Culture
Sometimes Dreams Come True
It was a lovely day for a bicycle ride, so I took my bike up on the old railroad spur now known as The Bloomingdale Trail to see what I could see. The city of Chicago does not encourage this (nor do I after seeing all the broken glass strewn along the pathway) but there is something magical about this abandoned railway that pulls people in––so magical that Mayor Emanuel has found $46 million in his first 12 months in office to turn The Bloomingdale Trail into Chicago’s next great public park. MORE...
Still Fishin’
It'll come to us. Just waitin' for the inspiration. MORE...
Gone Fishin’
Gone fishing . . . Gone golfing . . . It's Finals Week . . . Meet me in the parking lot behind the center field bleachers. . . Any way you put it, we're not publishin' this week. MORE...
Who Needs City Stickers Anyway?
You can debate whether Chicago is better off with superheroes on its city vehicle sticker instead gang signs, but who needs it? Who needs to plaster up the front windshield of your car with kiddie art projects better suited for a refrigerator door? Who needs the hassle of peeling the sticker off the paper onto dirt free glass, or worse, the torture of scraping it off with a razor after it has expired? When you come right down to it, who needs city stickers at all? MORE...
Letter from Guadalajara: Books and Other Entertainments
For 25 years Guadalajara Mexico has hosted the largest Spanish language book fair in the world (Feria Internacional del Libro) which is also one of the largest in the world outside of Frankfurt (including the popular BookExpo America in New York). Open to the public for six days – and restricted to book professionals for three – it attracts 600,000 visitors, 2,000 publishers from 43 countries, 2,500 media people, and 18,000 book professionals. For Mexico’s second largest city, this is a big deal. MORE...
The Santa Train
It comes swooshing into the station in a blur of silver metal and colored lights. A brightly lit CTA train packed with children, pausing only briefly to pick up more. MORE...
When Loving Gets Hard
“It’s really important that you understand, or maybe a better word is 'accept', that your wife is not the woman you married years ago,” a friend of mine once told me. This was in the early stages of my wife’s dementia, and I clung to that thought as the disease progressed. MORE...
Happy Thanksgiving!
See you next week. MORE...
Green Dreams: A New Vision for Chicago Grows at The Plant
In a derelict old meat packing plant near the Chicago Stockyards, John Edel has a vision for a new kind of factory in Chicago, one that manufactures food. He sees a vertical garden hanging off rows of meat hooks; water tanks filled with tilapia feeding nitrates into adjoining aquatic lettuce beds; shared kitchen facilities for Chicago’s growing band of locally-sourced food suppliers; and a local brewer, baker, and ice cream maker. Any business, really, that generates tons of organic waste. MORE...
The Trunk of His Car
When my father died in 1968 – in a head-on car wreck on an Indiana highway – the local authorities told my mother, “You can tell a lot about a man by what he keeps in the trunk of his car.” What they were clearly referencing, in that sad instance, more than the travel bags and briefcase of a businessman, was the Bible and Sunday School lesson plans they found in the wreckage, things that Dad must have wanted to be working on that evening down in Louisville. MORE...
JK: I know what would make my sore back feel better….. A nice big bowl of Mac ‘N Cheese!
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