By David Rutter
1. Todd Stroger, WTF?
What’s Chicago payoff politics coming to when embattled Cook County board chief Todd Stroger can’t even hire relatives of his embattled staff for fake jobs?
(All job titles under the purview of Stroger are now preceded by the standard rank of “embattled.”)
Todd was trying to unload $10 million in Homeland Security cash before the bell tolls and he is sent into the darkness. But the county jobs watchdog caught him.
One of the embattled recipients of Stroger’s largesse, Colin Longworth, didn’t even know what job he had “applied” for. He just applied – on the advice of a mysterious phone call he received from “somebody named Barry.”
Longworth is a former employee at CGC Communications, the public relations firm owned by Carla Oglesby, Stroger’s embattled deputy chief of staff.
Or at least we think he was a former employee. Longworth told the Sun-Times he wasn’t sure he actually ever worked for CGC.
As a representative of Chicago’s citizens, WTF demands more competence in our crooks.
2. Transformers 3, WTF?
If the entire Loop has to be shut down so a movie can be produced there, at least we can be proud this one is a cinematic classic.
WTF likes this SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT tipoff from EW.Com: “Taking an acute turn away from the quietly powerful chamber-drama plots of the previous two films, early photos indicate that much of Transformers 3: The Rise of the Vengeful Fallen’s Revenge will be about Shia LaBeouf cowering in the face of giant CGI robots making things go boom.”
Make that the embattled Shia LeBeouf.
3. Six Flags, WTF?
Unless a worse one comes along (and presuming manual chicken gender identification is eliminated from contention), WTF has found the worst job in the Chicago Metroplex.
Here are the components: It’s minimum wage. Natch. It’s 100 degrees outside. Figures. It’s at Six Flags. Where else? You have to wear a full body Porky Pig costume. No surprise there. Inside the suit it’s about 250 degrees. Hey, it’s Chicago in the summer.
It gets worse. Your co-workers hate you.
Six Flags employees Taras Sikalchuk, 20, and Dmytro Petrychenko,19 – we suspect they are undocumented immigrant spies from Minsk – went to the theme park on a day off Monday and, as the Porky Pig gig requires, Porky posed for candid photos with them.
Inspired by the moment, they beat the living beejeebers out of the unidentified woman inside the Porky Pig getup. (Ten to 15 blows – more punches, more fun?)
This woman actually had a day in which wearing a Porky Pig costume at Six Flags for minimum wage wasn’t the worst part of her job. W-T-Crying-Out-Loud-F.
More Porky Attack Facts
You knew there were more facts, didn’t you?
News editors everywhere couldn’t resist the compelling news value of a Warner Brothers cartoon character being beaten up. So the word went out the world over that mayhem had occurred in Gurnee. Jimmy Olsens everywhere revved up their Newsmobiles. On the Internet, it was bigger than the Afghanistan War.
The only person less happy Monday than the woman in the Porky uniform was Dr. Dmytro Petrychenko of Brooklyn. Until Monday night, he pretty much had that name citation to himself on Google. On Tuesday morning, he got only two of the first 250 hits. The rest went to the Porky bashers.
(An instant NBC5 poll found 35 percent of news-swilling respondents were “laughing” at the story; 27 percent were sad; 24 percent were furious and 11 percent could not tell exactly what they thought. The remaining 3 percent had no discernible brain wave activity.)
Most outlets included a color photo of Porky, in case you’d forgotten what he looked like.
Porky Pig, embattled.
4. American Idiots, WTF?
A recent Marist poll finds 26 percent of Americans don’t know what country the United States gained independence from. Another poll says 24 percent of Americans claim they are part of the Tea Party. Coincidence?
In another WTF check, a Bloomberg tally says 73 percent of Americans don’t want a ban on drilling for oil in the Gulf and that 20 percent believe the blowout leak was a freak accident and no one’s fault.
This logic defies WTF’s understanding of the term “freak accident” which, as we all know, means a traffic accident in which Billy Barty is run over by a cement truck being piloted by Lady GaGa.
5. Dick Cheney, WTF?
The one unfortunate side effect of the Left Ventricular Assistant Device lashed to Dick Cheney’s chest this week – besides the obvious one and I won’t dwell on the obvious – is that he will no longer have a pulse. Really. The gizmo “impels” the blood through his heart, and the heart valves don’t actually need to work. Also, he’s invisible when he looks into a mirror and has a very bad reaction to garlic.
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WTF Quote of the Week
“[Cheney] didn’t have a long period of time to exist without a fatal event.”
– Dr. Allan Stewart
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David Rutter is the former publisher/editor of the Lake County News-Sun, a Sun-Times Media property.
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Comments welcome.
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Previously in The Week in WTF:
* TWIWTF: Walter Jacobson, Mark Kirk, the Sun-Times
* TWIWTF: Conrad Murray, Jim Laski, Notre Dame Nation
* TWIWTF: Chris Zorich, Eddie and Jobo, Blago.
* TWIWTF: Burge, Zambrano, Tyree
* TWIWTF: The dumb media, LeBron James, Lake County prosecutors
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Also by David Rutter:
* The Lords of Ireland.
* Speaking of Notre Dame . . .
* Scheduling Notre Dame.
* Spade Robs Farley’s Grave.
* Gov. Fester.
* Black Talks, Zell Walks.
* Roeper’s Games.
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Plus:
* An excerpt from Rutter’s Olga’s War
Posted on July 16, 2010