Chicago -
By Natasha Julius
We hate to start the Report with something as dull and irrelevant as real news, but Barack Obama’s important announcement that he’s “somebody who is not engaged in any wrongdoing . . . and who [we] can trust” broke awfully late on Friday. We’re sure he wouldn’t want any of us to miss this just because we’ll all be drunk this weekend, right?
Now that’s out of the way, back to the crucial work at hand.
Posted on March 15, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
The Sun-Times guide today to the city’s best corned beef – with St. Patrick’s Day around the corner – reminds me of a curiosity about cultures and food. I grew up in a Reform Jewish home culturally poles apart far from Irish, but as you already know, corned beef is a Jewish deli food. We also ate tongue growing up, which I now eat in burritos here in Chicago; it’s called lengua. Seems to me every culture eats just about the same foods, just prepared differently with different names.
–
COMMENTS
From Garry Jaffe:
The S-T left out the absolute best corned beef in the city: Sinai Kosher’s factory store on Pershing. Also the cheapest and leanest you’ve ever seen. The pastrami is great, too.
*
From Bethany Lankin:
Re: Plenty to beef about: St. Patrick’s Day (or any day) is reason enough to celebrate Chicago’s love affair with corned beef
“For starters: Irish spring rolls at Moher’s, 5310 W. Devon, (773) 467-1954.”
Come on . . . A deep fried veloute of green and white striped soap? Ugh. Do they taste fresh and clean as a whistle?
–
Obama Ears
“Sen. Barack Obama, who had been declining to reveal earmarks he requested in 2005 and 2006, finally did so Thursday and probably would prefer the story to be about how his campaign challenged Democratic presidential rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, to do the same for her entire Senate tenure,” Lynn Sweet reports.
Posted on March 14, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
Normally I would be up for a good newspaper campaign inveighing against the misdeeds an ogreous rich guy and his unfeeling company were planning against the good people of our fair city.
But the Sun-Times’s campaign against Sam Zell’s plan to sell Wrigley Field to the state has been transparent and sophomoric. After all, I haven’t seen the paper put its editorial giving out its phone number and asking Barack Obama to give them a call and ‘fess up to Tony Rezko on front page; it wasn’t even the lead editorial of the day. I haven’t seen an Obama-Rezko video contest like the one the paper is running for Zell and the Cubs.
That said, the Sun-Times hits a home run today. It’s “Home Field Disadvantage” editorial is the best-written (and presumably, edited), most well-reasoned argument I’ve seen coming out its pages in . . . well, at least in a long time. Did they bring in a stunt board for this one?
Posted on March 13, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
Page overheard at O’Hare: “Client 10, please pick up the white courtesy whore.”
Coffee Whores
“Starbucks did a great job of letting consumers know it was closing for three hours last month, but it failed to communicate the most important part – why. At least that’s the conclusion of one new study,” Ad Age reports.
Ad Age previously noted the “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of media coverage” generated by the shutdown in “News Outlets Fixate on Starbucks’ No-Joe Play Media Attention Over Coffee Chain’s Three-Hour Closure Helped Publicize Howard Schultz’s Turnaround Message.”
Posted on March 12, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
Client 10 to the Blue Concourse!
Rezkorama
The New York Times today devoted an entire story to the latest mention of Barack Obama in the Tony Rezko trial, and with a tone altogether harsher than the locals:
“An e-mail message made public on Monday in the fraud trial of Antoin Rezko, a businessman and political contributor, brought attention to Barack Obama’s role in discussions involving a state health planning board that Mr. Rezko is accused of improperly influencing,” the Times said.
“The vaguely worded message also seemed to raise the possibility that Mr. Obama, who at the time was chairman of the Illinois Senate’s health committee, had been involved in recommending candidates for the board.”
Posted on March 11, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
1. “Why is it that so many people who are paid to write about and talk about sports in this town can’t figure out that Jerry Angelo knows what he’s doing?” our very own Jim Coffman asks today in SportsMonday, where he makes a case for Angelo’s off-season.
2. “The Dave Clark Five were the Beatles if Ringo had been a heavy metal drummer and George had played sax at Chess Records,” our very own Don Jacobson writes in his appreciation of the band in RockNotes.
The Dave Clark Five will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame today.
Posted on March 10, 2008
By Natasha Julius
This whole report might be total bullshit. And you know what? I don’t have to admit a damn thing.
Market Update
Due to spiraling energy costs, we have decided to “green up” the Weekend Desk by recycling a joke. President Bush this week conceded that the economy has slowed, but predicted things would improve rapidly right around the time he fixes the Middle East.
Posted on March 8, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
“Yes, Barack Obama’s name came up on the first day of the Tony Rezko trial and Rezko didn’t blush or flinch or twitch,” John Kass writes.
That’s because the real news to come out of day one was about a Republican. Kass explains.
Posted on March 7, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
With Wheel of Fortune in town and taping shows at Navy Pier, I thought I’d tell a little story today before getting to the news.
When I was in college at the University of Minnesota in the 1980s – I was there most of the decade because I was having too much fun to leave – one of my buddies got our circle of friends hooked on Wheel for awhile. We would hunker down every night at 6:30 p.m. for 30 minutes of puzzle-solving and hijinks, before moving on to mere hijinks.
Posted on March 6, 2008
By Steve Rhodes
“Speaking in San Antonio, Obama congratulated Clinton for her wins, but added, ‘We know this, no matter what happens tonight, we have nearly the same delegate lead we had this morning, and we are on our way to winning this nomination,'” the Sun-Times reports.
The delegate math is one of the biggest lines of baloney that the media has bought into . . . because it doesn’t matter who finishes the primary season with more delegates. The nomination doesn’t go to the candidate in the lead, it goes to the candidate who secures 2,025 delegates.
And Obama is nearly as unlikely to get there as Clinton. Beyond that, a delegate lead of under a hundred out of 2,000 surely doesn’t close the deal, as opposed to, say, a candidate with 1,800 delegates and another with 500.
Posted on March 5, 2008
