unfortunately, was not quick enough to get a clear shot of this dude, he was trucking on his skate board though.
there is something about this photo I like a lot, as technically flawed as it is. Again, looks better if you view the larger size.
Month: July 2009
Hotel Sofitel Chicago Water Tower
very cold place inside too, imo
a friend stayed here a couple years ago, I wouldn’t really recommend it, unless you just loved the location, or got a cheap price.
Talking Points Memo Will Expand Staff
Good news, as TPM is one of the best blogs out there, and one of the few that consistently does its own reporting in addition to sifting through the political reporting of others. Very high signal to noise ratio1
Footnotes:The political news Web site Talking Points Memo this weekend completed a round of investment, of $500,000 to $1 million. The move is intended to increase the number of employees, to roughly 20, from the current 11, in the next 10 months.
The financing is the first part of a three-year plan to increase the site’s staff to 60 employees, Joshua Micah Marshall, the site’s founder, said in an interview at his offices on West 20th Street in New York.
He would not identify his investors, who he said were angel investors, not venture capitalists. One name that has been made public is that of Marc Andreessen, who is investing personally, not on behalf of his new venture capital fund.
“We could have gotten a higher dollar amount — I didn’t think we needed it — but it would have come with strings attached,” Mr. Marshall said. “It would not have been best for the site.”
[From Investment Will Expand Staff at Talking Points Memo – NYTimes.com]
- as opposed to webzines like the Huffington Post which can’t decide if it wants to be a tabloid or a serious journal [↩]
Kiva Loan Number 12
Ganna Levitskaya from Ukraine has fully repaid a Kiva loan
Location: Nadvirna, Ukraine
Repayment Term: 12 months (more info)
Activity: Retail Repayment Schedule: Monthly
Loan Use: To purchase mineral fertilizer
Ganna is married with four grown children: a son, three daughters and six grandkids. Her whole family lives in Nadvirna, Western Ukraine. She offers various goods for sale. Ganna owns two vending kiosks at two different local markets – central marketplace and farming supply market. Moreover, she has just bought a small store in a village to offer fresh produce to residents of that neighborhood. Ganna started small about 20 years ago. She worked hard to keep her business running. Lending services have helped her grow and expand her small venture. Currently, Ganna has about 30,000 Grivnyas in the vending business. Her net monthly profit is about 6,000 Grivnyas.
Ganna is requesting a loan of 16,000 Grivnyas to purchase mineral fertilizer wholesale for further retail sale at one of her vending locations. She has much experience working in the sphere of trade and commerce for over 37 years. After Ganna retired, she ventured to launch her small vending business and hasn’t been sorry about it. Today her business is the main source of income for her family and kids.
On the photo, Ganna is pictured at one of her vending locations where she offers clothing items for retail sale.
(click to continue reading Kiva – Ganna Levitskaya from Ukraine has fully repaid a Kiva loan.)
| Country: | Ukraine |
|---|---|
| Avg Annual Income: | $8,000 |
| Currency: | Ukraine Hryvnia (UAH) |
| Exchange Rate: | 7.6670 UAH = 1 USD |
Chicago Children’s Museum move stalls out
About a year ago, we had a flurry of posts opposing the move1 /2 /3 /4 /5 /6 /7 of the Chicago Children’s Museum from Navy Pier to a semi-subterranean location in a corner of Grant Park.
Just a year after winning hard-fought City Council permission to move to Grant Park, the Chicago Children’s Museum has hit a financial wall, raising a real prospect that its highly controversial new facility in the park’s northeast corner may never be built.
A moribund economy now may have a better chance of blocking the project than lawsuits by parks activists and neighborhood opponents. Fundraising has foundered while projected costs have climbed by tens of millions to $150 million or more, Crain’s has learned. Sources close to the project say odds now are 50-50 at best that the Grant Park plan will proceed.
As a result, the museum is considering its options, including downsizing the proposed facility, getting a cash infusion from the Chicago Park District or extending the lease on its current space at Navy Pier as far as 2025.
…
Museum board Chairman Gigi Pritzker, who was not available for comment, could tap her personal fortune to bail out the project, were she so inclined. But short of that, signs are multiplying that the proposed facility is turning into one more headache for Mayor Richard M. Daley, who spent considerable political capital pushing the museum plan through the council in June 2008 over the opposition of the local alderman, Brendan Reilly (42nd).
According to the museum’s latest available income-tax return, filed in May with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s charitable trust division, the museum had $28.1 million in “pledges receivable” as of June 30, 2008 — just $1 million more than it did a year earlier. Much of that is believed to be a continuing naming-rights commitment for the proposed facility from Northbrook-based Allstate Corp., which says it still backs the project.
[Click to read more details of Museum move stalls out | Crain’s Chicago Business]
Of course, wealthy heiress Gigi Pritzker could fund the construction out of her own vast wealth should she choose to, since she was one of the driving forces behind the whole fiasco, but the whole point was to get taxpayers to pay for the museum’s new location. Kind of like one of those sports stadium deals we fulminate against now and then. The Chicago Children’s Museum is a private museum, thus any profits collected will remain in the museum, and not the City of Chicago.
Footnotes:- for instance: Setback for the CCM juggernaut [↩]
- or: Fight for Chicago’s treasured lakefront [↩]
- or: Subterranean museum [↩]
- or: The Grant Park land-grab [↩]
- or: Chicago astroturf alert [↩]
- or: Keep childrens museum out of Grant Park [↩]
- or: Daley vs Reilly [↩]
Speaking of Race
Speaking of race relations in contemporary America, Frank Rich writes:
The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.
That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)
…
The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.
Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”
[Click to continue reading Frank Rich – She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It – NYTimes.com]
Palin is the hero to those same reactionary bilious few who celebrated George Wallace a scant few decades ago.
No ketchup on a properly made hot dog
Hot dogs, and their consumption, is nearly a religion in Chicago.1 Dogma proclaims that a hot dog has certain condiments, and ketchup is not one of the allowed sacraments. Cecil Adams offers one explanation:
Ketchup smothers the flavor of the hot dog because ketchup makers add sugar to their products. That takes the edge off the highly acidic tomatoes, but it takes the edge off everything else, too. Which is exactly why a lot of parents like it, according to Mel Plotsky, sales manager for the David Berg hot dog company in Chicago. (Chicago is one of the hot dog’s holy cities.) Put ketchup on it and a kid will swallow anything–and from there it’s a straight shot to Velveeta cheese, Franco-American spaghetti, and Deborah Norville.
For that matter, you want to watch the mustard, too. Plotsky says your mainstream brands like French’s put in too much turmeric and whatnot. What you want is some unpretentious mustard like Plochman’s that enhances rather than competes with the flavor of the beef. You should also steam or grill rather than boil your hot dogs–water leaches away the flavor and softens the wiener till it becomes non-tooth-resistant mush.
But–getting back to the original question–you say you like the taste of tomatoes. Fine, then eat tomatoes, as God meant them to be eaten–fresh sliced and piled on top of the hot dog. The recommended ingredients of a hot dog with everything, in order of application, are mustard, relish, chopped onion, sliced tomato, kosher pickle spear, optional peppers, and celery salt.
[From The Straight Dope: Why is there no ketchup on a properly made hot dog? ]
If I grill my own hot dogs, and have time to create it exactly as I wish to eat it, I add mustard, chopped onion, giardiniera peppers, and serve the grilled hot dog on a lightly toasted whole wheat bun. If I eat a hot dog somewhere in the city, I may have the extra “Chicago-esque” ingredients like celery salt, sliced tomato and kosher pickle in addition to my other favorite ingredients.
[A Chicago style char dog from Wiener’s Circle on Clark Street]
Never ketchup. I actively avoid ketchup on any food item. If for some reason I am eating french fries, and I can’t have vinegar, I’ll use mustard as a dipping condiment.
[Give the Gift of Chicago – the side of a Vienna Beef truck]
- slightly more adherents than simply a cult, but not quite enough attention with atheists to qualify as a real religion [↩]
Noam Chomsky Discusses Religion
A Quiet Hero of Civil Rights History, Vanished in 1939
In 1938, the Supreme Court, in a 6-2 decision1, ruled that the segregated University of Missouri Law School had to admit Lloyd Lionel Gaines, but he never made it there.
Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades. And oddly, even though it was raining and the sidewalks of Chicago were clogged with slush, he felt a need to buy postage stamps one night.
Or so he told a friend just before he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and other giants whose names will be invoked at the centennial convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which started this weekend in Manhattan.
Instead, Mr. Gaines has been consigned to one of history’s side rooms, his name recalled mainly by legal scholars and relatives, like Tracy Berry, an assistant United States attorney in St. Louis whose grandmother was Mr. Gaines’s sister.
“He was taken away and more than likely killed,” Ms. Berry said when asked to speculate on his fate. She said Mr. Gaines was known in family lore as “a caring, loving brother and son” who would not have chosen to disappear or commit suicide, despite the pressure he was under.
[Click to read more of A Quiet Hero of Civil Rights History, Vanished in 1939 – NYTimes.com]
I’m nearly done reading American Pharaoh, and so much of the book is about race relations in Chicago. I am amazed how virulent the hatred towards blacks was, even as late as the 1970s. Not that there isn’t still racism in Chicago2, but I can’t imagine bigots throwing rocks and burning bottles at police for daring to attempt to protect black families from harm. I’m unsure as to the exact circumstances that led to Mr. Gaines’ death (was it abduction by bigots, or something else?), but the racism was so ingrained in Chicago of the last century, I am not surprised if he was actually murdered.
—
update, post-racial, like in swimming pools in Huntingdon Valley, PA, as illustrated by Tony Auth.
Vegas Thrills Chills and hopefully no Onanistic Spills
Yet another Republican family values freaky-deac(on).
One of Ensign’s roommates, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was described by Hampton as being particularly vocal about the importance of cash contributions to “make these folks whole.” Coburn denies this, although he won’t say exactly what advice he gave to his erring colleague. Coburn told Roll Call that he talked to Ensign as a “physician and as an ordained deacon” and that he will therefore have the right to keep mum even if he’s dragged into court or a Senate committee hearing.
This makes me sort of hope that some kind of investigation takes place just so Coburn, who’s an obstetrician, can explain how exactly doctor-patient confidentiality figures into this.
…
We hardly need to point out that Ensign was one of the people who demanded that President Bill Clinton resign over the Lewinsky affair, that he votes against financing for education and contraception services to combat teenage pregnancy and that he supports a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In the world of politics, hypocrisy is a hard market to corner, but lately the Republicans have been making a Microsoft-like effort to do it.
Both of the Hamptons lost their jobs, and Doug was shuttled off to a Las Vegas-based airline, run by a friend of Ensign’s, where he is now vice president of government affairs. Unappeased, he hired a lawyer to demand that Ensign make financial amends for “evil and completely unjustifiable acts by one of our country’s top leaders.” He also tried to leak the story of the affair to Fox News, apparently under the theory that out of all the media, Fox would be most excited by the opportunity to humiliate a powerful conservative Republican senator.
[Click to continue reading Gail Collins – What Happened in Vegas – NYTimes.com]
Also, the payoff was a very precise number of dollars: $96,000, or as The Washington Monthly puts it:
$96,000 is a lot of money. Interestingly, it is precisely the amount you can give as a gift without having to report it to the IRS, multiplied by eight: one gift of $12,000 from each parent to Ensign’s lover, her husband, and two of their children. I wonder what the IRS will make of that? I certainly hope that neither of the parents has made use of their children’s money, or done anything else to suggest that this was all one big gift split up to avoid paying gift tax, or (more likely) having to report the gift. It’s bad enough asking your parents to cough up $96,000 to cover up your indiscretions; asking them to violate the tax code and risk prison is a whole lot worse.
[Click to continue reading: The Washington Monthly – O, What A Tangled Web We Weave]
Strange concept that, neatly avoiding investigation by the IRS by having your parents pay off your mistress, and her family. Hope there wasn’t any money laundering going on.
Albert Hofmann fundraising letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs
Strangely, I had never heard of this before
Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experience “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” So, toward the end of his life, LSD inventor Albert Hofmann decided to write to the iPhone creator to see if he’d be interested in putting some money where the tip of his tongue had been.
Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, died in April 2008 at the age of 102.
See the letter here.
Steve Jobs and Albert Hofmann
and for lack of a better place: the Google Voice message left, presumedly by Google executives:
Reading Around on July 9th through July 10th
A few interesting links collected July 9th through July 10th:
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Think Progress» David Brooks: A Republican senator put ‘his hand on my inner thigh’ for a ‘whole’ dinner party. – “BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.”
That’s just creepy. And creepier that David Brooks didn’t make the Senator remove his hand, or otherwise stop him from caressing him.
- Extra, Extra – Chicagoist July 9 2009 – sunsets and Yeats
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Bring island taste to your home | Frugal Village – photo by swanksalot
Pineapple offers a sweet, tropical flair for summer dishes. It’s a good source of vitamin C
Papa Hemingway as a KGB dilettante
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB
Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press), which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB’s list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 1990s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.
Its section on the author’s secret life as a “dilettante spy” draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name “Argo”, and “repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us” when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to “give us any political information” and was never “verified in practical work”, so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?
[Click to continue reading Hemingway revealed as failed KGB spy – guardian.co.uk ]
So the inventor of the Papa Doble was a dilettante spy? What exactly does that mean? Curious. And of course, The Soviet Union was an ally against Hitler in this era. But I expect more will be made of this in upcoming months.
Reading Around on July 8th through July 9th
A few interesting links collected July 8th through July 9th:
- The New York Times > Magazine > Second Gilded Age – “A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.”A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.”
- PDNPulse: New York Times Magazine Withdraws Altered Photo Essay – The New York Times Magazine has withdrawn a photo essay by Edgar Martins — described in print as having been produced “without digital manipulation” — because several of the photographs show signs of digital manipulation. The photo essay, which ran in the July 5 issue of the magazine, shows abandoned real estate projects.
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- Straight Dope Chicago: Followup: Is the late arrival of summer in Chicago proof of global warming? – “Here we begin to see a pattern. The long-term winter temperature trend is up, though not dramatically. Clearly the 1950s were an unusually warm time. Considered over a shorter period, however — from the bitterly cold winters of 1977-79 to the present — winter temperatures in Chicago have risen sharply. The past decade has been the warmest stretch in the past 60 years. That’s in line with the common observation among climate-change specialists that winters have warmed up more than summers.Now look again at the early fall chart. We see the same rising trend, although it started later. The average high temperature declined until 1993, but has risen markedly since then. Is this evidence of the seasonal shift some experts claim to have detected — an unmistakable sign of global warming? Eh, 15 years is too short a time to judge. But could “
“70INX70IN Versatol Tri-pod Screen Matte White Keystone Elim.” (Da-Lite Screen Company, Inc.)
Which End Has the Pot of Gold?
tonight’s rainbow over the west loop, about ten minutes before sunset, two photos, stitched together.
If you look closely at the large version ( Original ), you can see where I cloned the sky a bit. Otherwise, no out-of-the ordinary Photoshop corrections.
If I spent more time I could maybe make the clouds look less stitched, but unless you are looking, you might not notice them at all. (Upper right corner is copied from elsewhere)