Date: 6/10/06
From: Roscoe Village
To: Lincoln Square
The Cab: Reasonably clean and noise-free. Seatbelts functioning as they should. A fairly unremarkable physical specimen.
Posted on June 16, 2006
Cab #199
Date: 6/10/06
From: Lakeview
To: River North
The Cab: A fine example of the growing and welcome tradition of exceedingly clean Chicago cabs, the lone item of clutter being the charming lucky penny just behind the driver’s seat. Classical music was kept to a barely-audible hum, clearly played solely for the driver’s personal enjoyment. Not a cell phone in sight.
Posted on June 16, 2006
Cab #6312
Date: June 2, 2006
From: Lakeview
To: River North
The Cab: Essentially clean, save for a deeply-perplexing stain on the ceiling. Closer inspection yielded the general consensus that it was a smudged boot print, leading the backseat occupants to contemplate what exactly had been done to, with or in this cab to cause such a disfigurement. Aside from this grubby enigma, the seat belts were functional, and the generously opened windows provided plenty of ventilation.
Posted on June 15, 2006
Newspaper Directory*
By The Beachwood Puzzle Affairs Desk
Horoscope Writer: Krystal Ball
Puzzle Editor: Anna Gramm
Foreign Affairs Editor: Warren Peace
Handyman’s Corner Columnist: Jerry Riggs
Obituary Writer: Doug Graves
Book Reviewer: Paige Turner
Travel Editor: Skip Towne
Weather Page Editor: April Raines
High School Sports Reporter: Jim Shorts
Gardening Columnist: Rose Busch
* As revealed in the crossword puzzle of that name in The New York Times on Sunday.
Posted on June 13, 2006
Dirty Men With Dollar Bills
The girls smile because they have to, even as their bodies get thinner each day and their souls melt away. They smile because they have to – they are here to sell themselves to strangers every night. These particular girls are in Athens, but there are girls like them all over the world, girls locked in rooms all day, forced into the streets at night, beaten with bats and worse if they don’t bring back enough money. The voices that accompany the blows occupy their thoughts. “Not all the girls are as pretty as you,” one of the girls here was told. “They may not have customers, but for you there are always customers!”
And yet, freedom terrified her. She told an aid worker that if she tried to escape, her insides would expand and suffocate her. Or so the voodoo priest had said. Her family would suffer, too. So freedom terrified her. Besides, she took a vow. Of silence. Of obedience. Of shame.
The girls smile because they have to, but they smile without hope. They smile only for the dirty men with dollar bills.
The girls are the product in the $9.5 billion human trafficking industry, the crucial commodity in a global enterprise that now matches illegal arms dealing as the second largest criminal trade in the world, behind trafficking in drugs. And the human trafficking trade is growing faster than its narcotics counterpart.
Posted on June 6, 2006
15 Things Australians Say
By Andrew Kingsford
1. Don’t be a girl’s dress.
2. Put your two-bob in.
3. He’s a yancee man.
4. If you’re looking to get a leg over . . .
5. To knock on a girl.
6. She’s got a sticky beak.
7. I’ve got shagger’s back.
8. It’s time to give the ferret a run.
9. In a pig’s ass.
10. Don’t chuck a spaz.
11. There are a lot of moisties there.
12. He’s a pooh job.
13. Did you punch him in the faghole?
14. If you want to stick your boot in . . .
15. He’s a ponce.
Posted on June 3, 2006
A Righteous Film Fest Spans Lubbock to Northern Ireland – With A Stop At Mardi Gras
By Marilyn Ferdinand
As our long nuclear winter of human rights abuses continues with authorization to build the Great Wall of the Rio Grande as well as desecration of privacy rights, particularly of the people we honor on this Memorial Day weekend, there comes a glimmer of sanity from the North Side. Beginning this evening, the Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival stops at Facets for a one-week engagement.
Human Rights Watch, the festival’s sponsoring organization, started its international film festival in 1994, “in recognition of the power of film to educate and galvanize a broad constituency of concerned citizens.” Organizers rigorously fact-check
selected films for accuracy, though no point of view is censored. Until four years ago, the festival played only in New York City and London. Recognizing that the enemy of freedom is ignorance, HRW started making a sampling of the best of the fest available to venues anywhere in the United States and Canada that wanted to host them. Facets has been showing them ever since.
The 2005-2006 selection of 12 films includes both features and documentaries. I caught two of the films on The Sundance Channel and both are worth a look. The Education of Shelby Knox focuses on the attempts of a conservative, evangelical Christian teenager to force her Lubbock, Texas, school district to offer sex education classes to stem the high rate of teen pregnancies and STDs. Shelby Knox proves that, yes, conservatives have brains, too, and can use them in the service of the common good – she’s really a remarkable person. I saw Mardi Gras: Made in China on the eve of New Orleans’s first such celebration after Killer Katrina drowned its streets. I became the official killjoy in my office when I rejected the beads my co-workers were handing out by saying, “I know the near-slave who burned herself putting those beads together is very happy for you.” Yes, definitely don’t invite me to your next party. But do see this movie.
Posted on May 26, 2006
Cab #3693
Date: March 26, 2006
From: Wicker Park
To: Navy Pier
The Cab: Relatively clean, but with the sound-and-feel of a workhorse, with its bumpy suspension and telltale squeaks and harrumphs. A real respectable piece of work, though, like a hard-working family cab just trying to do its best for its cab family.
The Driver:“Navy Pier!” were the only words he uttered. It was hard to tell what he meant by that. He was driving silent when he picked me up, but, perhaps upon spotting my armful of newspapers, he quickly switched on the radio – to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!
He also wore a satisfying fishing hat that was not quite the measure of Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s, but slightly better than this one.
The Driving: Full of the quick stop-and-gos that tend to make me nauseas. Poor timing of (Dunkin’ Donuts) coffee-drinking imperiled safety. Fumbling for CDs almost put us into the back of a stopped school bus. Music was hard to place: Dido meets Shakira. Latin but not revolutionary.
Overall rating: 2 extended arms
– Steve Rhodes
Posted on May 26, 2006
The Great American Jobs Machine
By The Beachwood Public Affairs Desk
JOBS AMERICANS WON’T DO:
1. Work 80 hours a week picking fruit in the Florida heat for $2 a day.
2. Learn the names of their political representatives.
3. Be Naomi Campbell’s personal assistant.
4. Certain wrestling smackdowns.
5. Clean hotel lobby restrooms used by conventioneers for $7/hour.
6. Bat .210 for less than $2 milllion a year.
Posted on May 16, 2006
Pie-Eyed And Blue
By Marty Gangler
One of America’s most underrated mascots is dead, and hardly anyone, it seems, is mourning this tremendous loss.
Well, I am. Let this be a tribute then, a tribute to a man I took for granted. A guy I thought would always be there for me, always there with my fix, my jump, my edge.
Farewell, Hostess Pie Magician.
You graced the waxy packaging of Hostess fruit pies for as long as I can remember, reporting to work in top hat and tux, blessing each pie with your special pixie wand.
And now you’ve been replaced by a small bushel of fruit.
Posted on May 1, 2006