By Steve Rhodes
Boy, the morning has really gotten away from me. No time to fill out the rest of the site the way I had expected to, so lots of goodies coming tomorrow and the rest of the week.
But our sports section continues its impressive roll.
“First and foremost and forevermore it must be noted that Bears special teams guru Dave Toub can coach a return,” Jim Coffman writes in SportsTuesday. “Can he ever!
“It is hard to imagine a team putting together a better game’s worth of kick-receiving than did the Bears Sunday. It was the difference, plain and simple, in a game that otherwise would have been very close, no matter how much the defense (led by a great performance by Brown, Ogunleye and Anderson) bounced back in the second half and no matter how many points the offense scored.”
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“And now the expectations are back to ‘they suck and need a new manager’,” Marty Gangler writes in The Cub Factor. “I can totally handle that. It’s my comfort zone; my groove. I’m better off. Because expecting them to win is like waiting for the Christmas that never comes. Like what if you just know that Santa is going to bring you that new bike this year and you are super pumped. Your dad is dropping hints about how he talked to Santa around Thanksgiving and that they had a conversation about a certain chrome alloy frame and yellow mag wheels. And then Christmas morning your mom and dad decide that your family no longer celebrates holidays. It’s like that for Cub Fans. It’s the Christmas that never comes. But who knows, you’re dad might change his mind next year.”
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“Even if BYU pulls together for a run through TCU and the remainder of the schedule, they close the year at home with the Holy War,” Mike Luce writes in The College Football Report. “Yes, the BYU-Utah rivalry is known as The Holy War. That game will also be known as the 2009 Lock of the Year. Bet on the Mormons – you can’t lose.”
Elsewhere
* Colbert fails to make fun of Duncan.
* The Million-Dollar Mystery Candidate.
* Daley’s New Excuse.
What of Washington Park Now?
From Beachwood reader Michael O’Connor:
“I thought one of the most understated but effective rebukes to the Olympic hedgemony was in Blair Kamin’s column in the Sunday Tribune. He simply took the Green Line to 51st St. and described the immediate area near Washington Park. Then he posed a simple question: If Washington Park was a jewel of greenspace when designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead, why has it been allowed to decline so? Where, Mr. Mayor, is the pressure you put on private money to build Millennium Park on top of railroad yard and why won’t you do the same thing for this part of the city?”
From Kamin’s piece:
“On Wednesday, anticipating that Chicago might get the nod from the International Olympic Committee, I took the Chicago Transit Authority’s Green Line from the Loop down to the 51st Street station, a few blocks from the stadium site in Washington Park.
“The greeting I got there was not pretty: cracked sidewalks, broken glass, vacant lots strewn with trash, a couple of thriving businesses, like a crowded barbershop, but just as many boarded-up storefronts.
“If the Olympics had come to Chicago, there would have been a full court press to spruce up the area, just as Mayor Richard M. Daley pushed to give the Near West Side new parks, streets and housing, not to mention yard upon yard of imitation wrought-iron fencing, before the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
“Now, that station represents in microcosm the challenge confronting post-Olympics Chicago.”
Jack and Squat
* Here’s that SNL Obama skit that everyone is talking about.
The Silly Olympics
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Blameless.
Posted on October 6, 2009