Chicago Pols React to Obama Nobel Prize

Obama: Can you believe they gave me the friggin' Nobel Peace Prize?

Daley: I wish I could get in on a deal like that!!

Blagojevich: That thing's fuckin' golden!!

Obama to GM: Bring Back the Chevy Vega

As everyone knows by now, General Motors has ceased to exist as a privately owned company. Having succumbed to the siren song of free taxpayer bailout money, it's now effectively owned by the UAW and the federal government.

That means that the people who so efficiently deliver your mail are now in the business of providing you with GM automotive offerings.

So it should come as no great surprise that one of the first federal dictates to the once world leader in car production, is to bring back the Chevy Vega.

For those too young to remember the Vega was GM's response to the American consumer's fascination with gas sipping small cars during the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s.

When gas prices soared as a result of the OPEC oil embargo (their response to US backing for its Israeli client during the 1973 Middle East War) GM went right ahead producing it enormous, lumbering gas-guzzlers. US Consumers then began buying small German Volkswagens, and previously unheard of little cars with funny names like Toyota, Datsun, Honda and Mazda.

GM's response to this unforseen development was the Chevy Vega.

It was a small subcompact with a revolutionary new all aluminum engine bloc design. In fact it was so revolutionary, that the engine would not contain the lubricants and flammable fuels that non-revolutionary engines normally contain.

As a result, the Chevy Vega's engines had an unhappy tendency to spontaneously burst on fire.

You could be driving along the Edens Expressway at 55 mph in your Vega and -- poof-- your engine would bust into flame.

Aside from its revolutionary engineering qualities, the Vega was a very ugly car.

It had kind of a pointy front end that reminded one a bit of Groucho Marx's nose. Perhaps this was intended by the GM car designers, because, after all, the Vega was a colossal joke.

It seemed to be available in two principal colors-- puke green and taco sauce burnt orange. This was someone at GM's idea of being hip.

But the Chevy Vega did get very good gas mileage. Of course it's kind of easy to get good gas mileage when your car is always hitched to the back end of a tow truck.

So eventually, things settled down in the Middle East, gas declined a bit in price and GM phased out the Vega and went back to producing its gas guzzling monstrosities.

The only one of my childhood friends to ever buy a Vega was an Italian kid named Jimmy. He knew absolutely nothing about cars and bought one of the ghastly burnt orange models. He is now an attorney for the IRS.

Any day now I expect to hear that he has been transferred to another branch of the federal government to oversee the production lines of the revolutionary new Vega II.

Why not?

And I have an idea for the ad campaign:

The Chevy Vega II
--- A car we can believe in.

And the driver will get into the front seat and just hope that it starts for a change.

Car Repo Biz Booming in West Rogers Park/Lincolnwood

Last night, while quietly bicycling to the Rogers Park School park, mini-bikepath, I ran into an unusual occurrence. A Honda mini-van being repo-ed on the 2700 block of Chase Avenue.

This would have been considered aberrant for, usually sedate, West Rogers Park in more normal times --and and certainly for affluent Lincolnwood. But is apparently becoming a part of the social fabric during the new Obamanation.

I ran into an interesting fellow, named Elijah, who was as burly as the monstrous diesel-fueled tow truch that he was using to effect the bank repossession of the vehicle.

Eli -- as he called himself, was a scary looking, enourmously rotund, yet wildly muscular fellow. The sort of which would readily qualify for a WWE wrestling bout.

His closely cropped hair, earring and menacing body tattoos (one of which was the famous Grateful Dead's icon of a pot-smoking, rolling paper advertisement) made you think that this was surely the kind of guy that you would definitely want on your side in a free-for-all bar fight.

(Memo to self: Get Eli to go barhoppping with you next time you go to Wells St. or to Madison, WI. publick houses. And guarantee to pay for all his booze.)

But aside from looking menacing, he was a very articulate fellow. He apprised me as to the astounding rate at which bank repossession of cars is now occurring in even, usually solid neighborhoods like West Rogers Park, Chicago, Lincolnwood, IL and even posh, Sauganash, Chicago.

Eli apprised me that he was a native of West Rogers Park, a grad of St. Gertrude's School and Mather -- and seldom had had calls to perform his trade in his old neighborhood.

But on this night, he politely apprised the African-American, new and probably, sub-prime-mortgage, affirmative-action homeowner on Chase Ave., that he had legal and lawful papers for the banks repo of his Honda mini-van. Eli told me that the man was in the process of bank foreclosure on his newly acquired home.

The African-American gentleman asked Eli for a copy of the repo notice for his files. Eli demurred, saying it was not part of their standard repo procedure, but I intervened and said, "What the hell, Eli, let the poor guy make a copy for his files."

He did.

Eli apprised me that it was weird for repos to occur in areas like this, and even in Lincolnwood -- of all places.

More amusing details on that in tomorrow's piece, which will be entitled:

"Eli's coming,
hide your car girl,
Eli's coming
hide your car"

Until Tomorrow, when I'll have some rather amusing tales to relate as to Eli's re-po's of some really crazy charachters in West Roger's Park and his wild adventures re-poing a short-bed pickup truck from a family of Gypsy homeowners in Licolnwood.

I am just relating what he reported.

I am not making this stuff up.

It is too weaird for words.

But nothing should surpirse in the Brave New Obamanation.

This is, after all, Obama's Chicago.