Belmont and somewhere (Sheffield?)
republished:
chicagoist.com/2009/09/15/extra_extra_540.php
Tag: Chicago
Reading Around on September 11th through September 14th
A few interesting links collected September 11th through September 14th:
- Sprouting 101: How do you sprout seeds, nuts and grains? – Sprouting seeds, nuts and grains is a way of greatly increasing their nutritional value and makes them easier to digest. For example, most sprouts double their protein content and have highly increased levels of vitamins! Sprouting seeds is simple and you don't need a lot of fancy equipment. Here's how:
- Mac OS X Automation: Services Downloads – These services and Automator actions are provided as examples of the design and use of Mac OS X automation technologies. All service workflows are fully editable and can be customized as need requires.
- Daily Photo Archive – Photo taken by Seth Anderson
Featured as our daily photo on 9/11/2009.
Reading Around on September 8th through September 10th
A few interesting links collected September 8th through September 10th:
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dy/dan » Blog Archive » What I Would Do With This: Groceries
– “The express lane isn’t faster. The manager backed me up on this one. You attract more people holding fewer total items, but as the data shows above, when you add one person to the line, you’re adding 48 extra seconds to the line length (that’s “tender time” added to “other time”) without even considering the items in her cart. Meanwhile, an extra item only costs you an extra 2.8 seconds. Therefore, you’d rather add 17 more items to the line than one extra person! ” I’d add – when I do the mental calculations as to what checkout line to choose, I also add gender and age into the mix (of cashier and customer both)
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- Post Office Buyer May Not Deliver | NBC Chicago – my photo used by NBC Chicago with a fairly crappy credit link: better than none I guess, but NBC didn’t ask either.
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Peapod celebrates 20 years :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Business
– Thomas Parkinson, co-founder with his brother Andrew of online grocer Peapod 20 years ago, recalls checking customers’ 1200- and 2400-baud modems while he delivered groceries in those early days.
“There were moments of sweat rolling down my face as I thought I’d messed up someone’s hard drive,” recalled Thomas, Peapod’s chief technology officer. “One woman asked, ‘What do I use this foot pedal for?’ Turned out, it was the mouse.”
Andrew Parkinson serves as president. The two brothers started Peapod 20 years ago in Evanston with $25,000 they’d raised from friends and family.”
I find I use Peapod more frequently in the winter months
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Tasty ways to use seasonal tomatoes | Frugal Village – “photo by swanksalot
If you have an abundance of juicy tomatoes this season, consider yourself lucky to have escaped late blight. For folks not so lucky, I’m sharing recipes that don’t use a ton as the main ingredient but will let you savor every delicious bite.
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Interview: Wallace Shawn – Chicagoist
“I suppose I should say that all my roots are all in Chicago,” Wallace Shawn told us. “Both sides of my family. My parents were very identified with being from Chicago, really. My childhood memories of visiting the relatives in Chicago are central to my being. And all sorts of things that some people associate with New York, I associate with Chicago, like going to hear jazz. I went with my uncle to hear Erroll Garner in Chicago.” Shawn is usually thought of as the quintessential New Yorker (in fact his father William was the long-time editor of The New Yorker) but his new book is published by Chicago-based Haymarket Press.
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Wonk Room » Joe Klein Compares ‘Left-Extremist’ Van Jones To ‘White Supremacist,’ ‘Nazi’ – ”Joe Klein, the prominent Time Magazine liberal columnist, has embraced the right-wing
Hate that Joe Klein aka Joke Line is still called a liberal columnist, even after being a Republican suck-up for twenty years or more.
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Chicago Olympics = Unmitigated Disaster
Ramsin Canon of GapersBlock on why Olympics 2016, if Chicago is unlucky enough to win it, will be a Mongolian clusterfuck1 of the worst kind.
We’re going to get the watered down [Olympic Oversight] ordinance2, because our Aldermen are afraid of their own shadows. We’re going to get the Olympics. Mayor Daley will get re-elected. There will be massive cost-overruns; historic displacement of working class black families from the South and West side*; abuse of the homeless and indigent**; brutal police crackdowns; privatized security armies on the streets of Chicago; an unceasing stream of conflict-of-interest and contracting scandals; there will be gigantic budget shortfalls that will force more layoffs, more shutting down of social services like the mental health centers, more labor disputes.
We know why the Mayor and his people are pursuing this: it’s a distraction from the problems in the city, it wipes clean what is now approaching a decade of scandals and bad news for the Mayor, and pumps enormous sums of money into the pinstripe and identity politics patronage that has protected the status quo for a generation. Or, have we become so credulous, and ungenerous, that we believe that the Mayor honestly believes the Olympics are the only way to invest in our neighborhoods, and that he sincerely understands “being a world class city” as “getting on television”?
[Click to continue reading Gapers Block : Mechanics : Chicago Politics – No Cap on Public Money + No Oversight = Unmitigated Disaster]
I read somewhere today that one of the other four finalists, Tokyo, only has 56 percent of its population supporting their bid, while Chicago’s populace allegedly is 67 percent gung-ho. Ha, if only 33 percent of us oppose 2016, we sure are vocal. In fact, in my own informal surveys, I have yet to meet a single person who thinks the Olympics won’t be a disaster for Chicago. My sample size is under 100, but 73-03 is pretty compelling evidence, if not exactly statistically valid.
Click here for some other posts discussing the 2016 games
Footnotes:Plans for the old Pontiac spot
Cool, sounds like somewhere I’d go, if it wasn’t too crowded. The old Pontiac Cafe was located in a sweet spot, just north of the park that gives Wicker Park its name. Their food wasn’t anything special, but sitting outside on a bright, sunny day was a pleasure. Glad to hear the new owners are only tweaking the restaurant.
The rumors were swirling for months about Wicker Park’s old Pontiac Cafe space (1531 N. Damen Ave.)—and the plans that Alexander, Paul Kahan and the rest of their cronies from The Publican, and Peter Garfield (Alexander’s Violet Hour partner) had for it—before last week’s revelation that it would be a still-unnamed taquería. (ETA: late October.) We finally got some details.
D: What was with all the rumors?
TA: My partner Peter and I were presented with the possibility of taking over the Pontiac a year and a half ago, but that was when we were working on The Publican. The farthest thing from my mind was to do another operation. Everyone thought we were being secretive, but there was no secret.D: What ideas did you discuss for the space?
TA: The last thing we wanted to see was another sports bar come in to the neighborhood. Paul started talking about barbecue, and other ideas with a Mexican twist. Our first ideas centered around the music. We wanted old country from the fifties to the seventies, alt country, and the Bakersfield sound that originated in California in the fifties and sixties. We’re going have a turntable behind the bar, and the bartenders will play these albums.D: So is it a restaurant or a bar?
TA: It’s a bar next to a little tiny taquería. Seven or eight items. We don’t want the neighborhood to think a restaurant is going in here. Think of Dairy Queen. The way those windows slide open. That’s the way the kitchen will be. So if you want a taco, you walk up to the kitchen window and order it.D: And the booze?
TA: There will be about 50 obscure whiskeys. About 40 tequilas that a lot of people don’t know about. We’re not going to do the in-depth cocktails that we do at the Violet Hour, but they are going to be amazing. The beers are predominantly from Texas and California, Mexico, and some from Chicago, of course. And we will be one of the least expensive bars—trying to do a $1 draught and a $3 glass of whiskey.[Click to continue reading This Old Pontiac Is No Clunker – Dish – September 2009 – Chicago]
Actually sounds like an Austin, Texas bar, circa 1979, before Austin boomed into tech central, and the Armadillo World Headquarters turned into an office park. I like that Bakersfield sound, actually, and the Outlaw Country era of Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and pals, plus any bar that plays Uncle Tupelo on a regular basis will be ok with me.
Hope it succeeds well enough to stay in business, but not so well that I can’t find a table when I want one.
Reading Around on September 1st through September 2nd
A few interesting links collected September 1st through September 2nd:
- Will Chicago See a Hotel Strike? – Chicagoist – Chicago's hotel workers are clocking in today without a union contract, as negotiators from UNITE-HERE Local 1 and the Hotel Employers Labor Relations Association has yet to reach an agreement on a new pact. The previous contract expired at last night at midnight. “It’s been a fight to even just get to the table,” a spokeswoman for the hotel workers’ union told Crain's. “We’re not close, and I think we’re looking at the possibility of a major fight.”
- Dithering: Jonny Greenwood: Sasha Frere-Jones : The New Yorker – "Q: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?
JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me"
I would add, they sound fine if they are recorded at a high enough sample rate. - Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch – And if it is indeed the case that the Washington Post is recycling the public views of ideologues, hacks, and torture-tourists like Marc Thiessen as inside scoops, then Finn, Warrick, and Tate granted anonymity to their sources because naming them would by itself discredit the story. There is a place for anonymous quotes in journalism, but this is not it.
Fifty Million Dollars Just to Sit At the Table
From my vantage point, $50,000,000 is a lot of cheese just to be one of the four finalists for the 2016 Olympic Games. Especially if this money was provided by the City of Chicago, and not private largesse1
[Anti-Olympic Fever! Catch It!2 ]
After spending $50 million showing off Chicago and circling the globe to hobnob with the world’s sporting potentates, civic boosters pursuing the 2016 Olympic Games are fretting over one last detail: Will Chicago’s First Citizen, President Barack Obama, travel to Europe next month to make the final pitch to the International Olympic Committee?
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Chicago’s rivals plan to send their own heavyweights to Copenhagen for the Oct. 2 vote: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for Rio de Janeiro; King Juan Carlos for Madrid; and Japan’s crown prince and princess for Tokyo.
Mayor Richard Daley has led Chicago’s charge for 2016, but an appearance by Mr. Obama in Copenhagen would be the trump card. The White House “certainly knows that we would like him to come,” says Patrick Ryan, founder of Aon Corp. and leader of the bid committee.
[Click to continue reading For 2016 Olympic Contenders, the Games Have Now Begun – WSJ.com]
previous bids have been derailed by blabbing politicians:
In the weeks leading up to the decision, Paris was the presumed favorite over London and New York City. But [Prime Minister Tony] Blair arrived for the final IOC session in Singapore three days early, and proceeded to receive a phalanx of IOC members. [French President Jacques] Chirac arrived fashionably late.…
London won by four votes over Paris; New York was eliminated in an earlier round. The voting is secret, but a number of IOC members later said Mr. Blair’s lobbying was likely decisive.
Mr. Chirac also might have lost votes when, in the company of fellow world leaders, he took a Gallic swipe at British cuisine: “After Finland,” he said, “it’s the country with the worst food.”
Finland had two members on the IOC during that host city election — perhaps the votes that pushed London over the top.
Loose lips also might have damaged Toronto’s pitch to host the 2008 Summer Olympics. Toronto was thought to be a robust candidate for the Games, until the city’s mayor, speaking before a trip to Africa, said he feared ending up in a pot of boiling water, surrounded by dancing natives. Instead, he was likely scalded by the IOC’s African members, who often provide swing votes in host-city elections, as the continent itself rarely puts forth a bid.
I have decidedly mixed feelings about Chicago’s bid to host the Games. I suspect a lot of debt will be incurred in the name of taxpayers, and for what? Crowds of international tourists, above and beyond the crowds of international tourists we already have? Money not spent on parks, bridges and schools, but instead spent building infrequently used sport stadiums, on land owned by friends of Mayor Daley? Of course, we, the citizens of Chicago, have decidedly not been asked our opinion, because we are skeptical of the actual practical benefits of being an Olympic City.
Update: Click here for some other posts discussing the 2016 games
Footnotes:Reading Around on August 31st through September 1st
A few interesting links collected August 31st through September 1st:
- Glenn Greenwald – Swampland – TIME.com – Can’t decide if my favorite part of this laughable Joke Line aka Joe Klein article is the article itself, the comments ripping Klein to shreds, or the thoughtful response Glenn Greenwald made on his Salon.com blog. Or all of the above. Klein should be so embarrassed as to resign and become an upstate bee keeper.
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- A Mugging on Lake Street – Chicago magazine – September 2009 – Chicago – “A veteran investigative reporter looks into his own beating and finds himself confronting harsh and lingering questions of race BY JOHN CONROY”
- Radiohead -Lollapalooza Festival 1st August 2008 – XM Broadcoast- mp3s | Radiohead Not For Profit – Radiohead – Lollapalooza, Grant Park; Chicago, IL
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Weakness Will Be Overcome
Slightly south of the Art Institute
From Feb 2007 – a brutally cold month, if I recall correctly…
Man Sues RINO nightclub
My quick take: serves the patron right for stepping foot in such a lame bar.
[343 West Erie, Chicago, despite what the sign says – 658 North refers to the cross street ]
A man is suing RiNo nightclub for injuries he says he sustained at the hands of one of RiNo’s bouncers.
According to the complaint, on December 20, 2008, plaintiff Sean Regan was in the VIP area of RiNo nightclub when he “inadvertently dropped a drink on the floor” and was asked to leave by an unknown bouncer.
When Regan asked to speak to the manager, the complaint states, the unknown bouncer angrily denied his request, led him down a dark hallway with another unknown bouncer, shoved him, twisted his arms behind his back and “spun him around violently at which time [plaintiff’s] left thumb hooked into the unknown bouncer’s jacket pocket, resulting in a fracture to [plaintiff’s] left hand.”
[Click to continue reading Man Sues RiNo nightclub for Injuries by Bouncer – Chicago Bar-tender, complaint here Scribd.com ]
Of course, I’ve only been inside about three minutes, but any bar that names themselves Republican In Name Only is suspect.
Reading Around on August 27th through August 28th
A few interesting links collected August 27th through August 28th:
- Solipsism « Earthpages.ca – Think Free – This is the philosophical position that only the subject exists and all impressions of others and the outside world are illusory.
While many dismiss solipsism as an extreme or strange view, others say it is logically impossible to prove or disprove
- d r i f t g l a s s: Da Mare Would Like To Apologize – "If you've never been to a public meeting where Da Mare or one of his goofs are having their political pipes rodded, let me tell you right off the bat, you should go. Over the years I’ve been to several, and it really is about as purely little-“d”-democratic an exercise as any big city could hope for: In front of Da Mare and the assembled heads of his every office and department, any citizen can step up to the microphone and “Cry Harold”"
Awesome description: I have to go to one of these sometimes
- Review: Snow Leopard Review | Mac OS X – Page 1 | Macworld – if you later try to launch a PowerPC app, Snow Leopard will pop up a window to explain that you need Rosetta and offer to install it for you (via Apple’s Software Update utility). I can only assume that making Rosetta optional is an attempt by Apple to goad users to upgrade their apps and to shame developers who still haven’t recompiled their apps to run on Intel chips. But given that most everyday users have no idea which of their apps are Intel-native and which are PowerPC, this seems unnecessarily harsh.
Reading Around on August 25th through August 27th
A few interesting links collected August 25th through August 27th:
- Mac OS X Automation: Services Downloads – Download free services. Service collections are grouped by color. Some services will install required Automator actions and may require an adminstrator password to do so.”
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- Chicago vice – chicagotribune.com – Chicago Police Sgt. John F. Mangin displays a bushel of marijuana leaves and a jar of ground marijuana found Sept. 27, 1945, in a flat at 601 W. Madison St.. Six men were arrested in the narcotics bust, including a 60-year-old man that Mangin said was the first person he arrested when he joined the narcotics detail in 1931.
Tribune Bondholders Fault Zell Takeover
Sam Zell might rue the day he impulsively decided to purchase the Tribune Corporation
Disgruntled Tribune Co. bondholders have asked a U.S. bankruptcy judge to let them investigate Sam Zell’s 2007 buyout of the newspaper-and-television chain in an effort to derail a plan that would hand the company over to its banks.
The filing, made late Wednesday, calls the $8.2 billion transaction a “fraudulent conveyance” that left Tribune insolvent from the onset of the 2007 deal. It accuses senior lenders led by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. of completing a leveraged buyout they should have known would push the company into bankruptcy.
“Fraudulent conveyance” is a legal term most often used in bankruptcy court, in which creditors allege a company has used assets in a way unfair to creditors. In the context of leveraged buyouts, creditors can argue a deal loaded up a company with too much debt, leaving it undercapitalized and unable to meet future obligations.
The filing will seek to slow or nullify an advancing plan for Tribune to exit from bankruptcy protection with J.P. Morgan, Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch and other banks owning nearly all of Tribune in return for the banks forgiving about $8 billion in debt.
Bondholders would likely receive only a sliver of new equity under the deal. The bondholders seeking to investigate Mr. Zell’s buyout of Tribune represent more than 18% of the company’s bond debt, according to the court filing. The bondholder’s requested investigation centers around some $1.26 billion in notes issued between 1992 and 1997.
[Click to continue reading Tribune Bondholders Fault Zell Takeover – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link]
why did Sam Zell even buy the Trib if not to strip it of assets and make money on the deal? He reminds me of a caricature of an 19th century robber baron, a comical villain in a graphic novel. Except of course, there are real lives effected by Zell’s greed.
and since I had to look up Fraudulent Conveyance, here is the Wikipedia entry:
In the United States, fraudulent conveyances or transfers are governed by two sets of laws that are generally consistent. The first is the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act (“UFTA”) that has been adopted by all but a handful of the states.The second is found in the federal Bankruptcy Code.
There are two kinds of fraudulent transfer. The archetypal example is the intentional fraudulent transfer. This is a transfer of property made by a debtor with intent to defraud, hinder, or delay his or her creditors. The second is a constructive fraudulent transfer. Generally, this occurs when a debtor transfers property without receiving “reasonably equivalent value” in exchange for the transfer if the debtor is insolvent at the time of the transfer or becomes insolvent or is left with unreasonably small capital to continue in business as a result of the transfer. Unlike the intentional fraudulent transfer, no intention to defraud is necessary.
The Bankruptcy Code authorizes a bankruptcy trustee to recover the property transferred fraudulently for the benefit of all of the creditors of the debtor if the transfer took place within the relevant time frame. The transfer may also be recovered by a bankruptcy trustee under the UFTA too, if the state in which the transfer took place has adopted it and the transfer took place within its relevant time period. Creditors may also pursue remedies under the UFTA without the necessity of a bankruptcy.
Because this second type of transfer does not necessarily involve any actual wrongdoing, it is a common trap into which honest, but unwary debtors fall when filing a bankruptcy petition without an attorney. Particularly devastating and not uncommon is the situation in which an adult child takes title to the parents’ home as a self-help probate measure (in order to avoid any confusion about who owns the home when the parents die and to avoid losing the home to a perceived threat from the state). Later, when the parents file a bankruptcy petition without recognizing the problem, they are unable to exempt the home from administration by the trustee. Unless they are able to pay the trustee an amount equal to the greater of the equity in the home or the sum of their debts (either directly to the Chapter 7 trustee or in payments to a Chapter 13 trustee,) the trustee will sell their home to pay the creditors. Ironically, in many cases, the parents would have been able to exempt the home and carry it safely through a bankruptcy if they had retained title or had recovered title before filing.
Even good faith purchasers of property who are the recipients of fraudulent transfers are only partially protected by the law in the U.S. Under the Bankruptcy Code, they get to keep the transfer to the extent of the value they gave for it, which means that they may lose much of the benefit of their bargain even though they have no knowledge that the transfer to them is fraudulent.
Often fraudulent transfers occur in connection with leveraged buyouts (LBOs), where the management/owners of a failing corporation will cause the corporation to borrow on its assets and use the loan proceeds to purchase the management/owner’s stock at highly inflated prices. The creditors of the corporation will then often have little or no unencumbered assets left upon which to collect their debts. LBOs can be either intentional or constructive fraudulent transfers, or both, depending on how obviously the corporation is financially impaired when the transaction is completed.
Although not all LBOs are fraudulent transfers, a red flag is raised when, after an LBO, the company then cannot pay its creditors
[Click to continue reading Fraudulent conveyance – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
The Zell deal seems1 to fit that definition, does it not?
Footnotes:At the time of the buyout, Tribune was valued at $8.2 billion, excluding debt. Including Tribune’s existing borrowings, the deal placed more than $12 billion of debt on the company, or about 10 times its annual cash flow.
“The LBO — and the unsustainable debt burden it imposed on a business already in a secular decline — undoubtedly caused the debtor’s demise,” the filing said. “The remedying of the LBO will most certainly dictate the economic outcome of these Chapter 11 cases
- and yes, I am not a lawyer, and not even particularly well versed in bankruptcy proceedings, so of course this is only speculation [↩]
Politicians and Pollution
A story that makes my blood boil: politicians dithering and being petty about enforcing environmental laws. They treat pollution like it is an earmark, or something to be bartererd. No you evil people, it isn’t – toxic death is permanent, and willfully destroying the health of your citizens should be a felony. The Illinois EPA is so corrupt and toothless, the entire organization’s staff should be fired, and new employees brought in, preferably not from the ranks of energy-related corporation employees.
Even though the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency had plenty of evidence to file charges against the owner and operator of Anchor Metal Finishing, top agency officials sat on the case for more than a year. Meanwhile, carcinogenic solvents and caustic acids kept leaching from barrels packed haphazardly into a ramshackle building, two blocks away from a Schiller Park subdivision.
What appeared to be an obvious violation of state environmental laws became entangled in one of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s political feuds, delaying action for months. Dozens of other cases against polluters languished as well, largely because Blagojevich and his top aides refused to refer them to his archnemesis, Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan, a Tribune investigation found.
The bitter dispute still reverberates through state government today, eight months after Blagojevich was arrested on federal corruption charges and then impeached and removed from office. Nearly 19 months after it was discovered, the Schiller Park site still hasn’t been cleaned up, and several other older cases are moving through an enforcement system that Gov. Pat Quinn and Madigan only recently have begun to repair.
Blagojevich and Madigan started out on amicable terms after they were elected in 2002. But EPA referrals of civil and criminal violations to the attorney general began to drop sharply in 2005, and fell to a record low of 114 in 2007, according to state records.
The agency hasn’t sent a criminal case to the attorney general in two years, records show.
[Click to continue reading Illinois pollution enforcement hampered by politics — chicagotribune.com]
and this is just horrible:
Federal regulators also cited Midwest Generation, the owner of six coal-fired power plants that records show are some of the biggest contributors to dirty air in the Chicago area. Madigan’s staff documented thousands of pollution violations at the plants, but the state EPA repeatedly refused to take action against the company, which was represented for years by one of Blagojevich’s top campaign aides.
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Business lobbyists persuaded lawmakers in 2002 to require a less-confrontational approach that doesn’t involve the attorney general’s office unless there is an imminent threat to the environment; lawsuits still can be filled if an agreement can’t be brokered.
Although the state EPA declined to cite Midwest Generation — the agency agreed with the company that frequent bursts of soot from its coal plants weren’t harmful — Scott noted the Blagojevich administration negotiated a deal that will force the aging generators to clean up or shut down by the end of the next decade. Environmental groups are seeking to impose tighter deadlines.
The EPA agreed with the polluter that frequent bursts of soot from its coal plants weren’t harmful? Un-fucking-believable. The EPA should be forced to move their offices to be located adjacent to pollution sites like the Midwest Generation plants, or adjacent to the Crestwood polluted well.
Read the whole article if you can stomach it.
Reading Around on August 20th
Some additional reading August 20th from 12:26 to 17:28:
- IVI-IPO Files Suit in Parking Meter Deal – Chicagoist – Will swanksalot's photo be called as People's Exhibit B in the case of The People V. King Daley?
- Beyond HandBrake's defaults | Entertainment & HDTV | Playlist | Macworld – If you’re a Mac user interested in ripping your commercial DVDs to a format playable on an Apple TV, iPod, or iPhone, the free video transcoder, HandBrake 0.9.3, is one of the easiest ways to go about it. With a copy of the free VLC installed on your Mac, HandBrake can rip most DVDs made today, and the results it produces are quite watchable.
But suppose you want to go beyond the defaults—tweak HandBrake to produce videos that take up less room on your iPod, dispense with a movie’s closing credits, or bear subtitles? It’s all possible with HandBrake, but it takes some tweaking. And tweaking HandBrake is what this article is all about
- The Balcony » Web Tip: ScanSnap Community – Fujitsu has opened a site dedicated to ScanSnap owners and those of you who want to become one: the ScanSnap Community. So if you own a ScanSnap or plan to to so, check out the Updates, Testimonials, Tips & Tricks, and Ask the Expert sections to learn more about what you can do with a document scanner.