Chicago -
By Stephanie B. Goldberg
1. Memo to the Farrelly Brothers: After you’re done with your Three Stooges biopic starring Sean Penn as Larry, could you please remake Whatever Happened to Baby Jane with Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff?
2. I bet you thought I was going to take a shot at Blago’s talk radio debut.
Nah, too easy.
Posted on March 27, 2009
By The Beachwood Bid Bureau
With news that Chicago’s Olympic bid has fallen to last place in GamesBids.com’s BidIndex, the Beachwood Bid Bureau did some digging and dialing and learned that the city ought to seriously consider each of the following if it wants to get its bid back on track.
* Fire Jody Weis. Even the IOC doesn’t like him.
* Put Eddie Vrdolyak in charge. The IOC likes his style; plus it’s always nice to have a judge or two in your pocket.
* Re-hire Al Sanchez. And put him in charge of trash, alleys and rats. But not personnel.
* Green-light cameras. Red-light cameras are just too negative.
Posted on March 23, 2009
By Stephanie B Goldberg
1. When incompetents get millions for contributing nothing of value to the economy, I really get steamed. Of course, I’m referring to this.
2. No, Rihanna is not in talks to star in The Bodyguard. She could sure use one, though.
3. Remember, back in the day, when the whole family would gather round the piano and sing. Actually, I don’t either but that’s beside the point. These days, no family event is complete without a rousing, multi-generational YouTube session, preferably one featuring Granny busting a few Soulja Boy moves.
And if you don’t have a Granny, you can always rent one for the occasion.
Posted on March 20, 2009
By J.J. Tindall
BLACK SPRING
I forgot I love you.
There was a star
Above your manger
And I followed it to the Empty Bottle.
Mammals re-emerged from the air-raid shelters
Toward the buzz drone ragas
Posted on March 19, 2009
By The Media PR Group
Any editorial comment or mention that you may give this press release would be greatly appreciated.
E-CIG, A MANUFACTURER OF ELECTRONIC CIGARETTES, RELEASES NEW INNOVATIVE PRODUCT LINE DESPITE A RECENT NASTY PATENT INFRINGEMENT LAWSUIT
LAS VEGAS, NV – Following a tiresome patent infringement lawsuit, E-Cig says it is moving on with new innovative electronic cigarette products. The company has been battling to protect its product line after a manufacturer called Ruyan took the company to court over patent rights in February 2009.
Unfortunately, following the lawsuit Ruyan released statements that E-Cig was ordered to never manufacture or market its electronic cigarettes again. E-Cig has denied these claims in a statement found on the company’s official Web site.
Posted on March 18, 2009
By David Rutter
When the members of the clans McGlone and McCrystal disembarked in New York in the middle 1870s, they strode through the front door like Irish emperors.
They had come packed jowl to flank in the belly of a sailing steamer. They carried their pride inside them, clutched to their souls, for they all had come from lives they would never seek to reprise and from which escape seemed the only sane course.
They chose that particular method of entry because swimming from Ireland would have been far less efficient and they were more or less legal.
That is, they had papers from Victoria’s government not only granting, but pretty much catapulting, their exit from The Sod.
American laws and regulations had no apparent argument against it.
And so they were here.
Posted on March 17, 2009
Dear Sears Tower:
Don’t let the sky scrape your ass on the way out. There is only one downside to your imminent renaming: Sears Tower by any other name is still Sears Tower.
My antipathy toward you is two-fold. I despise the craven avarice of your former corporate master, and aesthetically, I loathe your every I-beam.
If only there was one single aspect of you which I did not despise, I could easily work up some feeling for this passing piece of Chicago history. Normally my nostalgia knows no bounds. Two of the chairs in my dining room are seats from the original Comiskey Park. I eat my breakfast cereal every day with a spoon I stole from the Berghoff about 20 years ago. It has “The Berghoff” written in a graceful script on the handle. I still miss the Magikist sign at 85th and the Dan Ryan, which I rank right up there with the Water Tower. It was prettier, too. It glowed red.
Posted on March 16, 2009
By Stephanie B Goldberg
1. Yesterday we learned that the naming rights to the once-tallest building in the world have been acquired by George and Weezie Jefferson’s next door neighbors.
2. Bernie Madoff wants you to know that he is terribly sorry he embezzled $173 billion – an amount exceeding the GDP of 139 countries – and that he won’t do anything dishonest again. Unless, of course, the opportunity presents itself.
Posted on March 13, 2009
By Steve Rhodes
Weep not for the newspaper industry. As Bob Dylan might say, now is not the time for your tears.
Sure, the Rocky Mountain News is dead and the San Francisco Chronicle is on the ropes. I’m sorry. I am. But as Michael Miner said at a Chicago Headline Club get-together last week, newspapers have been dying my whole life.
When I was growing up, we had four dailies in Minneapolis-St. Paul. I lived through the death of two of them – the afternoon Minneapolis Star and St. Paul Dispatch. The Star was the best of the lot, the paper that inspired me.
And, of course, those of you who grew up in Chicago had even more dailies to choose from.
In fact, when I got out of college in the late 80s and began looking for a job, I found that newspapers were shutting down nearly en masse. The afternoon papers were dying, morning papers were consolidating, and hiring freezes were endemic.
Even then I might have wondered, Why are there fewer papers every year? But then, A.J. Liebling asked that in 1949.
Now is not the time to weep over our fallen comrades. Now is the time to celebrate, because we finally have something to replace those dead newspapers. We finally have the Internet.
Consider:
Posted on March 10, 2009
By Stephanie B Goldberg
1. I always thought of my brain as flypaper for salacious gossip, but the thought of dull, bespectacled CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin knocking up the daughter of dull, bespectacled former CNN analyst Jeff Greenfield just makes my head hurt. Daddy issues much? Or more of a CNN thing?
2. Just think: If Jimmy Fallon had received more attention from his parents as a child, we’d all be watching Late Night with Horatio Sanz. (And when I say all of us, I mean the entire Home Depot cleaning crew at store No. 326 in Laporte, Indiana.)
Posted on March 7, 2009
