By Steve Rhodes
1. “A potentially critical difference between this game and Game 3 of the series in Chicago early last week is there is only one day between the previous game and tonight’s clash,” our very own Jim Coffman writes in SportsMonday. “There were two days between Games 2 and 3 and that extra time was filled with people telling the Hawks how good they are as the home team relaxed in comfortable home environs. The resulting let-down was not surprising.”
2. Cinco De Porno.
3. “Blago Evidence Would Take 51 Years To Read: Lawyers”
A) If given to a CPS high school class
B) If assigned to a state government worker
C) If assigned to a union lawyer
D) If assigned to a dog in dog years
E) One year for every count on which he’s guilty
F) One year for every year he’ll serve in prison
4. Justice Anne Burke is the featured speaker at the Illinois Woman’s Press Association annual awards luncheon this Saturday.
Maybe the press association should ask her to tell us how she got her job.
5. Please, I beseech you: No more stories about the Coffee Wars. Especially those that waste a reporter’s day on nonsense.
6. “Juan Rivera was found guilty of rape and murder for a third time Friday despite new DNA evidence that he claimed was proof of his innocence,” the Tribune reported over the weekend. “The verdict seemed to stun his attorneys and family members, who believed science would be Rivera’s long-sought deliverance.”
I admittedly didn’t follow every detail of this trial, but this seems inexplicable to me.
“Rivera, 36, was able to force another trial after advanced DNA testing revealed in 2005 that semen found in the girl’s body could not have come from him. His lawyers said that meant someone else must have killed her.
“Prosecutors downplayed that evidence, however, suggesting the girl might have had sex with someone else before she met Rivera or that the sample had been contaminated.”
Is that even remotely likely?
Jurors didn’t speak to the media, so we’re left without an explanation. Rivera’s lawyers vowed to appeal – again.
7. “This Thursday, high school students across the country will be filling in tiny bubbles on the macroeconomics Advanced Placement test,” NPR reports. “But how do you grade a test on economics when the answers in real life are changing every day?”
– via This Week In Education
8. The IOC wrapped up its tour of bid cities last week without acknowledging that they were the slightest bit tired by the time they got to Madrid, which was Pat Ryan’s talking point for why it was better to be the first city visited when it was obviously best to be last.
9. Duh.
10. And even the IOC poll is suspect.
11. “A great testimony, and actually a really funny moment for us, is how often when people watch ONN and they see a segment that says the first openly gay racehorse is going to run in the Breeders’ Cup this weekend, they think it’s true.”
12. “LEMONT, Ill. – When the wind in this Chicago suburb began to whip last winter, the cyclist Christian Vande Velde sought refuge in his basement,” the New York Times reported last week.
“As his colleagues trained in more sensible climates, Vande Velde placed his racing bike in front of a big-screen television and pedaled in place. A recording of the 2008 Tour de France played on a loop.”
*
UPDATE 11:16 A.M.: “American Rider Christian Vande Velde Falls and Withdraws From Giro.”
13. Kerry Begins Newspaper Hearings.
14. There’s no way Lewis Lazare actually believes local TV news is this good. (And enough with this “we” business, Lew.)
*
And can give the Kurtis & Jacobson thing a rest? That was a long time ago.
15. From a front-page New York Times story last week about Ray LaHood:
“Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation, is not one to toot his own horn over how much he knows about planes, trains and automobile bailouts. On the contrary.
“‘ I don’t think they picked me because they thought I’d be that great a transportation person,’ Mr. LaHood says with refreshing indifference as to how this admission might play if, say, he were ever to bungle a bridge collapse.”
Deja vu, anyone? What’s next, putting Desiree Rogers in charge of FEMA?
*
Also: “I’ve never been passionate about any particular issue.”
I beg to differ; LaHood was pretty passionate about screwing Peter Fitzgerald because Fitzgerald opposed pork. One lost his Senate seat to Obama, the other was rewarded by him.
16. Todd Stroger’s Big Day.
17. Keyes Back, Still Wack.
18. High-Rolling Hammond.
19. A Murder of Tulips.
I lug my spavined heart
to work
along the Magnificent Mile.
A murder of tulips
belies my grief.
They are nothing!
20. Also Not Another Detroit.
–
The Beachwood Tip Line: Detroit.
Posted on May 11, 2009