Tag: Chicago

Reading Around on February 17th

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Some additional reading February 17th from 01:12 to 15:32:

  • Galoscaves – The technology of building salt-iodine caves, patented in 108 countries, is based on the Black Sea salt, crystallized in natural conditions.

    The sea microclimate created inside the caves becomes an oasis of peace and relaxation for citizens of many countries.

    Since 2000, the Everet Company has been building Galos caves in Poland.

    This summer, the first salt-iodine cave in the U.S. was built according to very strict technological rules.

    Considering the low level of iodine found in the air in the middle-eastern part of the U.S., the cave was erected in the biggest city Chicago, IL. Thanks to the efforts of specialists from the Ukraine and Poland, two caves were built, in which healing attributes are being confirmed by testing.

  • Apple – Support – Apple Expert – Do you have questions or need technical support? Simply describe the issue and an Apple Expert will call you now. Or if you prefer to choose an exact time for the support phone call, schedule an appointment at your convenience. You’ll start at the front of the line—no waiting in the queue, no talking to a machine.

Reading Around on February 8th through February 9th

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A few interesting links collected February 8th through February 9th:

  • The Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln – The Forensic Evidence – Numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841 as a result of a grave emotional crisis {6}. This coincides with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar. (They were married the following year.) This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight
  • Breaking Down the 2009 Trade Deadline | Dabullz – Photo by swanksalot on Flickr

Tube City

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservation show visited Chicago last summer, the episode was first aired last Tuesday.

Chicago Dog

In the bad old days of the culture wars, when the “Forces of Darkness” had aligned against the “Forces of Goodness and Light,” Chicago was a key battleground and an early, crucial loss for the good guys. Foie gras had been declared illegal and the ensuing ripples of fear spread cross country. Gutless, craven punks everywhere deserted their comrades like Vichy shopkeepers while animal “activists” terrorized chefs’ families and children, vandalized businesses, and strong-armed retailers. But even though chefs like Wolfgang Puck — for instance — suddenly discovered their preference for fluffy cute ducks over their fellow chefs or their traditions and headed for the lifeboats, a few lone heroes stood tall, proudly extending a stiff middle finger at the advancing horde. Doug Sohn, owner/proprietor of Chicago’s magnificent emporium of all things meat in tube-form (basically a lunchtime freakin’ Hot Dog joint) was just such a hero. After Chicago alderman Joe Moore slipped his own proverbial weiner into the body politic, ramming through legislation forbidding the sale of foie in the city, Sohn created an homage of sorts, the “Joe Moore” dog, a duck, foie gras and Sauternes sausage topped with truffled foie gras and Dijon mustard sauce, selling it in flagrant, open defiance of the law. It was the opening shot of what turned out to be a winning strategy: making the anti-foie gras forces look just so utterly ridiculous that the law was eventually overturned and balance returned to the universe.(For a detailed account of this epic struggle, with a full accounting of who was good, bad, principled, hypocritical, cowardly or heroic when the chips were down, read Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Caro’s excellent and illuminating


The Foie Gras Wars

(Simon and Schuster 2009).

I’m ambivelent about a lot of places, but I am unrestrained in my love for Chicago. Only Chicago could convince me that the New York hot dog was not, in fact, anywhere near the apex of the hot dog arts.(The Chicago Red Hot deserves that honor) . Two respectably old school baseball teams, great, great bars, a tradition of unapproachably good and important music, its own, truly imposing style of architecture, an attitude both big city wise-ass and heartland lack of bullshit, a city open to the bestand most excessive/creative of new, experimental cooking styles, loaded with great chefs (many of whom are pals), it’s simply another place I’ll use any excuse to visit. Tonight’s episode was just such an excuse. [Click to continue reading: Tube City]

I do have Hot Doug’s on my list of places to take tourists to, mainly to try this at least once in my life, but so far, no takers. One of these times…

With the exception of the cringe-worthy Mancow segment, the episode was good. There is a photo journal here with some other photos of Bourdain in Chicago here.

Reading Around on January 24th through January 25th

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A few interesting links collected January 24th through January 25th:

  • Want to Know What Flickr Thinks Should be Censored, Public Art, Museum Paintings and Screenshots of the Flickr Blog When They’re Critical of Flickr | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection – Censorship and communication re: censorship is the consistently bad part of Flickr, ever since their beginnings, actually. Early on, Flickr marked my entire stream as “restricted”, but I never did find out why. “If you’d like to see if Flickr is censoring any of your images as well, go to the Flickr Organizer and click on “more options” under the search function and then tell the organizer to show you only “Restricted” content. You might just be surprised that Flickr has censored some of your images as well.”

  • Johnny Red Kerr – Peter Vecsey – “On that disheartening note, longtime Bulls broadcaster John “Red” Kerr is ailing with prostate cancer. After working the microphone for the first seven or eight games this season, the 33-year veteran and expansion team’s original coach (of the year, 1966-67, gaining entry to the playoffs) was forced to stay close to home.

    A ceremony honoring Kerr’s service to the franchise has been moved up from April to the second week of February. A statue in his likeness, sculpted by the same artist who carved Michael Jordan’s image, will be placed outside the United Center in the same vicinity as His Airness.

    Conspicuously absent from the Hall of Fame as a contributor, Kerr was a better-than-average center (13.8 points, 11. 2 rebounds) for 12 seasons with Syracuse, Philadelphia and Baltimore. His biggest achievement in my eyes, though, was recognizing the greatness of Julius Erving and George Gervin as GM of the ABA Virginia Squires long before anyone else.”

Illinois coal ash sludge ponds are common

Seth Anderson0 comment

Michael Hawthorne alerts us that Illinois is at risk for a coal ash disaster as well.

Withered and Died

More than a dozen Illinois power plants store toxic coal ash in sludge ponds similar to the one that burst and spread contaminated muck over 300 acres of eastern Tennessee last month, according to a Tribune review of federal records.

The sludge dumps, all Downstate, are among hundreds of makeshift ponds across the nation that are regulated far more loosely than household garbage landfills, despite years of studies documenting how arsenic, lead, mercury and other heavy metals in the coal ash threaten water supplies and human health.

Most of the water-soaked ash—the byproduct of burning coal to generate electricity—is stored close to bodies of water, including Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, the Mississippi River and the Illinois River.

[From Coal ash sludge ponds in use at some Illinois power plants — chicagotribune.com]

The administration of President Obama might be more interested in monitoring this potentially hazardous problem, but nobody really knows yet. Obama received a lot of campaign contributions from Exelon. Also, leaks don’t have to be quick to be dangerous, slow and steady contamination is just as deadly.

The dangers here are two-fold,” said Eric Schaeffer, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who now heads the non-profit Environmental Integrity Project. “You can have the sudden spill and the dramatic disaster that Kingston represents, or you can have slow poisoning as these impoundments leach toxic metals.”

Red and Green

Illinois is in the top ten in a dubious category:

14 of the state’s power plants dumped sludge containing a combined 2,826 tons of toxic metals into Downstate sludge ponds during 2006, the last year for which figures are available from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.

Only nine other states dumped more toxic metals in this way. Alabama led the nation with 6,680 tons; Indiana was fourth with 4,431 tons.

National environmental policies and regulations have to change, lest we all are buried underneath a veritable lake of toxic dust.

When Fats Waller Met Al Capone

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“The Very Best of Fats Waller” (Fats Waller)

Kottke pointed out this great incident in Jazz history.

One evening Fats felt a revolver poked into his paunchy stomach. He found himself bullied into a black limousine, heard the driver ordered to East Cicero. Sweat pouring down his body, Fats foresaw a premature end to his career, but on arrival at a fancy saloon, he was merely pushed toward a piano and told to play. He played. Loudest in applause was a beefy man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone was having a birthday, and he, Fats, was a present from “the boys”.

The party lasted three days. Fats exhausted himself and his repertoire, but with every request bills were stuffed into his pockets. He and Capone consumed vast quantities of food and drink. By the time the black limousine headed back to the Sherman, Fats had acquired severeal thousand dollars in cash and a decided taste for vintage champagne

[From First encounters: When Fats Waller met Al Capone | Independent, The (London) ]

I’ve always had an affection for Fats Waller (and in fact, we have a song of his that is ‘penciled in‘ to our screenplay), now I love him even more. What a cool cat.

By the way, you could purchase a home previously owned by Al Capone (seen here getting an autographed baseball at Comiskey Park1 ), if you were so inclined:

Want to own a notorious piece of Chicago history?



The modest, red-brick home once owned by Al Capone is expected to hit the market this spring for an estimated $450,000, marking a new chapter for the infamous South Side landmark that has had just two owners since the death of Capone’s mother in 1952.



“I think there’s some value in the home’s history,” said Barbara Hogsette, 71, who has lived in the house since 1963

…

For more than a century, the two-flat home with large bay windows has stood near the corner of 72nd Street and South Prairie Avenue in the working-class Park Manor neighborhood. Cook County records show the Capones bought the home for $5,500 in August 1923, part of a wave of first- and second-generation European immigrants who moved to that part of the city in the Prohibition era.

Footnotes:
  1. Gangster Al Capone and his son having baseball autographed by player Gabby Hartnett aka Charles Leo Hartnett from Capone’s front row seat [↩]

Ready for Action

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Ready for Action, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

almost a cliche now, as so many other flickr-eenos have taken a similar photograph.

West Loop – historic Beaux Arts-style building that used to house the coal-fired generators and boilers for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad, now converted into retail, office, restaurant space.

[view large on black: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=166 ]

I blogged about the conversion sometime ago, but am too lazy to look for the link at the moment

Rod The Paler

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’m sure Governor Blah Blah feels like there’s a spike in his gut after the transcript of the Criminal Complaint (PDF) gets read by the public.1

One person it most likely won’t affect is Obama himself, who appears to have been inadvertently cleared by Blagojevich. The Democrat was allegedly captured on a wiretap in multiple conversations in which he discussed an Obama advisor he believed the president-elect wanted appointed. But Blagojevich said he wasn’t willing to do that without some benefit for himself.

“I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there,” Blagojevich said in one conversation, according to the complaint. Elsewhere, the complaint reads:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put “[Senate Candidate 4]” in the Senate “before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a fucking Senate seat and I don’t get anything.”

The next day, according to the complaint, Blagojevich allegedly said, “he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 for the Senate seat but ‘they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.’“

[From Rod Blagojevich has had better days – War Room – Salon.com]

Impeachment proceedings? Sure, where do I sign.

The Senate Candidates are not names, but there are clues as to their identity:

Unsurprisingly, since this investigation is in U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s district, and since he’s known for this sort of thing, multiple contenders for Obama’s seat are named as “Senate Candidate 1,” “Senate Candidate 2” and so on. It’s hard to say for sure who any of these candidates are, but as with any good blind item, there are plenty of hints. Senate Candidate 1, for instance, appears to be Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett. And based on the complaint’s discussion of a deliberate leak from the Blagojevich administration to a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, it appears that Senate Candidate 2 is Lisa Madigan, the state’s attorney general.

It’s Senate Candidate 5, though, who might end up being the most interesting contender, because of this passage from this complaint:

In a recorded conversation on October 31, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH described an earlier approach by an associate of Senate Candidate Five as follows: “We were approached ‘pay to play.’ That, you know, he’d raise me 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him (Senate Candidate 5) a Senator.”

Another passage gives a hint as to the identify of Senate Candidate 5:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated he was “elevating” Senate Candidate 5 on the list of candidates for the open Senate seat. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated he might be able to cut a deal with Senate Candidate 5 that provided ROD BLAGOJEVICH with something “tangible up front.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH noted he was going to meet with Senate Candidate 5 in the next few days.

One intriguing possibility? Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who met with Blagojevich about the job just yesterday.

Except that the Sun-Times columnist is probably Sneed, who wrote:

Sneed hears Gov. Blago, who will choose Obama’s replacement in the U.S. Senate, privately feels there may be only one choice that makes sense: His buddy, outgoing Senate President Emil Jones.

• • To wit: Jones is this/close to Blago, who may pay his pal back for being such a staunch ally. Jones would also be a strong ally in the Senate for his political godson — Obama.

• • Hmmm: Isn’t it true Gov. Blago, who truly believes a federal indictment is not in his future, is hoping Jones would be a placeholder until 2010 — when Gov. Rod could opt for a Senate seat or another run at the governorship? Is someone smoking posies?

[From 2 yrs. to dream? Rahm ’em . . . :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Michael Sneed]

Rich Miller has lots more speculation at The Capitol Fax Blog including:

Later on December 4, 2008… ROD BLAGOJEVICH noted he was going to meet with Senate Candidate 5 in the next few days…

ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Fundraiser A to tell Individual D that Senate Candidate 5 was very much a realistic candidate for the open Senate seat, but that ROD BLAGOJEVICH was getting “a lot of pressure” not to appoint Senate Candidate 5. ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Fundraiser A to tell Individual D that ROD BLAGOJEVICH had a problem with Senate Candidate 5 just promising to help ROD BLAGOJEVICH because ROD BLAGOJEVICH had a prior bad experience with Senate Candidate 5 not keeping his word.

As Ambinder reported earlier, that dateline matches up with Jackson’s planned meeting with the governor. Also, I’m not aware of any instances of the governor complaining that Emil Jones had broken his word. It’s time for somebody to come clean. So far, there’s still no response from Congressman Jackson’s office.

oh, and this Tribune page of web coverage is pretty cool

Footnotes:
  1. I have a copy, but have been too busy this morning to read it. [↩]

Workers Pay for Tribune Debacle

Seth Anderson2 Comments

The more I read about the Tribune bankruptcy, the more Sam Zell resembles one of those old movie villains.

Dewey Defeats Truman

Andrew Ross Sorkin writes:

Mr. Zell isn’t the only one responsible for this debacle. With one of the grand old names of American journalism now confronting an uncertain future, it is worth remembering all the people who mismanaged the company before hand and helped orchestrate this ill-fated deal — and made a lot of money in the process. They include members of the Tribune board, the company’s management and the bankers who walked away with millions of dollars for financing and advising on a transaction that many of them knew, or should have known, could end in ruin.

It was Tribune’s board that sold the company to Mr. Zell — and allowed him to use the employee’s pension plan to do so. Despite early resistance, Dennis J. FitzSimons, then the company’s chief executive, backed the plan. He was paid about $17.7 million in severance and other payments. The sale also bought all the shares he owned — $23.8 million worth. The day he left, he said in a note to employees that “completing this ‘going private’ transaction is a great outcome for our shareholders, employees and customers.”

Well, at least for some of them.

Tribune’s board was advised by a group of bankers from Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, which walked off with $35.8 million and $37 million, respectively. But those banks played both sides of the deal: they also lent Mr. Zell the money to buy the company. For that, they shared an additional $47 million pot of fees with several other banks, according to Thomson Reuters. And then there was Morgan Stanley, which wrote a “fairness opinion” blessing the deal, for which it was paid a $7.5 million fee (plus an additional $2.5 million advisory fee).

[From Dealbook – Workers Pay for Debacle at Tribune – NYTimes.com]

The Tribune employees (past and present) are now just one creditor among many, and their retirement plan suddenly is near worthless.

Mr. Zell financed much of his deal’s $13 billion of debt by borrowing against part of the future of his employees’ pension plan and taking a huge tax advantage. Tribune employees ended up with equity, and now they will probably be left with very little.

…

“If there is a problem with the company, most of the risk is on the employees, as Zell will not own Tribune shares.” He continued: “The cash will come from the sweat equity of the employees of Tribune.”

…

But what about those employees? They had no seat at the table when the company’s own board let Mr. Zell use part of its future pension plan in exchange for $34 a share.

Mr. Newman, the analyst who predicted the trouble, said in an interview on Monday, “The employees were put in a very bad situation.”

An anonymous Tribune employee emails Josh Marshall:

You are right on the money, this filing goes directly to insanely bad business decisions, not the secular decline in newspapers. The amazing thing that is happening right now is that all of the company’s assets are in the black. All of them. Every television station and newspaper is making money. Now lets not kid ourselves — many are in a fast downhill spiral, revenues are declining, etc. But what has killed this company is the insane amount of debt Zell has placed upon it.

That debt was not incurred to invest in the company’s product, or even physical plant. It was incurred solely to buy out Tribune Corp’s shareholders at an inflated share price and let Zell have his toy. It was the epitome of the bubble. And now it’s caught up with Zell. He’ll be fine. The employees are the ones who will suffer, as always. Basically, Zell has destroyed several great newspapers as part of an unwitting wealth transfer to various large Tribune shareholders.

[From Talking Points Memo | Report From the Trenches, Pt. 1]

Wonky Details of Tribune Bankruptcy

Seth Anderson4 Comments

It seems as if the Chicago Tribune paper will continue, albeit with some changes. I hope the dozen or so of my favorite Tribune writers1 don’t get fired.

Happy 4th of July -Wrigley, Chicago Tribune tower

It seems it has something called a “Delayed Draw Facility” that becomes part of its “Tranche B” credit facility as it draws upon funds. In October, Tribune refinanced an additional $168 million in these Tranche B medium-term bonds, money it said it intended to use to pay the $70 million in medium-term notes coming due Monday.

But Tribune might have seen a somewhat chilling vision of the future when, also in October as credit markets locked up, it sent notice to lenders that it intended to draw $250 million in principal from its revolving credit facility. Fine, but there was just $237 million in it, according to information in the SEC filing.

“The shortfall of approximately $13 million is a result of the fact that Lehman Brothers Commercial Bank, which provides a commitment in the amount of $40 million under the company’s $750 million revolving credit facility, declined to participate in the company’s $250 million funding request,” Tribune said. Lehman Brothers, of course, was one of the first casualties of last fall’s financial meltdown, and its commercial bank is in Chapter 11.

Sam Zell and Co. may also be figuring it makes no sense to pay that $70 million now since, by all reports, it appears Tribune will be in technical default of its loan covenants when the debt-to-EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) ratio is calculated at the end of this fourth quarter.

The loan agreement sets an outer limit of 9 times EBITDA to debt, which is pretty loose. (Consider that GateHouse Media Inc., sometimes considered a poster boy for the newspaper industry’s high debt, says its ratio is about 6 times.) Yet it appears that Tribune will be unable to report it is within the covenants.

So Monday’s $70 million payment is like the credit card bill appearing in the mail. You’re $5,000 in the hole, say. The minimum payment is just $30. But it makes you think, where are we going here? That’s no doubt what Sam Zell & Co. are asking themselves this morning in their Michigan Avenue tower.

[From Tribune: ‘Where Are We Going Here?’ ]

via Whet Moser‘s Twitter feed

The court filing [24 page PDF] if you are interested…

Update: Zell was worse than we thought. Zell really was just looking for a way to plunder the ESOP.

[Sam Zell ] put up $315 million of his own money and paid the balance of the purchase price, $8.2 billion, with the employee stock ownership plan – a move in which Tribune employees had no say whatever. But that actually overstates the amount of Zell’s investment. Of the $315 million he sunk into the company, it turns out that $225 million was simply a promissory note. Due to the vagaries of bankruptcy law, writes business analyst Mark Lacter on laobserved.com, that means that Zell has better protection for his stake than all his employees. Trib’s ESOP holds 100 percent of the company common equity – and it’s the holders of common stock who usually take a bath, or get wiped out altogether, in the debt restructuring that goes on under Chapter 11.

…

Even when measured against today’s sub-prime standards for CEO performance, Zell is in a class by himself. The CEOs of the Big Three auto companies may have paid a good deal less attention to the quality of their cars than they should have, but Zell repeatedly and profanely expressed his disdain for quality journalism. The company’s leading papers, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times – the latter one of the four great American newspapers – carried too much national and international news, he decreed. Hundreds of excellent reporters and editors were unceremoniously shown the door; the Times lost its Sunday book review and opinion sections; the Washington bureaus of the papers were consolidated and cut back at the very moment when readers are following decisions made in Washington more intently than they have in decades.

and there’s more!

The Tribune internal Q&A website on today’s bankruptcy filing states that “all ongoing severance payments have been discontinued.” So if you’re one of the large number of reporters, editors and other staffers at the L.A. Times, the Chicago Trib or other papers who got sacked and didn’t get your severance in one lump sum, you have a real problem.

In a just world, Sam Zell would go to prison.

Footnotes:
  1. those writers who have either a consistent, interesting voice, or cover a beat that I’m interested in. I don’t have a real list, but seems like it is less than 20 journalists. [↩]

Bookmarks for December 7th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading December 7th from 20:59 to 23:04:

  • How they shot The Godfather | Mail Online – "How's this for an offer you can't refuse: The Godfather Family Album – previously unseen candid pictures revealing how the finest gangster movies of them all were made…and a running commentary from author Mario Puzo how he came to write The Godfather in the first place (he needed the money)"
  • Mayor Daley is Parking Himself | Daily Daley: Tracking Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago – "Mayor Daley "sold" each parking meter for $1.17 per day over 75 years.

    1.15 billion dollars

    36,000 meters X 365 days X 75 years = 985,500,000 Meter days per length of contract.

    1.15 billion / 985,500,000 meter days = $1.17 per day

    Mayor Daley "sold" or "long term leased" each Chicago parking meter out for 75 years at $1.17 per day per parking meter."

New Green Line station at Morgan

Seth Anderson0 comment

Morgan and Lake, to be precise. In general, a new station is a good idea, if the capital is available. The West Loop has really boomed, and having an additional El stop would help traffic flow in the area.

Lake Street El to somewhere else
[The new station will basically be right here – there is a sign for Rubenstein Lumber in this photograph, and Rubenstein’s address is 167 N. MORGAN STREET.]

A new el station will be built on the Green Line at Morgan Street in order to serve an increased population in the northern part of the West Loop. The station, expected to cost between $35 million and $40 million in tax increment financing dollars, will be built despite a feasibility study that found more potential riders for a Western Avenue stop on the Green Line.

Brian Steele, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Transportation, said a 2002 study that examined daily boarding at potential stops on the western and southern Green Line branches found that around 1,000 people each day would board a new station on the Green Line at Western, with 800 boarding at Morgan. But Steele said the facts have changed.

“Since that time, the area around the Morgan station has seen big jumps in residential and commercial development,” Steele said, speaking anecdotally. The ’02 study, said, “was based on 2000 census numbers. This is 2008. Clearly, the Morgan station has seen significant growth, much more than the area around Western. Another thing that led to the decision was in 2006, the CTA introduced the Pink Line service, which goes through the corridor the Morgan station will serve.”

[From A Green Line station at Morgan]

It's all in the Motion
Lake Street Green line, from my building’s roof. The new station would be about 5-6 blocks west.

(via GapersBlock)