By Steve Rhodes
Note: I’ll be guest bartending tonight at the Beachwood Inn from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
1. Welcome to the World of Motion Sicktures!
2. The news this week from Bloodshot Records, including the 411 on Exene Cervenka’s solo project.
3. “Now I walk among these downtrodden of our Tourist Economy,” our man on the rail Thomas Chambers writes of River North. “I will reach out to these souls of limited disposable dollars, providing guidance to true neighborhood spots unique to Daley City. Watch locals drown sorrows, and with good food. I’ll recruit the microphone preacher from Washington and State, for he’ll become our human Green Sheet and spread the word on pace scenarios and false favorites and PolyTrack tendencies. If one should have a need to testify with $2 on a horse, one of His great creatures, as such a man, from Ohio, did last Saturday, we will remain true to our calling and show him the way.”
4. David Greising catches Lori Healey, president of the Chicago 2016 bid committee, in a web of lies.
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Anyone who believes anything the city or Chicago 2016 has to say at this point is a stone cold idiot whose drinking, driving and voting privileges should be revoked.
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Olympic Darts Landing.
5. Utah? Oregon?
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6. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Tribune baseball writers Paul Sullivan and Dave Van Dyke were defending Alfonso Soriano on Chicago Tribune Live last night.
Host David Kaplan – one of the smarter guys in the local sports media world – is right: He’s just a terrible baseball player.
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Sullivan and Van Dyke also challenged Kaplan’s account of Steve Stone telling Lou Piniella on his first day of practice to give Ryan Theriot a chance because no one else in the organization believed in him.
But that squares with the accounts I’ve read about how the organization handled Theriot.
Evaluating minor league talent has never exactly been a strong suit for the Cubs organization. Why is Kaplan’s anecdote so hard to believe?
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Kaplan recently said that, without a doubt, it was Kerry Wood who smashed Sammy Sosa’s boombox.
Kaplan also said that some teammates urinated in Sosa’s locker.
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“Is [Bradley] a .321 hitter with .563 slugging ability, like he showed in Texas last year? No, he was a .280 career hitter who never had hit 20 home runs in a season at any level when the Cubs signed him and more than 30 points worse left-handed than right-handed,” Gordon Wittenmyer points out today.
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“At the end of last season, when Milton was a free agent, it was difficult for me to see a National League team signing him, because he would not have gotten the at-bats for us last year without the DH,” Rangers TV analyst Tom Grieve recently said on The Mully & Hanley Show (via Fred Mitchell).
“He was injured off and on all season long , and there were plenty of games where he was okay to DH but not okay to play in the field.”
7. “Buildings Commissioner Richard Monocchio also moved to fire Richard Bivins, a $66,556-a-year project manager who reviews plans before permits are issued,” the Sun-Times reports.
“Bivins is accused of accepting a fee to provide expert testimony as part of a lawsuit between two outside parties, in violation of the city’s ethics ordinance, which prohibits employees from soliciting and receiving money for their advice and assistance.
“Bivins was fired in August 2005 for granting zoning approval to build a 44-unit condominium building where residential units are forbidden.
“But the Personnel Board overturned the firing and reduced it to a one-year suspension, which Bivins served.”
8. “Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money,” the New York Times reports.
9. Chicago Hedge Fund Enters Espionage Fray. Secret codes and non-competes.
10. “Perhaps someone should introduce an ordinance changing our motto to City of Coincidences, because we have so many of them around here, it’s like being blessed with a rare natural resource.
“In fact, the Chicago Coincidence – a subset of the Chicago Way – is even more eerie than those Cubbie Occurences.”
11. Daley: Out Of Ideas. But we’re not.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Fresh and fluffed.
Posted on July 10, 2009