By Steve Rhodes
“In the latest Ventra snafu, CTA customers are rolling through turnstiles despite having negative balances on their Ventra cards,” the Sun-Times reports.
You know, I like the way the Sun-Times’s morning newsletter put it better:
“We congratulate Ventra on the nearly 23 hours it didn’t have a scandal. Alas, the streak is broken. This meltdown involves the head of the CTA rail union showing reporters a photo of a negative balance of $272.50.”
More like that, please.
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Also from this morning’s S-T newsletter:
“The Cubs continue to endear themselves to their petulant neighbors. Yesterday, the city granted the club an extra 10 feet of street and sidewalk and gave it permission to sell advertising on a branding arch that’ll extend over Clark Street.”
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And:
“You know what we don’t have enough of? McDonald’s. And we never will. At least not till CEO Don Thompson’s dead. So says Don Thompson. Don Thompson also says that the world, desperate for more Big Macs, will receive 1,600 new locations at which to buy them next year.”
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Chicago Can’t Handle The Truth
“In our market you can’t do [a broadcast] straight,” Jerry Reinsdorf says. “It’s not like New York.”
Paging Jon Stewart.
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Now, by “our market,” does Reinsdorf mean “the White Sox market,” in which case he’s saying White Sox fans are just too primitive and tribal to accept a fair, truth-telling broadcast? Or does he mean “the Chicago market,” in which case he’s saying that, unlike New York, we’re insecure, Second City Syndrome flyover hicks who can’t accept a fair, truth-telling broadcast?
Either way, he’s insulting a lot of people.
Doprah Spinfrey
Barack Obama awarded Oprah Winfrey the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wednesday, saying. “In more than 4,500 episodes of her show, her message was always, ‘You can.'”
Here are some other messages Oprah has sent during her career that Obama might have missed.
Reporting Malpractice
“The biggest goal is to overcome really poor reporting that focuses on fleeting increases to crime and doesn’t look at long-term causes,” Tracy Siska of the Chicago Justice Project tells The Chicago Bureau.
“That’s really the need we’re trying to fulfill, which is give communities and journalists and policy makers access to data that is in context and that shows a pattern, rather than the monthly comparisons or the year-to-year comparisons that, depending on a whole slew of other factors, are completely invalid.
“Reporters completely overstated the homicide issue, mainly because the main driver for the 2012 increase in homicides was the warm winter we had. And while that was mentioned in the reporting, it was (buried). It would never be the overall crux of the story, even though everybody knows it and all the criminologists know it.
“Then in February, there were these really low numbers of homicides, and there was all this cheering about how great the superintendent was doing, how the Chicago Police Department was turning it around, when in reality we just had a very cold February.”
Truth.
Spamalot
“Somehow we endured the murders of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley without ‘losing our innocence.'” – Tim Willette
It Took A Lawsuit
Sunlight Foundation Wins 13 Years Of Federal Contract Data.
Beachwood Photo Booth: For Rent
Live/work.
The Week In Chicago Rock
Just tremendous. Please sample these bands and artists. I promise you won’t regret it.
Featuring: The Right Now, Temples, The Virus, Gary Clark Jr., Dave Davies, The Travelin’ McCourys, MGMT, Obituary, The Coldies, MAMA, Young the Giant, In This Moment, and Now, Now.
The College Football Report
Who Needs A Palate Cleanser?
Rebel Access TV Is In Your Face
Raw, Fast and Super Exciting.
Local Book Notes
Chicago Book Expo & The Uptown Factor.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: By a factor of one.
Posted on November 22, 2013