By Steve Rhodes
1. Jay Mariotti is back from his long, post-fag vacation with a hefty new contract in hand. Terms were not disclosed, but if someone knows where to place him on this salary chart, let me know.
2. Jay Mariotti’s Wikipedia entry.
3. I wonder how much of this reaction broke down along racial lines.
4. “The Downside of Upscale.”
5. “Ozzie Guillen has been upset that at key times this year his World Champion White Sox have failed to lay down a sacrifice bunt when needed. In the last couple of weeks he has set up his ‘Bunting School,’ where selected players take extra bunting practice on a daily basis,” asks Acta Sports, publisher of The Bill James Handbook and Twelve Stories Of Finding God At The Old Ball Park. “Is it true that his team has struggled, or are the White Sox really not that bad when it comes to getting down a good sacrifice bunt?”
6. “Saddam Hussein is a terrible person, he is a threat to his own people. I think his people would be better off with a different leader, but there is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam Hussein got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting in the wings to hold popular elections. (Laughter.) You’re going to get – guess what – probably another Saddam Hussein. It will take a little while for them to paint the pictures all over the walls again – (laughter) – but there should be no illusions about the nature of that country or its society. And the American people and all of the people who second-guess us now would have been outraged if we had gone on to Baghdad and we found ourselves in Baghdad with American soldiers patrolling the streets two years later still looking for Jefferson. ”
– Colin Powell, in a 1992 press briefing as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush, spotted at Nathan Bierma’s Notebook
7. Best of the Beachwood/July 2006: BBQ Talking Points.
8. Unicycle hockey.
9. “Texas Figured Out (For Now) How To Fix School Funding; When Will We?
10. “In 1995, Catalyst Chicago reported that Mayor Richard M. Daley and his takeover team had used their new power over the city’s public schools to fix budget deficits, pay for teacher raises, build new schools and launch new programs – all during the summer break.
“What a difference three months make,” Catalyst observed. Fast forward to today. How much of a difference have 10 years made?
“Signs of progress abound, for sure. As the numbers in this district report card will show, test scores are up, high school graduation rates are up, first-year teachers are less likely to leave and new schools are popping up all over town. In some areas, more middle-class families are enrolling their children – a trend that has long topped the mayor’s wish list.
“But the burning question is: Have those years made enough of a difference? Teacher turnover in high-poverty schools is getting worse. One of every three high school students drops out. More than half of all children still do not meet academic standards.
“Simply put, we’ve got a long, long way to go. On the nation’s only common measure of school performance, low-income students in seven urban districts outscored Chicago.
“With so many programs spread over hundreds of schools each – reading coaches, probation sanctions, half-day preschools, high school redesign, Renaissance 2010 – it is difficult to see where Chicago Public Schools will gain traction in the years ahead.
“Chicago might be further along if, like Boston, it concentrated on improving smaller groups of schools, turning them into models that others would emulate. In school reform, quality is what counts.”
11. Who Cut The Cheese: A Cultural History Of The Fart. Explore Similar Items.
12. “Would You Let These Guys Pick Out The Front Page?” At the Aurora Beacon-News, the answer is Yes.
13. “Business Doubts Daley: Big-Box Defeat Shows Corporate Honchos Need New Friends At City Hall.”
– “Aldermen wanted our attention,” says Greg Baise, president and CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association. “They got it, no question about it.”
– “There is a paradigm shift,” says Gerald Roper, president and CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. “We will have to do business differently. We learned our lesson.”
– “For most of his tenure, Mr. Daley pretty much has represented one-stop shopping for business leaders. He crossed them on a few matters, most notably the closure of Meigs Field. But generally he has been viewed as on their side, coming across with millions in tax-increment financing dollars for new building projects, collaborating on a massive expansion plan for O’Hare International Airport, and dishing out incentives for Boeing Co. and United Airlines to move their headquarters to the city. In turn, business responded with open wallets when the mayor needed money for Millennium Park and other projects.”
– “A spokeswoman for Mr. Daley says, ‘The mayor remains pro-business. The mayor has always welcomed those who want to get on that bus with him.'”
Is there really such a thing as anti-business?
14. “What Is Racism?” Mary Mitchell has opened the dialogue.
15. Nepotism is bad.
16. As of this writing, Eric Zorn’s post about Mancow joining Chicago Tonight had garnered 91 comments.
17. Trolley-Man.
18. Don’t let the Chicago City Council see this.
19. “Barns and Nobles is the most successful medieval farming roleplaying game, played by millions of teenage nerds worldwide.”
20. “[From Beirut to Jerusalem] is still . . . the bible for
understanding that part of the world.”
– Tim Russert, introducing interview guest and the book’s author, Tom Friedman
I thought the Bible was the bible for . . . oh, nevermind.
– Tim Willette
21. “I wrote a column endorsing CAFTA – I didn’t even
know what was in it. I only knew two words: free trade.”
– Tom Friedman
22. “I think most people in baseball expected the White Sox might drop off here. That certainly looks like that’s going to happen. We’ve just got to find a way to probably get around the Yankees and the Red Sox, that sort of thing, the wild-card thing.”
– Former Minnesota Twins manager Tom Kelly, who still consults for the club
23. “Hey, why not have ‘Cow do the pledge drive?!? Put him on during the same time as the skin infomercial, maybe he can talk shop with the woman. I think WTTW could win awards for excellence in public broadcasting with that line-up!”
– posted by Jim Scanlan on the WTTW message boards
24. Chief Whigham.
25. “The NORAD operations centre in Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain, as iconic a symbol of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall or Peter Sellers’s portrayal of Dr. Strangelove, is being placed in mothballs,” reports the Toronto Globe and Mail.
“Chiselled out of granite in the 1960s by the North American Aerospace Defence Command, the 1.8-hectare facility has long been at the heart of the U.S.-Canada joint early-warning system for nuclear war, as well as the stuff of thriller films such as WarGames, the 1983 movie starring Matthew Broderick.
“The 15 steel buildings inside the centre are mounted on 1,319 massive springs to absorb the shock from a nuclear blast. The entrance is protected by steel blast doors weighing 25 tonnes, which were last closed after the terrorist attack of Sept 11, 2001.
“But times have changed, and defending North America from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles is no longer the No. 1 ‘threat du jour.'”
26. “WarGames: Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy star on Saturday, July 29th at 9PM ET/PT and Sunday, July 30th at 9PM ET/PT. When a young hacker (Broderick) taps into the government’s computer, he unleashes much more than just a game – he starts a global thermonuclear war. ”
I must have seen the “happy ending” version where global thermonuclear war is narrowly averted.
– Tim Willette
27. Hillary Clinton panders for the Beachwood vote .
28. Illinois debate organizers ask candidates to please refrain from debating.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Solar-powered.
Posted on August 1, 2006