Chicago -
By Steve Rhodes
1. The [Super Bowl] Papers.
2. CTA text messages the Chicago Journal would like to see, including:
there’s a guy drinking
miller high life on the train.
why doesn’t he just go to a bar,
JEESH! Uh oh. I think he’s touch-
ing himself in appropriately. oh
god. he’s looking right this way.
3. “Mayor Daley: Please make improving the CTA your priority.”
Posted on February 5, 2007
By Natasha Julius
Market Update
It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on the Civilization Exchange, and the news is not good. Despite a coordinated effort to defraud potential shareholders, Human futures plunged this week after strong data indicated the company might never cap its out-of-control expenses.
Posted on February 3, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
1. Expect a lot of penalties on Sunday. Why? Because Tony Corrente will be the ref.
2. Robbie Gould hates Pennsylvania.
3. From Brendon Ayanbadejo’s blog: “I get a lot of wardrobe questions which I find a bit weird. I guess I am a fashion mogul or something.”
4. Will logic beat Lovie?
(Thanks to our friends at Rivalfish.)
5. The Official Site of Bears Longsnapper Patrick Mannelly.
Posted on February 2, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
* If the Bears lose on Sunday, Jay Mariotti will:
A) Blame the Bears for partying too much while the Colts arrived late in an all-business mode.
B) Declare that Rex Grossman cannot be the starting QB when the season opens next year.
C) Blame Lovie Smith for failing to make adjustments and suggest the team let him go to Dallas.
If the Bears win on Sunday, Mariotti will:
A) Credit the Bears for staying loose and enjoying the ride while the Colts arrived late in an all-business mode and played tight.
B) Proclaim Grossman the franchise.
C) Castigate Bears management for not locking up Lovie within minutes of the victory.
* Here’s something that Indianapolis can do that we can’t.
* Fun with Photoshop.
* Funny how no one questions the value of experience when it comes to quarterbacking a professional football team, but when it comes to the presidency . . .
* Big endorsements are on the line for several Bears players. The Beachwood investigates.
* Kass in Miami with Mayor Loco.
Posted on February 1, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
“Coach, this team, the ’85 Bears, that’s a team. These men have never quit giving to this town. They’re responsible for 389 restaurant bars, 219 sports-talk shows and 741 DUIs.”
– From a Superfans script written by Robert Smigel last year that never made it on air, as reported by Greg Couch of the Sun-Times.
* Super Bowl halftime performer Prince is going to be 50 next year. Shouldn’t he be a Duke or Baron by now? Rick Kaempfer and Dave Stern suggest some other age-appropriate name changes, including Iron Butterfly to Iron Lung, Journey to Cruise, and The Who to Who’s Left?
* Colts president Jim Irsay’s political donations.
* Dos and Donts for Super Bowl Sunday, in Eric Emery’s Blue & Orange Kool-Aid Report.
* The Sun-Times wants photos of other Chicagoans named Lovie, and other stories the media will use to fill the remaining days until the big game.
Posted on January 31, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
“Well, we’re halfway through the two-week Super Bowl hype orgy, with media from around the world grinding away so hard they ought to be administered lube,” the Tribune reports.
Whoa!
That’s in the Tribune?
Circulation must be really bad.
* Our approach to discussing how the media will occupy itself until the actual game.
* “The media are making a big deal out of Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy becoming the first African American head coaches in the Super Bowl. Good. It provides the perfect contrast to an untold story about the media,” writes the Tribune‘s Ed Sherman.
“In a sport where more than 60 percent of the players are African American, there never has been an African American analyst in the booth for a Super Bowl.”
* “Bears Play Underdog Card, But They Were Favored In 16 Of 18 Games.”
* “Pines Die and Bears Feel It.”
Blue’s Clues
You can now start your O’Hare delay early on the Blue Line.
“The problems on the Blue Line illustrate how slow, unreliable and inconvenient taking the L has become for riders on almost every line,” Monifa Thomas reports in the Sun-Times.
Daley’s CTA
“Only Mayor Richard M. Daley can save the train system,” Crain’s implores in an editorial. “So far, he’s mostly ignored the deterioration of service as trains swell with downtown office workers commuting from the gentrifying neighborhoods of the North and Northwest sides — a predictable side effect of the middle-class renaissance he worked so hard to foster.”
Posted on January 30, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
* Bears Super Bowl victory headline neither Chicago paper will be willing to use: “Crown Their Ass!”
* More likely Indy victory headline after Adam Vinateiri kicks the game-winning field goal as time runs out: “Money!”
* The city’s best Bears coverage, all week in Beachwood Sports:
1. Lessons and observations in a Top Ten season review.
2. The Bears are in the Super Bowl. Emery tries to wrap his head around it. In The Blue & Orange Kool-Aid Report.
3. Super Bowl Shuffling.
4. What the NFL taught us this year. In Over/Under.
Posted on January 29, 2007
By Natasha Julius
Numbers Game
President Bush this week sought to quell broad-based congressional resistance to his current Iraq plan. Using a new statistical model, Bush now says the actual number of U.S. troops, casualties, and Iraqi insurgents is considerably lower than first estimated. For that reason, he contends, it should be no problem to send 20,000 more soldiers to the beleaguered battlegrounds, and maybe toss a few bones Afghanistan’s way too.
Posted on January 26, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
1. Why Bears fans without Super Bowl tickets won’t be able to watch the game at Soldier Field either.
2. Not everyone is in love with the Tribune‘s proposed teen-driving legislation.
3. “A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps,” the president said in his State of the Union addresss Tuesday night. “Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them. And it would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.”
Yeah . . .. bringing you the Peace Corps, except without the peace part.
– Scott Buckner
4. The Daily Southtown‘s Kristen McQueary has the solution to the county budget mess: a nepotism tax.
5. Make it stop.
Posted on January 26, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
“For one night at least, President Bush drew more TV viewers than American Idol,” the Tribune reports.
Which just confirms viewers are tuning in to see people making fools of themselves.
Affirmative Action
As explained by Mary Mitchell this morning in a column about Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy, affirmative action and diversity programs – run right – have nothing to do with hiring and promoting people who are unqualified to do their jobs. That’s what patronage machines are for.
Affirmative action is about overcoming still ever-present barriers to give everyone – everyone – the fair shot they deserve.
It’s a well-observed fact of the sports world, for example, that the same white coaches and managers always seem to find jobs, often despite records of failure, while minorities are often given only token consideration at best.
As referenced by Mitchell, the “Rooney Rule”in the NFL requires teams with head coaching vacancies to interview at least one minority. And you know what? It’s not as if there is only one decent minority candidate for each vacancy.
Posted on January 25, 2007
