By Jersey Jack Pinball

Jersey Jack Pinball, creator of premium pinball machines, will relocate its manufacturing operations from Lakewood, New Jersey to Elk Grove Village, Illinois, bringing fabrication into greater synergy with the design and engineering teams currently based in Bensenville, where JJP anticipates creating 50 or more new jobs.
“First and foremost, I would like to thank all the employees in Lakewood for their hard work and dedication to Jersey Jack Pinball and the wider pinball industry. Their contributions are greatly appreciated,” said JJP founder and owner Jack Guarnieri. “This move will allow JJP to remain competitive and efficient in the market. We look forward to creating an exciting, collaborative workplace in Illinois, where we can continue to be pioneers of pinball design, building great games for many years to come.”
Jersey Jack Pinball is the industry leader in quality and technical innovation, creating groundbreaking pinball machines for seasoned players, collectors, and newcomers to the game. Designed and manufactured in the United States, JJP’s state-of-the-art games are conceived on a foundation of pinball’s rich history and engineered with an unflinching eye toward its future.

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Posted on February 26, 2020

By InventHelp

While birthdays are generally festive occasions with the tradition of the honoree blowing out candles on a cake, there is always the risk that this process exposes the cake to germs. Fortunately, two inventors from Broadview have designed something than can help with that problem.
They developed GERMAWAY, patent pending, to protect the cake against spittle from blowing out candles. As such, it cleanses the air dispersed from the user’s mouth, facilitating more sanitary conditions. In other words, this lightweight, compact and easy to use novelty prevents the spread of germs and bacteria. It is also convenient, effective and affordably priced. In addition, its simple design minimizes production costs.

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Posted on February 23, 2020

By J.J. Tindall

J.J., please . . .
Not quite in time for Oscar night and the hegemony of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, nor Valentine’s Day memories of that distasteful little “gangland” dust-up on the Near North Side, Confessions was scurrying down myriad rabbit holes around the Myth of the American Mob: re-bingeing The Sopranos, re-reading Nick Tosches’ searing anti-biography of Dean Martin, Dino, and reveling in, even projecting myself into, all things Cosa Nostra.
Like his recent cinematic “riff” on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, Scorsese’s The Irishman is as full of holes as a slice of Swiss cheese. But it makes for a hell of a story, and a heck of a movie. In this atmosphere, we began digging into recurrent myths of the Chicago Mob, known locally as the Outfit.

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Posted on February 21, 2020

By Cara Anthony/Kaiser Health News

HECKER, Ill. – The first fingernail tattoo started off as a joke by a man who lost the tips of two fingers in a construction accident in 2018.
But that shifted after Eric Catalano, an auto finance manager turned tattoo artist, finished with his needle.
“The mood changed in here,” Catalano recalled as he stood in his Eternal Ink Tattoo Studio. “Everything turned from funny to wow.”
When Catalano posted a photo of the inked fingernails online last January, he thought maybe 300 people would like the realistic tattoo. He had no idea the image would be viewed by millions of people around the world. Even Ripley’s Believe It or Not! tracked him down to feature the viral tattoo: a pair of fingernails that looked so real no one could believe their eyes.
Courtesy of Eric Catalano via KHN
The viral photo pushed Catalano, 39, further into the world of paramedical tattooing. Now people with life-altering scars come from as far as Ireland to visit Catalano’s tattoo shop in this rural village about 30 miles outside St. Louis. They enter Eternal Ink looking for the healing touch they saw online. With flesh-toned ink and a needle, Catalano makes his clients feel whole again with an art form and industry that picks up where doctors leave off.

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Posted on February 19, 2020

By Pete Kastanes/Vanished Chicago

Fresh whole fryers for 39 cents!

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Posted on February 18, 2020

By Will Cushman/WisContext

Perched along the state’s border with Illinois, Beloit is as far south as one can get in Wisconsin. However, the city’s roots extend much farther into the South, where they tap into the fertile soils of northeast Mississippi and a handful of small agricultural towns.
Beloit stands out in Wisconsin. It’s a small city – home to fewer than 40,000 people – with a relatively large African-American community. Black residents have called Beloit home since its early years in the mid-19th century – one of the city’s first blacksmiths was an African-American man. But the city’s black community remained tiny in its early years, numbering in the dozens until the second decade of the 20th century.
African Americans began arriving in Beloit by the hundreds in the 1910s as part of the first Great Migration, which continued for several decades up to World War II. Millions of black Southerners moved north to find employment and to escape rampant racial violence and state-sanctioned segregation. In the Midwest, major cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee became prominent Great Migration destinations. But despite being lesser-known, some smaller communities also attracted African-American migrants from the South.

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Posted on February 14, 2020

By The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service

Family Traditions Meat Company, an Ackley, Iowa establishment, is recalling approximately 270 pounds of ready-to-eat (RTE) beef stick products due to misbranding and an undeclared allergen, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced Saturday. The product contains milk, a known allergen, which is not declared on the product label.
The fully cooked, ready-to-eat beef stick items were produced on Nov. 14, 2019, Dec. 3, 2019 and Jan. 6, 2020 and have a shelf life of six months. The following product is subject to recall:

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Posted on February 8, 2020