Dear Illinois Legislators Considering a Chicago Casino:

I don’t object to funding society with money raised from the state-sponsored addiction of wretched citizens blowing their next child support or mortgage payments on their next fix. Gambling, in other words. But this Chicago casino idea you’re batting around . . . I just don’t know.
Really, it’s not the gambling that bothers me, per se. The case can be made that, since addictions are often genetically-based, they can’t be stamped out – so we may as well make hay while administrative assistants and salesmen squander their meager paychecks on riverboats.
As the gambling lobby points out, riverboat customers contribute to the surrounding economy. After a long day on the water yanking slot machine handles, anyone who left their children strapped securely in their car seats will be much more likely to treat the little tykes to a Happy Meal. Who wants to cook when you’ve lost all the grocery money?

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Posted on October 23, 2007

Dear Washlet Company:

Who knew there could be anything more annoying in this benighted world than the classic 70s yellow smiley face? Yet that phenomenon does exist: your ads for the Washlet.
As anyone who has looked at any website in the past few months knows, Washlet ads feature physically fit, mostly female butts with a smiley face drawn on them. They look like pages out of a very staid porno magazine that’s been found by some kids with magic markers. One keeps hoping to see a beard, glasses or big nose scrawled on these posteriors as well, but no – it’s always the irritating smiley faces and your vaguely menacing motto, “Clean is happy.” Are you sure you didn’t get that out of Animal Farm?

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Posted on October 4, 2007

Dear Children’s Museum:

Look, I hate Navy Pier as much as the next guy. I don’t blame you for deciding to blow that joint. You’re probably tired of the insane parking rates.
However, I am puzzled by the widely-promulgated theory that the Children’s Museum must move to Grant Park, and only Grant Park. I gather from your supporters that if you are prevented from building an approximately 100,000 square foot, largely subterranean new museum on the site of Daley Bicentennial Plaza in Grant Park, all hell will break loose.
The children of Chicago will be irrevocably harmed, perhaps forced to snack on lead paint chips and play exclusively with recalled toys made in China. A mob of uppity rich people from East Randolph and the developing Lakeshore East will wrest control of Grant Park in a bloody midnight coup, keeping the rest of us at bay by waving hundreds of The Best Flaming Torch from Hammacher Schlemmer.
No, I’m sorry. I’m just not feeling it. You’ve successfully turned the narrative of this issue, as the spin doctors would say, into “poor children of Chicago versus rich selfish high-rise dwellers.” Mayor Daley got in on it too at a Monday press conference with one of his trademark nutty rants, no doubt hoping to steer attention away from the CTA. “You mean you don’t want children from the city in Grant Park?” he demanded. “Why? Are they black?”
However, to buy into that scenario, one must believe some manifestly untrue points:

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Posted on September 18, 2007

Dear Fellow Parents Planning Birthday Parties:

For several years, my younger daughter has been invited annually to a friend’s birthday party at The Four Seasons. The one on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, just to be clear. One year the invitation was an inscribed blue ball, approximately one foot in diameter, with the stamps slapped right on it. I still can’t believe the post office delivered it. They must have mistaken it for junk mail, the only thing that reliably makes it to our mailbox. Of course, the ball didn’t fit in the mailbox; we found it on the front steps.
Anyway, every year a big group of giggling girls takes over the hotel’s restaurant before moving on to the Four Seasons pool, eventually hopping into Gold Coast horse carriages and returning for a slumber party in a Four Seasons suite. The contents of the goody bag are inevitably worth more than my iPod mini and all the music downloaded onto it.

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Posted on July 24, 2007

Dear Eric Zorn and Rich Miller:

Mind if I pick the scab off your discussion of good versus evil in the world of editors? I’d like to dig a bit deeper before a final dab of Neosporin is applied.
To recap, Rich is best known for his authoritative political newsletter and blog chronicling Illinois state government, The Capitol Fax. He now also writes an Op-Ed column for the Sun-Times. Eric is a veteran metro columnist at the Tribune and pioneered columnist blogging there – his is now called Change of Subject.
Last week, Rich noted on his blog that Sun-Times Editorial Page Editor Steve Huntley is shifting positions to concentrate on his own column. According to Rich, Steve Huntley “has been a great editor – meaning he approved all my column ideas and never touched my copy.”
Eric responded in his own blog that he believes “a great editor is not just a middleman with a rubber stamp.”

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Posted on July 10, 2007

Dear Lake Forest:

Can’t we all just get along? You have to admit it’s ironic when an exclusive, wealthy suburb passes a rule to exclude even many of its own wealthy citizens. I refer, of course, to the new Lake Forest beach protocol so interestingly reported in the Chicago Tribune by Susan Kuczka, which restricts about a quarter of the mile-long beach to adults only. Even the children of Lake Forest, it seems, are not good enough for Lake Forest.

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Posted on June 26, 2007

What the hell is wrong with you? And I don’t mean your prostate cancer.
Did you really think everyone in town would simply accept that you’d be gone for three weeks for a “routine medical procedure” – and no one could know why because it was “personal” and “private”?
Apparently that’s exactly what you thought, or your people wouldn’t have stonewalled the press until Sun-Times reporters found out about your cancer from other sources.
Thoughtful long-term planning is obviously not your strong suit. Still, let’s consider the implications of your strategy. By your logic, mayors, governors and senators could be mysteriously disappearing right and left for secret face lifts, tummy tucks, breast enlargement, and you-know-what enlargement. (I presume since you consider “prostate” too embarrassing to say out loud,you would positively cringe at the other word that begins with ‘p’.)

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Posted on June 20, 2007

Dear Alderman Natarus:

Thank you for not speaking to me for an entire year when I was writing a column for the Sun-Times, often centering on the Chicago City Council. Truthfully, I can’t remember exactly what I wrote to prompt such an uncharacteristic response from you. But I do know there were many at City Hall who wished they knew my secret.

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Posted on May 10, 2007

Dear Paul McCartney On The Occasion Of Your Latest Release:

Please, just stop.
I’m considering putting my children into foster care and devoting my life to a relentless study of quantum physics for the single purpose of developing a time machine, so I can travel back to 1982 and deliver this message before you record “Ebony and Ivory.”
We must, however, face a cataclysmic possibility: I may not succeed. So I beg you, begin the damage control which is now sadly necessary to preserve your musical reputation for future generations

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Posted on May 2, 2007

Dear New Skin Cancer Specialist:

You had me at “You will get skin cancer. You were born to get skin cancer.”
I can’t say “You had me at hello” because you never actually said that. When you walked into the exam room, I said “Hi” and you declared, “I’m going to cut you today!” – in a very friendly, cheerful way. I enjoyed your slight accent. I couldn’t quite place it, but from your pale complexion I’m guessing somewhere Nordic. I’m also assuming that “I’m going to cut you today” isn’t slang for “hello” in your native tongue. If it is, then you did have me at hello, after all.

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Posted on April 17, 2007