. Trading furs and goods back and forth, crops exchanged for whiskey, Chippewa chiefs, French fur trappers, English settlers all elbow to elbow at the bars. The original melting pot.

Beaubien thought so much of Sauganash that he named a hotel after him, the first of its kind in Chicago. It's said that Beaubien used to greet mud-covered travelers with a blanket, and lead them to a vacant spot on the floor. While taking payment for the night's lodging, Beaubien would warn the lodger to "watch out for the Indians, they'll try stealing the blanket." Once the lodger was sound asleep, Beaubien would gently peel the blanket off the travel-weary snoozer, and sell it to the next guy in the door.

Beaubien's Tavern (on what is now Beaubien Street) was a meeting place for the social climbers just in from the east coast. Young men by the boatload came down the St. Lawrence, through the Erie Canal, and from across Lake Michigan, while wagonloads arrived via the 2000 mile rut-filled muddy trail that came around the southern tip of the lake by what is now Gary, Indiana. They came here to work hard and get rich. And sleep on the floor of the Sauganash Hotel.

They would gather at Beaubien's to talk current events, like the proposed US Government buyout of the Indian land they were all standing on.

(Less than 30 years later, in a building called the Wigwam, on the very same land formerly occupied by the Sauganash Hotel, Abraham Lincoln was nominated at the 1860 Republic Convention.)

In September 1833, the US government called a grand council in Chicago of the 77 chiefs of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Pottawatomie tribes. On Sept 26th, a treaty was signed with 76 chiefs affixing their marks and one, Sau-Ko-Nock, his name to the formal agreement.

For the next two years, an annuity was paid to the tribes within the city itself. After that, the payment of goods would be delivered to the Indians at their new home....west of the Mississippi River.

The annuity consisted of food, blankets, pots and pans, and assorted other goods that were distributed by piling the stuff in mounds on the west side of the Chicago river near what is now the intersection of Randolph and Canal Streets.

The first payment was made in 1834, and the Indians were made to sit in a large circle around the mounds of merchandise, and it was literally thrown to/at them. The morons who were in charge of distribution lost all control and soon the Indians were all over the small mountains of goods.

When the distribution was completed, the Indians then bartered away what they'd just been given for clothing and whiskey from the traders waiting nearby.

The final payment to be made (in the city) in 1835 was a much more dramatic event. Indians by the thousands gathered on the edge of the city in full ceremonial splendor. Faces painted, and with eagle and hawk feathers knotted into their hair, they came on horseback and on foot. Their numbers dwarfed that of the white residents of Chicago.

They knew that this was their final day as the caretakers of this land, and the idea that a government would claim actual ownership of land enraged them. Before leaving the country of the Illinois, they would leave an impression on the strangers who had settled in the land they'd occupied for generations.

A thousand warriors gathered at the council house on the river's north side and began to march into the heart of the city. They carried clubs and tomahawks. As they entered what is now The Loop, their music makers began chanting and banging their drums. They slammed large sticks together as they gathered for a War Dance.

The column of warriors poured into the city and went street by street, shouting and shrieking their dislike for those who now called Chicago their own.

People were scared shitless, and stayed locked in their ramshackle homes, peering out through the blinds and expecting the worst. An Indian uprising.

John Dean Caton, who later became Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court witnessed the event from the Sauganash Hotel. He described what he saw as "all the worst passions which can find a place in the breast of a savage- fierce anger, terrible hate, dire revenge, remorseless cruelty...."

It was only afterward, and to his great relief, Caton realized it was only a demonstration of Indian might, designed "to test the nerve of the stoutest." Given the overwhelming force that the Indians possessed, Caton noted that had they actually attacked the city, "They would have left not a living soul to tell the story."

And then, the Indians withdrew from the city.

Much has been speculated about the role of mediator that Sauganash played in helping prevent a massacre in 1835. He is said to have had big cred within the community. The Indians knew he was able to speak and write in English and French. They knew he was friends with Mark Beaubien.

The white men knew he was Jesuit educated and that his father was a white man. Rumors of Sauganash's connection to Tecumseh and his life as a chief in Michigan were never confirmed, but the white men used that propaganda to convince Washington that they had "their man" in Sauganash.

Sauganash is actually a butchered version of the native American term for Englishman. Mark Beaubien and the white power brokers in early Chicago actually called him Billy Caldwell.

Caldwell Ave. and Milwaukee Ave. are diagonals for a very simple reason.

They were here first.

They were here long before Daniel Burnham and the other city planners laid out the orderly grid pattern on top of them.

They were Indian trails that pre-dated the white settlers.

Today, if I leave my office and drive south on Milwaukee Ave, I can cut east on Touhy and pick up Caldwell Ave. About a mile south of there, Caldwell curves over the Edens Expressway, right at the edge of the lovely little Chicago neighborhood known as Sauganash, bordered on the west by Cicero Ave.

And Caldwell Ave. named for Archibald "Billy" Caldwell now sits directly atop the route used by the Ottawa, the Chippewa, and the Pottawatomie as they departed Chicago, forever, 175 years ago.

Mercury

2011-03-18T10:52:00.006-05:00

Originally thought to be two different planets, Apollo visible around dawn, and Hermes which could be seen at dusk. The Romans eventually named it Mercury after the God they equated with Hermes and the rest is celestial history.

It's so close to the Sun that the surface temps are in the 400C range on the bright side, and -170C in the shady part, and at the poles. Heavy, with a huge iron core at its center, Mercury moves very quickly. Its orbit around the sun takes 88 Earth days.

Because of the solar glare, very little was known about Mercury until it was mapped, 45% worth anyway, by Mariner 10 back in the mid 70s. That's when we found out with certainty that its cratered surface resembles our own Moon. Until then it was a crescent on the morning and evening horizons.

Because of the solar glare, very few people have ever seen Mercury outside of the usual suspects in the field. When you combine it's proximity to the sun, and the fact that you can only see Mercury when its orbit has taken it to either side of the sun, and then only when the sun has dipped just below our own horizon (with traditional equipment I mean, without a solar filter), it's not hard to understand why Mercury is elusive from an amateur astronomer's standpoint.

I find it fascinating that we've got a rocky inner planet that we know next to nothing about.

We know its size is small in relation to the other inner planets, (Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's Ganymede are larger) that it's got craters and maria like our Moon, that Mercury has no moon of its own, and the stuff about its magnetic poles and orbital mechanics. We know it has an equatorial radius of a little less than 2500 miles.

I know there are other details but those are the rough ones and that's really all we know, with certainty, about Mercury.

On August 3, 2004 NASA launched the spacecraft Messenger atop a Boeing Delta II rocket. Its voyage would carry it 5.9 billion miles, with a total of 15 trips around the Sun, once around Earth, a reasonably close first fly-by of the target in 2008, twice around Venus, with the final destination being the planet Mercury. Can't just fire a rocket at Mercury and hope to get there I guess, something to do with gravitational slingshots and changing trajectories but that shit makes my head hurt.

All I know is that there are people who do understand that stuff, and that those people calculated correctly, because at 9PM ET last night Messenger achieved orbital insertion around the planet Mercury.

And that is a first. Outward bound is the usual direction for the exploration of our solar system, and even with Venus it's more like next door. Even planetary missions that required a swing around the sun were eventually destined for out that-a-way.

Mercury is unique in this way. The mission is unique. They're going to map the remainder of the surface (30% was mapped 3 years ago when Messenger did it 1st fly-by of the planet), as well as look for traces of ice at the perma-shade points near the poles. Pretty weird to think ice could exist in a pizza oven, but there is that shadow line where 400C meets -175C.

What a bizarre environment Messenger entered last night.

The designers at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory had to come up with a craft that could withstand the sun's rays in extremely close proximity, as well as enormous heat reflected by Mercury's planet surface. Messenger is rugged. It is shielded front at back by, essentially, heat screens that protect the scientific package contained within.

Messenger weighed a little over 2100 lbs when it launched in Aug. 2004, and over 1300 lbs of that was propellant required to slow the spacecraft as it approached Mercury and allow for orbital insertion. That doesn't leave much weight allowance for scientific instruments.

The mission itself hopes to finish mapping Mercury (in color), to examine its surface composition, its magnetic field and core, its magnetosphere, its atmosphere, and its polar regions.

Very ambitious to say the least, but nothing would have meant a damned thing if they hadn't pulled off one of the truly astounding feats of space rendezvous last night.

No do-overs, no fly-bys, no take-it-around and let's try a little steeper descent angle this time. One chance, and one chance only to correctly send signals from the Earth, which would fire Messenger's thrusters, and slow the thing down enough so that it could gently settle into orbit and not get sucked into the gigantic ball of hydrogen and helium glowing right next door.

Last night at 9PM ET, exquisite engineering and practically perfect mathematical calculations combined to accomplish a first in human history. We have arrived at Mercury.

Noteworthy I'd say.

Secrets

Here I am, arrived at last to swoop around you
Like a glass and metal hawk, my electronic claws
Reaching down to snatch up data as I sweep o'er
Your mountains and meandering rupes.
Bathed in the flares billowing off this so-close star
Head down against the gusts of its golden solar wind
I am here to steal your secrets, reveal
The mercurial mysteries you have teased us with
For far too long, hiding here in the sun's blinding glare
Daring us, to stare at you.

I hope you have enjoyed your isolation, your surreptitious
Solitude, laying low here in Sol's radiation-thick glow
For I have come to finally Know you.
Unlike others of my kind, who find beauty in the billowing
Clouds of a bloated ball of gas, I am in love with stone.
So I am here to take countless two-tone portraits
Of your asteroid-blasted plains; lovingly paint
The great bulls-eye of Caloris in a million pixel shades
And immortalise your craters and canyons
In 21st century jpeg glory, for all those on the Waterworld to see.

Stuart Atkinson 2011

Coffee & Cigarettes

2011-03-12T14:57:00.002-06:00

Tom Waits _ Iggy Pop - Coffee and Cigarettes by mugu_77

Dear Philip Morris,

2011-03-10T16:12:00.004-06:00

You're probably asking yourselves "Gee, I wonder how that 51 year old, two packs of Marlboro a day, junkie from Chicago is doing in his attempt to rid himself once and for all of our criminally addictive product."

Winning! Duh.

Fuck you, fuck your drugs, fuck your lobby, fuck your NASCAR team, fuck your F1 team, fuck your marketing department, fuck your research and development department, and fuck the guy who sprays the menthol on the pile of tobacco leaves. Kick that motherfucker in the balls for me.

You're probably saying to yourselves, "Well sure, he's one of our junkies and he's trying to kick, and he's just a little on edge. You know what he could use? A nice smoooooth Marlboro menthol in the handy flip-top box. Send him a nice $10 coupon for his next carton. He's on our mailing list."

Fuck Washington Duke and his fucking farm in Raleigh, NC. In fact fuck the entire state of North Carolina. Fuck James Bonsack and his goddamned 1881 cigarette rolling machine that allowed you assholes to make 120,000 cigarettes a day. Goddamned jackals.

As I feel your poison leaving my system, the cravings are growing. The withdrawal. Twitchy fingers.

One of your carcinogenic delivery devices is sitting right in front of me.

It's talking to me Philip.

It's calling to me.

Light me.

Just flip that gold Zippo open, and light me.

Breathe deep the soothing nicotine, and the edginess will disappear.

Fuck you.

In fact, your entire industry can go fuck itself. You're a bunch of Pablo Escobars. Drug peddling bastards, every last one of you.

Sure, I'm a little twitchy right now you god-damned sons-of-bitches, but this will pass. And then comes the winning duh.

Food, fresh air, no more social outcast, no more listening to my family and friends telling me I'm a suicidal d-bag

And no more spending money on your drugs. Lots and lots of money that I'm keeping from now on, instead of giving it to you so you can sell me more drugs. It's my money, but you want it don't you?

My cash is your drug, isn't it?

Well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut you off.

Has anyone told you cocksuckers today that you're a bunch of degenerate ghouls?

They have now.

Grand Canyon Traffic Jam

2011-03-09T16:36:00.005-06:00

Hell of a Life

2011-03-01T15:20:00.003-06:00

I was just 16 and didn’t look a day older. I confess to you that I lied to more than one recruiter. I gave them my solemn word that I was 18, but I’d left my birth certificate back home in the family Bible. They’d take one look at me and laugh and tell me to go home before my mother noticed I was gone. Somehow I got the idea that telling an even bigger whopper was the way to go. So I told the next recruiter that I was 21 and darned if he didn’t sign me up on the spot! I enlisted in the Army on 14 August 1917.

Frank W Buckles

Frank rode over to Europe on the Carpathia after that. While in passage, he talked to some of the crew who were aboard when she was sent to rescue Titanic survivors five years prior. Drove ambulances in France and England with the US Army's Fort Riley Casual Detachment, and after the war escorted POWs back to Germany.

Discharged from the army in 1920.

In 1942, working for the White Star Shipping Company, he was traveling to Manila and was captured by the Japanese. Spent the next 3 1/2 years in the Los Baños prison camp, where he almost died of malnourishment. Weight dropped to under a buck, and he caught beriberi.

In February of '45 he was rescued, a 44 year old civilian POW.

Moved to San Francisco where he married Audrey Mayo in 1946.

He got tired of the shipping business, and in 1953 purchased the 330 acre Gap View Farm near the Shenandoah Junction in West Virginia, where he raised cattle.

In 1999 Audrey passed away after 53 years of marriage, and Frank remained at Gap View until he died yesterday at the age of 110, the last surviving American veteran of WWI.

Frank Buckles- 1901-2011

Project Tuva

2011-02-25T16:11:00.004-06:00

"...because any place that's got a capitol named K-Y-Z-Y-L has just got to be interesting."

~ Richard P Feynman

As a young boy, Feynman located a country named Tuva on a globe. Middle of Nowhere just outside of downtown Mongolia. Interesting stamps for the young philatelist. He immediately wanted to know more about it. (Being a young Richard P Feynman must have been a daily adventure. Must have been.)

Later on in the same life, at a cocktail party, Feynman quizzed a friend of his who claimed to know about geography, as to the existence of a country named Tannu Tuva. (Feynman knew the friend would think he'd made it up, which the friend immediately did, and so they looked it up.) Sure enough, an encyclopedia listing. The capitol of Tannu Tuva was named Kyzyl, and Feynman decided that one day he'd travel there.

"Travels in Central Siberia" was a book Feynman found at the library in San Francisco (he was in town to play bongos for a ballet) but the only thing he discovered from that book was that nobody, and I mean nobody, travels to Tannu Tuva. It was in central Siberia, and was located in a "bowl" which according to Feynman meant "that if you wanted to go down into it, you had to climb out of it, and there really was no particular reason to go through it so..."

Nobody knew anything about Tannu Tuva, which was of course irresistible to Richard P. Feynman.

He got sidetracked often on his way to Kyzyl, Manhattan Project, Nobel, teaching at both Cornell and Cal Tech, solving things like O-Ring induced Shuttle explosions, painting, drawing, a little poetry and what-not, but he and close friend Ralph Leighton never let that Tuva dream die.

It became an obsession for both of them. It was getting late in Feynman's life, he was battling stomach cancer, and so Leighton, son of a physics prof, former Feynman grad student and later asst prof/TA/beer buddy/weed buddy (pure speculation on my part but I know RPF smoked weed and I know he had to get it somewhere) bongo buddy, ....author....did much of the bureaucratic heavy lifting. Letters to what was then the Soviet Union repeatedly informed Leighton that entry permits for their "research team" could not be granted this year, perhaps next.

Then, Feynman and Leighton came across a 1931 book, published in Berlin, written by a German historian and explorer named Otto Mänchen-Helfen that described Mänchen-Helfen's travels in the remote country of Tannu Tuva. Otto said that he was the first non-Russian to ever visit the Republic of Tuva, that he had low expectations going in, but found the experience "astonishing." They learned from Otto that the only time they turned on the power plant in Kyzyl was when the movie theater was running.

"I saw the beautiful Pudovkin film Mother there," wrote Mänchen-Helfen. "...the film broke at least twenty times that night, but that only made the audience happy. So much the better. Now the fairy-tale would last that much longer."

The Tuvans were unable to understand the Russian sub-titles, but according to Otto, they couldn't have cared less. The only time they got pissed off was when Pudovkin showed a close-up of thundering horse-hooves. They couldn't understand the reason for only showing part of the horse.

The horses they liked. Horses they understood. They rode from all over Tuva on horseback to get to Kyzyl on movie night to see a blockbuster movie that they didn't understand spoken in a foreign language. They wanted to see the whole horse, not just a hoof.

Completely removed from "modern" 1920s society except for the movie theater. Like stumbling across one of those Amazon tribes who don't wear clothes but talk on cell phones.

Leighton told of the red-tape hairball that he and Richard ("The Chief") had encountered attempting to travel to Tuva, and how letter after letter were answered with polite declines. No can do. Thanks for asking, but Intourism doesn't route through Kyzyl.

Finally, Leighton hit paydirt. He found a Mongolian-Tuvan-Russian phrase-book, and used a Russian-English translation book to complete the deal. He could now decipher Tuvan, and more importantly, write a letter in that language.

It became a puzzle. Take a Tuvan phrase, translate it to Russian, to English, do the turn-around and try to figure out a way to write a letter to the Tuvan honchos, in their own language, and bypass the Soviet travel/kgb agents. Right in Feynman's power alley. He loved that kinda shit. (Google Feynman/Dresden Codex for further examples of his love of puzzles.)

They wrote their letter to Tuva, in Tuvan, mailed it, and waited. Weeks passed. Months. Just when they'd about given up the ghost they got a reply from a Tuvan guy who told them that he was delighted to know that someone like Feynman was interested in his culture, and warned them that travel to Tuva was extremely limited, very few people allowed in, good luck, nice to meet ya. And of course it was written in Tuvan so they had to crack that code, just to understand the bad news.

They discovered Mongolian throat singers, and hatched a scheme where they'd travel to the World Mongolian Throat Singing Extravagnza in a town not far from Tuva (2 time zones or so) and they'd finagle their way to Kyzyl by making up some shit about studying Mongolian Throat Singing. That busted out when the Mongolian Throat Singing Extravaganza got canceled.

At one point in their journey, Leighton traveled to Sweden to see a museum exhibit that covered the history of The Silk Road. There he encountered a Russian museum curator named Kapitsov who was traveling with the exhibit, and, essentially impersonated an American museum curator. Leighton told the Rooskie that he might be able to swing a trip to the US for the entire Silk Road production. (I guess you can do that sort of thing if you have Richard Feynman running interference for you.)

In order to schedule such a thing Leighton would need to speak to several local museums, and would the Russian be interested in a sort of cultural exchange? You know, we bring 17 of you people to America with your exhibit, you'll see Disneyland you'll have a great time. When asked what his "finder's fee" would be Leighton said there'd be no fee, but maybe you can give us a little reach-around and find a way for us to see Kyzyl, Tuva.

Well? Am I exaggerating when I say these guys were obsessed?

And so the Russians came to America. And they showed their Silk Road exhibit. And they saw Disneyland. Feynman and Leightont took the Russian delegation to a gathering area for a bunch of Hippies. People walking along the beach with parrots, and roller-skating by topless, the usual California stuff. The Russians had a great time, and Kaiptsov assured Richard and Ralph that they would see Kyzyl, Tuva.

"I'm gonna guarantee it." said Feynman, quoting the Russian to an interviewer. He was excited about the new possibility of reaching the end of a lifetime quest.

Three days after that, he went into the hospital and on Feb 15, 1988 Richard Feynman died at the age of 69.

Two days after he died, a letter arrived.

Moscow.

Dear Professor Feynman,

I have the great pleasure to invite you, your wife, and four of your colleagues to visit the Soviet Union. I was informed by Professor Kapitsov that you would like to visit Tuva and get acquainted of its sightseeings. We consider the most favorable time for such a trip to be period of May and June, 1988. Your trip will take three to four weeks. Kindly note that the Academy of Sciences will cover your expenses.

Yours sincerely,

Vice President Velikov

Most of that is from the books I've read about Feynman, and from Ralph Leighton himself in interviews. The Tuva story was the theme of the PBS show, and at the end the interviewer asked Ralph "What's going to happen now,...to the Tuva Project?"

Leighton said that he wasn't sure what he would do, that he was considering finances and logistics...things that had never really been a consideration before Feynman died. Those sudden considerations caused Ralph to conclude that "It was the adventure with my friend that this was all about."

Not long ago, I was surfing around and came across something about a guy named Curtis Wong, who works at Microsoft's Next Media Research Group. Wong had already done projects that were aimed at interactive learning via the web. Encarta Online, a CD -ROM tour of the Barnes Foundation's collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings outside Philly, and another virtual tour of one of da Vinci's notebooks.

The project Bill Gates had in mind for Wong this time involved the production of a new kind of teaching tool. Interactive. Watch a video, pop-ups along the way with tidbits of info, click on the pop-up, take notes on the side, the video stops and you can read the most current wiki entry on the subject or whatever, subtitles of the audio,...pretty cool idea.

The subject would be Richard Feynman's 1964 lectures at Cornell, the rights to which Gates had recently purchased from the BBC. Turns out Gates is a Feynman fan too. He says that Feynman is the guy who took the subject of physics and made in both interesting and fun. Bill calls the Messenger Lectures the best he's ever seen at explaining the complexities, as well as the simple beauty of physics, and that nobody is better at that than Richard Feynman.

It became a 20 year project for Gates. The pieces had to all come together. First the internet needed to happen, then he had to get the rights, and then he needed the suitable platform to share this treasure.
7 hours of lectures on Physical Laws, the Relation of Math and Physics, The Distinction of Past and Future,...the goods, delivered by the best

Unavailable on the web until 2009, and after much production effort, Bill Gates and Curtis Wong came up with, Project Tuva .

Fuck me for liking Glee!

2011-02-22T19:14:00.004-06:00

I wanted to hate this show. I so wanted to hate this show. Young, good-looking, talented people singing songs and dancing? Oh fuck yeah, I hate that kinda shit all day, every day.

That's like disco. That's when we all split up. The social schism that rocked America in 1976. Disco. Some us listened to Keith Moon play drums while smoking dope, and some of us wore satin pants with no pockets and drank spritzers. Those disco assholes are the ones who made me lose track of popular music, and I've never caught up.

I can't dance.

Okay? There I said it. When I dance, I look bad. Real bad. And I've always resented people who could dance. Envied actually, if I'm being honest. Hang a Fender Strat on me and I can appear to understand the concept of body movement in rhythm to music. I can do the guitar guy dance just fine, but take that accessory away and I'm lost. Panicky.

So I'm thinking, I'm not about to enjoy watching these young people show incredible dancing skill, while acting no less, oh and singing too. Singing, dancing and acting all at the same time. And being nice looking while they're at it.

And I stumbled across Glee the night they did the football team Thriller half-time bit. A few weeks ago. Super Bowl night? Okay, not bad. Pretty good actually. Funny dialog. Kinda edgy. Some pretty good tunes they're picking too.

And Cheerios? Excuse me, but calling the cheerleading squad The Cheerios is brilliant and I can't believe nobody thought of that before, and least not that I know of.

I think one of the teachers is transgendered, but I can't be sure. And I don't ever want to be the guy who asks..."Hey, did you used to be a guy?"

The stories are pretty good, and they seem to be dealing with issues that I imagine are the issues facing young people today without being too kick-me-in-the-balls with it. Gay students? Yeah sure, what the hell. I can see how that might be interesting since no TV shows have really had the balls to just make that part of the show, or perhaps the free reign.

See? The transgendered teacher is singing One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer in a country and western bar right now, and I'm really okay with that too.

And in an odd deja vu kind of thing, tonight they're playing the exact same Carole King tunes that I had on in the car while out and about today. Really, Been to Canaan, I Feel the Earth Move, Been So Long. If you look at the vid I posted directly below this, you can hear the Carole King in the background in the car...how weird is that? Glee likes Carole too. Nice.

What are the odds?

Anyway, I could live without Glee if that's all they've got to show me.

However, I find it practically impossible to pull off the curmudgeonly stuck-in-the-70s thing when Jane Lynch is pushing guys down flights of stairs. Funny, funny stuff. Sue Sylvester is cool, no matter what that bitch Diane Sawyer thinks.

Friends of Rahm

2011-02-22T12:41:00.000-06:00

It's election day in Chicago. We're about to pick a new mayor.The end of an era is upon us. Ding dong Daley's gone.

It's been suggested that with a little help, Rahm Emanuel may be able to win the thing outright today. He's gotta get 50.1% to avoid a runoff election in April against the 2nd place finisher, presumably Gery Chico.

Our outgoing mayor, Richard M Daley, is not openly supporting anyone, but it's generally accepted that he is supporting Rahm.

Now up here in the 41st Ward, which is on the far northwest side of the city, it's not exactly Rahm country. Our last alderman, Brian Doherty, was the only Republican on the city council. Plenty of cops, firemen & women, public school teachers, and other city employees live in 41. They are the ones who elected Doherty.

Recently, these people received a letter from Rahm explaining his position on their pensions, and clarifying remarks made by Gery Chico that suggested that Rahm is going to start chopping away at their money. There was immediate outcry from both Rahm's mayoral opponents, as well as the city employees.

Foul!

Rahm Emanuel is not supposed to mail election material to these people directly, and plenty of these cops are wondering, loudly, how Rahm found out their names and addresses. Must have someone on the inside, down at City Hall, with access to the city's data base or something.

I know, shocking isn't it?

On a whim, I just took a drive over to the local polling place on Birchwood Ave to see what turnout looked like. I figured there'd be the usual poll watchers (off-duty cops usually) and a handful of reporters along with those people who wanted to vote at Dodge School.

Would you believe it? Of all days, the Chicago Dept of Streets and Sanitation chose today to haul out the heavy equipment and dig a huge hole in the middle of Oleander Ave, right in front of the 41st Ward polling place. The excavator is there. The CAUTION tape is there. The barricades are up to keep people from parking on either Oleander or Birchwood. But there was no work being done. None. Not a hardhat or dayglo vest in sight. It was almost as if the Streets and San people had dug the fucking hole, blocked off the places to park, and then just left for the day.

That's going to be a problem for the people who want to go vote.

Some cynical types might say that Daley is trying to give a little help to Rahm by screwing up the 41st Ward polling place, and keeping those cops, fire personnel, and teachers from casting votes. But really, why would Richie do that? He's always had such a good working relationship with city employees.

Other cynical types night say that Daley couldn't get the plows to clear Birchwood and Oleander for a week after the Feb 1 blizzard, and yet somehow he found a way to get all that equipment out on election day, just to fuck up Gery Chico's chances of carrying 41. I don't think so. That would be using city services for political purposes, and a Daley would never do something like that.

If by chance Rahm doesn't win the Mayor's Office outright today, I'm thinking perhaps they could dig up the other two streets that border Dodge School, Olcott Ave and Jarvis St. some time in April. Scheduled maintenance.

On the other hand, if Rahm does win today, look for the cops, the fire dept., and the teachers union to give the new mayor a little help once he takes over in May. Very little help.

22

2011-02-19T22:37:00.007-06:00

Dave Duerson was from Muncie, Indiana.

He was a year younger than I, and due to my marrying into a Notre Dame family, I saw Dave play his last 2 years of college ball. Hell of player.

During high school, he was offered the chance to play baseball in the Dodgers farm system, which he passed up. He was a National Honor Student at Muncie Northside High School, a member of The Musical Ambassadors All-American Band, and a great basketball player to boot.

But football was Dave's great passion and he was voted Indiana's Mr. Football in 1979. So it was a natural that he'd go to ND.

A 4 year starter, he was a two-time All-American, the Fightin' Irish MVP in 1982, and somewhere in there he found time to graduate with honors, and a BA in econ.

I remember the day the Bears drafted him in '83. One of those 3rd round picks that most people don't give a shrug about but I was glad when Dave became a Chicago Bear. I knew they'd grabbed a hell of a player.

Dave was one of those guys who was always where he was supposed to be on the field. Back in the day, that was saying something because the Bears defense was not exactly easy to break into.

The defensive coach...guy by the name of Buddy Ryan had a real tendency to hate rookies. The reason I know that is because in interviews Buddy used to say "I hate rookies."

But Buddy started saying great things about Dave right from the first training camp. Great things, like "He doesn't suck" and "He might become a decent ballplayer some day." Might as well have been putting a stamp on 22. "OK, I'll take this guy."

So Dave made the team, but imagine being 21 years old, and walking into a locker room only to be greeted by Gary Fencik, Wilbur Marshall, Mike Singletary, Dan Hampton, Mike Hartenstein, Steve McMichael, Richard Dent looking up at the FNG. Right around then, according to legend, Otis Wilson and his down-to-his-knee cock walked by and said "What the fuck do you want? Get your rookie ass out of my face motherfucker."

Ahhh. The club. Nothing like being in a club and beating the shit out of the new meat. Nothing like being the new meat either. Been both, the former is better. But once you're in, you're in.

Dave survived his rookie year, and became a starter the next.

They named The 46 Defense after the Bears D. Buddy called it The 46 because it involved substituting Doug Plank for a linebacker. Plank was a psycho who would smash into fullbacks twice his size, and was famous, infamous...for leading with the crown of his helmet. He was 180 lbs, and would run full speed from his safety position into a 240 lb running back, who was running full speed at Plank. Boom!

Plank played safety like a madman, and it was said that he was running head first into guys back in his Ohio State days too, and so by the time the Bears reached the Super Bowl in '85, Plank's body had crapped out on him. He was finished. Use that helmet as a weapon too many times and funny shit happens to your brain, only not funny funny.

Dave Duerson played safety for Buddy's 46 in that blowout against the Pats. Another hard hitting guy. Had to be if you wanted to play safety in Buddy's 46. Had to be able to drop into pass coverage, but also be able to rush the quarterback. Dave set a record in '86 (since broken) for QB sacks by a defensive back with 7.

Always smart on the field. Dave was like a defensive quarterback, only he didn't have to be because we had Singletary but that's a different story. Dave was a real heads-up player.

22 was the guy who threw the block nobody noticed when Hollywood Mike Richardson ran a Tony Eason interception back for a TD in Super Bowl XX. Hell of a season, and a real nice career with the Bears. But that's a funny position. Guys break down fast playing that shit.

That's why I liked kicking the ball. Kick it, go have a smoke, talk to some friends in the stands. Kick it again. Good times.

Dave went to the Giants a couple of years later, and won another Super Bowl with them before retiring in 1993.

Nice career stats, NFL Man of The Year Award one time, and then it was on to the Honcho section in South Bend, and a string of McDonalds restaurants. Sold his shit in that and bought a sausage company that eventually sold sosseege to Burger King. Took that company from 20something million a year to 60something million a year before selling that. Then he started Duerson Foods in 2002, but that went south on Dave.

And his marriage started to show signs of problems. His wife filed domestic abuse charges a few years ago, and that made headlines around here. Mr. Nice Guy beats the shit out of his wife. Notre Dame cut Dave loose immediately. Notre Dame is not exactly famous for dealing with things the right way. They let shit happen right under their noses and not say a word, but when the image is at stake. Adios Dave.

Duerson Foods went broke in 2006. They sold Dave's stuff. Receivership.

The Duerson's officially split up a couple of years ago and Dave moved to Sunny Isles Beach, FL.

Duerson told his family that when he dies, he wants his brain given to Boston University's med school for study. Dave wanted to help researchers learn more about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition that used be known as "punch drunk." Repeated blows to the head, which cause depression, mood swings, erratic behavior is believed to effect a large number of former professional football players (and hockey players and boxers.)

That's what Dave said in a text message he sent to his family on Thursday. Be sure to get my brain to Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

And then Dave shot himself in the chest.

Dave Duerson- 1960-2011

Dear God,

2011-02-17T11:20:00.004-06:00

About that deal we made last night.

You held up your end, and now I promise I'll do the same.

Do not take this to mean that I actually believe you're up there, but simply that I'm not so sure that you aren't.

(And no, I'm not going back to church on Sundays.)

Peace.

Swift Road

2011-02-10T12:29:00.003-06:00

I remember when it happened, almost exactly a year ago today. It made the papers. They were football players from Glenbard West. Two of them. Terrible car wreck, along Swift Rd. out in unincorporated DuPage County around 8PM.

Glenbard West is a big public school in Glen Ellyn that draws students from that town, as well as from neighboring Lombard. (Glen-bard.) It's very close to where the accident occurred.

That's a road I've driven hundreds of times, not more than 5 miles from where I lived in Wheaton, during my own high school years. Two lane country road back in the day, now it's a busy highway due to the population boom in Chicago's western suburbs.

They apparently lost control, drove off of Swift Road, and into a utility pole. At the time, cops said there was no sign that drugs or alcohol were involved in the crash.

Hundreds of students stood vigil at Glenbard West's Duchon Field, praying for their fellow Hilltoppers.

One of them, the driver, Pierre Washington-Steel, a star running back, was critically injured and died a week later from his injuries. He was 17.

The other, Demarco Whitley, a backup to Washington-Steel, spent two months in the hospital before being released.

After Washington-Steel's death, counselors were brought in, to help the Glenbard West students deal with the shock. The grief. The students wore bracelets to honor Washington-Steel.

"Kids really liked him," said Glenbard West principal Jane Thorsen. "He had a real concern for other students."

This past season the Hilltoppers played a game in his honor. It was the 7th game, a nod to Washington-Steel's jersey #7. They won the game, and afterward the Glenbard West coach held a portrait of Washington-Steel above his head.

At the end of the 2010 school year, a full page of the yearbook paid tribute to Pierre Washington-Steel.

"Forever in Our Hearts" read the caption under a picture of him in his Glenbard West uniform.

Gone, but not forgotten.

And, Demarco Whitley, while not gone, is also remembered.

Whitley, now 18, was arrested on his way to school this week, and charged with raping a 15 year old girl up in north suburban Rolling Meadows.

Gang raping actually.

They raped her in a church parking lot. DNA evidence was recovered from a condom found at the scene, as well as from a pair of nylons the girl was wearing at the time. The condom was used by Whitley. His accomplice, allegedly, forced the girl to perform oral sex on him.

According to the Rolling Meadows cops, Whitley has made a statement that officially implicates him in the crime.

The attack took place almost exactly a year ago today.

And, approximately one hour after the attack, Whitley was riding shotgun when the driver, his gang rape accomplice, the late Pierre Washington-Steel, lost control of the car and drove into that utility pole on Swift Rd.

Pablo

2011-02-08T17:29:00.004-06:00

His name was Paul R. but everyone called him Pablo.

Fat guy back in high school. A great guy. Quickest wit you ever saw. One-liner comebacks that rivaled Rickles. He was a junior when I was a sophomore. His brother Ken and I were really good buddies. Drinking buddies, pot smoking buddies, girl chasing buddies. And Pablo quite often, along with his own friends, would join Ken, myself, and our other buds on weekends. At any given time there were 3 or 4 carloads of us idiots making the rounds. We ripped it up famously. The town of Downers Grove, IL will never be the same because of us. The Omega 24 Hour Restaurant on Ogden Ave. briefly considered naming a menu item after us, or so I've been told.

And we all played football. Not like the song and dance jocks in Glee, but more like the normally toasted jocks in Dazed and Confused. Very much like those guys in fact. Makes sense I guess, now that I think about it. Same time frame, mid 70s.

When Pablo was a senior and I was a junior, our varsity team made it to the Final 4 in our state playoffs (Class 4A, based on school size. Big schools are 8A) But that was later.

When I was a sophomore, and Pablo was a junior, we played on different teams. He played on the varsity (jrs & srs for our foreign readers) and I played on the sophomore team.

My sophomore team went undefeated that year, 1975, but Pablo's varsity team was bad. And they had a coach named, well I'll just call him Ziggy (his nickname.)

Ziggy was a fucking nutcase.

Picture the Paul Gleason character in Breakfast Club. Now, add steroids and 60 lbs along with a military background. The man hated to lose, and I mean hated. He was also an English teacher, but this psycho lived and breathed football. His practices were run like drill sessions. Stopwatches. Running from one place to another, full speed. If you had to go to the bathroom, you RAN off the field, or you paid for it later.

Everything was sir.

"What was the snap count!?!?"

"Two, sir!"

"And what did you go on?!?!"

"One, sir!"

"That's an extra ladder for you!"

A ladder consists of 75 guys lining up on the goal line, all in a 3 point stance, and on the toot of Ziggy's whistle, we'd sprint to the 10 yard line and stop. Turn around. Back a 3 point. Another toot. And sprint back to the goal line. Stop. Turn around. 3 point stance. Motionless. Don't you dare jump before the whistle or we're starting this motherfucker over. Toot! You'd run to the 20. Stop. Turn around. Stance. Wait. Whistle. Sprint to the goal line. Stop. 3 point. Toot! To the 30...and so on until you got to the 50, and then you either hit the showers, or...if Ziggy felt like you needed the exercise, he'd run you back to the 40, the 30, the 20, the 10.

It's an amazing sound when 75 guys in football gear are at a dead sprint, and then slam on the breaks and spin round. It's loud. You can feel the ground under you tremble a bit. A human stampede. And then, total silence. Waiting, waiting, waiting....toot.

The first kind of ladder is known as a "half-ladder." Just to the 50, and call it a day. The second kind is known, of course, as a "full-ladder." Full ladders are a killer after a 2 hour football practice, especially one run by Ziggy. Half-ladders are no picnic either. Doesn't sound that tough until you've run one.

Ziggy loved ladders. Ziggy also loved my older brother, the football star. That was when I was a freshman. Ziggy had his eye on me even then. He knew I could kick the shit out a ball, but he wanted me to play. So did I. Whatever.

The first week of my sophomore year, Ziggy had my team join his team for a week of double-session practices. Pre-season stuff. Let the little guys get a taste of what comes next when they're varsity athletes. And that whole week, Ziggy dogged my ass. Right up in my grill. "You better believe I'm watching you!! Can't you jump in and out of that tire any faster than that??? Move it move it move it!"

I decided then and there that I would never play for Ziggy. He was a sadistic son-of-a-bitch.

Midway through that season, after a Monday practice, I sat on the back stairs by the AD's office and watched Ziggy torture people. Varsity athletes.

They'd lost to lowly St. Francis of Wheaton, and they were going to pay. When I sat down to watch the torture, Ziggy was on his first half-ladder. He didn't stop there. He didn't put them through a full-ladder either. He ran, for the first I ever saw it, a full 100 yard ladder. By the time they were done with their last 90 yard sprint, even the fastest guys were unable to sprint. You just can't. Your legs refuse to obey commands at a certain point.

When they hit the goal line, Ziggy told them to line up again. Not fast enough. This time, I want your all! And he ran a second hundred yard ladder.

Sitting on those stairs watching was a regular thing for me. I watched Pablo, and Ice, and Schrods, and Augie. They were my friends.

By the time they were halfway through Ziggy's 2nd full field ladder, people started dropping.

Dropping dropping. Barely conscious, on all fours, puking.

Pablo made it all the way through two full field ladders. And, he made it to the showers in the locker room next door to ours. And that's when he collapsed.

Flopping around of the floor of the shower like a carp on the beach. Convulsions. People screaming, people running around frantic. AD came sprinting into the shower, fully clothed of course, and immediately grabbed Pablo's tongue.

"Call an ambulance!" snapped Ronnie B.

I stood outside that shower next to my friend Ken, Pablo's little brother, and watched in absolute fucking horror.

Pablo lived. Spent a week at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers (right near Omega.) Dehydration, exhaustion, shock, fucked up blood sugar, the works.

Calls from outraged parents. Calls for Ziggy's ass. It was, without a doubt, the biggest story that school had seen,...maybe ever. If it had happened today, those Benedictines would be paying out a lot of money to Pablo's parents. Millions.

Instead, they allowed Ziggy to finish the season, and the school year. He was a very hated man in those halls. His practices became a breeze for the last half of the season. He knew he'd gone too far. I don't think he ran another half-ladder the rest of the year. They quietly eased him out the door that summer, and he took a similar job over at Hinsdale South.

To this day, the mere mention of his name causes anger in some people who remember. Me for instance. I hated that guy as much as I've hated anyone in my life. That dude was evil.

This past summer, I was helping my sister run the annual alumni golf outing at Cog Hill and who do I see walking up with a big smile on his face, but Pablo. I don't think I'd seen him since 1980. He's a gynecologist now. That makes sense. He was always a big fan of that area of study, even in high school.

And we were sitting under the big tent by 18, where the BMW honchos party when the PGA comes to town. Just shooting the breeze, catching up on old times. Ken's fine. Married, got 4 kids, tell him I said hello and blah blah blah...

You guessed it.

Ziggy.

Fucker walked right up to our table and reached to shake our hands. He's older now, as are we. 35 years older. He's an old man. Gray hair, no more rippling muscles, the fiery insane look in his eyes gone.it was all I could do to not stand up and kick him right in the balls.

And then, Pablo shook Ziggy's hand. It was one of those handshakes you almost have to witness. Hard to describe, and hard to believe so much can be said without words. And then, so as to not seem petty, I shook Ziggy's hand too.

After Ziggy walked away, I sensed that Pablo sensed my anger. He shrugged.

"Can't carry shit around with you forever Michael. Life is just too short."

Snow Lightning

2011-02-03T14:27:00.005-06:00

Taken at roughly 11PM on 2/1/2011.

All is well enough

2011-02-02T22:37:00.002-06:00

Nobody hung me from the ceiling for days and days of interrogation, nor hit me in the head with a club for standing in the wrong place. The Army didn't take over, nor did the cops. The politicians are assholes who couldn't find their assholes if you spotted them their taints, but last time I checked they hadn't tortured anybody.

Writing something about our weather seems, ...trivial. Very.

We were warned more than a week ago. Ain't that a bitch? WGN's Tommy Skilling (Enron Jeff's sweetheart brother) called this thing almost two weeks ago. Meteorological bragging rights. Tommy's a weather savant, and you could almost feel his excitement building as the day approached. Doppler radar. Massive massive motherfucker building down in Texas and Arkansas that was poised like a dagger. A really, really big dagger.

On Sunday, Tommy said that it was going to snow Monday, about 2 inches. And then it would get sunny, and the skies would stay clear until approximately 3PM on Tuesday.

Then, according to Tom, it was going to get windy, and it was going to snow, and it was going to be extraordinarily intense. And, it was going to rage for about 16 hours.

Closed up the shop at noon, stopped at the store. Happy Foods on Northwest Highway. Coffee, soda, spuds, normal shit. Girl at the checkout tells me they've emptied and restocked the bread shelves and the pasta shelves (..?..really, ...pasta?) twice in the course of the morning.

I was laughing as I remarked to her "It's Chicago for God's sake. They've never seen snow before? It's not a hurricane."

And she rolled her eyes and said "We'll probably get about 5 inches or something. They always say these storms are going to be huge."

"Tommy Skilling is comparing it to '67. You're too young to remember '67 but I do. I was 7 years old, and it was unbelievable. Mountains of show everywhere. Kids jumping from roofs into snowdrifts. Trees whose trunks were completely hidden up to the lowest branches. Full grown trees. Cars completely buried in their own driveways. I hope it's not like '67."

1967 was a hell of a bad winter.

Same year, by the way, as the Six Day War.

So anyway, I got home and loaded up the fridge. Battened down the hatches. Got my cameras ready. Watched daytime TV. I'm never home to watch daytime TV. I think, "Oh dear god, please don't make this like '67, I can't take too much daytime TV."

At almost 3 O'Clock on the dot, it started. Skies turned cobalt, and the wind began to build. And build. And build. At around 6, the first real snow started falling, but it was falling horizontally. Not so much falling I guess, as sailing.

Skilling said the heavy stuff will start around 9, as much as 3 inches per hour. Maybe it was coming at that rate, but in 50 mph gales, it's a whole different deal.

And then came the lightning.

You're just not ready for something like that. Imagine peeking out of your quonset hut down at McMurdo Station on Ross Island, Antarctica. Almost total whiteout as the raging wind is blowing so much snow across your field of vision that it's really all you see, and then throw some lightning and thunder into the mix.

That's what it was like.

Thundersnow?

That's what we're calling it?

That sucks.

That awesome phenomenon needs a way cooler name.

Icy Flash-Hammers or some fucking thing. You ain't lived until you've seen blue lightning and heard booming thunder in the middle of a raging blizzard.

I stayed up most of the night. Crashed about 4:45 and got up around 8. Snowplows out on Summit.

I was only out for 4 hours, but in the light of day, it's a hell of a sight let me tell you. A little snow still falling but the bulk of it now covering everything with 2 feet of frosting, the first thing I noticed was that the wind had finally died.

We'll dig out, again. We'll be at half-speed, at best, for another week. Outer Dive still closed. 900 cars stranded. Emergency rescues. Power outages. No rail service. Practically every road partially or totally impassable. Snowmobiles driving down Prospect Ave. Midway and O'Hare closed!

No way in, no way out.

It is very much like 1967 all over again.

True Grits: A Comparison

2011-01-31T11:09:00.008-06:00

***SPOILER ALERT***

If you don't want to know about True Grit, just stop now.

It's takes a strong will, a determined effort, a stick-to-it-iveness not everyone can summon.

An inner toughness to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

But, I decided to ignore the old fuckers behind me who would not shut the fuck up, and the old fucker across the aisle who could not get that red and white striped candy out of the plastic wrapper for AT LEAST 20 minutes, and I watched Joel and Ethan's latest, True Grit.

I've seen Henry Hathaway's version 25 times minimum. It's one of those flicks,... I can do most of the dialog from memory. When I heard the Coens were doing a "remake" I hoped they weren't doing just a "remake." They didn't.

I hesitate to call Hathaway's version "the original" as both Henry and the Coen brothers' films are adaptations of the book by Charles Portis.

Up until recently, I hadn't given much credit to Portis, sort of like I don't give credit to Peter Benchley. I always saw True Grit as Henry Hathaway's creation.

And that's where Kim Darby comes in to play.

When you've seen the '69 version as many times as I've seen it, you cannot help but comparing the two movies, and the actors in them. Rooster Cogburn became John Wayne's signature role, and it won him a Best Actor Oscar. (do I capitalize Oscar?)

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself, The Dude vs. The Duke is not the first comparison to be made.

Hathaway's version had a sort of sunny, dum-dee-dum, everything in the old west was cleaned and pressed look to it. Even the guys who were lynched in Fort Smith at the beginning were clean. Marquerite Roberts handled the screenplay for Hathaway and, probably due to the fact that it was 1969, decided to feature John Wayne. Perhaps that was at Hathaway's urging, I don't know.

The Coens also handled the screenplay, and leading up to going to see it, I'd heard there were some differences between the two movies; the Coens supposedly sticking more closely to the book. Joel and Ethan's version has a darker feel, right down to the soundtrack. Not gloomy, just non-sunny. Whereas Hathaway made a western with mountain scenery, Joel and Ethan set it in Arkansas and the cinematographer goes to great lengths to show the authentic Arkansas and Chocktaw Nation/Oklahoma terrain as depicted in the book.

Anyway, just around the time the old man across the aisle got his (first) red and white striped candy out of that balky cellophane, the train pulled into Fort Smith and off stepped Mattie Ross with Yarnell in tow, supposedly he was to keep an eye on her.

First difference right away, Hathaway/Roberts gave the back story of Mattie's father, Frank Ross, being killed by his farm hand Tom Cheney before taking Kim Darby/Mattie into town.

The Coens let that part of the story unfold through the words of the narrator, a 48 year old Mattie Ross. Oh, that's interesting. Hmm. I wonder if those seniors behind me heard what she said. Apparently one of them didn't because his companion repeated it....for the entire theater to hear. Old people talk in movies, and the "Do you mind???" look doesn't phase them.

Sorry, where was I? Watching how actors read lines of dialog that I already know by heart, with their own take on it, is something I rarely see. I hate "remakes" as they're almost always inferior. It's more of a play thing for me. I can see how stage actors can change the feel of The Life of Henry the Fifth with body language and inflection and facial expression. Not so much in movies.

At least, that's what I used to think.

Hailee Steinfeld, a 13 year old (at the time of filming) actress from California, was chosen from, according to the Coens, thousands who read for the part. They were looking for a certain maturity required to play the part of Mattie. She had to be just right to capture the character they felt Portis had created.

For the first 20 minutes or so, I was mentally comparing the two True Grits. Couldn't help it. Lynching scenes, similar, but the Coens made it a bit more graphic.

I absolutely adored Strother Marrtin, Hathaway's choice to play Col Stonehill, the horse trader from Fort Smith. As Hailee/Mattie walked into Stonehill's office to haggle over her late father's ponies recently purchased, I began immediately comparing Dakin Matthews to Strother Martin.

It was close enough to the same dialog that I was able to see the two actors' different interpretation of their lines and both did them in a fashion that seemed as realistic as hell. Kudos to Dakin Matthews even though he didn't get to do the "I heard a young girl had fallen down a well, and I thought perhaps it was you!" line.

But it's at that point where I suddenly realized that the entire movie is different. Holy crap, Hailee Steinfeld is acting like, like, a 14 year old girl!

Kim Darby was a 20something actress playing Mattie, and it felt that way. Hathaway focused much less on the character's youth, and more on her spunky cuteness. Darby was the unfortunate recipient of one of those 1960s "And Introducing" things during the opening credits, but that couldn't stop The Duke from eating the furniture in every scene, probably because Hathaway was feeding it to him. The Hathaway version is about Rooster Cogburn.

Through Henry Hathaway's camera, Rooster is the one with "true grit."

I can see now why the Coens auditioned so many young actresses for the role of Mattie Ross. It takes a certain maturity to play the part of a 14 year old girl, who is mature well beyond her years in any part. Add to that the setting, 1878 Arkansas, and I start to see why Hailee Steinfeld was getting so much praise when the movie was first released.

It is an astonishing performance.

Her exchanges with LeBoeuf (Matt Damon) have a completely different feel than those between Darby and Glen Campbell under Hathaway's direction. The Coens allowed Steinfeld to play the part as it was written, and that difference changes the performance of Damon/LeBoeuf. Hell, her performance makes everybody's performance different in the Coens' True Grit.

It's just a completely different dynamic. LeBoeuf for instance is now a man arguing with a little girl, and the little girl is winning.

There are differences in the storyline itself as it is told by Joel and Ethan. Slight plot alterations. LeBoeuf is not nearly as prominent, nor is Lucky Ned Pepper. Robert Duvall's Ned Pepper got a lot more face time than does Barry Pepper's Lucky Ned Pepper. (try typing that three times fast.)

Ditto Tom Cheney. Josh Brolin's Cheney is wonderfully performed, but something of a minor role when compared to Jeff Corey's turn as the powder-burned asshole who killed that little girl's daddy.

That brings me to The Dude. Jeff Bridges is an outstanding actor. He just keeps on being great. Is he ever not good? He does essentially the same lines that The Duke read, he's got the eye-patch (on his right by the way as opposed to Duke's left) , he's got the gravelly voice, and the sloppy drunken thing down pat. But Rooster Cogburn, as played by Jeff Bridges, is a much darker character. He's not comical, he's darkly funny.

At one point he decides he's had enough and tells LeBoeuf to take the girl and just go.

"I'm out." says Rooster.

He comes back.

The Coens wrap the whole thing up pretty much the same way that Hathaway/Roberts did, with a few noticeable changes.

**ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT**

In the first True Grit, LeBoeuf dies. Not so this time. Although we never see the older LeBoeuf, through a letter read by Mattie, we learn that he's joined a traveling wild west show that's passing through Fort Smith. He invites Mattie to come visit him when they pass through. He tells her he's 25 years older since they last spoke, and a lot slower, but he's doing well. When she goes to see him, now a 48 year old one-armed spinster (the snake-bite cost her her left arm*), she learns that he passed away just three weeks prior.

Rooster and Mattie reunite after her snakebite near-death experience in the 1969 film, whereas in the Coens' movie, Mattie blacks out just as Rooster gets her to safety and she never sees him again. She reads a letter she got from him as she walks into the setting sun, and the film ends with narrator Mattie talking about her life, and her adventure with these guys when she was just 14.

And as I walked out of the theater, I began to think about Charles Portis. So that's what True Grit is about! It's the little girl who has true grit.

What an idea for a character. Absolutely fantastic.

Charles Portis is 77 now, and according to what I've read, something of a hermit. Apparently he still shows up in Little Rock from time to time. Wiki calls him "A recluse who enjoys traveling in Mexico."

I often wonder why supremely talented writers like Portis decide to drop out of sight. How can someone with such amazing skill stop doing what they're so fucking good at? Why does a great writer go Salinger?

I find myself glad on the one hand that I have a few new books that I'm simply going to have to read, Norwood, The Dog of The South, Masters of Atlantis, ....and True Grit.(no, I've never read it.)

On the other hand, I'm somewhat saddened to know there isn't more from this guy. It almost makes me want to read these few books of his more slowly, to savor the flavor, as I know there are no more after that.

If you haven't seen True Grit, I don't think I've given too much away. By all means go see the movie. It's one of the best I've seen in years.

Also, I hope Hailee Steinfeld does not win an Oscar for supporting actress (supporting actress? huh?) Not because she doesn't deserve it but because I'd like to see her develop her skills before the "And introducing" Hollywood types chew her up and spit her out.

(Note to Joel and Ethan. Re: Mattie's missing left arm....the snake bit her on the right hand.)

The Monsters Among Us

2011-01-28T09:59:00.016-06:00

So ya,.. thought ya,... might like to ...go to the show.
To feel the warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow.
I got me some bad news for you, Sunshine.
Pink isn't well, he stayed back at the hotel,
And he sent us along as a surrogate band.
We're gonna find out where you fans really stand.

In the course of my travels on the internet I've come across some pretty fucked up opinions. 9/11 Inside-Jobbers. Moon Landing Hoaxers, Jew Banking Conspiracy nuts, Global Warming deniers, Birthers,... the number of goofy opinions that are floating through the ether is pretty frightening really.

Despite astonishing utility, the internet has also given a global voice to some really fucked up human beings.

For the most part, I can shrug off those opinions with which I disagree, or those that I know are completely insane, like those I mentioned up there.

But for some reason, I can't resist the urge to confront the pseudo-religious types.

Creationists annoy me, but not to any great degree because I can dismiss them as either willfully ignorant, or sadly uninformed. No way the earth is 6000 years old. Absolutely not possible. No chance the Bible is an accurate account of world history. Not possible. A fairy tale loaded with symbolism designed to keep the rabble in line.

Got it. So far, the religious argument is taken as seriously, in my mind, as people who think aliens are living among us. No skin off my nose if people want to believe that shit.

But some of them can't leave it at that.

The types that I find almost irresistible are the fuckheads who get right up in my grill with their fucked up ideas about how I should behave, or how you should burn in hell. I've never been able to stop myself from kicking these fuckers, figuratively speaking, in the balls.

There's just something about an asshole who displays astonishing ignorance in the act of condescension that it makes me pull off the road.

One such example is the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.

A bigger bunch of shitheads could not be found on earth in a hundred years of searching.

I knew these people were human ooze when they began picketing the funerals of fallen US Troops. You see, the Westboro Baptist Church feels that God is punishing those who defend what they consider a "fag lifestyle."

Now generally speaking, I might just dismiss such shit as the unfortunate byproduct of the 1st Amendment, (and a hell of an argument against the 1st Amendment) but in reading up a bit on Westboro I've found that they're not some little shitbox in Topeka with a crazy fucking pastor, Fred Phelps, preaching hellfire and damnation on the lambs who have strayed from the righteous path of God, ...well they're not only that.

Westboro Baptist Church pickets an average of 6 places a day, up to 15 churches every Sunday, has picketed in every state in the union, and according to Phelps, the crazy fucking leader of these crazy fucking assholes, they've conducted over 30,000 pickets since 1991.

The Westboro Baptist Church has an annual travel budget of $200,000, and one member of the cult estimated that they spend almost $300,000 just on picketing every year.

GodHatesFags.com, GodHatesAmerica.com and GodHatesSweden.com are a a few of the websites operated by Phelps.

It's all about hating the fags with Westboro. That's why they picket funerals of fallen troops, ...because the US tolerates homosexuals in our society. Same reason they picket funerals of AIDS victims. The Sweden thing? They tolerate them homy-sekshals over there too.

Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KN worships a God who sounds like a real hateful asshole.

I've been doing some reading about Phelps and his insane family for the last couple of days, and I won't bore you with too many details other than the critical one. They're completely fucking insane.

According to Wiki...Phelps and Westboro have "targeted" President Ronald Reagan, Princess Diana, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, National Football League star Reggie White, Sonny Bono, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, atheists, Muslims, murdered college student Matthew Shepard, the late children's television host Fred Rogers, the late Australian actor Heath Ledger, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, political commentator Bill O'Reilly, Jews, Catholics, Swedes, the Irish....

The Irish....whu....wh....huh?

But it wasn't until Phelps and Westboro came out and praised Jared Loughner, that I pulled off the road and started to actually listen to what these fuckers are saying.

According to Phelps and the shit-eaters at Westboro Baptist Church, Jared Loughner was acting on behalf of God. In the case of Loughner, Phelps said that God was getting even with the people who are trying to stifle the message of Westboro Baptist Church, including Gabrielle Giffords who, according to Phelps, is an avid supporter of baby killing and sin, and "was shot for that mischief."

In referring to a lawsuit brought against Westboro in Baltimore, Phelps said that Judge John Roll "paid for that sin, ...with his life!"

(Apparently so did 9 year old Christina Taylor Green. She got whacked by God/Loughner because of the Baltimore lawsuit too.)

"Thank God for the violent shooter! One of your soldier heroes in Tucson." said Phelps in the same video released after the shooting. He delights in praising Loughner's body count "...wounding 16! At least 6 are dead....and counting."

"Westboro Baptist Church prays for more shooters, more violent veterans, and more dead. Praise God for his righteous judgments in this earth. Amen."

In all the ontological discussions/debates I've ever heard, I have yet to hear anyone give a lucid explanation that definitively proves the existence of God.

Gotta have faith.

And if ever there was a strong argument against the existence of, at the very least, an all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being, it's the very existence of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church.

Are there any queers in the theatre tonight?
Get 'em up against the wall. -- 'Gainst the wall!
And that one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me.
Get him up against the wall. -- 'Gainst the wall!
And that one looks Jewish, and that one's a coon.
Who let all this riffraff into the room?
There's one smoking a joint, and another with spots!

If I had my way I'd have all of ya shot.

(lyrics borrowed from Pink)

Christina Taylor Green

2011-01-27T22:34:00.003-06:00

I remember that night in 1984. I was still a Cub fan, and had in hand a World Series ticket that my father-in-law had gotten for me. Cubs were up two games to none against the San Diego Padres, and only needed to win one out of the next three, to be played at Jack Murphy Stadium.

Cubs lost Game 3. And then Game 4. It all came down to one final game, and the Cubs had the lead late in that game when Leon Durham let a grounder dribble through his legs. A gimme, and he booted it. Padres scored a couple there, and a couple more, and before I knew it, the Cubs had lost. Three in a row they lost. And my World Series Ticket is now framed on the wall next to my desk. The ink has faded.

Everyone here heard the details after Tucson, and when they said "Christina Taylor Green, 9 year old granddaughter of former Cubs General Manager Dallas Green." you could almost feel the city's fucking shoulders droop even more.

A fucking gut punch.

The local connection. I don't know why we do it, but we do it. We get attached. We adopt. Family.

Dallas hasn't lived here in a long time, but the time he spent here rubbed off on us, and us on him I think.

I thought back and remembered Dallas being interviewed all those years ago, that night at Jack Murphy Stadium, in San Diego. Crushed, like every Cub fan.

Dude wears his heart on his sleeve. Volatile. Dallas was the guy who traded Ivan DeJesus to the Philadelphia Phillies for Larry Bowa. The trade would never have been made if the Phillies didn't include a AAA guy that Dallas had seen coming up through the Philly farm system. Throw him in, or there's no trade said Dallas Green.

They threw him in.

Ryne Sandberg.

Dallas always smiled about that. A little digging just now and I discovered that trade was made 29 years ago today.

He's 76 now and Dallas has been keeping a low profile since his granddaughter Christina was murdered in Tucson, but he gave an interview to the Tribune today. I thought you folks might like to read it.

I guess Dallas didn't expect the outpouring of support, but he appreciates it. He's most concerned of course with his son John, John's wife Roxanna, and their 11 year old son Dallas.

Little D.

If you want to drop a note to John and Roxanna Green, the Dodgers have set up an email address..

greenfamily@dodgers.com

Bald

2011-01-27T12:51:00.004-06:00

I has it. Well, not entirely, but there's more bald than not bald, and the bald part is really taking over now.

It's time..

I'm going to do it.

I'm shaving it all off.

Yes, of course I'm terrified. Who wouldn't be?

What if forgotten scars from my youth suddenly appear, and bad memories come flooding back? Oh my God, I'd completely forgotten about that time my brother crashed me into the coffee table when I was 9!

What if I have one of those three-ring pink gummers in the back? Ya know, those Shar Pei looking rolls of flesh when I tilt my head back? I'll be hideous.

I can grow a Grizzly Adams in a couple of weeks, and the question of where the neck stops and where the chest begins is an every day dilemma. I can't claim to have Robin Williams Opera Gloves, but it's not far off. So what about beards? The last few years I've taken to the bi-weekly shaving routine during the winter. The blending of the "Is it a beard or is he a bum?" beard with the current horseshoe pattern on my pate usually leaves the horseshoe looking dominant. Once the beard starts getting to be the same length as the head-wreath, I shave the beard and start over.

Now what?

Beards look weird on bald guys, just look at Carlos Boozer or Emmitt Smith.

If I go full cue-ball, I'll have to give up the beard and limit myself to goatees.

That's been done to death.

Speaking of Mr. Clean, will full cue-ball mean I have to get pierced?

Can't tell you how many times someone told me to go full-bald, and get a big fuckin' earring.

What if I don't want an earring?

Is it so wrong that I resist pounding a nail through my earlobe?

Who the hell started that shit anyway? Hey I know, I'll pound this sharp rock through my earlobe and hang this rabbit's foot from it. Wow, that looks great, maybe I'll do the other one too. A matched set of bunny feet hanging from the holes I pounded in my earlobes.

I understand that some women find bald men absolutely repulsive, and yes, I'm talking to you. That's okay with me. I've always said that any woman who will rule me out because of my hair is a woman I didn't want to know in the first place. And I understand there are some babes who think it's nice, at least better than some absurd comb-over or a goddamn toupee. So there's them.

I can't be worrying about that sort of stuff right now. I'll deal with the anti-baldists as the situation arises.

I'm doing it.

And yes, I'm scared.

For My Friends

2011-01-26T22:22:00.003-06:00

About 15 years ago, Cosmo Kramer gave Elaine Benes a gift. A simple thing really, just a small bench that he knew she loved. (Jerry had given her a card, with cash.) Along with the bench, Cosmo gave Elaine a card (no cash) and in that card Cosmo quoted the last couple of lines of this, and so naturally I had to look it up. Turns out it was written in 1937-38ish, by a guy from Sligo, the place my grandparents called home.

The Municipal Gallery Revisited

By William Butler Yeats

I
Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;
Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears
A gentle questioning look that cannot hide
A soul incapable of remorse or rest;
A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II
An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand
Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,' I say,
'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland
The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.'
Before a woman's portrait suddenly I stand,
Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.
I met her all but fifty years ago
For twenty minutes in some studio.

III
Heart-smitten with emotion I Sink down,
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images:
Augusta Gregory's son; her sister's son,
Hugh Lane, 'onlie begetter' of all these;
Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale
As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV
Mancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,
'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge;
A great ebullient portrait certainly;
But where is the brush that could show anything
Of all that pride and that humility?
And I am in despair that time may bring
Approved patterns of women or of men
But not that selfsame excellence again.

V
My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,
But in that woman, in that household where
Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.
Childless I thought, 'My children may find here
Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,
And now that end has come I have not wept;
No fox can foul the lair the badger swept --

VI
(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII
And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man,
'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.

New Mexico

2011-01-24T20:14:00.002-06:00

Navajo Nation

2011-01-17T17:53:00.003-06:00

Gallup

2011-01-16T17:56:00.004-06:00

While driving into Cameron

2011-01-12T15:57:00.005-06:00

Hey, genuine Navajo.

Yeah, I see you there, all hunched over your little card table.

The sign back up the road told me you'd be here.

Ample parking I see. Beautiful view. I really love the high desert. Do you live out here?

Where are all the cars? Where's your car? How'd you get all the way out here?

The multi-colored streamers on the roof-edge of the tent are a nice festive touch dude, too bad there's no wind today. They dangle all limp and lifeless when there's no wind. Not sure if you noticed, but you're missing a few streamers too.

I wonder what you aren't selling.

I wonder why your boss makes you sit on that rickety old wooden folding chair. All day with that shit? Even in the summer? For how many years now?

What does he do, ...drop you off in the morning, and pick you up at night?

Trinkets.

I wonder how many trinkets you have for sale, hand made, by a genuine Navajo.

What's a good year in the Navajo trinket business?

I wonder if you hate me as I fly by.

I would.

Have you noticed?

2011-01-09T21:03:00.003-06:00

That the people who spend the most time talking about how much they love America spend the rest of their time talking about which Americans they hate?

The Way We Get By

2011-01-06T17:37:00.001-06:00

The Big Ditch

2011-01-02T14:07:00.010-06:00

Into the Canyon
with all who are sick with megalomania!
As a guest in the abyss
the dwarf will quickly understand that he is a dwarf.

~Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I cannot travel, overland, through the American southwest without an almost constant reminder that I am a speck. Chicagoans are no strangers to large things, but most of our big shit is vertical.

I recall hearing William Least Heat-Moon describing the shock that must have been felt by the first westward bound settlers upon seeing the Great Plains. He was discussing the Corps of Discovery's first glimpses of the Dakotas after 700 miles of paddling up the Missouri and emerging onto one of the largest grasslands on the planet.

"At first, they must have thought 'Okay, this is a meadow. I understand meadows and this is just a big one.' But as the days became weeks they began to grasp the scale of the place. It's time that brings the Great Plains to life, ...and makes them fearful for the traveler."

As I was passing through St. Louis on Christmas Eve I was already, again, feeling that creeping dwarfism. It's 300 miles south of here so even though I was ripping along at 65 mph...well, you can do the math. 4 or 5 hours to cover what took 10 days 200 years ago.

Passing over the Mississippi was humbling, again. This time I was treated to an amazing view of the Arch, the upper half of which was missing. The low cloud ceiling obscured everything but two gargantuan isoceles struts standing maybe 200 feet tall, and leaning slightly toward each other. I thought "Ah, so that's what it looked like when it was half-built." Of course I knew that those two struts eventually meet in the clouds about 650 feet up, but seeing the Arch like that was like stepping back to 1963. What an absolutely amazing monument.

Passing over the Mississippi always conjures something within me. Now entering the Louisiana Territory. 207 years ago, right down there in St. Louis, the boys found out that Jefferson had just bought the west bank of the river, and everything out to the Rocky Mountains as well.

Running south through Missouri isn't vastly different than Illinois except for the rolling hills. The towns are 5 or 10 miles apart, standard midwest distribution, and you're never too far from "civilization." You break down half-way between Rolla and Joplin there's a good bet a cop will be along in 5 minutes.

Back in 1889 they had this thing called the Oklahoma Land Rush, perhaps you've heard of it. In one day, April 22, more than 50,000 settlers staked claims to government land, and in one case, the town of Guthrie,OK went from population=zero to population 10,000+ in one afternoon. Sooners were the earliest ones who grabbed the real plum spots, thus the term Sooners.

Oklahoma City's population exploded that day as well, and I always think of that (and McVeigh) whenever I pass through OKC. Just 120 years ago that town was almost literally non-existent.

Fuck flying.

Your pilot turns a few knobs, the plane banks, your ass feels the change for a few seconds, and then you level off. The only way you notice that you've changed course is if the sun suddenly floods through your window.

When you leave US44 in OKC, and you get on US40, you know you have changed directions. Gentle southwest becomes due west, and if it's later in the day you thank GM that they installed visors on Pontiacs.

That's about when the "holy fuck I'm out there now" thing sets in. That's when you start to really begin to grasp what Least Heat-Moon was talking about. Hour after hour after hour of flats. The speed limit is 75 out there, and while I always keep it pegged at 65, for some reason 65 seems slower in Oklahoma.

The stretch of US40 between Okahoma City and Tucumcari, NM must be felt, ....lived. It's the time thing. It's 346 miles of absolute flatness, and trees are nowhere to be seen so you can see to the fucking horizon maybe 20 miles away. You start to feel about this big. Like a good wind could blow you off the road like a tumbleweed. You get a broke down car in between towns out in the panhandle, and your heartbeat increases. You're a good 20 or 30 miles from anything, and I mean anything. Exit ramps are an event you anticipate for 20 minutes. You never let the tank go below half full. You question whether you can hold that piss for another 45 minutes if you don't jump off at Groom,TX.

That's when you need to look out the passenger side window for a bit. It's so wide open that you really can look away from the road ahead for 10 seconds without crossing a line. They have continuous rumble-strips to warn you if you're drifting. Looking to the side is when it strikes you just how much ground you're covering, while seemingly getting nowhere. Yevgeny was right.

Right at the border of Texas and New Mexico you change time zones. Another clear indication that you're really out there now. An hour earlier in Tucumcari than it is in Oklahoma City. Chasing the sun as it drops below the horizon, or more accurately, as the earth spins toward me.

Once into New Mexico the terrain changes dramatically. Plate tectonics. One plate sliding under another plate and forcing this plate upward. It's surprisingly gradual, the altitude change. You see mesas and bluffs to both sides of you, but it's not a lot of up and down like in Missouri. Missouri's like a washboard, whereas New Mexico is more of an inclined plane. Only when your ears start popping, and the cruise control starts kicking Poncho into passing gear does it dawn on you that you are climbing.

Once you get to Albuquerque, which sits beautifully at the foot of the Sandia Mountains (sort of the southern tip of the Sangre de Cristos/Rockies) you really begin to feel the history of things. The surroundings crawl with ghosts. It's no longer driving west, it's driving through The West.

1350 miles from home. 21 straight hours of 65mph. Twenty One fucking hours!...and still 400 miles from the South Rim. (of course I stopped in Joplin to sleep.)

I used to love taking these drives with my wife, and I can't help but get nostalgic. Sadness at first, but then a bit of satisfaction. Solo flying in my 50s wasn't my first choice, but I've gotten pretty fucking good at it. Same goes for driving. I wonder how my forbears handled the loneliness of such desolation. You start to realize that we formed little towns and communities for a reason. A certain comfort in knowing that there are 372 others in this settlement.

You can't avoid the mixed emotions when considering our western expansion as a nation. On one hand there's awe at the whole undertaking, and on the other there's the shame felt over the actions of my conquering ancestors. Manifest Destiny showed both our capability to handle huge endeavors, and our utter ruthlessness.

Real Hand Made Navajo Jewelry---> Next Exit-12 Miles

When you enter Arizona, you enter the Navajo Nation. You hear people talking on the radio about racism in Arizona and New Mexico. One Sheriff's race in November was between a Navajo and a "Hispanic." The winner, the Navajo, was being interviewed, and was asked about allegations by his opponent of anti-Mexican racism. I pondered that for a while. A racist Navajo. The station became white-noise before the interview was over, so I'm not sure if they've settled their racial argument yet.

In very few places can you feel the results of American western expansion like you can in the southwest. Around Gallup, NM, which is near the western border of the state, I looked to my left and saw a Burlington Northern & Santa Fe freight train cruising along. As luck would have it, we were going the exact same speed. For almost 140 miles we were side-by-side going 70mph. For two full hours we drove into Arizona, and that same Hyundai cargo container was at my 9 O'Clock. Absolutely astonishing. I took some video, but I'm not sure it does justice. Never before in my life have I experienced anything like that.

Weirdest part was that as I was jumping off in Winslow to get gas, I knew that eventually that same Burlington Northern & Santa Fe freight train was going to pass within one block of my hotel in Flagstaff.

The railroad changed everything out west.

As opposed to last year's trip, I had the most sensational weather anyone could ask for when I reached the South Rim.

The Grand Canyon is....well, fuck it, why bother? Someone said that those who have seen it understand why it can't truly be described with words, and those who have not seen it don't believe those who have.

It's 277 miles long. (4 full hours at 65mph from east to west if you could find a place to lay a highway)

Standing at some points on the South Rim, you can look across 12 miles of chasm and clearly make out tiny Ponderosa pines on the North Rim, only they ain't tiny. You look behind you at the trees on your side, and it hits you that those little fuckers over there are this tall?

The scale of the whole fucking place is off the charts.

And as you look out at Vishnu, at Walhalla Plateau, you get this feeling of absolute timelessness. Teddy Roosevelt stood near what is now Zuni Point on the South Rim and looked across what was then Grand Canyon. Not Grand Canyon National Monument, and not Grand Canyon National Park. He'd gotten some John Muir in his ear by then, and he understood the significance of what he saw stretched out before him. Before leaving, Roosevelt gave a speech near what is now Mather Point.

"Leave it as it is." TR told the crowd. "The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."

Amen brother Theodore.

It's over a mile deep in some spots, and when you look down into the canyon, well you fully come to understand what a mile deep means. It grabs you by the throat. It's fucking deep. Vertigo. The whole place is just a sensory overload.

But again. it's time that makes the whole thing come to life.

The fucking joint is alive with geology.

Those Vishnu Basement rocks are 1.5 billion years old. Higher up newer. Kaibab Limestone. Higher up, newer still. Coconino Sandstone. The canyon itself is relatively young. Arguments rage over whether it's 4 million years old, or 7 million. Either way, a blink in geological terms. It's the upheaval of the earth's crust due to the underslipping of the plate combined with the Colorado River dragging tons and tons and tons of liquid sandpaper over the rock as it runs downhill to the Gulf of California, that have combined and ripped open this huge gash. It's a huge, fresh, gaping wound in the earth's skin.

That view from Moran Point is exactly what it was, more or less, a million years ago. The ravens have been around for longer.

The first Spaniards to arrive in the 1500s saw exactly what I saw.

There's no evidence that man has marred, but then again we've only been aware of Grand Canyon (American conquerors I mean) for a little under 200 years. Fur trapper James Ohio Pattie first looked into it in 1826, so he gets credit. John Muir and Stephen Mather are more responsible than any other two human beings for the wonders we still enjoy today. Ralph Cameron tried to build dams in the canyon in the early 20th century, and you can feel the creeping commercialism as you ascend the Coconino Plateau. If left to our devices, we'd do our level best to fuck this place up in 20 years.

But it was here long before we were, and it will be here long after we've perished. We're specks crawling around it. Something very reaffirming about that. It helps every so often to remind ourselves that we're dwarfs.

42 Scumbags

2010-12-13T12:07:00.002-06:00

Back in September, US Rep Mark Kirk from the Fightin' 10th in Illinois, was one of 17 Republicans to break ranks and vote in favor of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010.

At the time, Mark was running against Alexi Gainnoulias for the about-to-be-vacated seat held by Roland Burris, who of course took over for Barack Obama.

Kirk's TV ads were almost constant (as were Alexi's) and in the last couple of weeks before the election he was actually referring to himself as "Mr. Independent." Never afraid to vote his conscience. All about doing the "right thing."

Well, Mr. Independent won the Senate race, and because of Blago's hijinx, Kirk was allowed to take the Burris seat back in late November rather than waiting for the end of the lame duck session.

When the James Zadronga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010 was about to come up for a test vote in the Senate last week, Chuck Schumer was begging, begging!, two Republicans to step forward and do the right thing.

The Zadronga Act would provide $3.2billion to track and treat illnesses suffered by 9/11 responders, and another $4.2billion to re-open old claims for people who are still suffering as well as the families of those who died.Most of the $6billion originally earmarked for these people ran out back in 2003, long before many of the responders became ill.

One such guy, Kevin Czartoryski, a 46 year old NYPD detective, died last week after battling a lung disease.

Anyway, back to Schumer's plea to the Republican party to put aside political differences and do the right thing for these 9/11 victims.

Great time for Mark Kirk to show me that he wasn't lying.

Great time for Mark Kirk to do the right thing and break ranks.

No such luck.

In short, the test vote failed 57-42, with Mr. Independent Mark Kirk, my new junior senator, following his party and voting against providing medical care for these people, same thing he voted for back in September when he was a US Rep., simply because the Dems wouldn't compromise on tax cuts for the wealthy.

All 42 no votes were cast by Republicans, which in my mind makes them all scumbags. I don't care what this fucker Kirk does for the rest of his career now. This one vote tells me all I'll ever need to know about this gutless turd.

Shame on all 42 of these Senators.

BBBullshit

2010-11-19T13:35:00.001-06:00

"Good morning, may I speak to the owner please?"

"She's not here, you can talk to me."

"And what is your name?"

"No, you go first, you called me."

"Oh, I'm sorry, this is Steve with the Chicagoland Better Business Bureau."

"I'm sorry..."

"I said this is Steve with the Chicag..."

"I heard you the first time, I'm just sorry."

"Excuse me?"

"What can I do for you Steve?"

"Well, I'd like to talk to you about becoming members of the BBB."

"We were members, from 1972-2000."

"May I ask why you stopped being members?"

"Sure, go right ahead."

"Excuse me?"

"Go right ahead and ask why we stopped being members."

"Oh, hah hah...that's funny, Misterrrrrrr......may I ask your name?"

"Sure go ahead."

"What's your name?"

"Smutty."

"Okay Smutty, why did you stop being members of the BBB?"

"Because your company is, for lack of a better term, complete bullshit."

"I'm sorry?"

"You should be."

"I mean why do you think that?"

"I don't think it, I know it. I'm the one who made the management decision to fire your asses back in 2000."

"And why is that?"

"Because the BBB is fraudulent. It's a bullshit organization. A phony bastard outfit trying to pass itself off as a consumer advocate group. A watchdog that doesn't watch anything but the bottom line."

"That's not true Mr. Smutty."

"It is true Steve. The BBB is a money making operation, am I wrong?"

"Well, technically maybe, but our purpose is to serve the consumers of the area. We keep records of businesses and any complaints against those businesses. When consumers call and ask us for a report, we tell them I see from our records that you have never had a complaint filed. That's the sort of business we want as a Member Business."

"Bullshit Steve. You'll accept anyone with $400 and a business license registered with the State of Illinois. You'll accept the biggest crooks in the home improvement industry, in fact one of your Board of Directors is the owner of the owner of the biggest replacement window rip-off artists in the history of the fucking world. You know the company that's all over TV? Sox games? Cubs games. Bears games. Bulls games. Hawks games. Hell they sponsor the Sox 7th inning stretch! You have to know who I'm talking about."

"You mean Delfco?"

"Close enough."

"Are you suggesting that they are ..."

"I'm saying they're rip-off artists. Bait-and-switch dildos who prey on senior citizens and stupid people who don't know that bait-and-switch is illegal. Saps who think they can actually get a window replaced for $129, and who wind up paying $700 per. Not only that, the parasite bastards hook the morons up with "financing" that allows the sucker to make low-low-low-low payments for the next 14 years. And, they proudly tell the community in all their ads, that they're a Member Business of the BBB!"

"Mr. Smutty, we check out our Member Businesses with the same..."

"Bullshit Steve. You don't check out anybody. You're a boiler room with a bunch of computers. Here let me explain it this way, maybe you can understand better. Four simple scenarios. Number 1- I'm a member, and someone calls to check me out. No complaints. That's what you tell the consumer. Number 2- I'm a member, and someone calls to check me out. There are complaints on file. You tell the consumer that. Number 3- I'm NOT a member, and someone calls to check me out. No complaints. You tell the consumer that whether I'm a member or not. And finally, Number 4- I'm not a member of the BBB, and I have a ton of outstanding complaints. You tell the consumer that. So, there you have it from my point of view. Since I'm in Group Number 3, why in the hell would I give you $400?"

"Membership means you can display our BBB Torch Logo in your ads."

"I know, and that's why I fired you in 2000. You're new there Steve?"

"3 years."

"Ya see Steve, up until then, around 2000, it was strictly against the rules to fly the BBB flag in advertisements. The BBB was somewhat worthwhile back then. A reasonably ethical outfit. But then, I believe it was right when James Baumhart took over, the BBB changed that rule. Suddenly, Member Businesses were permitted to display the BBB Torch in our ads. That's when the BBB became a bullshit outfit. That's when BBB Membership meant that we were an alphabetical listing in a phone book, populated by scam artists, ....at least the contractor section is populated by scam artists, .....and published by whores."

"But sir, please, that's not completely accurate. Our Summer and Winter directories are distributed to everyone who gets either the Tribune or the SunTimes. That's twice a year your business gets the chance to remind your customers that you are concerned with their well-being. You get to tell them that fair business practices are your trademark."

"They already know that Steve. Check your records. No complaints. And that's what you tell people without me giving you four hundred bucks. And let's talk about your Summer and Winter directories Steve, ya know...the ones that allow me to tell my customers that I'm all for fair trade practices. Have you ever looked closely at the directory Steve? Down there along the bottom, it says "The BBB does not endorse any businesses listed. Consumers are encouraged to check with your local BBB."

"Yes that's correct. We clearly spell out that the BBB does not endorse ANY businesses Mr. Smutty."

"Yeah, exactly. You publish a fucking phone book with your BBB Logo prominent on the front, and inside you alphabetically list everyone who sent you $400, and then finally the BBB says we don't endorse any of these people, down there in the small print. As if the BBB isn't tacitly implying endorsement by the mere presence of business in their own fucking phone book. Then you call me up and somehow try to pressure me into joining the list of scammers who you'll take money from, but not actually endorse."

"But you said yourself that your company was a member."

"Yeah, that was back in the day. My father, a guy who really was interested in fair business practices, used to send you $200 because he felt like you served a purpose. He was right. That was before Baumhart began pimping out the reputation of the BBB. I was able to convince my dad that we didn't need you any more back in 2000. Seriously Steve, after 55 years in business, I'm pretty sure they know we're an established business. And as I explained to my dad, a day will come when the BBB is not only pimping out their rep with the silly fucking phone books, they're going to take the next step and start bullshitting people about members."

"The BBB would never do anything..."

"That's what they said before they started doing what they said they wouldn't do back in the day. The advertising thing. They said they'd never allow it. Which turned out to be bullshit. And as I told my dad, the only businesses who need to join the BBB any more are start-ups, and shysters. The start-ups get to buy a little instant cred, and the shysters get to seem legit. I'm neither, so I'm not interested in becoming a Member Business of the BBB. You people are one step away from becoming part of the scam."

"But ..."

"Bye Steve."

That conversation is as accurate as I can recall, and took place about 3 or 4 years ago.

Well, it turns out that the BBB is part of the scam.

Pay no attention to the BBB people. Word of mouth is king. If you're not sure about a contractor, or a dentist, or a lawn care company, ask a friend. The BBB is not your friend.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-fi-bbb-ratings-20101119,0,1948750.story

The Race is On

2010-11-08T16:32:00.000-06:00

Tom Dart dropped out.

That's likely because of the presence of Rahm Emanuel.

Ya see, we can only have one white guy running.

Gery Chico doesn't count as white, he's Hispanic.

That's why Gutierrez isn't running.

We can only have one Hispanic running.

Carol Mosley Braun has opened a campaign office.

She hasn't tossed her hat in the ring yet, but she will. Just getting the signatures together.

That might be a problem.

Carol's black.

We already have a black candidate.

Danny Davis.

We can only have one black candidate.

Neil Steinberg's column in today's Sun-Times approaches the issue, and even skirts the stupidity of it all, but he pulls up short.

I'm one of the people who wrote weeks ago that the 2011 Chicago mayoral race is going to break down to simple racial politics, and that's exactly what is happeneing.

I'm one of the people who was tsk tsk tsking the blatant racism shown by "Chicago area African American political leaders" who gathered to select a consensus candidate from the black community.

Steinberg stifles a yawn while pointing out that the white powers-that-were-and-are in Chicago have been gathering to select white candidates for ages. Neil points out that the main difference between then and now is that the white guys didn't self-identify as such.

That's correct. And, additionally, those white guys wouldn't have dreamed of self-identifying as white guys in a fucking press release.

Part of the problem back in 1983, as I've said before, was that the media went along for the racial ride. They didn't point out the shame of Bernie Epton getting the white votes, and Harold Washington getting the black votes. They just read the numbers according to race, and then gave the weather and sports.

No shame at all.

Steinberg goes on to opine that Mosley Braun isn't long for the race, because she doesn't have the same appeal within the black community as Danny Davis.

After some more dancing around, Steinberg concludes that Rahm will be the next Mayor of Chicago because, well he doesn't come right out and say it, the white powers-that-were-and-are have chosen Emanuel.

This whole business makes me want to puke.

Our city is at a serious crossroad. Actually a T-intersection because straight ahead is not an option. We need a mayor who is going to attack the city's budget problems, the city's infrastructure problems, the crisis within city's public schools, the about-to-revolt Chicago police and firefighters, and the painful reality that their predecessor has left a mountain of shit on the big desk at 121 N. LaSalle and a trail of debt stretching to the horizon.

I don't give a flying fuck what color our next mayor is.

I wish my fellow Chicagoans didn't give a fuck either.

If only our local media, and I'm looking at you today Neil Steinberg, would stop treating the race issue as if it's THE issue, maybe just maybe the voters would start paying attention to that brick wall we're heading for.

A Tale of Two Falls

2010-11-01T17:55:00.007-05:00

On Saturday night, 23 year old Megan Duskey was attending a huge Halloween party at the Palmer House. Huge, as in 2000 people. Accounts vary, but it seems Megan was dressed as the Silver Spectre, and was having a great time.

Sometime around 10:30, Megan decided to slide down the spiral staircase railing and lost her balance. She was somewhere around the 4th floor at the time.

50 feet or so later, Megan landed on the basement floor of the Palmer House.

Megan studied childhood education, and early childhood special education at Northern Illinois University. She took a job at Orville T Bright elementary school on the South Side after graduating from NIU.

Megan was a "caring, energetic person who was full of life and eager to help others and make a difference in the world” according to her family. She leaves behind her parents, Debbie and Jim, and her two brothers, Matt and Mark.

Police ruled Megan's death an accident, and wouldn't comment on the role, if any, played by alcohol.

Seems like the right thing to not comment on, at this point.

Last Wednesday, while I was telling you fine people about the slightly fiercer than normal wind we'd been experiencing here, Declan Drumm Sullivan was videotaping football practice at Notre Dame.

Declan, who was from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, was filming from what they've referred to as a "scissor lift." Basically, a platform that folds down flat for transportation, and that can be telescoped (via one of those 3 Stooges trick boxing glove contraptions) as high up as 50 feet.

While filming up there in the 50-60MPH gusts, Declan tweeted that he was scared shitless in that wind, and something to the effect that "Oh well, I guess I've lived long enough."

Those who were attending practice reported hearing a loud crash shortly after that last tweet from Declan.

Declan's funeral was held today in Buffalo Grove, and was attended by the ND football team, and coach Brian Kelly....and a few hundred other friends and family.

Much has been said about Declan Sullivan these last few days. His mom went to high school with my brother, and his aunt was a classmate of mine. It's a pretty tightly knit alum group, and so the outpouring of condolences at the old alma mater website started pouring in immediately.

I never knew the kid, but like I said before about serving mass at funerals, sometimes you get a feeling for how deeply someone's death hits a family, or a group of friends and classmates, simply by seeing the emotions on their faces. Pretty obvious that Declan Drumm Sullivan was a hell of a nice kid.

In the interest of full disclosure, I've made no secret of my contempt for the people who run Notre Dame. I've disliked that pack of Pharisaic d-bags for about 30 years. I consider them among the biggest hypocrites on the planet.

That said, I think we need to figure out why a supposedly elite academic institution, run by allegedly intelligent people, sent Declan Sullivan up into that tower to video a fucking football practice.

According to Jack Swarbrick, Notre Dame's ~~pimp~~ Athletic Director, the weather was "unremarkable" before a "pretty extraordinary burst of wind" toppled the 50 foot tower, sending 20 year old Declan Sullivan to his death.

Anyone who was anywhere in the midwest last Tuesday or Wednesday knows that is complete and utter bullshit. The weather had been "remarkable" for two days, in fact I remarked about it here. It was a recipe for a real tragedy, and that's exactly what Notre Dame got.

Heads need to roll in South Bend over this.

Bye Week

2010-10-31T14:23:00.005-05:00

December 12, 1965 was my 6th birthday. The next day was my grandfather's wake. My dad's dad. Didn't really know the guy very well, but he was the first living human being that I knew, that had stopped living. All day on the 13th I watched people I didn't know pay their respects, and then go join the party downstairs.

Maybe party isn't the exact right word, but it's closer to being a party than it is to not being a party. Oh sure there are a few who don't get the whole Irish Wake thing, but that's really not my problem. There's never any disrespect to the deceased, and as a matter of fact it's because the deceased became deceased, after a lifetime of not being deceased, that everyone is gathered. And, since we are all gathered, we face the option of either lamenting a world without old deady over there, or getting loaded and telling funny stories about O'Stiffman, as well as discussing current events.

But again, the key elements that every Irish wake shares: alcohol. laughing, gossiping, and bullshitting about politics.

In that order.

They don't call the obits the "Irish sports page" for nothing.

And, at my grandfather's wake, the big topic of discussion was yesterday, December 12, 1965.

My 6th birthday.

All anyone was talking about was the number 6.

Only they weren't discussing how fucking cool it was that little Smutty was 6 years old.

They were talking about how cool it was that Bears rookie Gale Sayers had run for 6 touchdowns in the mud against the San Francisco 49ers. To the vast majority of people in the world, roughly 100%, Sayers running wild against the 49ers was the cool thing about December 12th. Well, that and Frank Sinatra's birthday, which oddly is still not a national holiday.

But on that day, after talking about my grandfather, it was all about Sayers. Not Smutty or Frank.

61-20.

1- Sayers 80 yards with a screen. a run that featured two early moves the defy description. Knee-bucklers. Jock droppers. What Bill Cosby once called Sayers "splitting like an amoeba and going around both sides of a tackler."

2- Sayers 30 yard run that showed how to "get around the corner."

3- 10 yard dash to the corner and wait for the block thing.

4- 50 yards, burst through the line, and gone. The reason he was called the Kansas Comet. A blur. And, showing that he was a mudder in the last 30 yards. Everyone else slippin' and sloppin', he's accelerating.

5- A one yard over the top dive where he landed on his head. Sayers was Payton before Payton was Payton.

6- 85 yard punt return that featured two more what-in-theee-fuck-did-I-just-see? moves at mid-field.

Gale Sayers was absolutely amazing.

6 TDS on my 6th birthday. Just the sort of thing that yanks a 6 year old kid by the throat and forces, that's what I said, forces him to become a fan of the fucking team.

Between 1965 and 1985 , Chicago Bears fans lived through some really miserable seasons, but there was always some reason to watch. Early on, late 60s, it was Sayers and Butkus. After Dr. Fox had his way with Gale's knees, it was down to Butkus.

By the early 70s, the Bears were just bad, and that is not a good thing to be when the owner of your team essentially invented the NFL.

Bobby Douglass. Abe Gibron.

Papa Bear had some smarts though. He hired Jim Finks. And then they drafted Walter. And then they built an offensive line that was solid. And finally, they built a defense that scared the shit out of people.

The 1985 Chicago Bears.

Kinda like.... Disco Demolition coming to your town this week! They just beat the hell out of everybody. Except the Dolphins on Monday Night Football. Fucking Gary Fencik. What? you didn't know he was going to cut inside? The entire world knew he was ...sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah, so we had this one great team, and it was really fun and shit, and then pffffft.

20 more years of mediocre, bad, kind OK, mediocre, bad again, pretty decent, hey look Rex Grossman is starting against Peyton Manning in the Super Bowl!, back to mediocre, kinda bad, pretty decent, and now bad again.

Now, I'm not exactly sure when the NFL started this "bye week" shit, seems like it's been around for a while but I'm too lazy to Google it.

Whenever it was, up until today, I hated the bye week.

Not this year.

This year I love the bye week.

Let's make next week bye week too.

I started watching this team in 1965 and, I am seriously considering calling it quits.

I mean it this time!

Being a Chicago Bears fan sucks.

I've had more fun at wakes.

Grant Park

2010-10-29T11:01:00.005-05:00

And as the Chicago police worked their way east on Balbo, they crossed onto Michigan Ave.

There, ahead of them, they saw thousands and thousands of people gathered in Grant Park. The city of Chicago was very concerned.

In Mayor Daley's eyes, the assembly was illegal. No permit had been issued. The police could hear the crowd chanting. Hard to make out clearly, but it was something about dissatisfaction with the American government.

Those in Grant Park felt that they were exercising their right to assemble peacefully. Clearly a First Amendment issue, so fuck you and your permit. This is the United States and we still have that Constitution backing us up.

Another group of police approached Grant Park from the north. They came east on Congress, and as they crossed Michigan Ave. they could see that the two sculptures guarding the entrance, Spearman and Bowman had been vandalized. The two proud warriors still sat astride their horses, but Bowman's bow had been snapped off and Spearman's spear was also missing.

Vietnam War protesters.

The cops on Balbo looked north, past the Hilton, and could see their fellow officers moving east into the park. They entered from the south, and moved slowly towards the mass of humanity.

"Sarah Palin is a fucking retard!" came a shout from the crowd.

"Take it easy. Take it easy. We're all here to have a good time. We can talk about Palin without all that shit. Let's talk about solutions."

"Excuse me, we're with the Chicago police...."

"Oh hey fellas, how's it going?"

"Fine thank you. Do you have a permit for your gathering?"

"Nah. Angie McMahon with the Chemically Imbalanced Theater raised eighteen thousand bucks on Facebook, but the douchebags over at the Park District gave her the old red-tape runaround and refused to issue the permit anyway. Hey look, it's Oprah!! Hi Oprah!!!"

"She raised eighteen grand and they wouldn't..."

"That's right officer. Isn't the city kinda strapped for cash at the moment?"

"Don't even get us started. Our last contract was a fucking nightmare. Somebody offered them eighteen grand for permission to do something they're legally allowed to do..."

"That's right officer. We're not breaking any laws."

"No you aren't."

"Wanna beer?"

"Nah, we're on duty. You have a safe day now."

"You too officer."

LINK

Dear Chicago Park District,

Fuck you. Arrest me.

Love,

Smutty.

A Windy City

2010-10-26T18:24:00.001-05:00

Staff Sgt. Robert J. Miller

2010-10-06T17:30:00.012-05:00

St. Michael school in downtown Wheaton is where I did most of my 5 year sentence as an altar boy. Aside from the usual drudgery of having to wake up at 5 so I could serves 6AM mass, the job did have its upside. Great view of the babes from up there and communion time was a highlight.

We used to get to leave class if there was a wedding at St. Mike's, ..or a funeral.

Weddings were fun of course, and funerals were a real drag as you might expect. Thing about funerals is that I would actually pay attention to the words spoken by someone I didn't know about a deceased person I also didn't know. It was like getting to know a little about a person I could never know by way of the shared grief of the people they did know. I could tell when someone's death hit hard. It showed in the faces of the mourners. And there were those other times when I'd notice someone checking their watch during the funeral mass. Over the loss already.

On Saturdays, during the final years of the Vietnam War, we had what they called "Benediction and Prayers for Peace." Basically just did the stations of the cross, some incense was burned (which I can still smell Gerlich), and the really big monstrance with the over-sized Eucharist was hauled out. That was only for really serious occasions at St. Michael's church, and the parishioners really prayed their asses off on those Saturdays. I did too. That's back when I still hadn't completely ruled out the efficacy of prayers.

There were times when serving the benedictions that I would see my grade school classmates out there in the pews. Sitting alone. Sheila Murphy lived close to school, and was there quite often. Voluntarily went to church! A foreign concept to me back then. Sheila's the one who sold me my copper Vietnam POW/MIA bracelet which, in hindsight, is kind of amazing. She was in 8th grade, and yet she was already all tuned in to the conflict in Southeast Asia.

Sheila kept track of who had which POW/MIA guy, and would test us in the halls to recall the name without checking our bracelets. (Sheila thought some people were just using the things as fashion accessories apparently.)

Kelvin Maines was my guy, just in case Sheila's reading this.

Saw a lady at benediction one day way n the back just bawling her eyes out. No surprise to see Murph sit down next to her in the pew and start patting her on the shoulder. Sheila was good people. Turned out the lady had lost her son in Nam and would come to St. Mikes for these "prayers for peace" with some regularity, although I hadn't noticed her before.

Maybe it was the crying.

After mass I talked to John Prello, the greatest priest I've ever known, and asked him what it's like to be seen as a source of comfort for the bereaved. He spoke in generalities about giving comfort to people who had lost family members, mainly the elderly, and said essentially he's a sympathetic ear and a trusted friend more than a counselor.

Dealing with someone like the crying mother of son killed in Vietnam was a different story. Prello hated the Vietnam War, and while he never actually came out and said it, I got the impression he resented having to priest up because of it. Hard enough to be a pillar of strength for someone whose son died in a car crash, harder still to tell the parents of a son who came home from Vietnam in a bag that he died doing what he loves and for a good reason.

On Jan 25, 2008, Staff Sgt. Robert Miller, your basic Green Beret, was on a patrol in the Kunar province of Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border along with eight Special Forces ass-kickers and about a dozen Afghan troops.

They came under heavy fire, and by various accounts it seems that Rob Miller charged the enemy, simultaneously firing his weapon and throwing hand grenades, in an effort to draw enemy fire away from his comrades. After being hit, Rob continued calling in coordinates of gun emplacements so they could be targeted for airstrikes. 5 other squad members were wounded, and those who survived credited Rob for saving their lives.

According to Rob's friend, Staff Sgt. Nick McGarry, the last thing Rob Miller said to him was "If I get killed on this mission, I don't want to be remembered for dying, I want to be remembered for who I was."

Robert Miller died that day.

Today, there was a special ceremony held at the White House. Phil and Maureen Miller traveled to Washington to meet with President Obama, and to accept the posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor their son earned that day in Kunar province near the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

In addressing Rob's parents, President Obama said.."Today and in the years to come, may you find some comfort in knowing that Rob gave his life doing what he loved -- protecting his friends and defending his country. You gave your oldest son to America, and America is forever in your debt."

Today in Wheaton they held a special ceremony to celebrate the life of Staff Sgt. Robert Miller, killed at the age of 24. This afternoon, a mass was held in St. Michael's church to honor the memory of Rob, who graduated from there in 1998. I don't know if they still have benedictions and prayers for peace on Saturday at St. Mikes, but I wonder what John Prello would say about Rob's death.

They're calling Rob a hometown hero in Wheaton, but to completely honest about it, I don't know what the fuck that even means anymore.

Robert J Miller- 1984-2008

Days of Rage

2010-09-23T19:35:00.010-05:00

Happened to meet Chris Kennedy once or twice back in the late 80s. Nice enough guy, if a bit aloof. His wife and my wife were law school classmates. I recall thinking that it was a good thing the Kennedys weren't still around when Northwestern hired Bernardine Dohrn in 1991.

Dorhn's father-in-law, Thomas Ayers, and his close friend Howard Trienens, both sat on the board of trustees at Northwestern.

Trienens had been the honcho at Sidley Austin, your basic gold standard Chicago area law firm, when the firm hired Ms. Dohrn in the early 80s, despite the fact that the Illinois ethics people refused to grant her a law license.

Trienens was willing to overlook details like that, as, like I said, he was dear dear golf buddies with Dohrn's father-in-law, Tommy "The Big Hitter" Ayers.

The reason the Illinois legal community didn't want Ms. Dohrn in the club, was her previous criminal record.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, Bernardine Dohrn was part of the Weather Underground.

It was during that time, those Days of Rage which she herself led, when Ms. Dohrn met her to-be husband.

Fella by the name of Bill Ayers, who is now a "distinguished professor of education" at the University of Illinois Chicago.

I recall news items from the late 70s about Ayers and Dohrn being on the lam, and they were very much hiding out. Dohrn was at one point on the FBI's Top Ten List of People The FBI Hates.

In the late 70s, the Weathermen split into a couple of groups, the May 19 Coalition and The Prairie Fire Collective. The latter group was in favor of turning themselves in to the law enforcement community, while the May 19s wanted to stay underground.

Dohrn and Ayers were Prairie Fire Collectivists. They'd had enough running. They had kids.

They turned themselves in in 1980, the year I got married. They received probation.

Shortly after that Trienens hired her at Sidley.

Anyway, after her time at Sidley Austin, Dohrn was hired as an "adjunct professor or law" at NU, which in Northwestern lingo means " a professor who was hired without faculty approval" and which in the case of Bernardine Dohrn meant there was no vote. That was in 1991, same year as the Burris/Nicarico fiasco.

Trienens insisted that neither himself nor Dohrn's father-in-law Thomas Ayers, Bill's dad, both Northwestern Law School trustees, had anything to do with the hiring of Ms. Dohrn as an "adjunct professor of law" at the Northwestern University School of Law.

No influence whatsoever.

Hey what can I tell you? Call me a cynic, but I was skeptical.

I smelled a rat, and I was very relieved to know that Sheila and Chris Kennedy had moved on, because their presence in the same legal circles as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn could have possibly caused some cocktail party tension. Ya know, because of the whole Sirhan Sirhan book dedication thing.

Anyway, we spring forward to 2008, and right in the midst of the Obama/Blago/Burris/Durbin/Reid "Don't send us a senator" thing, some people around here, myself included, speculated that it might be a good time for Chris Kennedy to jump into Illinois politics.

Chris cut everyone off at the pass by accepting a position on the the board of the University of Illinois, a job that he did while running the Merchandise Mart. In short order, Chris was named the Chairman of the U of I board.

And that, is not a good thing if your name is William Ayers, and you want the University of Illinois to grant you emeritus status.

“I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our university to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy,” he said.

“There is nothing more antithetical to the hopes for a university that is lively and yet civil, or to the hopes of our founding fathers for their great experiment of a self-governing people, than to permanently seal off debate with one’s opponents by killing them.”

The vote was taken and William Ayers' request to be granted emeritus status, usually an informal thing that gets rubber stamped, was shot down,.. by a unanimous vote

Ouch.

The Pickwick

2010-09-15T11:12:00.002-05:00

There's a push on right now to have the Pickwick Theater given national landmark status. Corey MacPherrin and Anna Devlantes were yakking with Park Ridge mayor Dave Schmidt about it this morning on WFLD, Chicago's local Fox News affiliate.

The End of an Era

2010-09-07T17:43:00.002-05:00

Chicago Mayor Richard M Daley announced today that he won't seek re-election next year.

Wonderful news.

Video.

Good riddance Richie!

Fuck off.

Don't let the door hit you and all that shit.

Since 1955, Chicago has had 42 years worth of mayors named Richard Daley, the first one was a political giant, and the second one a bumbling buffoon. This Christmas, Richie will pass The Boss in length of service, and that fact alone is nothing short of astonishing.

Some day I'll write a post about the man who told me he took the bar exam for Richie, but in the meantime I'll simply say that Richard M Daley has been a terrible, terrible mayor. The City of Chicago will be better off without him and his corrupt friends. Much much better off.

In his announcement, Richie said that "Everyone, especially public officials, must know when it's time to move on. For me, that time is now."

Bullshit! The time for Richie Daley to move on came and went years ago. While trying to portray himself as a modern day version of his "Nuthin' I love more dan dis great city!" father, the reality is something much different.

Both Daley's were money grubbing, patronage laden, smoke-filled-room deal making crooks, but at least the old man knew what Priority One was. The City itself. The City That Works worked because The Boss made sure it worked. The money grubbing and deal-making were more of a hobby for The Boss, whereas money grubbing and deal-making were Priority One for Richie the Corrupt. And, as a result of his neglect, the City of Chicago has suffered.

Well, not for much longer.

Somewhere, 12,000 Chicago police are celebrating.

And somewhere else, Rahm Emanuel is formulating his plan for the invasion of the 5th Floor at 121 N. LaSalle Street..

Negotiating with Terrorists

2010-09-03T10:56:00.006-05:00

This past week, Chicago police superintendent Jody Weis held a "secret meeting" with the leaders of some of the Windy City's more prominent street gangs. Hustlers and Kings and Disciples and a number of other youth organizations were invited for a summit with our top cop, federal prosecutors, as well as the family members of other youths who couldn't be at the meeting on account of their being dead.

The gangster leaders called themselves the representatives of "The Movement."

Weis has taken a lot of heat this week because of the meeting, from both sides.

Chicagoans were pretty vocal in condemning the meeting at first; we heard complaints about dealing with criminals and granting credibility to thugs by sending our #1 cop to the summit. We can't send our best person to this thing, send some flunky and pass along a message that we don't negotiate with terrorists.

I wasn't quite so quick to pass judgment on Jody Weis, at least not on this matter. He's had his moments where I wondered what the hell this guy is doing in that job, and the rank and file coppers don't think much of Weis at all. He's seen as an outsider who doesn't relate well to the beat cop.

They think even less of Mayor Daley, as we will all see when the Chicago police hold a march on September 15th. As John Kass pointed out today, it will come as no surprise if Richie moves his trip to China up a few days so he can avoid the embarrassment that waits for him Wednesday after next.

Something weird happened yesterday. The Movement held a press conference. According to Kass, there were 3 men in suits and bow ties behind the stage, silently listening to the comments made by the gangsters. Anyone who's spent any time around this city knows the suit and bow tie as the uniform of the Nation of Islam, and these three suits obviously were reporters for the Louis Farrakhan Daily D-Bag.

The speakers at the gangster pep rally spoke of political corruption in Chicago, as well as lack of access to jobs. The reason we're killing each other is because we're drug dealers, and we wouldn't be drug dealers if Chicago would just find a way to arrange for full employment for gangsters, presumably including Blue Cross and full dental.

Political corruption? Unemployment? That's Farrakhan talking, and he wasn't even in the house.

It's a power struggle here, and this is a defining moment. The gangsters are pissed off at Jody Weis. They think he's trying to strong-arm them. At least that's what they're saying.

The big gangster/cop/fed/victim wasn't about "negotiations" it appears. Seems as though Jody Weis informed the youth leaders that he intends to do something about the rampant violence on the south and west sides of Chicago. Weis told the gangsters that it's up to them to stop shooting each other, but if they don't....we're going to go all RICO on their asses. Thus, the feds at the summit.

Shoot somebody, and we'll take your mom and dad's house. Sell crack at 31st and State, and we'll seize the property of anybody even remotely related to you as it must have been criminally obtained.

Back in the late 60s, Richie Daley's old man, The Boss, scoffed at the notion of needing federal or state help in dealing with rioters in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination. We can deal with our own problems, in-house.

A few months ago, we had 54 people shot in one weekend here, more Americans ate hot lead in Chicago, Illinois that month than we did in Afghanistan ind Iraq combined. In the aftermath of that bloody weekend, someone suggested calling up the Illinois National Guard, a notion quickly dismissed by Richie Daley. We can deal with this ourselves, in-house.

Well, apparently we can't. And so, the gangsters have been put on notice. RICO is coming to town, and he's pissed off. Early indications are pointing to a quick drop in gun crimes since the summit, although you'd be hard pressed to believe that if you watch our local news. (4 people duct tape muzzled, and shot dead last night in a garage down by Midway.)

But if the gangsters are pissed off, I'm encouraged.

I'm encouraged, just like I am about the handgun ban being shot down by the Supreme Court. The other way hasn't been working here. Time to try something else. I've read about other cities taking a similar approach to gang problems, and from what I can gather reactions are mixed.

That's okay with me too. Mixed reactions to trying something somewhat radical are expected, but the reality here is that it's worth a try, because simply put, there's no way on earth the gangster situation in Chicago could get worse.

Women discussing men

2010-08-24T14:57:00.002-05:00

Dear Lou,

2010-08-23T14:31:00.008-05:00

Are you crying?

There's no crying.

There's no crying in baseball.

There is NO crying in baseball!

You know Lou, it seems like just yesterday I was looking down at my Riddell square-toed kicking shoe in the locker room out in Geneva, knowing full well that would be the last time I ever took it off. A heartbreaking 30-28 loss to the Vikings of Geneva in the quarter-finals of the IHSA 3A State Playoffs would be my final competitive game, and it really hit me hard. The end of an era that started in 5th grade and ended eight years later that chilly Saturday afternoon in November of 1978.

No more football. No more shoulder-pads over half-shirts. No more protective cups. No more chin-strap rash. No more air-helmets with the Riddell ® Patented Safety Bladder (do not over-inflate.) No more double-sessions in the sweltering August heat.

The undefeated Redwings had been defeated and I wouldn't kick another football through another goalpost, something I'd done thousands of times in practice and in games, ever again.

It was over.

I took off my kicking shoe and jammed it in my gear bag. Tossed the left one in a garbage can next to the lockers. Turned in my uniform to the equipment manager, grabbed a quick shower, rode back to school in the quietest bus you never heard, and then went out and got loaded with Sully and Gorms, the snapper and the holder.

But I didn't cry Lou.

Got a little lumpy in the larynx.

But I didn't cry.

Bitty Schram cried when Tom Hanks yelled at her because Bitty is a girl Lou, a girl.

Girls cry Lou.

Warriors like us don't cry.

Listen buddy, the single greatest comeback I ever saw on a baseball field happened in August of 2001 between your 116 win Seattle Mariners and the Cleveland Indians, in Cleveland. It was a national broadcast, thank goodness, and I watched the entire game, unlike most people who first tuned in.

You had the Indians down 14-2 headed to the bottom of the 7th inning.

Do you remember the game ? Of course you do.

The Erie Warriors threw a 3 spot up in the bottom of the 7th, to make it 14-5. They pushed 4 across in the 8th to close it to 14-9. And then...they scored 5 runs in the bottom of the 9th to miraculously tie the game and send it to extras.

After a scoreless 10th, and a Mariners blank in the top half, the Fighting Braves of the Cuyahoga came all the way back Lou, scoring in the bottom of the 11th to win 15-14.

As the comeback was being mounted, the camera crew routinely cut to you sitting in the corner of the Mariners dugout, and your expression went from relaxed, to agitated, to concerned, to panicked, to bemused. After the game, you said something about baseball being a funny game and if you watch long enough you'll see just about anything.

But you didn't cry!

And now, as you announced your retirement before the agony of the 2010 season is even over, leaving the Friendly Confines for the final time as a member of the most inept franchise in the history of franchises, you took a look back on your career and you choked up.

You cried.

"It's the last time I'll ever put on a uniform. (sniff) I get emotional. (sniff sniff) I don't mean to. (tears) It's just a fun place to play baseball. Really, it is. (sniff) Maybe the most fun place in all of baseball. I'll really miss it."

Wrigley is a gorgeous park to be sure, and a great party. cub fans are having beer garden party fun Lou, not baseball fun. It's baseball hell. Wrigley Field has hosted enough beer parties in the last 102 years to float the Titanic, which was still on the drawing board the last time the cubs won a World Series by the way.

The 57 cub managers before you failed to win a World Series. Why you took the job as cub manager is anyone's guess, but you shouldn't be sad that you're leaving. You should celebrate. (And seriously dude, that Tony Soprano girth of yours is a constant reminder that baseball managers shouldn't wear uniforms in the first place.) I can understand why you're going to miss baseball in general, but you should see your departure from the Chicago cubs as the smartest career move you ever made.

Look at it like this Mr. Piniella....you can now enjoy a pitcher of high-balls.

Thanks for the laughs. Congrats on a fine career, and enjoy your retirement.

You're in a better place now.

Hubble

2010-07-27T17:41:00.006-05:00

"Don't ask me, I'm just a dumb reporter from Wheaton, Illinois."

When Redford/Woodward spoke that line in "All the President's Men" everyone in Wheaton was proud.

Sure it's in the heart of DuPage County, one of our state's Republican strongholds. Sure Redford/Woodward and Hoffman/Bernstein were bringing down Richard Nixon, on-screen. Maybe the crowd at the old Wheaton Theater booed from the beginning to the end of that flick, and maybe they wanted Ben Bradlee's head on a pike.

But when Redford/Woodward gave a shout out to the folks back in Wheaton, for that brief instant, they were as proud as they could be.

Wheaton.

He just said Wheaton,Illinois.

That's us!

Little old railroad town out west. Cornfields when we moved there in '69, at least to the south. Up north was the old part of town.

Founded by Erastus Gary and the Wheaton Brothers, Jesse and Warren, in the late 1830s, Wheaton grew with the railroad. No dummies, they gave land to the railroad, gave it, so that they'd lay track through where they envisioned a town would be. In 1859 the town incorporated.

It was a dry town for much of its history. I think they issued their first liquor license while I was living there in the early 70s. Famous for having more denominations of churches per person than any other town in the Milky Way Galaxy or something. I think there were 97 different faiths with storefront operations up and running when I lived there, which was from 1969 until 1978 when I left home and started riding the rails with other Wheaton hobos, at the age of 18.

It was about 30,000 people back then, slightly more than half of what it is now. Out south in the cornfields, subdivisions sprung up, and we moved into one of them. Right down the street from Judge and Mrs. Woodward, ...Bob's parents.

That was a big deal around 1974-ish. Home town boy helps topple the President of the United States.

People from Wheaton have always been proud (more or less Bob and Billy) of their (our) more newsworthy residents.

They were always quick to remind people that Belushi (the funny one) was a Wheaton boy. There was a photograph on the wall of some friends of mine, Carl and Erik xxxxx, who lived in the Lakeside Apartments in Lisle. The first thing you saw when you walked in the front door of their place was this picture. About 4 feet wide, and about 2 feet tall. A football team. The 1967 Wheaton Central Tigers.

But Carl and Erik went to rival Glenbard West. What in the hell were they doing with a 14 year old team picture from Wheaton Central? Well, if you looked closely at the kid holding the trophy in the middle of the bottom row. you saw John Belushi. These goofy bastards had broken into Wheaton Central and stolen the thing from the trophy case. A prize among college kids in the late 70s, and by 1982....well, I hope they returned it to Judy.

Belushi went to Wheaton Central.

So did Woodward.

So did Red Grange.(My grade school football practices were across the street. Many an hour spent looking at the sign that declared Red Grange Field.)

And so did one of my great heroes, Edwin Hubble. Hubble was a star athlete back in his Wheaton Central days, and a fairly good student from what I hear.

I was delighted to learn that when the old high school had passed its shelf life, it was converted to the Edwin Hubble Middle School. Two newer high schools made restoration impractical, and so demolition was considered briefly, before the townfolk came to their senses and embraced the history in that old place.

Most of the building was left vacant, but the newer front part was used to teach grade school kids, and I'm sure they learned all about Edwin Hubble, the guy who debunked Genesis.

It's been called The Hubble Middle School since 1992.

So I looked into the paper today.

Fuck.

Maybe a Costco.

Maybe a subdivision with a strip mall with a nice Starbucks and a Cinnabon.

Not sure what to do with the property, but for sure they've got to do something with it, right? A subdivision sounds good, but in this tough economy, maybe let's go with a fucking Costco.

Thinking about 20 years from now, when it's all developed and people are parking their cars on the football field so they can run in to buy 24 rolls of toilet paper...you guessed it, my head exploded again.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Jungle

2010-07-04T12:11:00.006-05:00

In the summer of my 7th year, Martin Luther King moved to Chicago.

In the 20 or so years since the end of WWII, Chicago had seen a huge increase in its African American population and a corresponding decrease in whites. Between 1960 and 1970, 505,000 white folk left the city, and 300,000 blacks moved in.

Most blacks moved in on the South Side, where my parents had grown up. My dad's neighborhood was around 79th and Dante, pretty far south, and somewhat rough. As blacks migrated to Chicago from the south, they initially set up residence on the far south end of the city, and in the words of many of my dad's friends, " took over everything south of 47th Street." It was my dad's neighbors who started the trend of white flight. "There goes the neighborhood" started at one of their block parties I'm sure.

It was a very racially segregated city back then. Chicago was called at the time "the most segregated city in America.

My mom was from Canaryville, an area bordered by Halsted on the west, arguably Canal on the east, 40th Street on the north, and 47th Street on the south. (Wiki says 49th Street, proving once again that Wiki is usually about half-right.) . That's right, 47th Street on the south, which meant that black people stayed south of 47th and whites stayed north of 47th, and therein was the, ahem, peace.

Canaryville. A square basically, comprised of approximately 100% Irish working class. Bordered by Daley's Bridgeport to the north. Home to a large number of Chicago's politicians, police, fire personnel, flunkies, and a patronage army.

One thing Canaryville had over Bridgeport was the Chicago Stockyards. When the wind was off the plains, I could sit in the window of my grandparents' house at 46th and Union, and almost taste Sinclair's Jungle, just 2 blocks to the west. The smell lingered for years after they closed down Hog Butcher to The World 'R Us.

Because Daley lived in Bridgeport, and because so many Irish people who controlled Chicago lived nearby, there was an odd absence of police presence in the summer of 1966, when Martin Luther King Jr. and Dick Gregory lead a group of protesters through White Man's Land. In other areas around the city, white areas, Daley's police had maintained order and protected protesters. Not in Bridgeport and Canaryville.

I've heard stories about what transpired, mainly from my terribly bigoted grandfather, may he rest in anger. Suffice to say that the protesters, who were demanding that housing be opened up to blacks, were made to understand that Bridgeport and Canaryville were very happy the way they were, and had no use for large crowds of angry black people.

Up until that point, Daley had maintained control of the South Side via a Congressman named William Dawson. Dawson controlled police hiring on the South Side, much of the day-to-day patronage hiring, and had a flunky job pipeline to City Hall. In Daley's deal with Dawson, Dawson delivered the black vote, and Daley kept Dawson rich. And therein was the peace. (Once Dawson died in '70, Daley redistricted the South Side so no single person could ever hold so much power again. Except himself.)

But in August of 1967, racial tension was so high, that a summit was held. Make no mistake, racial tensions had been extremely high prior to that summer; several instances had drawn headlines. In one case in '65, a hook and ladder firetruck pulled out of a firehouse on the near west side and killed a woman on the sidewalk. It was in a black neighborhood, and, as per Chicago-usual, the firehouse was populated with 100% white men. When the riots ended two days later, 170 people were in jail.

The racial tension summit in August 1967, was attended by majordomos from the white business establishment in Chicago, politicians, an Episcopal bishop. Mayor Richard J Daley, and Martin Luther King Jr.

King had purchased a building on the West Side, near Edna's, and had rehabbed the thing to make a point about potential for Chicago's run-down neighborhoods. Daley responded with paperwork showing how much the city had done in the same regard. A blizzard of paperwork to prove that Chicago isn't filled with racists.

Much talking and not much of anything else later, Daley announced that he was forming a commission to look into the commission on commissions, and for the time being King was given a promise that Chicago would become more racially integrated.

Once the media stopped paying attention, it was back to business as usual, and not much got done about making Chicago a more racially integrated city.

And so, on April 4th of 1968, just a Memphis shot away, Chicago's West Side exploded.

That Sunday, Richard J Daley did a war zone fly-over in a Chicago Fire Dept. helicopter, accompanied by his dear buddy, Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn. Quinn was the guy in charge of making sure only white men worked at the Chicago fire department. Patronage. Votes.

At a press conference called after his bird's eye view, Daley issued a statement: " I have conferred with the superintendent of police this morning, and I gave him the following instructions: I said to him very emphatically and definitely that an order be issued by him immediately and under his signature to shoot and kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in hand because they're potential murderers, and to issue a police order to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting stores in our city." In regards to children, Daley's quote was "You wouldn't want to shoot them but you could use mace to detain them."

Them.

Later that summer, we had the Democratic Convention roll into town, and Daley's "shoot to kill" quote has been wrongly attributed to that historic event so many times that it has become part of lore. Daley actually claimed that he held no sway over what happened in Grant Park, and said that Police Superintendent James Conlisk was responsible for any police action that may have crossed the line of generally accepted methods of law enforcement.

The Martin Luther King riots on the west and southwest sides, different story. Daley was calling the shots there.

By the time August arrived, the Dems were committed to the Amphitheater and the Hilton. LBJ and Richard J had made a deal. Once LBJ had decided the anti-war movement was something he didn't feel like campaigning against, and that a nomination would be something he wouldn't seek nor accept, the DNC tried to quietly move the convention away from Chicago. Daley wasn't buying. Figured to move the convention would make Chicago look like a place of which he'd lost control, and that was not Richard J Daley's style.

He put the 12,000 Chicago cops on 12 hour shifts, called up the Illinois National Guard, and had 5,000 federal troops waiting at O'Hare and Glenview NAS.

About a week before the Convention, peace activists began gathering in Lincoln Park, a couple of miles up the lakefront from Grant Park. The cops kept their eyes on the activists, but allowed them to camp overnight. That stasis was maintained until the Sunday before the Convention, when Daley ordered Conlisk to suddenly begin enforcing the 11PM curfew in Chicago's parks.

Tear gas and sticks, lots of sticks, all in a nice row, worked their way across Lincoln Park, while bags of shit and bricks came from the opposite direction. Skulls were cracked open. Newsmen were beaten up. Yippies were bloodied in The Battle of Lincoln Park.

That's when I saw my first powder blue helmet on TV. Dragging some dude by his hair to a paddy wagon while another powder blue helmet cracked some other head open with a riot baton. (The race riots hadn't gotten too much TV time I guess.)

Those scenes were shown around the world. Daley was suddenly seen as a thug mayor, and while completely miscast as the clean cut flower children, the Yippies were his victims.

Wednesday the 27th, Hubert Humphrey was in his suite at the Hilton looking down at Grant Park. He was to be the Dem nominee, but he saw his chances dying.

As the police marched in a line on Balbo, from Wabash to Michigan Ave, they formed the flank that would trap the Grant Park protesters in a vise. Humphrey, who had intended to pursue LBJ's Vietnam policy, looked down and saw a war between citizens and government. The government won in Grant Park, and Nixon won in November.

A long standing alliance between the Daleys and the Kennedys was broken. In the opinion of Daley aide, and ultimately our Mayor in 1980, Jane Byrne, the Kennedys abandoned Richard J Daley when he needed them most, after Daley had done more than a few favors for them over the years. (Jane Byrne was our mayor when Chicago passed its handgun ordinance in 1982.)

8 people were charged with crimes relating to the riot Grant Park, all of them US citizens. David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Lee Weiner, John Froines, and Bobby Seale. After Judge Julius Hoffman had heard more than he cared to hear from Seale, he had Seale bound and gagged, and chained to his chair.

After a 103 day trial, the jury decided that none of the defendants were guilty of conspiracy, and despite guilty verdicts for 5 for crossing state lines to make trouble, not one of them spent a day in prison for their actions in Grant Park.

And, nobody got shot.

In that regard, I'd have to say Daley's comments about Conlisk's conduct leading up to, and during the DNC are believable. Skulls may have gotten cracked, but nobody was maimed by a police bullet. But only a fool would think that Richard J Daley hadn't told James Conlisk exactly where the battle line was drawn, and what degree of police aggression would be seen as acceptable to a worldwide audience.

In the mind of Richard J Daley, nobody would complain much if some black rioters got shot on the southwest side one steamy summer afternoon, but there was no chance that Daley would let the world see some college kids gunned down on Michigan Ave.

Daley was very aware of the racial tension in Chicago, as we all saw the following year when Edward Hanrahan's police staged their version of a Bay of Pigs reenactment at Black Panther HQ. With Fred Hampton's death, Daley tried to quietly elbow Hanrahan aside, even though Daley himself had "promoted" Hanrahan from US Attorney to Cook County State's Attorney the previous fall.

The not so dirty little secret around Chicago, has been, is, and will continue to be, that people of color are seen as 2nd class citizens. Had Hampton's death not drawn massive attention nationally and around the world, Daley would have stood by Hanrahan. But as is so often the case in politics, yesterday's ally is today's victim, and Daley was unequaled when it came to knee-capping friends to save his own power.

Richard J Daley remained Chicago's mayor until his death in 1976.

His son has been Chicago's mayor since 1989, and this Christmas will pass his father's record as our longest serving crook.

And you know what?

Not much has changed since Martin moved here in 1966.

Canaryville is still Canaryville.

Latinos have joined African Americans on the list of people who are not allowed to rise above a certain level of power. We had factions on the City Council, such as "Council Wars" during the Washington years. If the mayoral election of 1983 wasn't the clearest insight into the widespread racism here (black Democrat Harold Washington beat white Republican Bernie Epton 52%-48%, who knew there were so many Republicans in Chicago?), then Council Wars brought the problem into very sharp relief.

Of the 50 Aldermen on the City Council, approximately 50 were Democrats. And yet, they fought like wolverines, with the Washington allies and the Burke/Vrdolyak faction seeming more like mortal enemies than political kin. Why? The Washington group was all black, while the Burke/Vrdolyak crew were all white. It was a fucking civic embarrassment.

Now, Chicago's City Council, and more broadly the City of Chicago itself, has a black faction, a white faction, and a Latino faction. Whites are a minority in Chicago now, and yet whites still control all the power (money.) The Boss had control over all of Cook County, while Richie the Younger only controls the city itself, but the power still rests at 121 N. LaSalle.

I can say from experience that Chicago's police and fire departments are dominated by white men. I talk to cops almost every day of my life. My office sits in the heart of the greatest concentration of Chicago police officers in the city (due to a residency requirement for all city employees.) As much as I respect this people, I cannot ignore what they say to me about our city.

Rough neighborhood? 4CH territory, or Kings, or GDs, or insane whatevers running drug stores in the streets? Juvies with Glocks terrorizing people walking home from work?

"Well, we'll do a drive-by with a blue and white as soon as we can get someone over there but our best advice would be to stay inside until the shooting stops." Cops may show up within an hour or so, or maybe they won't.

You fire off a gun along the Gold Coast, you have a cop response time of about 3 seconds. You squeeze off a round at 59th and Winchester, you're pretty much okay to have lunch and wait for the bus.

Someone asked me recently how many of the 54 shootings that took place in a 48 hour period in Chicago were gang related. Oh, I'd say just about every fucking one of them. So just send a bunch of cops into the neighborhood? The cops are outgunned and have no interest in turning the streets into an open war zone, not to mention the fact that "the neighborhood" is roughly the size of Rhode Island, and there are dozens of different gangs controlling small chunks of turf. Turf that they are willing to defend by whatever means necessary, and the same amount of attention paid by City Hall in 2010 as there was in 1966.

In the wake of Chicago getting national headlines for those 54 shootings, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn recently offered to send 5,000 Illinois National Guardsmen to Chicago. Richie Daley got publicly offended. We don't need no outside help! When the Supreme Court issued their ruling, Daley expressed disgust at the language used in the majority opinion...the part where Alito said that Chicago was unable to protect its own citizens.

Fact of the matter is that Chicago does not protect all of its citizens.

I'm not saying it's Death Wish III down in Chicago's rougher hoods, but it's much closer to that than it is to Mayberry.

Prisoners in their own homes.

A throw-away line to some, a way of life for people in parts of Chicago.

So, when considering the ramifications of Chicago's new handgun laws, I'd suggest that those most unhappy with or confused by the new law are either: people who don't live in a place where gunfire is a nightly thing, or fucking gangsters.

The fucking gangsters are not happy about this at all.

Power to the people.