Day: September 3, 2012
Why loans are so hard to get
Small-business people can’t get the loans they need, reports Sun-Times.
While credit has loosened since the height of the financial crisis, the dollar volume of loans and numbers of loans made by large banks to small businesses still remains well below the levels seen prior to the recession locally and nationally.
Well what I don’t know about bank lending would . . . (you know the rest) and I hate to go out on a limb. . .
But low, low interest rates decreed by the nation’s fiscal authorities might have something to do with it. Maybe?
Emanuel attacks criminals? Sorry, no.
Had to read hard copy head for this Sun-Times story twice: “Emanuel leads attacks on criminals” — SORRY — on Romney.
Same head,continued: “Dems concede excitement level lower than” — SORRY — unlike 2008.
It’s not lower. It’s different. Like level 2 for men’s shoes, level 3 for ladies’ undergarments. It’s all in how you say things, not in whatever the hell you are saying.
And let us pass over in silence another Sun-Times hard-copy head, about what Obama plans for the convention this week: “MESSGAGE: LOOK WHAT I’VE DONE.”
It shows how hard it is to get good help these days.
Labor Day preacher, watch out!
Beware the Labor Day sermon with preacher reference to third rail of Chicago teachers union vs. city of same name and its impasse including strike threat, “I know it’s a complicated issue, but . . . “
Now stop right there, Father. The word you want is not the coordinating conjunction “but,” meaning complicated or not, I’m going to talk about it, but the adverbial conjunction “so,” as in “. . . so I’m not going to say anything except love your neighbor, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute and calumniate you . . .”
Demographic here, reporting on Paraddidle Joe
Mature demographic! That’s me! As in Chi Trib hard-copy caption (for Hartford Courant article by Kevin Hunt):
. . . over-size, amped-up, large-print Clarity Pal cellphone [featuring] old-school style and substance.”
That’s me too!
Oh yes, the days of early clock radio, 1946 with three brothers home from wars and waking of a morning to “Paradiddle Joe . . . beats out the rhythm in a rudimental way . . . Paradiddle Joe all the day,” about an indefatigable drummer. Wake to that sound, you’re ready for anything.
Tony Pastor and orchestra, Johnny Morris on drums. Yeah!
Where black doctors live or lived: shoot-’em-up
Four people, including an 11-year-old girl, were shot and wounded late Sunday when a gunman opened fire at a family party in the Pill Hill neighborhood on the city’s South Side, Chicago police said.
The 10:45 p.m. shooting in the 9100 block of South Chappel Avenue was only a block from the scene of a fatal shooting earlier in the day, though police said it was too soon to tell if they were connected.
Yr black and successful? No place to hide.
Personal recollection: In the 70s in Oak Park, we would sit with black neighbors to talk about problems, block from city-limit Austin Blvd. One discussion, a black guy, a CTA bus driver, told of young male passengers boarding in Pill Hill heading north, kids he’d seen at church with their parents. On the way, they would pull out the hat that tilted a certain way said what gang he belonged to or some other identification. Young men on their way to where the action was.
Nailing newsies
Russell Shaw on overdoing it at National Catholic Reporter:
News that the doctrine committee of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops last year adopted protocols to guide its procedures and those of its staff set the juices predictably flowing at the National Catholic Reporter. An overwritten story on the NCRwebsite let readers know that this particular USCCB committee was “tasked with enforcing church doctrine.”
Enforcing? How do you do that with doctrine? This is the way we journalists talk when we don’t like something and want you not to like it either.
It’s the narrative, you know: God proposes, Vatican enforces. The perfervid approach.
Blithe Spirit 