Hey Queen -- How Do Ya Like Chicago So Far?

While riding on the MWRD bike path near Evanston on this past beautiful Sunday afternoon, I ran into a very nice girl from the North of England. While riding astride for a mile or more, we chatted about the odd British propensity for class consciousness, the Falkland's Island war, the impending demise of the British Labour Party, George Orwell, Patrick Pearse and sundry other matters that quite appealed to my Anglophilic disposition.

I found it telling that she, English born, was riding an American-made Trek, while I, Chicago born, owned a Nottingham, England-made Raleigh.

But it got me thinking about the English in Chicago.

There is a rich tradition of English and English-American involvement in Chicago, but it has been largely overshadowed by the much more populous subsequent waves of immigration.

The first Mayor of Chicago was a total WASP named William Butler Ogden.

He traveled here from New York in 1835, because his nincompoop brother-in-law had sunk $100 k as a real estate investment into swampy, onion field land alongside Lake Michigan in a place called Chicago.

Ogden came here to sell off the deeds for anything he could possibly get for them -- pennies on the dollar, if need be.

He was amazed when after selling merely 1/3 of the holdings he had already recouped all of the investment. The WASPs were sharpies back then, and Ogden bought as much Chicago real estate as he could possibly get his hands on, sold it, became a de-facto billionaire by today's standards, decided to hang around and was elected Chicago's first mayor.

The Brits entered the picture again in 1871. After the Great Chicago fire devastated the city, Queen Victoria ("we are not amused") was anguished at word that the great Chicago library was destroyed and at her own initiative, scoured Britain for books to send to Chicago to rebuild its library collection.

That was nice of the old girl.

Fast forward to 1920.

That was when Chicago had its last Republican mayor, Big Bill Thompson.

Today Republicans like to claim moral superiority over the corrupt Democrat machine (as well they can -- but it's easy to be as pure as the driven snow when you have no boodle to pass around) but back then the GOP machine were total crooks.

Big Bill's chief financial backer was a well known Chicago philanthropist by the name of Al Capone.

Enough said.

But by 1920, waves of Irish and Germans had descended upon Chicago (my ancestors on both sides included) and had become the dominant electoral cohort in the city.

The Micks and the Krauts were not at all favorably disposed toward the British Limeys.

Big Bill knew which side his electoral bread was buttered on, so in 1920, when King George V of the House of Windsor was touring the US, Mayor Thompson told him to stay the hell out of his city.

When a reporter asked Big Bill what he would do if George V decided to come to Chicago anyway, Mayor Thompson said, "If King George sets one foot in Chicago, I'll punch him in the snoot."

The King stayed away. Big Bill was re-elected.

Fast forward to 1959.

Then the child-Queen, Elizabeth II, only 33 at the time, came to Chicago to celebrate the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which linked Chicago and ports in the British Dominion of Canada with the Atlantic Ocean.

When the Queen was alighting her ship in the port of Chicago, a throng of gruff, boozy, Chicago newsmen gathered around her and began shouting questions.

When she had been ashore no more than a minute or two, one of the paunchy, red-nosed scribes yelled out, "Hey Queen!! Howdya like Chicaguh so far???"

Not, "Your Royal Highness, what are your thoughts upon coming to Chicago?"

But "Hey Queen!! Howdya like Chicaguh so far???

The answer is lost to history.

But the question and questioner will be long remembered.

Is this an amusing place, or what?

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!!

Daley's Disposable Tropical Palm Trees

(This was first posted in October. But as we wade thru snowdrifts this morning and contemplate below zero wind chill temps tonight, it may comfort us to know that a few short months ago, our City government was giving us a taste of the tropics -- by planting expensive tropical plants in our parks -- which they then, proceeded to throw away as the climate became inhospitable.)

Chicagoans awoke this morning to the news that their city government has been hard at work conjuring up new ways to regulate their behavior and pick their pockets at the same time.

Three new possible fines to contemplate.

First, if some neighborhood Mrs. Kravitz doesn't like the sound of your dog's barking, you can now be fined up to $250 a day.

And now if you get caught idling your diesel truck or car for more than 3 minutes, you'll get slapped with a $250 fine.

And now, if you should wander within 50 feet of the entrance of an abortion mill and someone complains, you're out 500 bucks.

The city needs revenue, you see.

It isn't bad enough that the cost of parking on a city street now costs the equivalent of many monthly car payments. Daley needs cash and fast.

That's why the libraries are going to shorten their hours and why the parks now charge the equivalent of a 6 month health club membership fee for city kids to join their organized play activities.

So why then is the Mayor planting expensive, exotic tropical foliage on the public ways?

He actually had contractors plant palm trees right here in the Chicago arctic zone. Palm trees that are now, with the onset of winter, being ripped up and tossed away.

I am not making this up.

Palm trees!!!!

In Chicago parks!!!!

At the very corner of Lincoln Avenue and Peterson, at the entrance to Legion Park, with its grand gateway fountain, there is today a hugh gaping mound of dirt where yesterday stood a tropical palm tree and ancillary tropical foliage.

I met a nice old woman who was walking her somewhat overweight dachshund there and her cat (don't ask) and she reported to me that the crew that removed the tropical tree asked her if she wanted it for her home.

Since it stood at least 20 feet high and since she does not have a living room to rival Marie Antoinette's chambers at Versailles, she politely declined.

So it looks as if the disposable tropical foliage was just tossed into a wood chipper.

I asked my horticulturalist friend, Kathy, what a palm tree like that and the assorted other exotic foliage might cost, and she reckoned that it would be at least several thousand dollars wholesale. So with the city's purchasing acumen involved, you can bet that it was at least ten grand or more.

And just what are we doing planting equatorial foliage a full 42 degrees North of the equator?

Didn't anyone mention to the geniuses at the Chicago Park District that it has a wee tendency to get cold in Chicago?

And where else in Chicago did palm trees go up this summer?

I have seen them outside the concession stand at the Oak Street beach. Where else?

Maybe Daley & Co. got so carried away with Olympic fever that they thought they would rival Rio by planting Brazilian tropical plants.

At any rate, the city enforcement mavens and fine collectors had better get busy finding those noisy dogs and idling diesels so we can afford to make our parks look like Pago Pago and Tahiti again next year.

Or maybe like Rio.

Mama Mia! ABBA and Donna Summer for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame?

I seldom have expended many of my ever-declining number of brain cells pondering the machinations of the Rock ' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

I thought of it once back in '86 upon hearing reports that it was founded -- principally as an effort by the Cleveland city fathers to repair their fair city's image as "The mistake by the lake."

Cleveland was then largely known as the city whose waterways actually caught fire due to the massive quantities of flammable liquids that they had been dumping in them -- and as the city whose NFL football team snuck out in the middle of the night to move to greener pastures in greater metropolitan Baltimore.

I thought of it again around '93, when a 20-something, rock fan couple who were taking care of my dog told me that they were making a weekend pilgrimage there.

Since then the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame happily subsided to the margins of my consciousness.

That is until this week, when my spies reported to me that ABBA and Donna Summer were the favorites for induction to the hall for 2010.

ABBA were rockers!!??

Donna Summer, the disco queen, a rocker!!??

To put this in perspective, when I was an undergrad, ABBA began saturating the AM airwaves with their ear candy. As sophisticate collegiate rock connaisseurs we considered them laughably juvenile.

After all, this was a time when the Beatles were still churning out formidable solo albums. Mick Jagger was just beginning to really hit his groove. Dylan was still seriously composing. The Moody Blues were in search of the lost chord. And for the kinkier types on campus, Lou Reed was taking a walk on the wild side.

Into this rich, genuinely rock ' roll context strolled 2 very hot Swedish babes and their 2 geeky-looking male consorts, with "Honey, Honey." That single was very big among the pre-pubescent crowd. They liked it because its bubblegum quality seriously rivalled that of Boyce and Hart and the 1910 Fruitgum Company and perhaps the early Monkees.

But no serious (and admittedly pretentious) college rock fan took ABBA even vaguely seriously.

Then, throughout our undergrad years, ABBA was everywhere --- on the AM radio in the car, on the AM radio station that was piped in the the cafeteria, in elevators, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

"Waterloo", "SOS", "Mamma Mia", "Fernando."

And then when they abandoned ear candy pop for disco, they became very big in the gay community. With efforts like "Dancing Queen" and "Gimme, Gimme, Gimme a Man After Midnight", it isn't hard to imagine why.

Their music had a certain pleasant, predictable, non-threatening quality.

But I would paraphrase the French military observer to the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade, who commented: "C'est magnifique! Mais c'est ne pas le guerre." (It's magnificent! But it's not warfare.)

I would say of ABBA's vast discography, "It's very nice. But it's not rock 'n roll."

In fairness, I should add that a perusal of ABBA's YouTube videos does show that Agnetha Faltskog, in her prime, was truly one of the hottest babes ever to grace a stage in that era-- an amazing combination of cover-girl looks and Penthouse animal magnetism.

And I wouldn't have kicked her German-Swedish cohort Anna Frid Lyngstad out of bed for eating crackers.

But does that a Rock 'n Roll Hall of Famer make?

And don't even get me started on the 2010 nomination of disco queen Donna Summer.

She may have worked hard for the money, but disco was the very antithesis of rock.

To admit Donna Summer to the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, would be rather like Pope Benedict ordering a special new stain glass window in the Sistine Chapel for Martin Luther.

So I will not be spending my hard-earned cash to make a pilgrimage to the Cleveland rock shrine.

But should they ever get serious and induct Jan & Dean, The Moody Blues and Lou Christie, I could well reconsider.

And to Anna Frid, if you're out there reading this -- I'm still eminently available.

Cook Co. GOP: Please, Please Join Us - (But Bring Cash)

Two recent entries in my email inbox: 1) an invitation to the New Trier Twp. GOP picnic ($20 a person, $40 per family) and 2) an invitation to the Cook County GOP "Convention," ($45 +$10 for "VIP breakfast.")

What's wrong with this picture?

With the economy tanking and the Republican Party brand in Illinois rivalling that of the Ford Edsel and the Watergate-era Chevy Vega, you'd think they would make it as enticing as humanly possible to attend a Republican rally.

But not the Mensa-types who pass for decision makers in Republican circles around here.

From time immemorial, political parties have tried to attract the mass of potential voters with free food and free entertainment. Back in the 1880s, both parties in Chicago would try to excite the new waves of German and Irish immigrant voters with events featuring oceans of free beer and oompah bands and ceili dancing.

When I was a kid, the Democratic precinct captains in Skokie would stage an annual event in the newly booming Jewish part of town, featuring free kosher hot dogs, soda and wine.

When I was a teen, I would travel up to Hoffman Estates for picnics of the Phil Crane Youth Caucus -- eats and drinks on Phil.

But now, with the GOP at the lowest ebb that I can remember, they're saying "Please, Please, Pretty Please come -- and we accept Visa, MC and American Express."

The Cook County Republican "Convention," scheduled for next week, is not a convention in the usual sense, but actually a party pep rally, featuring orations by such awe-inspiring luminaries as those well known Demosthenes: Angel Garcia, Republican candidate for County Clerk, Eloise Gerson, the Chairlady of the ever-anemic Chicago Republican Party and the Boy-Wonder, himself, Lee Roupas, Chairman of the necrotic Cook County Republicans.

And for an extra ten bucks, they'll let me into a VIP breakfast.

Angel Garcia is sure to be one of the VIPs there.

Be still my beating heart.

A Cubs-Free Summer: CUBS--Completely Useless by September

It just occured to me.

I have had a Cubs-free summer.

This is no small matter for me. I first became a Cubs fan (and do understand that the term fan derives from fanatic) when I was a little first grader in 1963.

In that year, my father, who was a descendent of a Chicago Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher, gave me a 1963 major league baseball almanac.

I was first exposed to the Cubs that year. It became a life-long infatuation. And a life-long sickness.

That year I also bought my first Topps pack of baseball cards.

They were 5 cents at the time and you got 5 baseball cards and along with the cards you got one stick of rather sickly (usually stale) bubble gum.

My first Cubs card was of the Cubs catcher in 1963 -- the immortal Sammy Taylor (I am being satiric here) -- who had a lifetime .223 batting average.

For the benefit of you girls out there -- that really stinks!

But Sammy Taylor was a really good looking Southern guy and he had this really cool, tough looking, way of tilting his catcher's mitt while posing, with an Elvis-styled leer for the baseball card photograph.

So of course, when I went into the McNally Park Little League in Skokie that year (it was the only genuinely religiously integrated entity in a Village that was 60% Christian and 40% Jewish), I became a cather and tilted my cather's mitt in a rather cool, Sammy Taylor-styled way for the team photo.

I hit around .500 that year which was far better than Sammy was ever able to accomplish.

But, of course he had to contend with the 100 mph. heat from Don Drysdale and Bob Gibson and the biting sliders from Sandy Koufax.

I just had to put up with the 30 mph lobs from the likes of Ronnie Kleinschmidt, Craig Kloss and Richie Rubin.

So going Cubs-free for an entire summer is no small matter for me.

I did not attend a single game at Wrigley or on the road, did not listen to or watch a single broadcast after June 1st and did not so much as glance at a box score. This is the first time that I have done that since my college years when sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, a certain geographic distance and a heavy academic load precluded the pursuit of my long-time Cubs obsession.

And what did I really miss?

Carlos Zambrano snapping bats over his knee like an overpaid baby? Ron Santo crapping up the airwaves with his incessant moaning and groaning? Any number of crybaby failed relief pitchers lashing into the fans for rightfully booing them? $40 bleacher seats? $6 cups of warm Old Style?Another one of the highest paid teams in Chicago athletic history, which here in September has no hope whatsoever of even attaining a wild card berth?

I think I can live with the absence of that.

And the slight grey fringe that was appearing at my temples has been arrested, if not entirely reversed, due to the absence of all of the customary Cubs-induced angst.

The Chicago CUBS: Completely Useless By September.

AND NOW IT'S ORGANIC VODKA

Let's face it, Americans have always been suckers for food fads.

First we had the lo-cal, diet craze of the 50s and 60s. Jackie Gleason thought this so inane that he satirized it in an episode of the Honeymooners by coming up with a get-rich-quick scheme for marketing lo-cal pizza. That was considered laughable in the 50s, but sure enough today you can go to the freezer section of any Jewel Foods and find lo-cal pizza.

One of our obese neighbors in the 60s, an MD's wife, was so thrilled with the development of the revolutionary, new, 1 calorie Diet-Rite sodas, that a veritable mound of the returnable empties would litter her side doorstep every day.

She never seemed to lose any weight at all.

Since then we've had the lo-fat craze, lo-carb mania (I once even saw a candy bar touted as lo-carb) and of course the lite phenomenon.

The movement toward lite everything began in the late 70s with Miller's development of Lite Beer and it crested in the 80's. That was around the very time of the AIDS epidemic, when everyone was talking about condoms and safe-sex.

The simultaneous occurrence of lite everything and condom mania, prompted comic David Steinberg to quip to Johnny Carson, "You know, Johnny, we could make a fortune if we could just come up with a product called "Condoms-Lite."

But now, of course, it is the organic foods craze.

This started with a bunch of aging hippies from places like San Francisco and Evanston who thought that it would be morally superior to eat overpriced, scrawny, deformed produce trucked in to little farmers markets in their village squares every Saturday.

It was harmless enough, but now, I must say, it is clearly getting out of hand.

They are now marketing (I am not making this up) ORGANIC VODKA!!!

I was made aware of this inane development by the marquee on the Foremost Liquor store at Lincoln and Peterson, which touted the development amidst its usual ads for specials on Heinekens and Johnny Walker Red.

I went in to the Foremost to investigate, and sure enough there it was, Snow Queen Organic Vodka imported from Kazakhstan.

What??!!

When one pictures former Soviet Kazakhstan, organic purity is not what first springs to mind.

Chernobyl-styled nuclear waste dumps, perhaps, but not pristine waters and pure pesticide-free fields of rye.

Perhaps the Kazakh idea of organic is to use only camel dung from free range dromedaries to fertilize their vodka grain crops.

And besides, who really cares if their vodka is organic?

My experience has always been that the stuff is so vile tasting and alcoholicly lethal that after a few quaffs, I no more care if my vodka is organic than if my rocket fuel is organic.

At any rate, it is now available at about $30 a bottle for those gaunt, sandal-wearing organic purists in Evanston and Oak Park.

But the Snow Queen bottle and website graphics prominently feature women with rather pronounced decolletage. The website also boasts that it had busty J-Lo as guest of honor at one of its opening celebrity bashes.

I don't think that will go over so well with the ascetic organic granola crowd.

Someone has to fill the Kazakhs in on the puritanical catechism of American politically correct pecksniffs, circa 2009.

Kronos' Bonehead Free Gyro SNAFU

Chicago is no stranger to lame brained public relations disasters.

Who can forget the 1970s disco demolition at Comiskey Park?

In that event, a local rock station teamed with the White Sox to offer free admission to a Sox game to everyone who brought a disco record. The decidedly anti-disco DJs were then to amass the records midfield and blow them up -- thereby making a profound statement as to the superiority of pure rock 'n roll.

Problems ensued, however, when the drunken Sox fans began flinging the records at each other and at the opposing team's players on the field like so many semi-lethal frisbees. After numerous cuts and gashes and subsequent fisticuffs were reported, MLB officials called the game in light of the general life-threatening brouhaha. The Sox were awarded a forfeit loss.

And then there was the Great Snow of 1979.

Who can forget the reports of Democrat Machine (soon to be ex-)Mayor Michael Bilandic lolling on the beach in Florida with his fetching wife, Heather, while his inept city machine remained impotent as Chicagoans were stranded in snowdrifts left by a paralysing blizzard?

Those were textbook PR disasters of the first order.

But they may have been surpassed by yesterday's Kronos Free Gyro Giveaway.

The geniuses at Chicago-based Gyros manufacturing giant, Kronos Foods decided to combat slumping sales of gyros sandwiches, by offerring an on-line coupon for a free gyro at any one of about 3 dozen participating Chicago fast food outlets on September 1st.

For the culinarily uninformed, a gyro is a kind of big sloppy agglomeration of pressed lamb sliced off a spit and put on pita bread, slathered in a yogurt-based sauce and covered with tomato slices and mounds of onions.

It was reportedly invented in Chicago in 1973.

During my college years, we found downing a gyro to be a perfect end to an evening of non-stop bar hopping and beer swilling. The conventional wisdom was that its gargantuan fat content would sop up the gallons of alcohol running thru our systems.

Of course the perfect end to an evening would have been to accompany a hot co-ed back to her place, in which case you definitely would not want a gyro, unless your date happened to be an Albanian shepherdess who thought that onion breath was a total turn-on.

Anyway, come September 1st and the participating Free Gyro Day fast food joints are deluged with mobs of people brandishing coupons for the free $5 Greek concoction.

Well in advance of the dinner hour, many were entirely out of supplies and were turning away customers in droves -- many of them quite angry.

Mangio's in Wrigleyville, fearful of antogonizing its regular customers, began offering cheaper Polish Sausages in lieu of the promised gyro. People were still leaving angry.

At Dengeo's on the Skokie-Evanston border, the traffic jam caused by free gyro seekers was wildly unprecedented.

When I saw the cars and throngs of people, I thought that maybe Elvis had been sighted there.

Dengeo's was turning away disappointed gyro seekers at the height of the dinner hour.

Several of their regular customers were fuming at being caught up in the mob scene. A manager stood at the door and announced to the irritated throng, "we couldn't give you a gyro even if you wanted to buy one."

I wonder what ensued at the gyro joints in the rougher sections of the South and West sides.

In any event, this couldn't have been the PR result the promotional mavens at Kronos envisioned.

I hear that next year they're going to try and top this by introducing their new all-pork gyro at Jewish and Muslim street fairs.

Seditious and Ungrateful Asian Immigrants Gather in Chicago

This past weekend a gaggle of Asian open-borders advocates gathered at the Salvation Army compound on Pulaski near Foster to whine and moan and essentially bash white Americans.

Antonio Olivo, the unabashed immigrant activist who covers this issue for the Libune, heaved up his usual immigrant sob story article:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-asian-immigration-22-aug22,0,7042509.story

Olivo is the latest of a line of wildly biased Latino writers who the Libune has exclusively assigned to cover the immigration debate.

That is about as intellectually honest as assigning the cheerleading Ron Santo to give you an objective, clear headed critique of the Chicago Cubs.

Oh -- that's right-- the Tribune does that too on WGN radio.

Does anybody anywhere really believe the Chicago Tribune about anything anymore?

At any rate, what caught my notice in Olivo's rah-rah account of the event, was the report that Korean-American kids from the Korean-American Cultural Center in West Rogers Park, made up signs criticizing the United States for putting a small number of coastal Japanese and Japanese-Americans in detainment camps after the World War II Japanese sneak attack on the US.

They apparently chose this theme to corroborate the sponsoring, Asian American Institute's, larger theme that White America is racist and that is why we haven't just opened up our borders and let the entire Third World just waltz in here, unhindered.

For the grandchild of a Korean to bring up this complaint, makes about as much sense as for the grandchild of a Jewish holocaust victim to complain about US mistreatment of alleged Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

Let's put this into perspective.

Korea was forcibly occupied by the Imperial Japanese from 1910 until it was liberated (at the cost of much American blood) in 1945.

During that time, the hellish Japanese brutally enslaved the Korean people.

They conscripted tens of thousands of Koreans into life threatening forced labor. Like their Nazi allies, they murdered the inhabitants of entire towns which harbored partisan freedom fighters. They conscripted more than 20,000 Korean women into forced sexual slavery as "comfort women" for Japanese troops. Taking a page from the murderous Lenin and Stalin, they systematically starved to death recalcitrant villages. They looted Korean national treasures, including some 75,000 works of art and cultural artifacts, which they have yet to return.

And to this very day, Koreans who live and work in Japan are not allowed Japanese citizenship -- even if they are 3rd or 4th generation residents of Japan.

And the greatest historical complaint that these ill-educated, ingrate Korean kids can conjure up is that FDR badly treated Japanese in America during wartime!!??

And of course, there is nary a hint of appreciation to the millions of, mostly white, American servicemen, who sacrificed (some 300,000 with their lives) for the liberation of their grandparents in two major wars.

This is both testimony to the radical anti-American tenor of the organized pro-immigration pimp groups and the abject failure of our rotten public schools to assimilate and Americanize this massive wave of post 1980 immigration.

And the wanton America bashing at last weekend's Asian immigration rally looks really bad to thoughtful Americans who know they are paying the freight for this immigration onslaught.

One wonders who the Asian American Institute enlisted to do their PR.

Probably the same guy who told the Big-Three auto CEOs to take their private jets to the Congressional bailout hearings.

Castro to Cubans -- Get Ready to Drip Dry!!

Last week, Reuters reported that Raul Castro, Cuba's Brother-in-Chief, announced that due to "planning oversights", Cuba was running out of toilet paper and likely would not have any more until the beginning of 2010.

I am not making this up.

(See:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090807/lf_nm_life/us_cuba_crisis_toiletpaper_1)

Obviously being a function of the hellish U.S. trade embargo, this, of course, provoked an uproar amongst enlightened American humanitarians and led for calls for Obama to take immediate action to ensure the aridity of Cuban arses.

The stripling Commander in Chief showed no hesitation and immediately appointed a reknowned expert on anal hygiene, Mr. Lazlo Butz, (B.S., Harvard, 1969) to become America's first hemispheric anal hygiene Czar.

In a Washington news conference, the President introduced Butz as a man "who will get to the bottom of this pressing problem."

Butz, an SDS organizer in the 60's, called for solidarity with "our socialist Cuban allies," and hinted that the Kimberly-Clark corporation may have to be nationalized to provide the island state with sufficient quantites of the hygienic paper product.

"A clean, soft wipe is a human right," Butz said.

Also at the news conference was the acknowleged Congressional expert on matters anal, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA.)

"We've got to put clean pores before profits," he said, predicting the Kimberly-Clark nationalization would be on a fast track in the next session of Congress.

Also at the event was Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Chicago-based, modestly named, People United to Save Humanity (Operation PUSH.)

Injecting the requisite anti-white bashing to the event, he said the Cuban toilet paper shortage was a natural result of centuries of white oppression of Caribbean peoples of color.

Asked by a Washington Times reporter how this could be, given that the errant state planners, Fidel and Raoul Castro, were lily white Castilian Spanish purebloods, Jackson responded:

"If you cannot wipe
The smell will be ripe.

If you must drip-dry
You will attact the fly."

With that, White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, immediately cut off questions and told reporters he would have details of Obama's $3.2 billion hemispheric toilet paper stimulus plan available to the press and Congress several hours before the scheduled vote next week.

Abortion Remorse in "Last Chance Harvey"

Wonder of wonders, a current hit movie makes a subtle anti-abortion statement.

How did this slip by the liberal Hollywood thought controllers?

The film is "Last Chance Harvey," a thoroughly delightful and uplifting story of an August-December romance between Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson.

The anti-abortion sentiment is expressed quite briefly, and don't expect Roger Ebert or Richard Roeper to even make note of it, but it is in there, plain as day.

In a scene where the protagonists are talking, heart to heart, getting to know each other better, Emma Thompson's mood changes abruptly.

"You just became sad," Hoffman says. "Why?"

"I was thinking about my days as a college student. I became pregnant. I did away with it. But sometimes I find myself wondering if he or she would have have been funny -- or clever -- or neurotic.

"Stupid of me to get this way, really."

Abortion remorse in a major Hollywood movie -- interesting.

Some speculate that the shift in public opinion polls showing a majority of Americans now opposed to our liberal abortion laws, may be significantly due to the remorse felt by many baby boomer women over abortions that they had during an earlier, less thoughtful, time in their lives.

I doubt the Hollywood moguls would have kept this off the cutting room floor unless they perceived that a profound sentiment, like abortion remorse, was, indeed, in the air.

Interesting.

One lighter thought-- this is the second Dustin Hoffman film I can recall where he suffers from job instability. The other was Kramer vs. Kramer.

He might have avoided the vagaries of the employment market if he had just taken the profound advice profferred to him in The Graduate.

" Your father tells me you're going to be out job hunting soon. I have just one word for you, young man:

Plastics!!"

That Vacuous 60s Counterculture

I recently stumbled into a remarkable little shop on Oakton St. in Skokie. It had the effect of compelling me to recollect on my days as a boy growing up in that vast cultural wasteland known as the 1960s.

The newly opened shop, Selective Memories Resale and Collectables, deals in assorted bric-a-brac, junque, collectibles and objects d'art and is heavy on 60s memorobilia.

It is run by an effusively genial 50 something guy, Dave Zorig, who exudes a genuine love of pop antiquity.

His recently deceased dad, one of the very few American existentialists I have ever heard of (he was reading a volume of Sartre's scribblings when he passed on,) actually invented a primitive version of the rock video in the 60s. The geniuses at the mobbed-up Chicago juke box companies passed on the invention. They said that kids would never want to watch rock musicians perform to their music. This was 15 years before MTV and VH1.

Maybe that kind of foresight explains why Sam "MOMO" Giancana's social club and benevolent society has been in a precipitous decline since about that very time.

So Dave reported to me that he was personal friends with several members of the flash-in-the-pan pop group the Turtles, and gets a lot of their memorobilia to vend.

We began discussing several of their hits from the 1966-67 timeframe and for the rest of the day those Turtle songs kept running thru my head.

There is a name for this phenomena, but I forget what it is. If you doubt it exists, just go to one of the McDonald's that plays tapes of oldies music and tell me that for the next 24 hours your brain is not running a non-stop reel of, "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to."

So this got me thinking about the caliber of lyricism that formed the sound track of the antics of that "smartest generation," of the 60s.

Take this gem from the Turtles"



"Eleanor, Gee I think you're swell
And you really do me well
You're my pride and joy etcetera."

"Etcetera!!!???"

Aside from the fact that the only person I ever heard of in the 60s who still used the term "swell," was Judy Garland's little peach, Liza, "Etcetera" as the end of a lyric?

What that says to me is major intellectual and artistic laziness. It also says that the kids who ate this stuff up and plunked down hard cash for the vinyl discs were about as discerning as West Virginia hayseeds.

Can you imagine Cole Porter writing:

"I love Paris in the morning when it drizzles
I love Paris in the evening when it sizzles
I love Paris every moment
Every moment etcetera."

A poll of 60s college students taken at the time found that they rated Bob Dylan as the greatest poet of all time. Move aside Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Who needs Shakespeare's sonnets when you can ponder:

"I don't want to meet your kin
make you spin or do you in."

Paul Simon once expressed irritation that his peers were attributing great profundity to his lyrics and said that could only be because the vast majority of rock lyricists were quasi-literate nincumpoops.

They were and we bought it.

And now the unreconstructed countercultural gnomes of the 60s are tenured professors who dominate our universities and senior executives at our major news organs.

What is more frightening, is that in the incarnation of David Axlerod and Bill Ayres, they have the ear of the young, inexperienced, coffee-complected nincumpoop-in-chief.

Chatting With Walter Cronkite on the Eastern Shore of Maryland

I met Walter Cronkite on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1984. He was 3 years into his unceremoniously enforced retirement and was living out in that beautiful corner of the world to pursue his love of sailing.

A fellow Chicago native and I were at a little neighborhood gathering there -- one of their famous hard shell crab boils -- and all of a sudden, someone excitedly whispers to us, "there's Walter Cronkite."

For one who grew up with Walter Cronkite's authoratative, grandfatherly presence on the old black and white tv, it was almost like meeting royalty.

My friend and I were 20 something Reaganites at the time and as such, were full of the old ideological piss and vinegar.

So we struck up a conversation with Walter Cronkite on the subject of liberal media bias.

What was amazing was that he took the time and concern to engage us.

He took the CBS corporate line that news reportage and even agenda setting was entirely fair and balanced. He seemed solid in his belief that journalists, irrespective of affiliation, were solid professionals who could and would put their personal views aside.

I brought up the example of ABC news reporter, Geraldo Rivera, who had recently prompted little street urchins in Managua, Nicaragua to throw stones at government tanks so that he could get some good film footage and prove his point that there was widespread support for the communist Sandinistas.

To that, Walter chuckled and said, "Oh that's just Geraldo Rivera, who is he anyway?"

I think Cronkite was so imbued in the Edward R. Murrow school of honest, serious journalism that he was blind to the erosion of journalistic ethics that was then stirring.

I believe that he really believed in honest, ethical reporting and could not bring himself to see that it was going by the wayside.

Much as a mother can see no wrong in her favorite child.

Bernie Goldberg, who was one of Cronkite's much younger colleagues at CBS could see it coming and chronicled it in his 2001 best seller, "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News."

But Walter Cronkite came from the old school and I believe he adhered to journalistic ethics in a way that would have made his mentor and fellow WWII war correspondent, Edward R. Murrow proud.

There were real American journalists back then. It was when Americans were serious about themselves and their place in the world.

It was before today's comic news offerings of happy talkers and hair sprayed-dilletantes and Kiran Chetry-styled news readers concerned most with their ample decolletage and hiked-up skirts.

Walter Cronkite was certainly an American original.

I was proud to have had the good fortune and pleasure of meeting this towering American figure.

And that's the way it is. July 19th, 2009.

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.

If You liked Upchuck Percy, You'll Just Love Mark Kirk

One of the most selfless things that I can ever recall having been done by the usually selfishly self-preserving Members of the US Congress, during my time working there, was done by the great patriot, US Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

When the Republicans took control of the US Senate as a consequence of the Reagan landslide win over Democrat Jimma "the peanut" Carter in 1980, Republicans had to decide who would chair the various Senate committees, with all the power that that entails.

Senator Helms, by virtue of his seniority, had his choice of chairing either the Senate Agriculture Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Customarily, the Agriculture Committee is a choice plum, especially if you come from a highly agricultural state as was Helm's North Carolina, with its heavy concentration of tobacco farmers.

The Foreign Relations Committee is generally considered something of a backwash committee -- very powerful in its impact on the course of the Republic -- but not one whose decisions are highly valued by voters back home.

Senator Helms, after great agonizing, decided to forgo the politically useful Agriculture Committee in order to save the Republic from the dreadful prospect of the Foreign Relations Committee being chaired by the extremely internationalist, Soviet-appeasing, liberal Republican Senator from Kenilworth, Illinois, Charles Percy.

Mark Kirk, a product of Percy's same New Trier Township Republican Organization seems to be walking right in Percy's footsteps.

Kirk was one of only 8 GOP Members of Congress to vote for Obama's wild new "Cap & Trade," taxation scheme.

In a manner reminescent of Percy's frantically desperate run for cover ("I'm sorry -- Now I've got the message") just before his 1984 electoral loss, when Illinois conservatives abandoned Percy in droves as payback for his years of spitting in their faces, Kirk yesterday commandeered the email lists of the Republican organizations in his 10th Congressional district to send out an pathetically lame, poorly drafted, rationale for his apostate support for the Grand High Church of "global warming."

Kirk says that the new Obama tax scheme, which Obama overtly said will raise all electricity and oil costs to US businesses and consumers, is good because it will enable us not to buy oil from Communist Venezuelan strongman, Hugo Chavez.

Oh please!! How gullible does Kirk think Illinois conservatives are?

The Kirk-Obama cap n' trade, Stalinist power grab will cause untold hardship for Americans -- loss of jobs -- a wildly diminished standard of living -- a massive transfer of individual personal liberty to government apparatchicks.

Look for the usual Illinois Republican suspects to be telling you down the road that Kirk may be bad -- but at least he's better than Roland Burris.

I've heard that line once too often.

I did not vote for Upchuck Percy in 1984 and I will under no circumstances vote for liberal goo-brain, Kirk for US Senate in 2010.

Is John Galt Fleeing High Tax Chicago?

I heard the voice of Dagny Taggart on WGN Radio this afternoon.

For the benefit of the literary unwashed, she was the heroine of Ayn Rand's epic tale of libertarian revolt, Atlas Shrugged, wherein the productive people of the world go on strike in response to a government which destroys all productive incentive through taxation and regulation.

The voice I heard was that of a Chicago woman who called in to Gary Meier's radio show. She was in her 40s, at the height of her productive powers and had made definitive plans to move away from Chicago this coming December. She said they were moving to Dallas, Texas because the cost of living was lower, the weather was better and there was no state income tax.

I had been wondering if significant numbers of people were voting with their feet to flee Chicago's culture of high taxation. To my knowledge, no statistics on something this esoteric exist. It is not after all, the kind of story one would expect to find featured in the Chicago newspapers with their built-in incentive toward provincial civic boosterism.

But I have a feeling that there is more of this kind of flight going on than one might suspect.

We have known since a 1994 study by Donald Huddle at Rice University that there is a significant outmigration of native born American citizens, both white and black, from states that have large concentrations of illegal alien settlement. With "sanctuary city" Chicago as the 5th largest destination for illegal alien settlement, some of that has to be going on.

We have seen a major outflux of small businesses from high-tax, high regulation California to relatively low tax, low regulation Colorado and Nevada. But how many businesses have fled high-tax Chicago?

At any rate this caller to Gary Meier had developed a conscious, systematic plan to relocate her family to Dallas, by choice -- not simply due to some occupational imperative. She had set a definitive deadline of December 1st.

As I sit before the keyboard, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and wool sweater on this cold, grey, overcast, Chicago June 30th and contemplate Governor Quinn's machinations to increase the Illinois income tax and wonder if my car will be ticketed at the cash gobbling Chicago parking meter out front and contemplate the latest Cubs' June swoon, I can't say I don't envy that modern day Dagny Taggart radio caller.

One of the happiest summer trips of my life was to visit an old girlfriend in the hill country of Texas near Kerrville on the Guadalupe river.

She had flaming green eyes and the waterfall-studded river was sapphire blue.

The Texas Lampoon? Hmmmm!! Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Michael Jackson, Oscar Wilde, Jerry Lee Lewis and the new Obamaite Weimar Republic

So Michael Jackson died yesterday at age 50.

This is mystifyingly being treated as a matter of great societal import by the ever eager news grubbers at the major network electronic media and the MSN print media.

WOW!

Let's put this in perspective.

First, Michael Jackson was not that great a musical entity.

Let's face it. He never wrote a song or even strummed a simple chord on a guitar. He didn't even play the piano.

He did, however have a nice pre-pubescent adolescent boy voice -- rather like the Viennese castrati of Mozart's time -- and did have a penchant for grabbing his crotch on MTV concoctions.

He made nice pop music, but his greatest success came in the wake of the vapid 70's disco era. The music back then was so appallingly bad that had Michael Jackson not come around, accordian polka music might have moved in to fill the pop cultural void.

Michael Jackson was a pederast and child molester -- make no mistake about it.

He paid $12 million to the family of a young boy with whom he had slept and molested at his "Neverland Ranch." He shelled out that dough to induce them to drop criminal charges against him.

Say he was an "alleged" child molester, if you want, but in Chicago we call that hush money.

This 40+ year old adult male also said publically that "sleeping with a young boy is the kindest thing one can do for him," and that, "Cuddling with young boys is magical."

He also plied his underage sexual victims with wine -- "Jesus juice," he told them.

This guy was weird.

And clearly criminal!!

But he is being exulted by our corrupt, dying news media as an American hero. An international hero.

One African-American female was shown on ABC NEWS saying that this perverto "paved the way for Barack Obama."

YIKES!!!

Let's put this in perspective.

In the timeframe 1854-1900, Oscar Wilde was a literary leading light of the British Empire. Unlike the American negro boy wonder from Gary, Indiana, he was genuinely talented and a genuine genius. An Irish-Anglo poet, playwright and novelist, he gave us some of the greatest literature of the Western cultural experience -- most notably, The Portrait of Dorian Grey and The Importance of Being Ernest.

But quite like the negro boy wonder from Gary, Wilde had a penchant for seducing and raping young boys. He would find them in the poorer quarters of London and ply them with liquor (but his intellection was such he would have never used so pedestrian a term as "Jesus juice) and then he'd bugger them and pay them off to keep quiet.

Sound familiar?

But the British Empire was still sound then-- rather at its apogee.

And Wilde was nabbed for an sexually predatory affair with the college aged son of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry and -- far from being celebrated like our Gary boy wonder, he was sent off to Reading Gaol for 2 years at hard labor.

He was subsequently shunned by British society and slunk off to a well deserved death in obscurity.

Or take the 1950's rock 'n roll pioneering genius, Jerry Lee Lewis.

He dumped his wife to marry his 13 year old 1st cousin -- once removed. (Q: What is the definition of a West Virginia virgin? A: A girl who can outrun her brothers.)

When this came to public light, this genuine rock music genius, who was ranked the #24 top rock artist of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, was blacklisted from American radio and the American recording industry.

His descent was swift and marked. He went from playing $10k a night concerts to playing $250 a night gigs in obscure Southern beer joints.

Such was the recrimination of United States society and a coherent American moral code of the USA at its apogee.

But today -- a rank -- and one might say -- rather creepy pederastic character like Michael Jackson is celebrated by the American media elite.

Shall we further put this in perspective?

During the German Weimar Republic of 1918 to 1933, people like Michael Jackson were wildly celebrated.

Against a backdrop of national malaise, wild inflation and economic depression, that peculiar epoch in German history embraced and celebrated rampant prostitution, open homosexuality, kinky sex and transvestitism.

"Life is a Cabaret, old chum." Isn't that what Liza Minelli and Joel Grey sang?

But the Michael Jacksonesque celebratory era ended rather abruptly with the German national elections of 1933 -- with astoundingly tragic consequences.

Something for Americans to contemplate.

I'm very sorry -- but there is nothing funny here.

I'm Getting Into The "Peace Pole" Racket

The 1960s retreads in East Rogers Park are at it again.

As reported in a blog there, "The Rogers Park Bench," Catiana McKay, the lefty divorcee pastor of the lefty United Church of Rogers Park (that crumbling eyesore on the corner of Ashland and Morse) has come out with a sure-fire plan to combat the tsunami of violent crime that infests and infects that hellhole of a neighborhood.

She wants to erect "Peace Poles" all over East Rogers Park.

Speaking during an appearance at her "church" by the racial spoils racketeer and polygamist, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, this odd woman, an ostensible Methodist who strangely lists among her affiliations a membership in the Turkish Muslim Chicago Network, made the peculiar utterance:

"We would like to see Peace Poles all over this community to claim that there is no space for violence here."

That noble sentiment was echoed by one of her board members, Michael Harrington, the inveterate black, gay East Rogers Park goofball, perennial, losing office seeker who's now following in the messiah's footsteps as a self-proclaimed, "community organizer."

Harrington hints that had Ms. McKay's magical Peace Poles been present, they might have warded off the murder of a 16 year old youth (no doubt a CPS honor student) at the Jarvis El stop last December.

The denizens of this rather eccentric Rogers Park church, truly are a mystical lot. More steeped in supernatural romanticism than the religious snake handlers, I think.

Back in the 80s and 90s they sported a huge banner, proclaiming their crumbling edifice and its surroundings a "Nuclear Free Zone."

It must have worked since Gorbachev did not nuke them, so they progressed to a new banner proclaiming that "This Congregation Rejects War."

Kim Jong II and Al Qaeda, take note.

So now they want Peace Poles to ward off the almost weekly gangland shootings in their midst.

I was curious about these Peace Poles and the magical powers that they must contain. I've only ever seen two. One is at the Southern field at Northeastern Illinois University, off of St. Louis Ave, near Foster. In its shadow, at that goofy, leftist, high school with ashtrays, neo-druids seem to conduct various earth-worshipping rituals.

The other was erected across from the Skokie Village Library. It was put up by the left-wing Democrat machine candidate slate there during their last contested election to show their lefty voters how radical chic they are. They won their patronage plums and the Peace Pole remains.

But my crack research staff informs me that this Peace Pole business is quite a racket.

The Peace Pole was invented in 1955 by an alleged Japanese poet, Masahisa Goi, who was bummed out by the destruction of his country as a consequence of the war they started. It is a simple 4-sided pole with the words "May Peace Prevail on Earth," inscribed on each side in a different language.

Too bad Masahisa didn't come up with this little talisman 15 years earlier. We could have erected one at Pearl Harbor to ward off Admiral Hamamoto's bombs. The Chinese, Koreans, Philipinos and the 17 million other Asian victims of the Japanese Holocaust could have used them to ward off Tojo's tanks and Gen. Yamashita's death squads.

But hindsight is 20/20.

So now, under the auspices of an outfit in Wassaic, New York called, The World Peace Prayer Society, 200,000 of these peace poles have supposedly been erected in 180 countries.

As further proof of the essential vacuity of that body, the United Nations has recognized this peace pole prayer outfit at an official Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) under its auspices.

The Prayer Society has also trademarked the phrase, "May Peace Prevail on Earth," and in addition to selling a mind-boggling array of peace poles (all, they say, must be made of ecologically friendly materials, yet they offer a plastic one) they hawk a vast array of peace pole paraphanalia.

At the World Peace Prayer Society's website, one is admonished to "Shop Peace to Spread Peace."

Their site takes Visa, MC and American Express.

There one can simply go hog wild on a peace pole shopping binge. (Many of the items make great stocking stuffers.)

A sample of the Peace Society offerings:

Peace Poles, your choice of 6 different materials, 6' or 8' -- $185
Desktop Peace Pole w/brass plate, 20" -- $40
5 mini Peace Poles 6"-- $15
Peace Pole Heart key rings -- $12
Peace Pole Luggage Tags -- $12
Peace Pole key rings -- $4
Peace Pole patch to sew on your jeans -- $3
Peace Pole Trendy Hoodies -- $45 (Ms. McKay -- these might be ideal for the gang that sells crack at the Morse EL stop)
Peace Pole unisex T shirts --$18
Peace Pole kids T shirts -- $15
Peace Pole Sri Lankan shawls -- $35
Peace Pole tapestry pillow (designed by Anjuli?) --$20
Peace Pole tapestry throw rug -- $50
Peace Pole license plate frame -- $5
Peace Pole refrigerator magnet-- $5
Peace Pole candle --$18
Offered by another firm: Peace Pole Makers USA of Maple City Michigan
Peace Pole apron --$15
Peace Pole Braille plate --$12
Peace Pole baseball cap -- $24.95
Peace Pole rubber stamp-- $15
Peace Pole maintenance kit (varnish and a paintbrush)--$25
Peace Pole sculpture-- $1,800

You have to admit. This Peace Pole business is a swell racket.

I will admit, that I was somewhat sceptical about the efficacy of Ms. McKay's and Mr. Harrington's Peace Pole project. But now I see its possibilities. It can be a great crime fighting tool for East Rogers Park -- we just have to contour the message to the audience,

Consequently, these hard economic times being what they are (I am still waiting for the shovel ready job that Obama promised me) I am announcing my own Chicago Lampoon Line of Peace Pole products.

It is designed to appeal to the very constituency who we most need to embrace the Peace Pole concept and make our claim that there is no space for violence here. These are things the chillun would actually want and use. I mean, really, the boys in the hood aren't going to be caught dead (no pun intended) in a Peace Pole Sri Lankan shawl.

My product line:

Peace Pole Steel Reserve Malt Liquor, 17% alcohol, 40 oz. w Peace Pole logo--$3.89
Peace Pole black trendy hoodies XL, 1XL, 2XL -- $59.95
Peace Pole Cobra Malt Liquor -- 9% alchohol, 40oz w/ Peace Pole Logo --$2.69
Peace Pole Newport Cigarettes, 1 pack -- $12
Peace Pole crack pipe, brass with Peace logo inscribed on all 4 sides-- $18.95
Peace Pole Ammo belt, holds six 45mm clips-- $39.95
Snoop Dog Peace Pole T shirt -- Black with Snoop holding his "Peace Pole"-- $18.95

This is only my preliminary product offering. More products that are bound to be highly popular with the youts of the East Rogers Park area will surely occur to me in the coming days and I will be sure to keep you posted as they become available.

They are sure to go a long way toward moving the wayward youts of our area to embrace in their hearts the time honored maxim, "May Peace Prevail on Earth." (A trademark of the World Peace Prayer Society -- not to be used without express written permission of the owners, WPPS Inc., Wassaic, New York.)

Was it Really Torture?

This was going to be a post on the impending demise of the wonderful free book exchange at the North Park Village Recycling Center. It seems that wonderful all-volunteer institution of long standing is going to be extinguished by Daley's Department of Streets and Sanitation at the end of the month.

Liberal Democrats like Daley and the area's Alderman Margaret Laurino, always make grand pronouncements on the need for voluntary civic involvement, but when given the choice between citizens doing something for themselves and expanding their own bureaucratic powers and payrolls, the latter will inevitably win out -- as is the case here.

But that story can wait a few days.

This is about a book that I just picked up there: "Scars & Stripes" by Eugene B. McDaniel, Capt. USN.

It is a chronicle of his 6 years as a prisoner of war as a guest of the North Vietnamese Communists in the hellish "Hanoi Hilton," POW camp.

It is pertainent today in light of the news story that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the alleged masterminds of the September 11, 2001 Islamo-Fascist mass murders in New York, is saying that he underwent "punishing bouts of interrogation," administered by the CIA.

The ever-blaming-America-Firsters at the ACLU are pursuing legal action on his behalf. They want to open up Bush era documents regarding the interrogation program.

But the murderous Shaikh says that he managed to lie to the CIA despite his "punishing" regimen.

This leads me to believe that it likely was not all that punishing -- not brutal -- not torturous.

It was probably a game of paddy cake compared to the interrogation that Captain "Red"McDaniel and hundreds of other American servicemen in his predicament underwent.

How about this, Shaikh Mohammed?

Were your pants pulled down, while your arms were in irons and were you beaten on the buttocks 70 times with a knotted fan belt until your posterior resembled ground beef?

Were you forced to kneel on a pitted stone floor for as much as 9 hours on end, with your iron manacled hands held up above your head? Were you beaten unmercifully if you lowered your arms from exhaustion?

Shaikh, did these evil American interrogators bind your arms behind your back and attach the ropes to a winch and raise you up off the ground until your shoulders separated and one of your arms broke?

Were you then dropped to the stone floor and kicked repeatedly in the head, groin, stomach and limbs?

Were you sleep deprived for 7 straight days, while all this was going on?

Were you electroshocked repeatedly to the point of unconsciousness, woken up and then shocked repeatedly some more?

Did you endure the aforementioned regimen non-stop for 14 straight days with negligible nourishment virtually no sleep and no medical care?

That, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is what one might call a "punishing bout of interrogation." And it is precisely what the barbarian Vietnamese promulgated on Red McDaniel and their other American POW victims.

I don't think you endured anything nearly like that, Shaikh.

And Americans would do well to keep the truly barbaric torture that our brave servicemen endured at the hands of the Vietnamese and earlier the Red Chinese and Japanese, when the ACLU pea-brained propagandists start bandying about words like torture.

Shaikh Mohammed -- I think that it will emerge that compared to Red McDaniel, you had a day at the beach.

TV -- Good Riddance

Yesterday was the deadline for upgrading my old analog Sony TV to digital.

I didn't do it. I don't intend to.



At least not for now.



A few weeks ago I dropped my supposedly waterproof Sony Sports Walkman in a lake and it stopped working.

So instead of being bombarded with radio talk noise and incessant commercial pronunciementos, I actually was able to take my morning bike ride in relative silence. Heard birds chirping. Heard carp splashing in the river.

Even had a few stray thoughts that were not prompted by some fellow barking into my radio ear buds.

It reminded me that during my junior and senior years of undergrad, I never watched TV and seldom listened to the radio --and they were my most productive and thoughtful (and peaceful)years in school.

Customarily, of late I would listen to the Walkman at night -- Cubs games or Milt Rosenberg or the Savage Nation.

But while the Walkman was drying out and thoroughly afunctional, I actually read a book a night.

I read "The Guns of Navarone," written in 1957 by Alister Maclean.

I saw the movie as a very young boy, in a theatre with my father and sister. It was the top-selling movie of 1961, so we probably saw in in 1962 when it was making the rounds at the 50 cent 2nd tier theatres.

The reason I got this book from a used book exchange, was that I have discovered that the book that begot a film is usually vastly superior to the usually tawdry and overblown interpretation that Hollywood wrings from it.



That was true with this.



Alister Maclean was a no-nonsense Scotsman and he kept sex entirely out of his war novels as a matter of principle. He thought it needlessly distracted from the plot and character development. So there were no women at all in the written version of "The Guns of Navarone."

Hollywood, of course, replaced the male Greek partisan helpers with 2 hot Mediterranean babes, Irene Pappas and the very hot Gia Scala (who regrettably succumbed to drink and killed herself at age 38.)

It has been so long since I saw the film that I can't say definitively that the book was vastly better (all my pre-pubescent recollection offers is Gia Scala's beautifully sculpted and deliciously tanned body) but the book was a genuine page turner.

Another example of a book's superiority to the subsequent film is another 60s era war epic, "Von Ryan's Express." It was written by a WWII vet, David Westheimer in 1964 and became a hit movie the next year.

I had seen the film many times, but found a copy of the book at a used book store and eagerly devoured it. It was superb and far superior to the Hollywood adaptation.

For one thing, the POW camp leader, Col. Joseph Ryan, was a full-bored Irish American but was called Von Ryan by his troops, because of his strict disciplinary standards. Hollywood cast that quintessential Irishman, Frank Sinatra, in the role.

Moreover, in the book, the ending is happy as the POW escapees' train makes it safely to Switzerland.

In the film, Frank is gunned down while running and straining to catch hold of the caboose.

I don't recall if Hollywood injected sex into the film, but I have a feeling that they must have at some point.

One last example of book superiority to film is "The Firm," one of John Grisham's better earlier works. The book was hardly a masterpiece, but was gripping pulp fiction. Had I not read the book, I don't think I would have had a clue as to what Tom Cruise, Jean Tripplehorn and Gene Hackman were up to in the film version -- in and of itself, the film was veritably incomprehensible.

So, I'm going to forgo TV (what a novel idea -- how did our grandparents ever manage to survive?!) read more for a while. I'm not going to really miss "Two and a half men," and "Seinfeld" re-runs all that much.

And I may actually get a little more time for some quiet thought not prompted by mass media noise.

And if I really must find out what the erratic North Side Baseball team is up to, my Walkman has finally dried out and is functional again.

Libertarian Mancow Wants Nanny State to Police His Diet

I sometimes wonder if trendy radio jocks who find employment on conservative talk stations don't just adopt the self-description of being "libertarian" just to safeguard their employment, while not jeopardizing their invitations to A-list, wine and brie soirees on the Gold Coast, in Evanston, and in other trendy leftist circles.

First there was Jay Marvin, the self described, bi-polar, manic depressive talker on WLS-AM a few years back. As the station got progressively more conservative in tone, he began calling himself a "libertarian," while persisting in purveying his unabashed old-line liberal claptrap.

Then there was Jerry Agar, on WLS and now WGN. He genuinely is a libertarian. In fact during his stint in North Carolina, he rubbed shoulders with some acquaintances of mine who run a genuinely libertarian think tank there.

But now there is Erich Mancow Muller, the super jock that WLS recently lured in to fill its 9 to 11 am slot.

I genuinely like Mancow. He's a breath of fresh air after the turgid old schtick of Don Wade and Roma who seem to think that a weekly 30 minute bit on wine tasting makes for good radio. (I'm sure, however, it does generate a goodly number of gratis vintage bottles for the Wade household wine cellar.)

Former disco disc spinner, Wade has a sense of humor that high school sophomores would find embarassingly unsophisticated. Any day now I expect to hear him start laughing uproariously at his own booger and fart jokes. And if I hear Roma's grating voice touting the wonders of "Healthy Trinity" stomach bugs one more time, I think I'll stick a fork through my ear.

So Mancow is exciting by comparison -- even despite having to endure the burden of a woefully miscast, overpaid, news reader sidekick -- Pat Cassidy. Cassidy is at best dead weight to the show, but all too frequently, he begins to fancy himself a serious journalist, id est, liberal journalist and has the effect of stepping on Mancow's lines, creating unneeded tension and basically, upsetting the timing and throwing a wet blanket over the entire production.

But anyway, Mancow calls himself a libertarian.

And in truth, he usually seems pretty true to libertarian ideals. He spoke at the Chicago Tea Party tax protest and afterwards lashed into his on-air guest, Leftist Congressthing, Jan Schakowsky in a way that she has probably never experienced in her life. He actually had you cheering him on.

But yesterday, Mancow interviewed one of those pecksniffity women from the Ralph Nader nutritional group, that every six months or so, crawls out of the Beltway muck to propose some new limitation on our liberty.

This month they're advocating requirements that restaurant chains print complete nutritional information for every dish served.

Aside from the fact that this would cost restaurants a bundle -- likely necessitate an increase in costs to the consumer and probably necessitate the layoffs of some of their illegal alien busboys and cooks -- it is clearly a step down the Naderite road of prohibiting certain food choices.

But "libertarian" Mancow thought this was just great.

Apparently suffering from something of a burgeoning lard butt (perhaps osmotically contracted from daily proximity to Cassidy) and a passion for fast food, he said the government should regulate what he eats, to protect him from himself.

This prompted a regional Libertarian Party spokeswoman to call in and tell Mancow that real libertarians don't plead for government protection and care.

Maybe next, Mancow will want OSHA to come in to the WLS studios and put safety bars around his desk.

He would certainly want to be safeguarded by his government nanny protectors, should he somnalescently fall off his stool while listening to Roma's interminably turgid "Healthy Trinity," commercials.

Free Booze in Wrigleyville and Roscoe Village!

Yes -- I am not making this up!

There is free booze in Wrigleyville and in Roscoe Village.

How do I know this?

Well, I was riding my premium $700 mtn. bike thru the back alleys of those areas on 5/31 ---
the day before leases come due and all the yuppie types move either up or out.

So they throw everything out.

Realistically, if you had a flatbed pick-up truck, you could furnish an entire apartment with the things they discard.

I'm talking about leather couches, futons, lamps, plants, tables -- you name it!

But I was just looking for booze.

And I found it.

One yuppie woman threw out her husband's golf clubs (which an illegal alien Mexican metal scavenger quickly scarfed up) and her entire refrigerator -- which included a whole bottle of cheap California champagne and half a bottle of Jagermeister.

I was happy to let the illegal alien Mexican scavenger run off with the golf clubs -- having given up the horrifying game some years past -- but was more than happy to make off with the Champagne and the German liquoer.

It was delightful.

Then I found some yuppies moving out who were dispensing with two pairs -- of virtually new--
GAP khakis -- in my size!!!! And another goofus yuppie girl who was dispensing two pairs of virtually new Levi Strauss jeans --- in my size!!!!! She also threw out some of her poetry which I read and made me love her and made me fear for her future.

And then in Roscoe Village I found a brand new Dupont sleeping bag. And with it was a 5 liter unopened box of Almedan wine. And down the block was a 12 pack of dusty Leinenkugel Honey-Weiss beer.

I transported them back and had a rather happy day.

Chicago is a silly town -- but it can be rather amusing, at times.

It is -- after all -- a big city.

Chicago's Filthy Weather -- June 1st -- Give Me A Break!

Chicago, Illinois, June 1st 2009, 43 degrees F. at 3pm -- wind howling from the North making the de facto temperature around 34 degrees F.

I put on an Old Navy cotton sweater -- and then a Tommy Hilfiger cotton sweater atop that -- and then a jacket.

Pulllease!!!!

IOC -- are you listening?

Not only does Chicago's political climate stink -- but its meteorological climate stinks to high heavens.

The winds are howling here today. June 1st. IOC--How might you expect that to effect your kayak and rowing and sailing competitions?

IOC -- you may need to commandeer US and Canadian ice-breakers to make Chicago waters pliable for the competitions.

Chicago is a bad city.

I say this as one whose ancestors had the bad fortune to have settled here in 1848 -- as a consequence of the Bismarckian German unification and the Irish potatoe famine.

They -- of diverse ethnicity -- but common Roman Catholic Faith -- managed to meet here and spawn.

But the smart ones managed to make a fair amount of money and get the hell out of Chicago.

I hope to do that soon.

When I was in college, a roguish fellow wrote a peculiar book called "Death Trip in Illinois."

In it, he chronicled, from local newspaper items of the era, how a significant number of German and Irish immigrant miners in the Galena area were so depressed by the perpetually overcast skies and the endless cold winters, that they began stealing dynamite from the mine operations and blowing their heads off.

I feel like doing that now.

Chicago is a climactically laughable place.

No wonder so many Russian Siberian immigrants feel right at home here.

But as for me -- give me my swimming trunks, my sun tan lotion and a plane ticket to Tampa, St. Petersburg --

---or a stick of TNT.

Evanston's Jorgensen Steel Corp. Being Replaced by Dunkin' Donuts, Car Wash

Jorgensen Steel, with its big stately-looking office and massive production/distribution factory has left Evanston.

Its grand 50's vintage edifice on Oakton St., just east of the MSWRD canal has been demolished.

In its place is emerging three cookie-cutter buildings that will house a car wash, a self-storage operation and a Dunkin' Donuts.

Jorgensen Steel was a grand old building with a red brick and chrome facade on its front office building and a massive, hangar-like industrial operations building in back.

It seemed the kind of place to which Ward Cleaver might go off with his brief case in the morning after kissing June good-bye and admonishing Beaver and Wally to be good. It seemed the kind of place to which Chester A. Riley would dash off in the morning with his lunch bucket.

It was also the kind of industrial facility that provided millions upon millions in tax revenue to Evanston and the State of Illinois over the years.

Under its new ownership, it has moved operations to low-tax, right-to-work (non-union) Texas.

The grand old building has been razed now. While still a perfectly usable, architectural gem, no industrial operator silly enough to move to high-tax, high-regulation Evanston, Illinois could be located, even though the Evanston economic development team scoured the nation's lunatic asylums.

So overwhelmingly Obamaite, Evanston's, last large industrial operation will be replaced by a Dunkin' Donuts.

This is the face of the new American service economy.

Instead of producing steel and aluminium -- the very rock core of hard industrial production -- we will now have jobs serving each other donuts and washing each others cars.

Steel workers could provide a home and education for their families. Dunkin' Donut's workers can make enough to buy new i-pods at Best Buy.

And yet the donut servers and car washers will still show up on Federal statistics as being among the ranks of the employed.

"You ain't seen nothin' yet, " Obama squawked at his gala fundraiser in Los Angeles last week.

That is precisely what I'm afraid of.

With China now producing the world's hard industrial goods -- the true bases of real economic wealth -- how long can the US sustain this economic house of cards, which is increasingly based on paper shuffling and hamburger flipping (and massive amounts of consumer debt)? Can we export car washes? How many Dunkin' Donut's chocolate creme filled bismark's can possibly be exported to satisfy the US balance of trade?

This situation is precisely that about which Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan warned in the mid-90s during the NAFTA-GATT debate.

But no one listened.

So, Good bye Jorgensen Steel, with your well-paid factory and white collar jobs, employee health care and solid contribution to US economic economic preeminence.

And Hello Dunkin' Donuts.

How many creams do you want with your frappe?

All We Are Saying: Is Give Proft a Chance

Dan Proft has effectively announced that he will be running for Governor of Illinois.

I say, "Go for it Dan!"

Dan Proft is arguably the most literate and articulate and hard-line, conservative man in the State of Illinois.

He is the best that we've got.

The little screaming mimis from the margins of the rightist feminazi RTL crowd want to do him in.

Take, for instance, Fran "eatin'" Eaton. Looking at the massive girth of this intellectually limited school-marm, whose only claim to conservative intellection is having been a lady leader of a bunch of fellow elementary-educated rightist harpies, seems to be her formidable talent for lapping up mashed potatoes with a fork.

One is reminded of the old Beverly Hillbillies skit.

Where did Jethro go to school?

Eaton.

What did he major in there?

Eatin.

Just like fatty Fran. (Of Illinois Review misediting and large-sized girdle fame.)

So why should we back Dan Proft?

Because he is very probably the most politically saavy and intellectually adepy conservative in the State of Illinois.

And he is a man.

And that is why the mosquitos in the so-called, Illinois Conservative Movement, want to shoot him down.

The laughable Jill Stanek -- a probably competent hospital bed-pan changer, who somehow has boosted herself and her d0-nothing husband into becoming highly paid syndicated scribblers.

And Fran "Eatin."

And the panoply of silly woman and their male enablers , who have somehow grabbed control of the dying conservative movement in Illinois.-- are you listening Dennis Lacomb?
Are you gay or do you just like to cross-dress?

Why are conservatives so fearful of a real and serious man like Dan Proft?

We used to be led by serious conseervative men like Phil Crane and Henry Hyde.

Now, the remnants of the Illinois Conservative Movement are a bunch of Right to Life Nurse Ratsched, intent on neutering real conservative male leaders -- like Dan Proft.

One funny little point.

Ken Kesey, in his best-selling, "One Flew Over yhe Cuckoos Nest," named the ball-cutting nurse,
"Miss Ratsched."

I'm sure the ill-educated, Jill Staneks and Fran "Eatin'" Eatons won't be able to fathom this with their limited intellection -- But what Kesey was playing on was the notion of Nurse "Rat Shit."

Leave him alone, you silly right wing school marms!

You'd best leave Dan Proft alone.