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July 31, 2007

The [Tuesday] Papers

"Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren't so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions," the New York Times reports this morning in its Science Times section. "Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies - to find better genes, to gain status and resources - but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations.

"Perhaps you didn't lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people's minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately.

"For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons - everything from 'I wanted to feel closer to God' to 'I was drunk.' They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child."

Springfield Shuttle
"State Employees Told To Show Up: Despite lack of budget, gov tells them to report for work."

Can maybe one of them pick up the governor on the way?

Daley Shuffle
"There's a whopping $217.7 million hole in [the mayor's] 2008 budget that can only be filled with revenue hikes, layoffs, spending cuts, or a painful mix of all three," the Sun-Times reports.

Four views:

1. "During the election year, everything is fine. The following year, when they sit down to negotiate contracts, there's always a black hole," said Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue.

Memo to Donahue: Not entirely untrue, but it's not always about you.

2. "Ald. Bernard Stone (50th) accused Chief Financial Officer Paul Volpe of shoving the bad news under the rug until after the election. 'This doesn't happen overnight,' he said."

Memo to Stone: Nobody shoves bad news under the rug without the permission of the mayor, so be a man and blame the guy at the top.

3. "Volpe countered, 'We've always been open and honest. There's nobody who could have predicted such a slowdown in the real estate market."

Memo to Volpe: Yes, nobody saw that coming!

4. The mayor knew the city was in trouble but kept it from the public during his campaign because that's what dishonest politicians do. Now he will use the bad news to club the police union and others into submission while letting Volpe take the heat. And he will skate by without ever being held accountable, fending off press questions because he knows he can do so without penalty. Result: We'll all pay more, one way or another. And the mayor goes merrily along his way.

Filling a Hole
"I don't know how we are going to make up for the shortfall, but we are going to have to find a way to do it," Stone said.

A) Mayor reverses position; increases foie gras fines.
B) Hello, congestion tax!
C) Corruption Tax Stamps modeled after Drug Tax Stamps.
D) Bake sale.

City Council Follies
"16% of Chicago Aldermen Can't Read a Calendar or Use a Computer," the Better Government Association has found.

"Despite fairly simple and straightforward reporting standards, Aldermen Leslie Hairston and Willie Cochran have, as of today, failed to file their most recent semi-annual report of campaign contributions received between January 1st and June 30th. In addition, Aldermen Sandi Jackson, George Cardenas, Latasha Thomas, Howard Brookins, Billy Ocasio and Brendan Reilly failed to file their semi-annual reports by July 20th, the reporting deadline.

"Alderman Reilly has the dubious distinction of both filing late and filing on paper despite that fact he managed to file all other previous contribution reports electronically.

"'The citizens of Chicago are expected to comply with all the various laws that Aldermen impose upon us every year and non-compliance usually results in a stiff fine or penalty. It would be nice if the Aldermen could lead by example and obey the laws that govern their campaign fundraising and reporting,' said Jay Stewart, Executive Director of the BGA."

Arresting Figures
"In the 11 years that Dick Devine has been state's attorney we have charged at least one police officer a month. That's more than 130 police officers who have been charged," said Devine spokesman John Gorman.

Whoa. One a month? That sounds like a pretty rotten police department.

Michael "Sneed" Spilotro
Pat Spilotro, brother of Tony and Michael, told Sneed: "I promised my mother 21 years ago that I would find the men who did it; who butchered my brothers and tortured her sons."

Apparently he didn't promise the mothers of his brother's victims the same thing.

*

Meanwhile, unabashedly reported by Sneed, Pat Spilotro, the good brother, performed dental services for various members of the Outfit for 35 years.

Denmark Pissed
This (second item) is a parody of political incorrectness, right?

Camera Shy
The Tribune and other news organizations are protesting a new NFL policy requiring sideline photographers to wear the league's corporate-sponsor emblazoned vests while working. The NFL's media relations director wrote to the Tribune today that "The Reebok and Canon logos on the NFL vests are very small and not visible to the television audience."

Then why are Reebok and Canon paying to have them there?

Remembrances
* "Ingmar Bergman found bleakness and despair as well as comedy and hope in his indelible explorations of the human condition," according to Wikipedia. "He is regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema."

Also, Ingmar Bergman made a little-known film of the opera "The Magic Flute." Our Marilyn Ferdinand has the story.

And, Michelangelo Antonioni, "whose films are widely considered as some of the most influential in film aesthetics," is also dead.

* The Bill Walsh Coaching Tree.

* Conan O'Brien salutes Tom Snyder.

The Beachwood Tip Line: Any position you like.

Posted by Lou at 07:58 AM | Permalink

Chicagoetry: Peace Frog

PEACE FROG

Blood in the streets the town of Chicago!
PLEASE don't let

me
interrupt!

Let's take five for James Douglas Morrison . . .
Hunter Thompson got

his ass kicked at Michigan and Balbo.
FUCK! I digress.

Bloody red sun of fantastic
L.A., righteous.

Blood is the rose
of mysterious

union, OK?
Let us now

praise famous
men: Len

O'Connor, Ray
Rayner, ORION MOTHERFUCKING SAMUELSON!

My Naperville mornings
began

with Amiben.
I had

no clue!
TINY TOV?!

No
CLUE!

Mesmer-
ized . . .

-

J. J. Tindall is the Beachwood's poet-in-residence. He can reached at jjtindall@yahoo.com. Chicagoetry is an exclusive Beachwood collection-in-progress.

Posted by Lou at 06:32 AM | Permalink

July 30, 2007

The [Monday] Papers

The Tribune introduces its first front-page ad today.

Jesus, Back To Bed is the best you could do? A mattress dealer?

*

Ad copy: "Tonight, get the sleep you dream about."

Yes, take the Tribune to bed with you!

*

I wonder if the powers-that-be thought a BP ad would be too hot to start with. Late last week and through the weekend, BP ads ran on the Trib website within pixels of the paper's stories about the oil company's controversial plan to increase the amount of crap it dumps in Lake Michigan from its Whiting, Indiana refinery.

*

The Sun-Times resumes its Product Placement Program.

What, is it National Mattress Week or something?

*

Scott C. Smith's disingenuous Publishers Note.

Rejected version: "Our obscene margins are slipping so we sold out the front page so our executives can keep raking in millions of dollars a year to maintain their jet-set lifestyle at the expense of the public interest."

*

Smith writes that "The revenue generated by new ads also will play an important role in funding the first-rate journalism and customer service we are committed to delivering each and every day."

Why am I skeptical that even a penny of the ad revenue derived will find its way into the newsroom?

*

A better idea.

*

Life's Great Questions
Among those Ask Marilyn's Marilyn vos Savant found too "special" to answer:

"Do you think daylight-saving time could be contributing to global warming? The longer we have sunlight, the more it heats the atmosphere."

Executive Privilege
"We have the most protected, covered, cautious and public relations-barricaded generation of leaders in history," said Jeffrey A. Sonnefeld, a professor of corporate governance at Yale."

Kill Me Now
"Today, the Sun-Times kicks off a monthlong look at Chicagoland's babies . . . "

Oh Lord!

Findings: The most popular name by the richest 25 percent is Michael! As it is for the bottom 25 percent! But "you're 10 times more likely to find a child named Jack in a richer ZIP code than in a poorer one."

Alert the media!

Er, I guess they already know.

*

News meeting that took place somewhere other than the Sun-Times recently:

Editor 1: Hey, let's have one of our reporters go to an expert and see what her name says about her!

Editor 2: Look, we're in high school now. This isn't the junior high paper anymore.

Indian Giver
Will the new "progressive" Sun-Times editorial pages continue to include the comic cartoon stylings of Jack Higgins?

I just find his work to be a bit incongruous with the new tone. Take his cartoon on Sunday of controversial former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill.

"Who was that masked man?" Higgins has Churchill saying looking wistfully at a Lone Ranger in the distance. "Does he need a sidekick?"

Get it? Because Churchill is (supposedly) an American Indian. Like Tonto.

For further effect, Higgins has Churchill holding a piece of paper saying "Ward Churchill Fired - New low man on totem pole."

Get it? 'Cause Indians use totem poles and stuff.

I guess there was no room for a rain dance and a bottle of liquor.

Kill Me Now Again
Oh Lord, My Boys is back!

"There is so much wrong in this show I don't even know where to start."

"How hard does My Boys suck? Pretty hard."

"I actually look forward now to watching My Boys every Tuesday night so I can continue to crusade against it."

"It's not that I'm obsessed with how bad My Boys is, is that it's so bad I keep watching out of amazement."

Union Buster
So it turns out it may not be illegal at all for Cook County prosecutors to unionize. It may just be that Dick Devine doesn't want them to.

Hardy Har Har!
My Boys ad copy in full-page Sun-Times ad today: "When the two seasons in Chicago are winter and construction, let's face it, you could use a laugh!"

Rush Job I
What in the world is Bobby Rush doing talking about holding hearings about the alleged NBA gambling scandal? Well, it turns out he can hold hearings on anything he wants.

For example, if he wanted to hold a hearing about politicians and their relationships with companies whose bills they vote on, he could do that.

But really, shouldn't congressional hearings be about the public interest, not a congressman's interest?

Rush Job II
Rush has sent a letter to NBA commissioner David Stern asking for a personal briefing on the alleged gambling scandal.

The Beachwood has obtained a list of other folks Rush has sent letters to asking for personal briefings:

* Matt Groening, for a briefing of The Simpsons.
* J.K. Rowling, for a briefing on Harry Potter.
* Angelina Jolie, for a briefing on . . . Angelina Jolie.

That's Manny!
First Ward Ald. Manny Flores continues to smooth the way for developer financing of his congressional campaign.

History Lesson
"I really believe the Olympics movement sets aside politics," Daley said. "Otherwise, we would never have an Olympic movement. They'd be caught up in politics."

Like the time Hitler used the Berlin Games for propaganda purposes, or the American boycott of the Moscow Olympics and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics, or Herb Brooks saying the Lake Placid hockey victory validated our way of life, or Steven Spielberg considering pulling out of the Beijing Olympics because of China's culpability in Darfur.

But yes, otherwise the mayor is right.

Wages of Gentrification
Percentage of every dollar spent at a locally owned Chicago store that is retained or recirculated in the city: 68.

Percentage of every dollar spent at a chain store in Chicago that is: 43.

- Harper's Index

The Beachwood Tip Line: Insert ad here.

Posted by Lou at 09:14 AM | Permalink

RockNotes: Inside Funkytown, USA

Two new rock 'n' roll books are on my radar, one that chronicles how a terrific music scene can spring up and prosper in an unlikely place and another that takes a clear-eyed look at the perils and rewards in the everyday lives of rock world working stiffs.

1. I know the Beachwood is a Chicago thing, like Jake, the so-called "Neighborhood Guy" says on those never-ending Old Style radio commercials they play during the Cubs games. "The Spindle. It's a Chicago thing." "The Outfit. It's a Chicago thing." "Horrible watery beer made in Wisconsin. It's a Chicago thing."

But I also like to think that broad musical tastes are a Chicago thing as well, which is the justification I'm using to take this opportunity to relate a few highlights of a new book about Minnesota's rock music history. Full disclosure impels me to say that I'm a St. Paulite by birth and current residence, but also a former Chicagoan who paid his dues with all the "neighborhood guys" hanging around outside the group homes at the Bryn Mawr Red Line station, so, yah know, there yah go, okay? I know you like Minnesota bands, you really can't fool me, so let me tell you a bit about Music Legends: A Rewind on the Minnesota Music Scene by Martin Keller.

For anyone who wants a quick but skilled primer on the strangely prodigious rock, soul, folk and pop music output of this isolated, wintry outpost of a state, Keller's 128-page softcover is good place to go. It's the first of a planned two-part effort: Part Two will be devoted to Prince, the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum and others. Keller, who as a Twin Cities alternative weekly music writer in the '80s was about as involved as you could get in the what was essentially the state's second golden rock era, gives us what's clearly the Cliff's Notes version of his prodigious knowledge base. It's kind of a beginner's guide to the subject, but still just comprehensive enough to whet any music fan's appetite for more details about what's undeniably a musical heritage way out of proportion for a state with such a modest population.

Of course, there's Dylan, and Keller gives him his due as one of only two artists to get his own chapter in Music Legends ("Funkytown" writer/producer Steven Greenberg is the other). There really isn't too much you can add to the man's legacy in a couple of pages, but Keller does relate an amusing anecdote once told by fellow Minnesotan Bobby Vee on National Public Radio. Vee gave young Zimmy his first shot in a professional recording studio doing keyboards and hand claps, but he was under the impression the kid's name was Elston Gunnn (sic). A couple years later when Vee was in New York, he saw a poster hawking a performance in Greenwich Village by someone named Bob Dylan, and he remarked, "Gee, that looks a lot like Elston Gunnn!"

Bobby Vee and the Replacements pretty much bookend Keller's survey, and they share something in common - they both were signed to independent record labels that defined the two golden ages of Minnesota rock 'n' roll. In Vee's case, the label was Soma Records. Founded by a pair of middle-aged brothers who got their start in the 1940s by distributing jukeboxes and "rack jobbing" at retail stores, they decided in the late '50s to create the "content" for their music distribution channels as well, and so founded one of the earliest and most successful indie record labels in the country. The Heilicher Brothers established a recording studio on Nicollet Avenue and used it to create the state's first real hit: Bobby Vee's 1959 recording of "Suzy Baby."

But the record that really put Minnesota on the rock 'n' roll map was Soma's garage rock classic "Surfin' Bird," by the Trashmen. The 1963 smash reached No. 4 on the national charts and stayed there until it was bumped out by a new combo called the Beatles. Keller writes that the first day in the stores, "Surfin' Bird" sold out its initial pressing of 1,000 copies, then 10,000 copies were sold and Mercury Records picked up the distribution. One million records later it was still a phenomenon. The Soma era was summed up in the issuance of a pair of compilation albums in the mid-60s: Big Hits of Mid-America Volumes I and II.

At the other end of Keller's book, that same Nicollet Avenue recording studio also became the focal point of the state's second golden rock age: the late '70s and early- to mid-'80s, a time dominated by another seminal indie label, Twin/Tone Records, home to the Replacements and a slew of other great bands that turned the Twin Cities into one of the hottest local scenes in the country. This time, the scene was also centered on a record store, called Oar Folkjokeopus, and the bar across the street, the C.C. Club on Lyndale Avenue. The record store was where one of Twin/Tone's founders, Peter Jesperson, worked when he wasn't "sort of" managing the Replacements.

"How else could you explain it, that time between 1976 and 1984, other than to throw some kind of quasi-cosmological South Minneapolis spin on it?" Keller writes. "Something like: The bars were aligned with the record store and label, the rock rags, studios and impresarios, the film crew and hangers on, all reeling under the shakin' firmament in the House of Rock.

"It was the best of times. It was the best of times."

Those bestest of times sort of came full circle in 1980 when Twin/Tone issued Big Hits of Mid-America Volume III, in honor of its Soma forbears. It included songs from The Suburbs, The Suicide Commandos and The Jets, among many others. And It marked the starting point of a brilliant half-decade run that gave the world a model for how a local indie music scene could succeed in ways as-yet unimagined, a model that Seattle took and ran with in the '90s.

Music Legends, though modest in ambition, nonetheless has, in spots, some of the same cool style that Keller displayed during his essential stint as the best music writer in town while at the alt weekly Sweet Potato (now City Pages) starting in 1979, so that's very fun to see. But even more important is that he packs a lot of names and crucial basics about so many great-but-now-forgotten bands into the book's slender frame, it might be the best-ever place to get a start-up knowledge of the subject.

Jiggs Lee? Chameleon? The Wallets? Augie Garcia? Doug Maynard? Yep, it's a Minneapolis thing.

Okay, Chicagoans. It's safe to come back out now.

2. Meanwhile in New York, one of the foremost rock compilation disc assemblers, Bruce Pollock, has taken a break from his duties putting together the "all original songs" for those ultra-comprehensive Time-Life Records CDs to do essentially the same thing on the printed page with his own extensive trove of interviews with both the superstars and wanna-be's of rock 'n' roll. The idea he's going for in Working Musicians: Defining Moments from the Road, the Studio and the Stage is a gut-level, all-glamor-barred look at how the workaday realties of the rocking-as-a-job lifestyle can be unsurprisingly hard, especially for those who are less than supremely talented, but also extremely weird and funny.

Pollock has patterned his book as a series of long interview quotes built around several quintessential rock 'n' roll themes, such as the first gig, the first album, life on the road, show presentation, picking set lists, habits that breed success, etc. The overall effect varies quite a bit depending on who's doing the telling, whether it be Gene Simmons talking about how he almost burned himself to death during KISS' first big show or Andy Partridge explaining the joys and agonies of writing a song. Taken as a whole, it's a pretty sobering look at the price that needs to be paid to earn a music paycheck.

Among the book's more interesting quotes:

* Dawn Silva, a back-up singer with Sly and the Family Stone, tells of her first encounter with the enigmatic Sly. She was recruited by Cynthia Robinson to come out to his recording studio in Sausalito. Very nervous, she trembled at hearing his disembodied voice barking orders over the darkened studio's PA as she struggled to sing. Later, she says, someone invited her to a back room, where she saw "an enormous bed that took up the entire room. It was shaped like a mouth . . . the mattress looked like a swollen tongue. There lying in the center of the tongue, was Sly, surrounded by four women. He was wearing a large Afro wig . . . He introduced me to the four women. All of them looked me over suspiciously, except for Cynthia, who said, 'Welcome.'" Silva had officially become part of the Family Stone.

* Peter Tork of the Monkees recalls having Jimi Hendrix as an opening act during a tour of England and how when the rock biz heard him, they all thought turning up their amps would make them just as good, a mindset he calls "mistaking the finger for the moon. You point at the moon and somebody looks at your finger. It's inevitable." He also maintains that Capitol Records would have signed the Monkees on their musical chops alone, even without the TV show, and that Mickey Dolenz was so unnecessarily dubious of his own drumming skills that he always wanted to quit.

* Kenny Withrow of Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians: "'What I Am' got milked for everything it was worth. It was out too long, so people became, in my opinion, sick of us. We made four videos for our first album. Somebody could have been there to tell us not to make that video. We were ill-advised, and we wound up not making any money."

*

Go on, treat yourself.

Posted by Don at 02:16 AM | Permalink

What I Watched Last Night

If you're going to get a hankering for a good black-and-white horror flick, just after midnight in that time that bridges Friday and Saturday is as good a time to get it. The folks running the Independent Film Channel certainly get it, because they had the presence of mind to present This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, the subtitled 1967 sequel to At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul by Brazilian macabre master Jose Mojica Marins.

This one's even better than At Midnight because Marins demonstrates growth as a filmmaker - which basically means it's even more Felliniesque, there's considerably more screaming and cheesecake, the women are hotter, and Zé now has a hunchbacked assistant named Bruno.

Marins starred in and directed both films, which revolve around creepy town undertaker Zé do Caixo (also known as Coffin Joe). Interestingly, Marins is still an active director; over the past year, he's been working on the final installment of the Coffin Joe trilogy, Tomorrow At Midnight I'll Repossess Your Car.

The credit sequence of This Night opens with Zé looking quite dead from his previous encounter with soul-stealing. But soon enough, Zé comes strolling back into town, his trademark black top hat, cape, unibrow and curly-long fingernails shined up and looking unsettlingly like a whacked-out 1970s Burt Reynolds. For a corpse, Zé cleans up remarkably well, and he's still got one mission on his mind: to find the perfect woman who will immortalize him by giving him a son. His legend among the townsfolk is certain to outlive Adolf Hitler's because of all the sadism and murder Zé dished out in At Midnight, but still. "Immortality is in the blood," he proclaims.

Zé gets to it by setting up six village beauties in his undertaker house so he can decide which will be the perfect woman to bear him a son. The women aren't entirely happy with their current lot in life as daughters, wives and fiances, so it's pretty easy for the village's biggest dick in history to pull off something like this. If you've ever had your wife run off with the asshole building an addition onto your house, you can see how shit like this happens. His choice becomes clear when only love-hostage Marcia (Nadia Freitas) shows no fear during Zé's "test of courage" where the women are covered in their sleep by scores of crawling tarantulas. Zé's love hostages are the heaviest sleepers in history, so it takes them a good 10 minutes to feel their naked skin oozing with huge spiders (giving Marins plenty of cheesecake devotion time), but when they wake up, boy can these women ever scream and complain.

"Enough! I hate dramas," Zé yells. Zé apparently isn't too bright, because drama is pretty much what you ask for when you stick six women in the same room, with or without a giant box of tarantulas. His hunchback assistant Bruno is even dimmer; he takes Zé's gift of one of the love hostages, carries her off to another room, and promptly strangles her before he's actually able to do anything with her. "She was screaming," he says, just before pulling out his shopping to-do list and penciling in "duct tape."

Since Zé was in a giving mood, he could have gifted Bruno with the remaining four love hostage castoffs, since even bigger morons and Bret Michaels could work with with those sort of odds. But Zé's a sadistic cocksucker, so he promises them "peace fortune, and supreme happiness" by leading them into a room that ends up being filled with snakes in a very bad mood. If the snakes weren't bad enough, he makes them watch his seduction of Marcia through a sliding window next to the bed.

"You will never have a son!" screams one the love hostages - looking a lot like a Stone Ponys-era Linda Ronstadt - who manages to place a curse on Zé while being strangled by a boa constrictor." And before you can imagine, I will retun and avenge my death . . . Be afraid, for at midnight I will possess your corpse."

Zé heard nonsense like that in his last go-around, and he came out none the worse for wear. So he finds this whole curse business tremendously amusing. Marcia gets annoyed at watching women die before her eyes, so she breaks it off with Zé, who with the help of Bruno dumps the bodies of the dead love hostages in a swamp. Later, village beauty Laura returns from a long stint at community college and is immediately impressed by Zé's manhandling of village strongman Truncador, a bald fellow with a crazy eye who appears to have fallen off a circus wagon. Laura's an even bigger love connection than Marcia because she shares Zé's atheistic tendencies and belief in "the union between two perfect people," so she agrees to meet him in a dark alley at midnight. Dead Linda Ronstadt fails to show up at the promised hour for Zé's soul or corpse or even a new singing career. "I don't mind being the mistress of the devil," Laura tells Zé. She doesn't even mind having a razor put to her neck and drawing blood either, so off they go to his love nest.

School girls like this in the world and people actually need to wonder why the Girls Gone Wild series is so damn popular.

Meanwhile, Zé deals with his biggest neighborhood detractor in typical sadistic fashion by crushing his head between two huge blocks of granite after trying it out first on a white mouse. "If you end up in heaven say hello to the angels. And if you end up in hell, give the devil my address." The hapless fellow, lacking a utility belt to get out of the same exact jam Batman and Robin found themselves in so many times, gets his head squished in fine, bloody fashion.

However, the highlight of the film is Zé's vision/dream - filmed in color - of Hell, where everyone who isn't chained to a wall crawls around naked getting flogged and stuck by demons with pitchforks or getting whapped in the forehead with a hammer and a chrome spike. I'm not sure which of the nine circles of Hell Zé landed in, but it snows there, the walls are lit up in groovy-colored lights and have moving limbs growing out of them, and there's plenty of uninterrupted, anguished screaming. So lock up any acid and peyote that might be lying about.

If there's a Hell there must certainly be a Heaven, so now Zé's a seriously torn man. The rest of the movie features a mob scene complete with burning torches, Zé's decision whether to save Laura or their love child, and Zé meeting up in a swamp with the remains of either his love hostages or some townspeople who had been chasing him earlier - I'm not quite sure which. Either way, Zé would have been better off pleading for the village priest to toss him a rope or a life preserver instead of a crucifix.

For good measure, Marins closes the film with "fim" instead of "fin" so there's no mistake in anyone's mind that you didn't just spend all this time watching a French film.

*

The Discovery Channel's always-popular Shark Week kicked off on Sunday. In a brilliantly creative promo spot, Richard Dreyfuss voices over an underwater scene of men crowded around the outside of a life raft.

"When the USS Indianapolis sank in open waters, her surviving crew prayed they would be found. Unfortunately . . . (dramatic pause while a shark swims past) . . . they were."

Jose Mojica Marins would give it a thumbs up.

*

See what else Scott Buckner and the Beachwood TV Desk has been watching.

Posted by Lou at 12:20 AM | Permalink

The Cub Factor

Cubs fans may be feeling a bit giddy these days, but after a thorough analysis by the research staff here at The Cub Factor, we have determined that there is still plenty to worry about. To wit:

* The Cubs still have too many second basemen.

* Traffic. It keeps getting worse, doesn't it?

* Taxes. They keep going up, don't they?

* Alfonso Soriano. He still doesn't make enough consistent contact as a leadoff man.

* Gas Prices. On top of the taxes, and then you're just idling in traffic . . .

* Fat. You just keep gaining weight, don't you? And then you're just sitting in traffic all that time . . .

* Jim Hendry. This is so no longer his team. But he still has the power to ruin it.

* The government. It's still there, right?

* Your back. Geez, does it ever hurt. It's getting worse, too. What's up with that?

* Jason Marquis. Turns out he's Jason Marquis.

* Your job. It still sucks.

* Your mental health. Turns out you required more hugs than you received as a child.

* The inevitable Matt Murton-as-Brant-Brown Noooooooo! moment.

* The media. God they suck.

* Cubs third-base coach Mike Quade. 'Cause the third-base coach always gets blamed.

* The state of popular music these days. I mean, c'mon!

* The weather. We talk about it, but nobody ever does anything to fix it.

* Organized religion. It's like it has a death wish or something.

* Inevitably, a new Jim Carrey movie will be out soon.

* Ryan Dempster is not a legitimate closer. And neither is Bob Howry.

* Harry Caray impressions that are more like Will Ferrell doing Harry Caray than Harry Caray doing Harry Caray.

* Ryan Dempster's version of Will Ferrell doing Haray Caray, which we'll inevitably see each time the team plays on Fox.

* All the stories we'll have to read about The Curse and that damned goat when the Cubs inevitably blow it again.

-

Week in Review: The Cubs took two of three on the road from the Cardinals and the Reds each. The only downside is that life on the road can get pretty dull when no one is in a slump, because without slumps, there is no slumpbusting.

Week in Preview: The Cubs come home for four against the Phillies and three with the Mets. Some say we'll see who the Cubs are this week because the Phillies and Mets are not the Cardinals and Reds. I say it doesn't matter how hard the wood is when the saw is sharp and spinning. And in this analogy the Cubs are the spinning saw and the Philles and Mets are the hard wood. Just to be clear.

The Second Basemen Report:Mark DeRosa got two starts with Mike Fontenot getting the other four. Even with Derrek Lee back off suspension and the Cubs bringing up Ronnie Cedeno the second base position has stabilized. I hope Lou Pinella is reading this because he is really screwing the Second Baseman report over and to be honest he's screwing with my whole damn column. I'd like to see Lou try being creative when all the team does is win. My only hope is for an infield with Cedeno at third, Theriot at shortstop, Fontenot at second, and DeRosa at first. The all-second baseman infield. With ex-second baseman Soriano in left. It could happen . . .

In former second baseman news, Delino DeShields is partnering with Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd in an urban baseball league designed to revive interest in baseball among African Americans. He is missed.

Sweet and Sour Lou: 78% sweet and 22% sour. Lou is up another two points on the Sweet-O-Meter. Due to more winning baseball. Just like your crazy old drunk uncle, Lou is living the high life. He finally straightened out all that junk in the garage and even got the old Ford to turn over. He's still got some work to do under the hood but everyone at the plant said he'd never get it running again.

Beachwood Sabermetrics: A complex algorithm performed by the The Cub Factor staff using all historical data made available by Major League Baseball has determined that the Milwaukee Brewers are tighter than a really fat guy's belt.

Over/Under: The number of games at Wrigley that don't sell out for the rest of the season: +/- 0.

The Cub Factor: Catch up with them all.

Mount Lou: Mount Lou is so dormant that birdies and bunnies are back frolicking where they once feared to tread. Global warming experts detect a worldwide drop in temperatures. However, skeptics note that several fault lines still run through the base of the structure and lava-producing capabilities are still strong if provoked.

Posted by Lou at 12:20 AM | Permalink

Chicagoetry: I Want To Lick Tequila Off Your Thighs

I WANT TO LICK TEQUILA OFF YOUR THIGHS

Mourning Dove,
Town Crier,

Awaken to your
Power.

Sometimes all you do
Is moan

Bloody
Murder!

BUT YOU
PURGE US!

Attend: Your grief
Is your grace!

I'll say it
To your face!

I dream it
Every night, nightmare

Of bliss,
A soft, quiet

Kiss . . .
Bleed

My six o'clock
Blues.

Liberator!
SING IT AWAY!

Say: Once we all
Bleed

We can
Breathe

Again.

-

J. J. Tindall is the Beachwood's poet-in-residence. He can reached at jjtindall@yahoo.com. Chicagoetry is an exclusive Beachwood collection-in-progress.

Posted by Lou at 12:17 AM | Permalink

July 28, 2007

The Weekend Desk Report

Sorry I've been gone so long this month. It took me a while to get over the Baconator.

A New Low
The Weekend Desk Sports Book would like to issue an apology. It appears we closed the betting on the Lunatic Attorney General race a touch too early. We honestly didn't think anyone could top the Patriot Act, Son of the Patriot Act and that whole freaky calico cat thing. But you've got to admit, brow-beating your predecessor in his hospital room is going to be pretty tough to beat.

Shift of Power
Vice President Dick Cheney will undergo minor surgery this weekend to replace the battery in his cold, metal heart. President Bush will assume control of the nation during the procedure.

A Note of Clarity
As we've noted frequently in this space, it can be difficult to distinguish between the mess being made in Iraq and the mess being made by Lindsay Lohan. Just remember, in Iraq people are getting jacked and car-bombed. In Malibu, Lohan is getting bombed and car-jacking people.

The Other Sister
Tired of being overshadowed by Lohan's spectacular implosion, Nicole Richie has announced she will drag all 23 of her South Korean hostages off to the friggin' big house with her if that what it takes to get a little damn attention.

Defensive Tactics, Part 1
Meanwhile, LiLo's defense team has hit on a novel strategy to solve her latest legal hiccup. Lawyers now contend her alcohol-fueled car chase was simply preparation for an upcoming film role.

Defensive Tactics, Part 2
Worn down by months of bad publicity, NASA has now admitted it sometimes lets astronauts get their payload on. However representatives of the agency contend that, given the rather high likelihood the rickety old tin cans the crew are piloting will fail catastrophically, it'd be rather cruel to keep them sober.

And Finally . . .
We're not sure what the hell to do with this. We're not even sure it's funny. Oh, wait. Actually, yes it is.

Posted by Natasha at 12:48 AM | Permalink

July 27, 2007

The [Friday] Papers

"Pepsi agreed to change labels on its Aquafina bottled water to show it comes from municipal taps," the Sun-Times notes in a brief business item today. "Pepsi will spell out 'Public Water Source' on bottles of Aquafina, the largest U.S. bottled-water brand, after pressure from an advocacy group that said the snow-capped mountains on the bottle implied the source was spring water.

"Aquafina's label currently reads, 'Bottled at the Source P.W.S.,' which stands for the public water sources. Aquafina is bottled in several U.S. cities.'"

*

According to Wikipedia, Aquafina "is standard tap water but goes through an extensive purification process that includes charcoal filtration, reverse osmosis and ozonation."

1. There's charcoal in our tap water?
2. The reverse osmosis is a marketing technique that occurs in the grocery aisle.
3. Ozonation occurs when the water is exposed to air.

*

"Aquafina uses PepsiCo's own purification system, which it calls HydRO-7."

See, that's why I prefer the Coca-Cola's counterpart, Dasani, which uses HydRO-8. Why cheat your customers out of a HydRO?

GROANER: Spinal Tap uses HydRO-11.

*

"Aquafina is an official sponsor of Olympus Fashion Week."

Yes. It is Fashion Week's Official Breakfast and Lunch.

Aquacocaina is the Official Dinner.

*

"PepsiCo produces several other products under the Aquafina label:

- Aquafina Sparkling, carbonated flavoured water, available in Berry Blast (Raspberry), and Citrus Twist.

- Aquafina FlavorSplash, flavoured water (without carbonation), available in Grape, Citrus Blend, Wild Berry, and Raspberry.

- Aquafina Alive, a low calorie, vitamin-enhanced water beverage, available in Berry Pomegranate, Peach Mango and Orange Lime."

Coming Soon: Aquafina Mercury, a sludge-enhanced flavoured water with fuel additives and a clouty kick available in BP Twist and Indiana Green Tea.

And Aquapedia will allow users to add their own ingredients prior to drinking.

Book Patrol
Real library trustees don't need no stinkin' badges.

Best Library Cop Ever
"Well, let me tell you something, funny boy. You know that little stamp that says New York Public Library? Well that may not mean anything to you but that means a lot to me, one whole hell of a lot."

- Lt. Bookman

Character Study
Minor in name only.

Ad Man
The best advertisement I've seen yet for AMC's Mad Men is Lewis Lazare's pan today in the Sun-Times. Give it a read and tell me you can't wait for the next episode!

Kiss Off
Then again, Lazare doesn't like the new Dunkin' Donuts ad because he finds it unrealistic that "anybody with half a brain would think to employ [Kiss guitar player Ace] Frehley in an office job to begin with. Which is why this disjointed, hopelessly heavy-handed commercial simply doesn't work."

He's also troubled that "It tries to juxtapose Frehley with a perfectly pleasant looking female office worker who looks to be giving a board room presentation. We see very little of her and her presentation, however, while we are treated to way too much of Frehley's showy guitar riff as the buttoned down corporate executives look on."

Yes, show us more board room presentation and less guitar!

Hey Lew, stop trying to impress the Tribune.

Our Tribune
"But it was a controversial decision in 1990 that sensitized editors about considering race, ethnicity and class, as well as rethinking the role of pop culture on the front page," the Tribune's public editor, Timothy McNulty, writes today.

Until 1990, the Trib didn't consider race, ethnicity, class or pop culture when considering what stories it put on the front page!

"That day both Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, and singer Sammy Davis Jr. died. Jack Fuller, then editor of the paper, decided to place Henson's photo and obituary on the front beside a photo of Davis that referred readers to his obituary inside the paper.

"Fuller later wrote in a book titled News Values that while Davis was "the first black entertainer to present himself publicly as the social equal of white entertainers," he believed that Henson was more significant as a seminal figure in the evolution of television as an educational force."

If Fuller were black, or more enlightened, he might have seen Davis instead as a black Jew of a Puerto Rican mother accepted by a New Jersey Italian and his pack of infamous Hollywood lounge rats as not only an equal as an artist but as a friend whose symbolism of the meritocratic melting pot of America was so great he was used in one of the all-time classic sitcom episodes on the groundbreaking All in the Family.

Plus, he was The Candy Man.

Henson wasn't even one of the puppets!

(Yes, that's Sammy doing a loose Moonwalk 42 seconds in.)

Hiring Freeze
"Mayor Daley has said for the last three years that he does not know who appointed [Angelo] Torres to head the Hired Truck Program," the Sun-Times notes today.

He's filed a Freedom of Information request with the city but they aren't complying.

Dot-Com Bomb
Capitalizing on the success of the debate it co-sponsored with YouTube, CNN announced this morning that the CNN/Google Debate is next.

Questions will be solicited from citizen searches, excluding cached versions and supplemental results.

Prosecutorial Discretion
After appearing with Todd Stroger on Chicago Tonight last night, Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine said he would no longer meet with rogue dictators looking to score propaganda points without preconditions.

That's Todd!
"The problem with the media is that they report on issues but they don't have all the facts," Stroger said on the show.

No, really. He said that. It's not a punch line.

And then he stonewalled about the budget.

I kid you not.

Obama vs. Clinton
Rival campaign spokesmen David Axelrod and Howard Wolfson were up and down the cable dial yesterday. Decide for yourself, without prejudice.

Annoying Advice
Track your symptoms and see if Yaz is right for you.

Site Bite
The Tribune's new website is so powder-puffy. Plus, they seemed to have removed the news. But the ads sure pop out.

The Beachwood Tip Line: You can even eat the dishes.

Posted by Lou at 08:26 AM | Permalink

T-Ball Journal: Rubbing It In

We won our first-round playoff game a lot of runs to a little on Saturday. Noah's and my 8-and-under Dodgers were playing a team we had tied during the regular season so the result represented some progress. On the other hand, the head coach of the opposing team had apparently left early for summer vacation. And if the coach was gone that meant one of the best players (the teams I've coached have yet to face a squad where the coach's kid didn't qualify) was absent as well. I don't want to go overboard but it was goofy the guy wasn't there no matter what the excuse. How do you coach one of these teams for almost three months and then when it's time to sprint to the finish line, you're nowhere to be found?

Yikes.

In about the fourth inning I heard one of our kids ask what the score was and then repeat it loudly/incredulously/derisively. It was that special mocking tone that some kids this age so endearingly employ altogether too frequently. I promptly called the squad together and told them sternly we wouldn't be talking about the score any more, that first and foremost we are all about good sportsmanship. And the kids abided by my decree - for about a half inning.

Actually I'm reasonably confident there wasn't any "rubbing it in" going on. One of the great things about youth baseball is the fact that the teams are always separated from one another. In soccer, guys find themselves standing together with foes on the field all the time. Conversations inevitably ensue and are oftentimes less than cordial (I seem to recall just such an interaction in the final of last year's World Cup leading to the downfall of an international icon for goodness sake). In the majors, base-runners and first basemen always seem to be chatting. But even those get-togethers don't occur in the junior division (none of the fielders or the base-runners I've observed from my spot in the first-base coaching box have ever seemed inclined to converse). The moral of this story: if the kids aren't talking to each other, they aren't taunting each other.

We played well and won despite a sizable delay before the game began. Then again we might have won in part because of the delay - it enabled all of our players to squeeze in a little batting practice (and a special thanks to the assistant coach who suggested we take that course of action - up until then my distracted self was content to chat with friends while monitoring the game that was causing the delay). Playoff games must, of course, be contested until the bitter end and the contest that led up to ours went three extra innings. During the regular season there is a time limit that virtually always ensures games start no more than a few minutes late (it also results in the very occasional deadlock, like the one mentioned above). But this was the post-season and therefore our game started almost an hour late.

The 10 innings of tense T-Ball/coach pitch that resulted in a 21-20 victory for the Rangers over the White Sox (those stinking placekickers! One of them obviously missed a crucial extra point) featured all sorts of fascinating developments. The White Sox were in position to win in the eighth or ninth when the coach who was pitching was called for interference. Coach-pitchers are not allowed to say anything to batters after they release a given pitch (to prevent them from saying something like "that's a terrible pitch - don't swing"). They let you off with a warning for infractions during the season but during the playoffs the consequences are more serious. After the White Sox coach was cited, a runner who could have scored a critical run was sent back to third.

There was also a seven-run, seventh-inning rally and at least five major conferences between umpires and coaches (OK, so those weren't terribly exciting but I thought they should at least be noted). There were also all sorts of defensive plays that might be routine at higher levels of baseball, but which were extraordinary on the junior division diamond.

Then, finally, it was over and we were up. Our opponents scored a few runs in the first inning and it looked like it might be a battle but the Dodgers quickly pulled away, and pulled away, and pulled away. The result, which earned us a spot in a National League semifinal against the top-seeded Mets this coming weekend, was satisfying and the post-game spread of pizza and cupcakes tasted better.

The food was part of what became a bit of an awards ceremony for the volunteer coaches. It suffices to say that while there is a long tradition of volunteers in a variety of endeavors feeling underappreciated, that will not be a problem for the group of us who coached the Dodgers. And thereby another opportunity for me to develop at least a bit more of the cynical edge that serves so much of beachwoodreporter.com so well went by the boards.

Meanwhile, last weekend, 5-year-old Alana's (I should note at this point that she is actually 5 and 11/12ths - her much anticipated birthday is now just a few weeks away) T-ball season was meandering toward its conclusion. After an early-week practice described by one of the Red Sox assistant coaches as "the worst yet," the squad played one of its best games of the season and took a lead into the bottom half of the final inning. As had happened a couple times earlier this summer, their foes scored just enough runs to win and that was that.

Alana wasn't all that broken up about the setback. In fact, I'm not sure she noticed. In the defensive half of the final inning it was her turn to take a break and she spent her time playing with the older sister of one of her teammates. For a little while they played one of my daughter's favorite games - it's called 'let me pick you up." My daughter picked up her taller playmate a couple times and then was pleased to report on her feat of strength to various people for the next half hour or so.

I could feel for the coaches because bad practices followed by good games are always unnerving. One has to wonder why we bother when there doesn't seem to be any connection between preparation and results. But when I talked to a few of them after the contest they didn't seem concerned. They were happy the Red Sox had played well and even happier that the season is almost over. The season finale is schedule for this Sunday.

We also realized this week that none of the parents had stepped up and made arrangements for end-of-season gifts for the Red Sox coaches. My wife went ahead and sent some e-mails to get the ball rolling. That seemed like the right thing to do but a part of me noted there was a good reason not to take the trouble. With the right sort of preparation, Alana's coach might make a heck of a T-Ball Journal writer next year.

*

Jim Coffman's daughter is in her first season of T-Ball. Her older brother is in his last year in the Junior Division. Coffman is chronicling his travails as coach of his son's team and observer of his daughter's initial foray into this slice of Americana. (That's Coach Jim in the mug shot at the top of the story, and Coach Jim on the mound while his team wears rally caps in the photo above.)

Posted by Lou at 12:45 AM | Permalink

Chicagoetry: My Dad Was A Bong-Head In College

MY DAD WAS A BONG-HEAD IN COLLEGE

"Live Rust." That
was the giveaway:

I found his records
In the barn,

And I began to understand more deeply
My mother's

Sense of
Humor.

It all came to me
In a flash:

Dad
Was a bong-head

In
College.

I actually looked
For seeds

And shake
In the spine.

I'd previously taken
My mother's surprising, almost shocking, if slightly muted,

Support for legalizing
ALL drugs and letting a Federal Bureaucracy do its magic and run the whole thing into

The
Ground, once and for all.

Wow! A lot of that
Was pure bullshit!

Just to fuck
With Dad!

Wow!
Awesome.

Mother! What a clue
She had!

Very sophisticated, I'm thinking
Now. Well: for a

Girl.

-

J. J. Tindall is the Beachwood's poet-in-residence. He can reached at jjtindall@yahoo.com. Chicagoetry is a collection-in-progress.

Posted by Lou at 12:17 AM | Permalink

July 26, 2007

What I Watched Last Night

If you like your women cold and hard as a well-digger's ass in January, you'll like FX's new series, Damages. (Tuesday's premiere episode, which I wasn't home to see Tuesday, is being re-run several times tonight and probably to death this weekend, so you'll have ample chance to see it.) If you like legal dramas where you sit there the whole time trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on but you go along for the ride anyway because it's not often that you get to see the dark, manipulative underbelly of the legal profession, you'll like this show, too.

I like my women a bit softer than that, and there are times when I don't feel like working that hard in order to enjoy a TV show, but it's still a show worth watching because it solidifies common opinion that lawyers suck.

Glenn Close plays Patty Hewes, a class-action lawyer so prominent she's a familiar face on Greta Van Susteren's legal talk show. Close does Ice Queen WASP perfectly, giving us the impression that Hewes is capable of shooting laser beams of death from her eyes and shitting razor blades without wincing, and would eat little children if there was any money in it.

"If you were a man, I'd kick the living dog shit out of you," Hewes' opponent in a case tells her on the courthouse steps after she tricks him into making what's obviously going to be a case-losing gaffe in front of the jury's foreman, who happens to be wandering back from lunch. New York City's judicial system is pretty decent. They send you to Quizno's.

"If you were a man, I'd be worried," she shoots back. No, this is not a woman who would tolerate erectile dysfunction well. Or for long. Still, she likes a good bourbon, laments her parenting skills, and can recite Emily Dickinson. Talk about a complex ball of something that you can't wait to start unraveling before your eyes at some point.

The show revolves around two issues, one more mysterious than the other, and jumps between present day and six months ago without telling you, exactly. That's when you realize this is one of those shows where, if you blink too often or don't have TiVo, you'll be hopelessly lost until the end of the season. On one hand, there's the mysterious case of a half-naked, blood-drenched woman found wandering about the streets of New York in a green trench coat. That's the thing that happened today. On the other hand, there's the case of bazillionaire Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), a silver-fox sorta guy in his 60s so amazingly dynamic and big-dog that he zooms around doing ATV motocross for kicks without worrying about breaking a hip. That's what was happening six months ago.

Arthur unloaded a boatload of his company stock, sending his 5,000 employees down the river by leaving them out of work and pensionless. "I'm a rich man, but I'm also a reasonable man," Arthur says, so he offers his broke workers $100 million to go away. The employees want the settlement, but Patty thinks they can get - and deserve - more by taking it to a jury because, well, she's so good (and rich, apparently) that she only takes cases she is passionate about.

"I say we take this money and get on with our lives" says one of the unemployed Frobisher workers. It doesn't seem to occur to any of them that getting on won't be that easy on a check for $26.32 once prominent class-action lawyers like Patty Hewes take their cut.

Compounding the whole mess is freshly-hired associate Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), who's engaged to first-year hospital resident David Connor (Noah Bean). Ellen is exactly as bland as Kristin Davis' Charlotte York in Sex and the City, which makes it all the more interesting when it turns out that she's the bloody mess wandering the street in a trench coat at 7 a.m., and David is the bloody mess lying on the apartment floor. Yet, the show jumps between Ellen being hired six months ago and today, when the cops are trying to figure out what to do with this gory, uncommunicative mess of a woman.

Still, this is an FX original program, so things never are what they appear and they turn on a dime, which is why Rescue Me is so good. Is Arthur really a bad guy? Is Patty really a good guy? Did good girl Ellen flip out and go bad, or did someone else?

Who knows. When you're on this kind of trip, it's best for us kids in the back seat to just shut up and let dad drive.

*

The What I Watched Last Night library is open for your perusal.

Posted by Lou at 02:46 PM | Permalink

The [Thursday] Papers

1.Kwik-E-Marts are doing a booming business.

ABC News reports that sales at the converted 7-11s, like this one on the Southwest Side, have doubled.

The stats:

* 960,000 cans of Buzz Cola sold
* 880,400 Sprinklicious donuts sold
* 1.1 million Squishees sold

And Krusty O's? Can't keep 'em in stock. The Kwik-E-Mart near Times Square in Manhattan ran out by 1 p.m. on the first day of the promotion.

2. The joyless Tribune not only wants to Spike the Spindle, they want you to think they're clever for using that wacky Wayne's World lingo.

3. Save the Spindle.

4. "The names of the characters were changed. Timelines were shifted."

Oh, just like Obama's memoir!

5. "[Cook County prosecutors] ripped Stroger after learning he will oppose a 12 percent pay increase for the state's attorney's office this year after promising to deliver it," the Sun-Times reports.

"Stroger's [latest] spokeswoman, Ibis Antongiorgi, said he 'is committed to cost-of-living increases for the state's attorneys and for all nonunion employees, but the issue is finding a way to pay for them."

So it depends on what you mean by the word "committed."

6. "I think what is irresponsible and naive is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out," Obama said.

"And that's why I endorsed Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont."

7. There is some justice in the world.

* Number of copies of Back in Black sold last year: 440,000
* Number of copies of Whitney Houston's self-titled debut: 7,000

8. "Even as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has promoted a large following of small-dollar contributors representing ordinary Americans, his campaign has built an old-school political fundraising machine that relies heavily on the wealth and the powerful," the Tribune reports on its front page this morning.

Welcome to the party! Glad you could make it.

"The network of fundraisers generating money for the Illinois senator's campaign includes a heavy representation of attorneys at well-connected law firms and members of the financial industry, including highly paid managers of hedge funds and private equity funds whose lofty compensations have recently generated public controversy.

"The Obama campaign is hardly unique in depending upon fundraisers drawn from the nation's financial elite . . . But the Obama fundraising operation provides a contrast to an image that the campaign has ceaselessly cultivated as a movement powered by everyday Americans."

9. "Your friends may be more important than your genes in determining whether you gain weight, according to a new study billed as the first to demonstrate that obesity tends to spread through social networks," the Tribune reports in its lead front page story today, "Friendship at Heart of Obesity."

"The study, which followed a group of Americans for more than three decades, found that a person's chances of becoming obese increase dramatically after a close friend or relative fattens up. The same thing happens when someone close slims down."

Um, I dunno, I'm not so sure the researchers - or the media - is quite getting it right. Maybe people of similar body type and lifestyles tend to become friends. I think the cause-and-effect may be backwards. You don't tend to see a tall person with a short best friend or a budding young athlete hanging out with a sedentary bookworm.

10. "The front-page 'teaser' made sure I would read the story. It had a tough picture of Sen. Barack Obama and a headline "Obama Inc. Is our man of the people already beholden to fat cats? Abner Mikva wrote in May.

"I could not believe what I read when I turned to Page 6 of the Sun-Times last Monday. It said that Obama had taken more than $165,000 from the second-largest bank in Europe, almost $160,000 from Exelon Corp., $143,000 from one Wall Street corporation, $50,000 from Citigroup, and $40,000 from another Wall Street firm. The story even intimated that the Obama campaign had confirmed these numbers.

"If Obama had taken one dime from any of these corporations, he and the corporations would have been in clear violation of the federal Corrupt Practices Act that flatly prohibits any corporation from giving money to a federal campaign. There is a special law that has even stiffer penalties for any foreign corporation making such contributions. Not only can't corporations make such contributions, they cannot be involved in any activities leading to others making such contributions."

*
From today's Tribune: "Obama: 260 'bundlers' raise about $13 million."

11. "Dusty Baker and two of Barry Bonds' ex-teammates claim the San Francisco Giants star has been unfairly targeted by the government and media," AP reports.

"Baker said he noticed no signs of Bonds' alleged steroid use while he was managing the Giants. He said even if a manager suspected a player was using performance-enhancing drugs, proving it was another matter.

"'How was I supposed to know what a guy was doing when he left that baseball field?' Baker said.

I saw part of the ESPN forum where Baker made his comments. He also said: "You can go up to a guy and ask him and he won't tell you nuthin'."

Baker is also reportedly managing Lindsay Lohan.

12. How John Records Landecker almost got fired for playing the Dixie Chicks.

13. "Despite the media attention the [Obama] campaign has grabbed by attracting 258,000 donors - in many cases people of modest means who have given over the Internet - a much smaller group of large donors provides most of the funds for the campaign," the Tribune continues.

"Obama's campaign theme of reform has left him open to criticism of his fundraising operation. On the campaign trail, he regularly criticizes the influence of established special interests in shaping national policy . . .

"At least 17 of his major fundraisers are managers of either hedge funds or private equity funds."

14. "Among the next top cop's first challenges will be restoring faith in the Police Department, both inside and out, insiders and community leaders say," the Tribune reports.

Restoring?

"By 16, he had graduated to armed robberies, [Robert "Bobby the Beak"] Siegel testified, and he had become aware of the neighborhood's Outfit toughs," the Tribune reports.

"'They made the money, and they didn't go to jail,' testified Siegel, chuckling at the memory. 'Most of the police were on the [Outfit] payroll at that time.'"

The Beachwood Tip Line: Bundle your thoughts.

Posted by Lou at 08:20 AM | Permalink

The Cubs Answer Men #1

As you may or may not realize, the Chicago Cubs are the hottest team in baseball. After a slow start, they have surged to within a few games of division leading Milwaukee. Anyone who has lived in Chicago for a long time knows what is going to happen next:

The Cubs are going to win it all this year.

Because it's been a little while since this last occurred, many of our Chicago readers have been writing us with their questions. We don't have room to answer all of them here today, but we'll try to get through them before the parade in November.

"D" writes: "I'm getting a little nervous about all this World Series talk. Are we putting the cart before the horse?"

R&D: That phrase might have meant something the last time the Cubs won the World Series, but don't forget that cars have been invented since then. Horses and carts are nowhere near as popular as they were the last time the Cubs won it all.

"A" writes: "Is there anything we can learn from the last Cubs World Series champions?"

R&D: Absolutely. Pitching and defense are the keys to winning it all. If our current Cubbies follow the lead of the 1908 Champions, they'll be saying "World Champion Chicago Cubs" as soon as the news is telegraphed to all 46 states, including the brand new state of Oklahoma.

"B" writes: "Should the 2007 National League Champion Chicago Cubs be aware of any rule changes since their last World Series appearance in 1945?"

R&D: There have only been a few rule changes. During the 1960s the pitchers dominated in a big way - especially in 1968. That was the year that Bob Gibson had an ERA of 1.12, Denny McLain had 31 victories, and Carl Yastrzemski led the AL with a paltry .301 batting average. So the Baseball Rules Committee lowered the mound. Other changes included the shrinking of the strike zone and tighter enforcement against illegal pitches. Oh, and now they also allow Blacks to play.

"S" writes: "Since the World Series is played in October, what should I wear to Wrigley to combat the frigid evenings?"

R&D: Make sure you wear warm clothes in layers. We suggest a T-shirt under another T-shirt with a sweatshirt on top. Blue sweatshirts with the words "Renegades, Baseball" retain your natural heat the best. Since most of your body heat escapes through your head, wear big honking headphones. This is especially important if you're sitting in the front row. Remember, you're not just a spectator - you're a participant.

"K" writes: "I'm going to take my folding chairs out of my parking space and reserve a space for the parade. Any idea which route the parade took last time? I want to get the best seat."

R&D: They obviously avoided the notorious North Side German ghetto last time, so don't waste your time placing your chairs on one of those unpaved dirt roads there.

"R" writes: "Will President Theodore Roosevelt attend the World Series this time? We're all still a little miffed that he snubbed Chicago last time."

R&D: Unfortunately, no. It looks like Roosevelt won't be coming again this time. What do you expect from a New Yorker?

*

Originally appearing at Half Empty. If you have any other questions about how to handle the World Series, feel free to send them to Rick and Dave. Between now and the big parade they'll try to get to as many of your questions as they can.