By Steve Rhodes
“Growing up on a sharecropper’s farm outside Memphis, young [Koko] and her three brothers and two sisters slept on pallets in a shotgun shack with no running water or electricity,” Greg Kot writes. “By the time she was 11, both her parents had died. She picked cotton to survive and moved to Chicago in the early 1950s to be with her future husband, Robert ‘Pops’ Taylor. She found a job working as a domestic, scrubbing floors for rich people.”
She went on to become the Queen of the Blues.
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Hear my favorite Koko Taylor song (actually written by Ellington Jordan and first recorded by Etta James) and see a YouTube tribute and an excerpt from Scorsese’s The Blues: Here.
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Burke’s Law
Multi-millionaire alderman Ed Burke wants to send those ticketed by red-light cameras to red-light school. “We’ve got to find the money somewhere,” he said.
I wonder how many tickets Burke’s driver has gotten.
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Course materials: Red Means Stop; Red Lights & You; Red Lights For Dummies; and, just to be fair, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of Red Lights.
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Can we send aldermen to aldermen school and generate money that way somehow?
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On the other hand, I wonder how much being a red-light teacher would pay. I bet you’ll have to know someone to get one of those gigs.
Breaking Front Page News
“THERE ARE PLENTY OF WAYS TO PREP YOUR BODY FOR THE BEACH THIS SUMMER.”
If you’re a woman.
The paper doesn’t give advice to the guys.
Note the headless women.
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Didn’t anyone there ever take a women’s studies class?
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That was a joke. You don’t need a class to know how dehumanizing you are. But tomorrow there’ll be a story about the confounding mystery of anorexia among young girls.
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From the actual story (yes, there is one):
“Don’t worry if you forgot about bikini season. With so much going on, who had time to think about counting calories and working out to fit into a two-piece?”
I know, what with the stupid economy and everything! Who had time?
“But it’s not too late to get ready for the big reveal.”
You mean June 4 isn’t too late to get my body in shape for bikini season? In which hemisphere?
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See also:
* Calling Out All Democrats. State of party leaves some blue.
* Fight The Parking Power! It takes a million enforcers to hold us back.
* The Wrigley Field Rule. Respect the roof.
* Classic Heidi (Montag) Pratt, Christian.
* In case of emergency, summer or pain, the federal government is here to help.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Blind.
Posted on June 4, 2009