Chicago -
By Steve Rhodes
“In the grand NFL scheme, Sunday’s Bears game meant nothing,” our very own Jim Coffman writes.
“Yes, it was aggravating to lose to Aaron Rodgers and the Packers again. And to do so with a division title and a spot in the playoffs on the line! What fun! But this Bears team was clearly not a championship contender.”
Posted on December 30, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
“Nearly 90 percent of interstate highway miles in Illinois will have 70-mph speed limits starting Wednesday, state transportation officials announced Friday, but the sponsor of the law raising the limits is upset almost all existing posted speeds in the Chicago area will remain unchanged and he vowed to push for them to be higher,” the Tribune reports.
“‘It’s unacceptable,’ said State. Sen. Jim Oberweis, R-Sugar Grove, who sponsored the bill that Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law in August. Oberweis said he was upset that IDOT, which had the authority to draw up the speed limit map, left unchanged the 55-mph speed limit across virtually all of the Chicago region. ‘They’re putting law-abiding citizens into danger.'”
To avert disaster, Oberweis said he’d hire a fleet of helicopters to evacuate anyone who felt they couldn’t get out of the scary city fast enough.
Posted on December 28, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
“It’s an equation any math teacher should be able to solve: 1 check for $3,000 + X recipient = 1 successful charitable donation,” the Tribune reports.
“But after both the Park District and public library in Morton Grove declined to accept the $3,000 he raised, high school math teacher and atheist blogger Hemant Mehta is hoping he and fellow atheists can find a home for their contribution with a local food pantry.
“I can’t believe how hard it is to get rid of $3,000,” he said in a YouTube video, announcing plans to give the money to the Niles Township Food Pantry.
Here’s that video:
Posted on December 27, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
“Tamerlan Tsarnaev first heard the voice when he was a young man,” the Boston Globe reports.
It came to him at unexpected times, an internal rambling that he alone could hear. Alarmed, he confided to his mother that the voice “felt like two people inside of me.”
As he got older, the voice became more authoritative, its bidding more insistent. Tamerlan confided in a close friend that the voice had begun to issue orders and to require him to perform certain acts, though he never told his friend specifically what those acts were.
“He was torn between those two people,” said Donald Larking, 67, who attended the mosque with Tamerlan for nearly two years. “He said that several times. And he did not like it.”
Federal investigators have suspected that Tamerlan, the 26-year-old boxer from southern Russia who is believed, along with his brother, to have set off the deadly Boston Marathon bombs in April, was motivated, if not deliberately directed, by real life jihadist revolutionaries on the other side of the globe. But an investigation by the Boston Globe suggests that Tamerlan was in the perilous grip of someone far more menacing: himself.
The Globe corroborated with several people who knew him just how plagued Tamerlan felt by the inner voices. Some family acquaintances feared for his mental health, among them a doctor concerned it could be schizophrenia. The Globe’s five-month investigation, with reporting in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, and the United States, also:
- Fundamentally recasts the conventional public understanding of the brothers, showing them to be much more nearly coequals in failure, in growing desperation, and in conspiracy.
- Establishes that the brothers were heirs to a pattern of violence and dysfunction running back several generations. Their father, Anzor, scarred by brutal assaults in Russia and later in Boston, often awoke screaming and tearful at night. Both parents sought psychiatric care shortly after arriving in the United States but apparently sought no help for Tamerlan even as his mental condition grew more obvious and worrisome.
- Casts doubt on the claim by Russian security officials that Tamerlan made contact with or was recruited by Islamist radicals during his visit to his family homeland.
- Raises questions about the Tsarnaevs’ claim that they came to this country as victims of persecution seeking asylum. More likely, they were on the run from elements of the Russian underworld whom Anzor had fallen afoul of. Or they were simply fleeing economic hardship.
Posted on December 26, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
“Everybody knows Rudolph was the last reindeer to join Santa’s crew, but few people know about the department store copywriter who brought his story to the world,” Jessica Pupovac reports for NPR.
“The year was 1939, the Great Depression was waning and a manager at Montgomery Ward in Chicago decided that the store should create its own children’s book for the annual holiday promotion.”
Click through for the rest of the story.
Posted on December 25, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
“Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday announced the members of a grocery store task force that will work to find new owners for stores left vacant after Safeway closes all Dominick’s stores in the Chicago-area Dec. 28,” the Tribune reports.
Proposition: Buy this empty grocery store and we’ll throw in an empty school for free!
Posted on December 24, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
“Questions abound about whether Cutler can stay healthy enough to lead a team to a championship and whether he is simply good enough to do so, and they have been out there way before the Bears embarrassed themselves 11-54 last night (I’m using the backwards score kind of the same way the military uses an upside down flag – to signal extreme distress),” our very own Jim “Coach” Coffman writes in SportsMonday: Bears Stinks.
*
At least Henry Melton put up a fight.
Too easy?
Posted on December 23, 2013
By Natasha Julius
As part of our ongoing effort to regain your trust, this Weekend Desk Report will be 10% shorter.
Market Update
Still can’t find anything for that hard-to-shop-for relative? Just in time for the holidays, it turns out Money can buy you Love.
Posted on December 21, 2013
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!
Posted on December 20, 2013
By Steve Rhodes
1. SunTimesEpicFail.com.
2. Rita Law Not To Be Confused With Rose Laws.
3. Jennifer Hudson Has Never Had An Alcoholic Drink.
Posted on December 19, 2013
