-
Pages
-
Categories
- Abortion
- Abuse
- Archbishop Cupich
- Blithe Spirit
- Cardinal Sarah
- Catholic Church
- Catholics
- Chicago
- Chicago newspapers
- climate change
- Cupich
- Fr. Phillips
- Friend Jake
- Gay lobby
- gay marriage
- Guns
- Illinois Blues
- Jokes
- Lulu
- Married priests
- Marshawn Lynch
- Oak Park
- Obama
- Pope Francis
- Race matters
- Religion
- Same-sex-attracted priests
- Schooling
- Sharia
- Social justice
- Trump
- Uncategorized
- Vladimir Putin
- Wheeling Jesuit
- Worship
- Writing
-
Archives
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- August 2004
- July 2004
- June 2004
- May 2004
- April 2004
- March 2004
- December 2003
- November 2003
- October 2003
A-list
Chicago
Church
Jim Bowman
Oak Park IL
-
RSS Feeds
-
Meta
Monthly Archives: January 2007
"Price Gouging" the right thing!
Turnaround?
Two U.S. soldiers died Sunday when their helicopter crashed and about 250 insurgents were reported killed . . .
You can’t win for losin’ sometimes
MICKEY KAUS: “Labor costs–and specifically work rules–are part of what’s killing all the unionized auto manufacturers while their non-unionized competitors thrive.” Work rules, I think, are more damaging than pay issues because they cost flexibility and make it harder to introduce new technology.
— from the very helpful Instapundit, which most mornings beats your daily newspaper, or at least is more rewarding (except for obits, and local crime, politics, teams).
This retrogressive, feet-dug-in unionism, I fear, is the problem. What Walter Reuther the Socialist got his arm broken for in 30s picketing v. Big Capital became a millstone around neck of the masses, who profit most from growing productivity. Life’s a B, ain’t it?
Club news
Was a gathering of newsgatherers last night at Holiday Inn atop Sun-Times on the river — 15th floor, vu is stunning. Chi Headline Club gave out lifetime achievement honors. It was a combination of -atti’s, liter- and glitter- (we all dressed nice) and newshounds past, present and to come. The young were adequately represented.
These were clubbable news people honoring their own, as people do. It was a high-church affair but not solemn high. It helps when the honorees are people who talk straight and seem to say what they mean. No cutesy needed apply.
* WGN radio farm-matters announcer for 47 (!) years Orion Samuelson announced himself “a Norwegian, so only halfway there” at 72.
* News writer and editor with three Chi dailies from the ’50s, retired since ’88, Ed Baumann [correction here:] said it had been his good fortune to spend half his life in the “second oldest profession in the world,” adding, “Think what heights I might have attained if my parents had had a girl,” here earlier misinterpreted as a crack at gender-based affirmative action.
* Fotog Jim Frost of Sun-Times and TV newshen cum Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin looked appreciatively to their families there present.
* Chi Trib Sci writer and Pulitzer prize winner Ron Kotulak I am sure said something while I went to the men’s room, where a nice young man said hi to me, which is more than I get at the men’s room at Schaller’s on Halsted. And more than I require.
Clarence Page of Chi Trib and syndicated-column and TV talk show fame lately and Trib plus Chi’s Channel Two fame back in “jurassic” times, as he put it, set the tone or picked the key — better flat than sharp on such an occasion — for the event. He held up the literate part very well, moving things along briskly:
— Big affirmative action newsroom-hiring vehicle of the 60s was the urban riot: “Monochromatic” LA times drafted a messenger to go into the zone and see what the brothers were doing, got a byline promoting him to ad salesman. The entrepreneurial Louis Lomax pitched a black-Muslim story to Dan Rather and got the assignment himself as free-lancer because (alas) Elijah Muhammad would not talk to a white reporter. (Not sure I’d talk to Dan Rather either, but that’s another question.)
— “We used to be colored,” said Page, riffing on the Great American Name Game. Then Negro, then black — “I mean black,” he said, looking grr-threatening for a second. Then African-American –he called up his mother when this happened, delighted he was finally up there with other hyphenated people, Irish- and Italian– and the like. Finally “people of color.” “Full circle,” he exulted.
It just shows to go you: tone conquers all, and humor and common sense. There’s a lesson for us there.
Best reason around, given by smartest guy around . . .
“Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?” [Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney]
“No, I don’t.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s a Democrat.”
Truth Detector: Drive-By Hysterics Over Cheney Interview.
In fact, I was saying that very thing just the other day . . .
Sartre smoked
* The cigarette was brushed out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s hand for an exhibition in 2005. Sartre smoked, but not in the commemorative picture years after he died. He was also one of the great sexual athletes of history. So was his lifelong love, Simone de Beauvoir, a switch-hitter whose girl friends captured Sartre’s fancy now and again. One of these resisted his advances and near broke his haunted heart, however. It was not easy being a king of sex, so uneasy lies the head wearing that crown.
— from Jean-Pierre Boule’s review of TETE-A-TETE: The lives and loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley (Chatto and Windus) in TLS 3/17/06
* We hear complaints about senseless acts of violence, but never praise for sensible ones. Is this wise?
* At Bread Kitchen during Xmas week, “Tum te tum tum” (Drummer Boy) overhead for the thousandth time this season is bad enough. But what of the woman at the next table picking up on it and humming along lightly?
* Comedian Shelley Berman had a shtick where he spoke of dropping ashes in his lap while driving. Parked at a light on a busy street, he brushed furiously at his lap, looked up and there was an elderly female bus passenger looking at him censoriously. Likewise, I looked down while on a Bread K stool and saw that my belt was undone and my fly was unzipped. Oh boy.
* Old joke, but in view of recent highly publicized developments, is it time to revive “Crook County” as replacement name? No? Whatever.
Lit’ry matters
* U.S. southern novelist Walker Percy was a medical doctor.
* Longfellow is the most put to music of English-language poets.
(Items from Times [of London] Literary Supplement, hereafter TLS)
* The idiosyncrasy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry may be explained by the “constraint” of Jesuit life. Toeing the line in all else, he broke out in his verse. (You could say he sprang out with his rhythm.) Indeed, the tension he experienced — conflict between vocation and creativity — may have been productive. (Simon Humphries, “A Eunuch for God,” TLS 12/22&29/06)
* In Honor: a History (Encounter), James Bowman (no relation) displays “a propensity to be judgemental and didactic.” (Ditto Harvey C. Mansfield in Manliness [Yale].) Thus reviewer George Feaver, retired poly sci prof at U. of British Columbia and this year at UT-Austin, who was left with “nagging suspicions” about Bowman’s judgment of U.S. military decisions, having read to the end of his “dense, discursive account of the alleged ‘decline and fall’ of Western honour.”
In this and other matters, Bowman offers a “gloomy reading” of history, “overly selective” in Feaver’s view, as in its ignoring the civil rights revolution of the ‘60s and “real-life heroes” such as Martin Luther King and the New York firefighters on 9/11. Feaver closes with commendation of both books, “despite their shortcomings [for reminding us] of the importance of remembering the past, and standing up for beliefs central to the achievement of our civilization.” (“Limp Responses,” TLS 12/22&29/06)
* Reviewing Patrick Wyse Jackson’s The Chronologer’s Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge), John North says J. has “useful things to say,” albeit with “a weakness for discursive irrelevance.”
Whether J. displayed this weakness or not, I do not know, nor do I know if other reviewers’ comments are well-aimed, but I do find that phrase helpful. May writing teachers and editors everywhere hold discursive irrelevance to be a weakness not a strength. (TLS 1/12/07)
Movie, No-Child
Reverse Spin: Obama on wrong side of history
Where’s Marlene?
Has anyone heard from Marlene Lynch . . . ? Does she know there is an election coming up? No news. No email. No meetings. No Signs. No Nothing!
Her phone number isn’t even listed on the Cook County Clerk website! She has no official email or website according to the Cook County Republican website. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to anyone?
asked Oak Park Conservatives some time back.