By Steve Rhodes
A big thanks to everyone who turned out for our holiday party last night. I’m pretty sure a good time was had by all, and next year we’ll try to get Schlitz to officially sponsor us given how much of their product we drank.
We also had reason to toast our poet-in-residence J.J. Tindall on his write-up from Rick Kogan for the Trib’s Printers Row Journal.
Copies of Ballots From The Dead still available!
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Once again, I have to ask: Is there a better college football writer in the country than our very own Mike Luce? Even if you have no interest in college football, you’ll enjoy reading his stuff. The full title of this week’s installment:
The College Football Report and The College Football Report Free Range Sacred Chicken Present The 2013-14 Bowl Season: Winners, Losers, Covers, Pushes, Overs, Unders, Best Dressed, Worst Buffet, Bowls You Didn’t Know Existed, Bowls You Knew Existed But Had Forgotten, Most Obscure, Weirdest Sponsor, Best Destination, Worst Destination, Least Interesting, Best Match-Up, Awesomest Mascot, and the debut of the College Football Report Imaginary Bowl Game Series, or the CFRIBGS as we like to call it.
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I’m a huge fan of ProPublica and one of their innovations is to not only allow but to encourage other sites to “steal” their work through a simple republishing button. I’ve been proud to offer a lot of their work – the gold standard in digital investigative reporting – particularly given the relative dearth of coverage of the most important stories of our time in the rest of the local media, including Obama’s drone war and the NSA scandal.
Today we have an Obamacare update: Sign-Up Deadlines Keep Moving, Confusion Grows.
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Kanye West might be mad, but he’s not dumb, and just might be brilliant. On Wednesday night he unleashed “We Should Have Never, Ever Let Michael Jordan Play For The Wizards” on a hometown crowd at the big West Side arena (you know the one; I don’t believe in giving free advertising to companies who buy naming rights as a way to, in part, sneak their brand into news stories).
West’s musical diatribe put him on top of today’s The Week In Chicago Rock.
Other artists featured: Marrow, 10,000 Light Years, Star Of The Lid, The Wooten Brothers, The Atlantic, Waitan, Bongripper, Pillage, DKV Trio, Mingo Awareness Project, Through These Eyes, and Paquito D’Rivera.
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We’ll have party photos soon from Beachwood Photo Booth photographer Helene Smith. For now, we have this week’s featured photo: A Chicago Christmas Postcard, straight outta Jefferson Park.
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That’s all for today, Natasha Julius will be back tomorrow with The Weekend Desk Report and we’ll maintain some level of posting through the holidays.
Finally, if you’re so inclined, we’ll make one more appeal for 2013. To those who have already supported us through the years, we are grateful.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Operator sitting by.
Posted on December 20, 2013