Tag: Chicago

Faux Black and White in Chicago

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I’m having fun emulating the use of film1 and converting photos to black and white. A few recent snapshots – weren’t strong enough on their own, and still aren’t “print” worthy, but at least they are good practice fodder. For larger versions, click image, natch.

Inescapable Rhythms
Inescapable Rhythms
The color version for reference – actually used the Kodak 25 slide film emulation, which added contrast and richer colors to the image. View On Black

Inescapable Rhythms -TRI-X 400
Inescapable Rhythms -TRI-X 400
black and white version, TRI-X 400, a film I used to use quite extensively in my Nikon N8008 35mm camera. View Large On Black

Conceptual Silence
Conceptual Silence
Blue Line platform. Kodak T-Max p3200 speed film, another I used fairly freqently. I never owned a flash for my 35mm camera, plus was more frequently in nightclubs and bars in the 90s, situations that high-speed film was useful.View On Black

Intelligentsia Barista
Intelligentsia Barista
www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/locations/view/Broadway+Coff…. More high-speed film – adds grain, and masks blurriness. Still a lame photo, actually, but not quite as bad.

Modes of Transportation Number 6832 –
Modes of Transportation Number 6832 -
T-Max P3200 added grain. I always use Alien Skin Exposure 2 in its own layer, and sometimes change the opacity to allow a little bit of color to shine through. View On Black

The Chicago Gallery 1973 – TRI-X 400
The Chicago Gallery 1973 - TRI-X 400
Union Pacific is slowly (and I mean slowly!) rebuilding this over-pass.View On Black

State of Mind – TRI-X 400
State of Mind - TRI-X 400
underneath the Loop train track (at Quincy, or nearby)View Large On Black

James H Sammons M.D Way – Agfa APX 100
James H Sammons M.D Way - Agfa APX 100
random street scene. Who the hell is James H Sammons, M.D., and why is the street named after him?

Don’t recall ever using Agfa APX 100 film before, seems very fine grained. Again, let a small percentage of the underlying color to bleed through. Subtle effect though.

CLTV Truck
CLTV Truck
May Day, 2007

forgot which filter I used, but I’m guessing Ilford Delta 3200, based on the grain.

Unitrin Building – Plus-X 125
Unitrin Building - Plus-X 125
1 East Wacker, Chicago, IL

Plus-X 125 – used lots of rolls of this film.

Public Enemies – TRI-X 400
Public Enemies - TRI-X 400
taxi in front of Chicago Cultural Center

WH Salisburn Since 1855 – Ilford HP5 400
WH Salisburn Since 1855 - Ilford HP5 400
www.whsalisbury.com/

Self Portrait Jan 2006 – toned
Self Portrait Jan 2006 - toned

toned in Alien Skin, sort of emulating the Ilford black and white film that could be color-processed like C-412 and had this brown tonality.

Empty Blue Number 2

Empty Blue Number 2
Fulton Market

More 1049 Nostalgia – TRI-X 400
More 1049 Nostalgia - TRI-X 400
biked by my old apartment: corner of Cortez and Paulina. I rented the bottom floor (unfinished death trap that it was), something like 3500 sq. feet for $780.The neighborhood was slightly different in the mid-90s, but some structures are still there.

a quickr pickr post

Footnotes:
  1. using the Alien Skin plugin, Exposure 2 [↩]
  2. and thus could be taken to any photo developing lab. Think it was called XP2 Super [↩]

The Rant Moves to YouTube

Seth Anderson0 comment

You’ve probably seen or at least heard mention of most of these rants

Modern YouTube ranters include Christian Bale, William Shatner, Alec Baldwin and Lily Tomlin, the arrogant actors; Jim Mora and Dennis Green, the furious football coaches; Axl Rose, the intense rocker; Pat Condell, the smug atheist; Rick Santelli, the fed-up CNBC reporter; and Kanye West, the imperious musician. In a less-masculine key are end-of-rope rants by Chris Crocker, the Britney Spears superfan, and Tricia Walsh-Smith, the vengeful and off-kilter ex-wife.

Fictional YouTube rants — scenes from movies and TV that have found a second life online — include Jeremy Piven’s dressing-down of his therapist in “Entourage” (“I thought . . . you could give her [his wife] a pill that could either fix it or make her a mute!”) and Al Pacino’s savage tirade in “Glengarry Glen Ross” (“Where did you learn your trade . . . , you idiot? Who ever told you. That you. Could work. With men?”).

Watch all these rants — there should be a greatest-hits album — and intriguing patterns emerge. First, the Chicago connection. Axl Rose’s heated 1992 soliloquy about his cruel family took place at a theater outside the city. Lee Elia, the onetime manager of the Chicago Cubs, ranted memorably about disloyal fans at Wrigley Field. This year, Rick Santelli raged against the president’s housing plan from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “Glengarry Glen Ross” is set in Chicago — the hometown of its author, David Mamet, the nation’s leading playwright of rants.

Second, rants happen in prose, and often ugly, spluttery prose. Not poetry. Verse tirades (including Shaquille O’Neal’s rap roast of Kobe Bryant and Nas’s “I embrace y’all with Napalm” ripping of Jay-Z) are far too elegant to be rants, which are simultaneously more dangerous and more pathetic. The rhyme that dominates rants is not a rhyme at all but a repetition: a word matched exactly with itself, as in Bale’s harangue on the set of “Terminator Salvation,” in which he spit out a single obscenity some three dozen times. (As a general rule, inflection substitutes for reason.)

[Click to continue reading The Medium – The Rant Moves to YouTube – NYTimes.com]

This is placeholder text:I want to find as many of these rants on YouTube as I can. For amusement purposes only, of course, no wagering allowed.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HURJNd0J4U

Ricky Roma all but destroys Williamson after the latter screws up Roma’s big sale. One of the two great scenes from Glengarry Glen Ross, and one of Pacino’s best monologues.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXVuy0h29c

Christian Bale Goes nuts on the set of “Terminator Salvation”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HURJNd0J4U

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpVuxgSxFFE

Jessica Savitch goes on a tirade. Don’t know if she’s totally in the wrong though, after all the anchor is the one that ends up looking silly, even if its everyone behind the scenes that screwed up

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGDC2J_E0rY

Live performance in Rosemont (Chicago), Illinois, 1992.04.09. Axl talks about the things he said in his Rolling Stone interview about his upbringing.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv23pqH9iG0

Elia’s outburst occurred on April 29, 1983, after the Cubs suffered a one-run home loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The rant took place during a postgame session with reporters in his office. Elia was pissed off at the continual booing by the Wrigley crowd (both during and after the game) and frustrated that no one could see beyond the Cubs’ 5-14 record for any of the progress he felt the team was making.
The fact that Elia’s rant has been preserved for posterity is something of a miracle. In the early 80s, “baseball reporters didn’t work with tape recorders. But radio guys certainly did. So it was that Elia’s outburst came to be a part of the public domain.”
Les Grobstein, aka “ubiquitous” Les, was lurking on the edges of Elia’s office, with tape rolling. For Grobstein, graduate of Chicago’s Von Steuben High School, “it was his Zapruder moment.” Elia commented that he dearly wished Grobstein “had gotten a flat tire on his way to Wrigley that afternoon.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pp6WC1Ocz4

The title explains it all. Michael Richards becomes combative and explodes in a vile, racist diatribe at Laugh Factory in LA.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAeLFjNCb3A

Bill Shatner asks the question – ‘What is it with George Takei and his issues with me?’ The question is based on George Takei’s recent marriage and the multitude of press stories about his decision not to invite William Shatner to his wedding

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J0-ZatDHug – Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter

Houston versus Chicago redux

Seth Anderson7 Comments

Apparently, The Economist interviewed some Social Systems Architect and Houston booster by the name of Tory Gattis who claimed that Houston’s metropolitan area would soon surpass Chicago’s metropolitan area, but Mr. Gattis goofed, and really meant to say Philly. Cecil Adams corrects him in his usual manner:

Crowne Plaza at Night

My aim here isn’t to run down Houston (well, not my main aim), but simply to point out that it’s in a different stage of development from Chicago. Chicago was a boom town a hundred years ago; Houston is a boom town now. Like a lot of other Sunbelt cities, Houston is currently experiencing double-digit population growth; metropolitan Chicago, like many more established urban areas, is growing at single-digit rates. That’s not a problem; it’s what you’d expect. The real issue in Chicago and other older urban areas in the century just past was whether the central city would be able to stabilize once the fat years ended. For a long time in Chicago that was in doubt — between 1950 and 1990 the city proper lost almost a quarter of its population. After that things leveled off. Although some parts of town continued to decline, others boomed, downtown in particular — its population increased almost 40 percent between 1970 and 2000 and is now around 165,000, larger than any other Illinois city except Aurora. So I wouldn’t worry too much about Chicago’s lack of dynamism.

The more interesting question now is how well Chicago, Houston, and other U.S. cities are preparing for the future, when life is going to be way different due to rising energy costs. This is a vast topic I won’t attempt to explore now; I’ll just say you’re probably going to have an easier time of it in Chicago — at least in the city proper. That’s because the central city is becoming more densely built up, and thus supports better (if still inadequate) public transit. Chicago’s density as of 2000 was about 13,000 per square mile, and many neighborhoods are much higher — the Near North Side is approaching 50,000 per square mile. Houston’s density in contrast is about 4,400 per square mile. When gas prices were low that didn’t matter much (although traffic congestion in Houston is notoriously bad). But prices have increased sharply and will rise more due to growing worldwide demand once the economy recovers. Largely for that reason, U.S. transit usage in 2008 rose to its highest level in 52 years, while driving declined. Some cities are better equipped to handle this shift than others. However dismal you may think CTA service is, transit in Houston is worse. The city is belatedly attempting to rectify matters by building light-rail lines, but it’s so spread out there are limits to what can be done. Suburban Chicago is also thinly populated and faces a similar dilemma. Infill housing construction in the city of Chicago, on the other hand, has become a growth industry — city residential building permits accounted for just 7 percent of the metro total in 1990-1995 but 40 percent in 2007. Greater density will make it easier (not easy) to improve Chicago transit, which Lord knows could use it. Houston? Good luck.

[Click to continue reading Straight Dope Chicago: Will Houston soon make Chicago the fourth city?]

I’ve never resided in Houston, but I have spent enough time there over the years to know that it would never1 be on my list of top 1000 cities to live in. Chicago has its problems and weaknesses, but they are piddling compared to the weaknesses of Houston.

From Mr. Gattis’s blog:

Housing repossessions are still very rare; the state budget is still in surplus even as California and New York teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Unlike those fellow states with large populations, Texas levies no personal income tax, and with almost unlimited space on which to build, its houses are big and affordable.

All this has brought people flooding in and made Texas America’s fastest-growing state. Net domestic inflows have been running at around 150,000 people in recent years, whereas California and New York have seen net outflows. Next year’s national census is expected to show that flourishing Houston has replaced struggling Chicago as America’s third city (an unfortunate error, as we are expected pass the Philadelphia metro in 2010, but it could be decades before we pass Chicago as either a city or metro – see here). Of the ten largest cities in America, three are in Texas.

[Click to continue reading Houston Strategies: The Economist special report on Texas and TX vs. CA]

What More Can I Say

Again, fast growth is not always a plus2, and living in a city where one can walk or take public transit to places is infinitely better than having to drive a car3 everywhere.

Footnotes:
  1. at least in its current state [↩]
  2. just ask former Wall Street darlings like Enron and Global Crossing [↩]
  3. and get stuck in traffic [↩]

Obama Criticizes Arrest of Harvard Professor

Seth Anderson4 Comments

Professor Gates being arrested in front of his own house continues to resonate. President Obama even gave his opinion, when asked at last night’s White House news conference.

Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times asked him about the case and what it said about race relations in America.

Mr. Obama paused, then said, “Well, I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here.”

Then he made his only joke of the evening, as he speculated about what would happen if he were seen trying to force the door of his own home? “I guess this is my house now,” he said, “so it probably wouldn’t happen.” Then, after a beat, he added, “Let’s say my old house in Chicago. Here, I’d get shot.”

The president then became serious, taking up a chronology of the events last week after the police received a report of a possible break-in at the home of Mr. Gates, a leading authority on African-American history.

“The police are doing what they should,” he said. “There’s a call. They go investigate. What happens?

“My understanding is that Professor Gates then shows his I.D. to show that this is his house, and at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct.”.

“I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” Mr. Obama continued. “But I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by police disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

[Click to continue reading Obama Criticizes Arrest of Harvard Professor – NYTimes.com]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LucTPdK8VTc

Yeah, no kidding. Police should be trained well enough to be able to listen to people complain to them without the police feeling they have to “show their power” by arresting innocent people. No matter what Professor Gates said, arresting him was just a power play by the officer “I’ll show this asshole who dared question my authority, why, I’ll arrest him on trumped-up charges!”

Professor Gates was interviewed by Dayo Olopade of The Root, and disputes the allegation that he even was yelling at the officer

The police report says I was engaged in loud and tumultuous behavior. That’s a joke. Because I have a severe bronchial infection which I contracted in China and for which I was treated and have a doctor’s report from the Peninsula hotel in Beijing. So I couldn’t have yelled. I can’t yell even today, I’m not fully cured.

It escalated as follows: I kept saying to him, ‘What is your name, and what is your badge number?’ and he refused to respond. I asked him three times, and he refused to respond. And then I said, ‘You’re not responding because I’m a black man, and you’re a white officer.’ That’s what I said. He didn’t say anything. He turned his back to me and turned back to the porch. And I followed him. I kept saying, “I want your name, and I want your badge number.”

It looked like an ocean of police had gathered on my front porch. There were probably half a dozen police officers at this point. The mistake I made was I stepped onto the front porch and asked one of his colleagues for his name and badge number. And when I did, the same officer said, ‘Thank you for accommodating our request. You are under arrest.’ And he handcuffed me right there. It was outrageous. My hands were behind my back I said, ‘I’m handicapped. I walk with a cane. I can’t walk to the squad car like this.’ There was a huddle among the officers; there was a black man among them. They removed the cuffs from the back and put them around the front.

A crowd had gathered, and as they were handcuffing me and walking me out to the car, I said, ‘Is this how you treat a black man in America?’

[Click to continue reading Skip Gates Speaks]

Of course there are elements in the US1 that support any and all actions by police officers, even when they are clearly in the wrong. I’m not linking to any of these, but on nearly every article I’ve read about the incident, there is a vocal and often surprisingly openly racist contingent who defend the police. These people frighten me with their deference to power, as the phrase goes, might doesn’t make right.

The Smoking Gun has the police report which obviously contradicts some of Professor Gates’ statements

Footnotes:
  1. and the world – don’t know if the whole world is watching this incident, but having the President speak of it will certainly elevate it [↩]

Reading Around on July 20th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 20th from 09:53 to 19:30:

  • The Return of the Pay Wall | The Big Money – The summer of 2009 is a terrible time to start charging for what was free. …

    So is this really the best time to start charging for online news? No. The best time was back in 1994, when the Web made online publishing to the masses a snap. And now that newspapers are finally making the move, they're applying a 1994 solution to the 2009 Web. Today, online publishers are seeing more and more traffic coming through blogs, aggregators like Google News, and social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Ignoring them is even more perilous to a paper's image than it was two years ago, when the New York Times tore down its Times Select pay walls. The hypertext link that made the Web unique is even more powerful today, and pay walls that break those links send would-be readers a clear message: Don't bother.

  • pandagon.net – these things don't just blame themselves – Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in.. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.
    He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. …
    Now, I can understand why the police might think that a middle-aged black man was breaking into a home during lunchtime by trying to ram the front door with his shoulder, because it’s what many middle-aged black men do with their time, between Young and the Restless commercial breaks.
    … I’m sure that a significant number of people will read this and think that this is just a black man screaming racism because he handled a situation poorly, because a significant number of people like being dead fucking wrong.
  • The Return of the Pay Wall | The Big Money – The summer of 2009 is a terrible time to start charging for what was free. …

    So is this really the best time to start charging for online news? No. The best time was back in 1994, when the Web made online publishing to the masses a snap. And now that newspapers are finally making the move, they're applying a 1994 solution to the 2009 Web. Today, online publishers are seeing more and more traffic coming through blogs, aggregators like Google News, and social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Ignoring them is even more perilous to a paper's image than it was two years ago, when the New York Times tore down its Times Select pay walls. The hypertext link that made the Web unique is even more powerful today, and pay walls that break those links send would-be readers a clear message: Don't bother.

  • Hullabaloo – Wrecking Ball – Davis really had only bumped the fee back to its historic level: to 2% of a vehicle's value, rather than a recently enacted 0.65%.

    Schwarzenegger's canceling of the fee hike actually amounted to the single biggest spending increase of his reign. That's because all the revenue from the vehicle license fee had gone to local governments, and Schwarzenegger generously agreed to make up their losses by shipping them money from the state general fund.

    The annual drain on the state treasury was $6.3 billion until February. Then the governor and Legislature raised the fee to 1.15% of vehicle value, saving the state $1.7 billion.

  • Kennedy ’suicide ramp’ improvements to increase suicide rates | The Daily Blank – "According to an official Illinois Department of Transportation report, the notorious “suicide ramps” on Chicago’s downtown Kennedy Expressway will undergo much-needed improvements in order to bring the annual number of suicide deaths back up from what has been a startling decline in the past decade."

Reading Around on July 13th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading July 13th from 11:10 to 19:39:

  • Unscientific America and those awful atheists : Pharyngula – Mooney and Kirshenbaum are busily carping at these ghastly “New Atheists” for imagined transgressions against reason and the appropriate application of science, but what do they have to say about Christians who believe that crackers turn into Jesus in their mouths, or that a magical ensoulment occurs at fertilization to turn a zygote into a fully human being, or that children should be kept in ignorance about sex, or that woman’s role is as subservient breeder, or that using condoms to prevent disease is a violation of a divine dictate that the only purpose of sex is to have babies, or that people who love other people of the same sex deserve stoning…? Compared to the “New Atheist” insistence that remarkable claims about magic sky fairies ought to be regarded as patent nonsense, those can be rather destructive to society…and also negatively affect the acceptance of science. Rick Warren surely deserves as much condemnation as Richard Dawkins.

  • Baglione

  • Unscientific America, the gift that keeps on giving : Pharyngula – “Ultimately, this whole exchange illustrates the failure of Mooney/Kirshenbaum’s arguments. The demotion of Pluto, the rise of the “New Atheism”, PZ Myers, and blogging are all recent phenomena — they do not deal with the causes of the disconnect between society and science, and treating them is a distraction from dealing with the real problems. This book is more like a collection of poor rationalizations for complaining about stuff they don’t like than a serious and scholarly attempt to address a significant social problem. To useless, I must also add the adjective lightweight.”

  • Atheist

  • Greetings in a Taxi – “A raised hand generates an irresistible magnetic pull on a taxi driver. After some years the mind is trained to seek it out to the point of forming light-poles, reflections in parked cars, weaving tree branches, and on a slow night, just about any shape into that desired sign, the symbol of time not spent in vain. Depending on the time of day or night, what follows that hopeful hand will vary from absolute silence to aggressive and usually unwanted camaraderie, but in every case it always begins with some sort of greeting..”
  • Palin’s Long March to a Short-Notice Resignation – NYTimes.com – Oh, boo fucking hoo. Her acid tongue was able to destroy her base all on its own.

    “Lawmakers who had supported her signature effort to develop a natural gas pipeline turned into uncooperative critics.

    Ethics complaints mounted, and legal bills followed. At home Ms. Palin was dealing with a teenage daughter who had given birth to a son and broken up with the infant’s father, a baby of her own with special needs and a national news media that was eager to cover it all.

    Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser ”

eat a bag of dicks

Suicide Ramp Reconstruction to Begin

Seth Anderson0 comment

Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune passes on the news that the long-delayed project of reconfiguring the entrance ramps1 to the Kennedy Expressway is finally going ahead, with some changes.

Washington Suicide Ramp

Downtown Chicago must often throw the dice — and perhaps mumble a quick prayer or profanity — while attempting to merge, squeeze, plead or fight their way into highway traffic.

Hundreds of collisions result each year at the “suicide merges” along the Kennedy, the second-busiest expressway in the Chicago region. (The Dan Ryan Expressway ranks No. 1.)

After postponing safety improvements for years on the 1960s-era highway design, the state is now targeting federal stimulus grants for the $9.3 million project to try to straighten out the mess.

Work is set to begin Monday toward rebuilding six notoriously dangerous center-access entrance ramps to the Kennedy. And that inevitably will cause a whole different kind of mess: a months-long traffic nightmare at a crucial choke point for Chicago’s highway system.

[Click to continue reading: Kennedy Expressway left-lane ‘suicide’ ramps makeover begins Monday — chicagotribune.com]

Kennedy Suicide Ramp

Any improvement is good, but I would prefer the original plan had been viable, namely, moving the ramps to the right of the road. You know, like 95% of all on-ramps.

The first phase of work, aimed at improving traffic flow and reducing crashes on the Kennedy ( Interstate Highway 90/94) near the Hubbard’s Cave tunnel, focuses on realigning three exit ramps. The change is intended to allow for more gradual maneuvering off the expressway and to discourage drivers from aggressively weaving across lanes and causing rear-end or side-swipe collisions, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.

“Hubbard’s Cave is an area where we see fender-benders every day,” said IDOT spokeswoman Marisa Kollias.

After the exit ramps are overhauled, crews will start rebuilding the entrance ramps in September to improve the lines of sight and lengthen the acceleration lanes, IDOT officials said.

When the construction dust settles in November, reconfigured and more motorist-friendly entrance ramps to the Kennedy will open eastbound at Lake, Randolph and Madison Streets; and westbound at Madison and Adams Street and Jackson Boulevard, IDOT officials said.

The earthen remnants of the Kennedy entrance ramps at Washington Boulevard and Monroe Street, which were closed in 2005 and 2006, respectively, will be removed to make way for longer, gentler ramp entrances at Randolph, Madison and Adams, officials said.

Footnotes:
  1. often called the suicide ramps – I tend to avoid them altogether, leaving my house a few minutes earlier and taking another ramp [↩]

Skate Boarding – Ilford HP5 400

swanksalot0 comment

Pulaski Park. Unfortunately, was not quick enough to get a clear shot of this dude, he was trucking on his skate board though.

View Large On Black

the dudes lounging on their stoop is what makes this photo interesting to me (view the bigger version to get a good look)

A moment in Pulaski Park – Ilford Delta 3200

swanksalot0 comment
A moment in Pulaski Park - Ilford Delta 3200
A moment in Pulaski Park – Ilford Delta 3200, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

unfortunately, was not quick enough to get a clear shot of this dude, he was trucking on his skate board though.

View On Black

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.

Chicago Children’s Museum move stalls out

Seth Anderson2 Comments

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.

Daley Bicentennial Plaza

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:
  1. for instance: Setback for the CCM juggernaut [↩]
  2. or: Fight for Chicago’s treasured lakefront [↩]
  3. or: Subterranean museum [↩]
  4. or: The Grant Park land-grab [↩]
  5. or: Chicago astroturf alert [↩]
  6. or: Keep childrens museum out of Grant Park [↩]
  7. or: Daley vs Reilly [↩]

No ketchup on a properly made hot dog

Seth Anderson0 comment

the Wieners Family Crest

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.

Chicago Dog
[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
[Give the Gift of Chicago – the side of a Vienna Beef truck]

Footnotes:
  1. slightly more adherents than simply a cult, but not quite enough attention with atheists to qualify as a real religion [↩]

A Quiet Hero of Civil Rights History, Vanished in 1939

Seth Anderson1 Comment

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.

Footnotes:
  1. there was a vacancy on the court at the time [↩]
  2. and the US, and the world [↩]

Reading Around on July 8th through July 9th

swanksalot0 comment

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.

  • 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.)

Reading Around on July 7th through July 8th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 7th through July 8th:

  • Fox report suggests Pentagon policy nixing religious flyover is a sign Obama is anti-Christian | Crooks and Liars – The military was regularly providing flyovers at countless evangelical Christian events all over the country, not only violating the regulations prohibiting military participation in religious events, but spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money in the process.

    MRFF began exposing these events, which included flyovers on the five holidays when flyovers at civilian events are permitted, and even a few at National Day of Prayer events, and began to see some decline in their frequency, but we weren’t sure if the number of flyovers at these events was really decreasing, or if the military and organizers of these events were just being more careful not to make the nature of the events so obvious.

    Well, needless to say, the following letter denying, for the first time in 42 years, the request for a flyover at one Christian rally…was the best 4th of July present MRFF could have asked for.

  • Branding blunder gives Russia-Nigeria energy linkup a bad name – Russia’s attempt to create a joint gas venture with Nigeria is set to become one of the classic branding disasters of all time ‑ after the new company was named Nigaz.

    …the name has “rather different connotations” for English-speakers.

    It recalled other international branding mishaps including the Ford Pinto ‑ which in Brazil means small penis ‑ and the Pepsi slogan “come alive with the Pepsi generation”. In Taiwan this rousing motto translated as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”.

  • Living the “art” Life – … there is more, so much more to art…

Reading Around on July 2nd through July 3rd

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 2nd through July 3rd:

  • Dovecote Records Limewire is a bunch of hypocrites Gets mad at Us for stealing –

    Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”

    Kosuke: Well our friend came in and told us there was free pizza at the bar. We are. So. Sorry. It was a misunderstanding.

    Woman: (with unbridled entitlement) This is a company party our CEO is here and you STOLE our pizza. Are you from out of town? Because let me tell you, NOTHING is free in New York City. Nothing is free… well maybe except for the condoms in Times Square.

    Paul and Kosuke continue apologizing. They offer to pay for the two slices.

    Woman: (didactically snobbish) We don’t want your money. No. Enjoy the pizza, but you can’t steal other people’s things. You can’t take what’s not yours

    Kosuke: What company do you guys work for?

    Woman: We work for Limewire.

    <Long pause> Kosuke’s eyes go wide. Anger festers in his pupils.

    Kosuke: Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)

  • That’s Right! I Said It’s Caipirinha Time! on Flickr – Photo Sharing! – Every time I look at Friendly Joe’s awesome caipirinha making instructional Flickr page, I get a mighty, mighty thirst.

    “Caipirinhas are the Brazilian national drink. That said, we won’t conject on the overall condition of the Brazilian populace at large. No worries- They’re refreshing and the weather’s warmin’ up –
    Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll be ready to samba in your neighbor’s flower beds in no time… “

  • Tour № 2 – Ogden Avenue Extension | Forgotten Chicago –

    “Left: A brief aside, in case you forgot who built this damn city!

    Right: Remnants of Ogden’s bridge supports are still visible south of Division Street.”

  • Saddam And Goldman Sachs: Who Is The Student, And Who Is The Master? –

    The funniest part is, you could legitimately argue that Goldman Sachs has killed more people than Saddam.