Designated Bird Feeding Area, originally uploaded by swanksalot. Stencil in front of the Haymarket Memorial statue.
Not officially endorsed by The Mayor.
Plus you should subscribe to my daily email (usually gets released around 1 AM CST) so that you have something fun to read as you drink your morning beverage. A dose of B12's Solipsism can only enhance your day!
Oh, and you should follow me on Twitter too, if you are so inclined. I have other social media accounts, but I don't care if you friend me on Facebook, or subscribe to my Tumblr blog, for instance.
I've also installed a new photoblog which is pretty cool. Click here for the first image, click to image to advance to the next (or use the forward and back links). You can have a backdrop of white or black - black looks better, imho.
I installed WordPress 2.5 last night, and have been playing around with it for a few hours. Seems so much more responsive than Movable Type, at least at the moment. I don't know if that is because I have over 4,000 entries in MT, or because WP uses PHP, or if WP just is faster. MT gives one more control over the layout (templates for every page, archive, index), but this control also makes MT much more complicated to configure. I never did get the category archive to work properly, and gave up after struggling with the formatting for hours. Also, about every 3rd post made in MT doesn't complete the first time, I have to repost up to five times to get a proper response (though, this could be webhost-related, but then doesn't happen in WP).
Not sure what will happen in the near future, but for now, new content will be found here more likely than here. The only change is "/mt" to "/wp" at the end (http://www.b12partners.net/mt/ to http://www.b12partners.net/wp/ )
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[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]
Lake Street Green line, from my building's roof. The new station would be about 5-6 blocks west.
[Las Vegas Showgirls at Wrigley Field]
Think of it: Mark Cuban as the Chicago Cubs’ owner, bonding with the Bleacher Bums at Wrigley Field, splurging for rounds of Old Style beer and screaming at umpires. The concept is almost Veeckian, as if Bill Veeck, the populist former owner of the Browns, the Indians and the White Sox, had had zillions of dollars.
Buying the Cubs is the latest project for Cuban, the owner of the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks, but he is not alone in the expensive quest. Four other individuals and groups have given the debt-laden Tribune Company nonbinding offers of at least $1 billion for the team, its stake in Comcast SportsNet Chicago, and 92-year-old Wrigley Field.
Cuban is reported to be the top bidder, at nearly $1.3 billion
[From Cuban Wants Cubs, but Will Baseball Want Him? - NYTimes.com]
Richard Sandomir of the NYT keeps harping on the dollar amount of fines Cuban has gotten from the NBA, but there is a clear pattern of decline there, and Cuban has been less publicly inflammatory in recent years. I follow the NBA very closely, and Cuban has been a boon for the Dallas Mavs. The Cubs, and Chicago, would be well served to have an owner as activist as Mark Cuban.
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Tony Clifton may well be the rudest, crudest, most musically talentless lounge lizard ever to stalk a stage. But for those of a certain age and/or sensibility, he is an entertainer nonpareil.
As part of a national tour, his performing prowess will be showcased starting Thursday at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Accompanied by the Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra, the bellicose balladeer will croon from a vast repertoire of Sinatra, Lynyrd Skynyrd and even Led Zeppelin to raise funds for Gulf Coast artists who were hit by the hurricane.
"This is an amazing, amazing showman," says Clifton's longtime pal Dennis Hof, who owns the Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel in Carson City, Nev., where Clifton is said to be a frequent guest and winter boarder. "And he's the last of his kind."
Hof met Clifton a few decades back, when the late hooker-loving comedian Andy Kaufman would swing by the cathouse (which then bore a different name) with his Chicago-born friend Bob Zmuda, who now runs the charity Comic Relief.
In those "crazy" times, Hof says, Andy wasn't always himself.
"I remember one time, Andy partied with 18 girls in two days," he remembers. "And sometimes it was Tony."
[Click to read more of Kaufman's alter ego Tony Clifton is all trick and no treat :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Entertainment]
]]>Yes, back in 2001, Charles Oakley decided that maybe 50 to 60 percent of the players in the NBA used marijuana. A few years later, the Rocky Mountain News surveyed NBA players and from a sample of about 60 decided that some 30 percent of the players were using the drug.
[Click to read more of HoopsHype.com NBA Blogs - Sam Smith » Booze, not pot, the real problem]
Both of these accounts followed a 1997 New York Times report of substance abuse among NBA players and threw out a figure of 60 to 70 percent, though lost in the fine print was no real distinction between alcohol and marijuana.
And, yes, there’s the rub.
I know, I know, marijuana is illegal and alcohol is not.
But this should give pause to everyone who reads and reacts to headlines of NBA players using or being arrested in connection with marijuana.
I don’t know how many players in the NBA use marijuana, though we do know now about Noah. We’ve previously heard issues with Allen Iverson, Chris Webber, Robert Parish, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Rasheed Wallace and at one time most of Portland, though it is a particularly liberal place.
Of course, we’ve also heard the same about former President Bill Clinton, who insisted he didn’t inhale, and now U.S. Senator Barack Obama, who also wrote in his first book about experimenting with “blow,” the street name for cocaine.
Using Aristotelian logic, perhaps this means more NBA players than we think could be running for president, though in the Democratic party. Which might not be a bad thing because perhaps they’d be too mellow to be declaring war so often.
FDA has been caught with its head in the proverbial sand again, sort of a don't ask, don't tell policy for food safety. Venue shopping, in other words.
A congressional committee is investigating whether some private U.S. laboratories were instructed to withhold samples of tainted food so that importers could get their goods into the United States.
In a May 1 letter to 10 labs, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce suggests they may have been encouraged by importing companies to discard test results that had failed Food and Drug Administration standards.
"We're gathering information from both the FDA and private industry about the labs almost being complicit in helping importers game the system," said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee that is investigating the labs and food companies. "Someone told us you pay for the result you want to get from the labs."
The committee's letter reiterates Stupak's suspicion that testing on some samples was conducted repeatedly until the food passed.
In other instances, the letter says, importers whose food failed tests at one laboratory would hire a different lab to continue testing until they got a positive result. "This repeated testing is done without alerting FDA that potentially dangerous food has been imported into this country — a practice which we find deplorable," the letter states.
The committee asked 50 multinational food companies for a wide range of recall- and food-import records dating to 2000. A May 8 letter from the committee to the companies asks about instances when food was found to be contaminated with chemicals or bacteria such as E. coli, salmonella or listeria. "We wish to assess the extent of microbiological and/or chemical contamination occurring during the processing of food and the extent to which controls have failed to prevent or eliminate contamination in food," the committee wrote.
Three Chicago-area corporations— Kraft Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp. and the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co.—are included in the second request.
[From Suspicions deepen on food labs -- -- chicagotribune.com]
Sounds like a pretty big loophole to me: too bad the FDA's mandate is to protect the business interests of food manufacturers, and not consumers, or else the FDA would run its own laboratories, conducting its own tests. Privatization is usually not the best solution to address public health concerns.
The nation can't afford to ensure the quality of its citizen's food - there are wars in the desert to fund! ]]>Last autumn the FDA issued an alert on five types of Chinese seafood: eel, shrimp, catfish, basa and dace. The warning was recognition of the fast-growing Asian aquaculture industry and its frequent use of antibiotics banned in the United States.
To import those seafoods, companies affected by the alert must prove that their products don't contain banned substances. Conducting tests to prove it is one of the jobs the private labs perform.
So far, just 2 of the 10 labs targeted by the House committee have complied with the records request, according to committee staffers. Amir Jalaeikhoo, president of one lab that did comply, Imperial Private Laboratories Inc. of Miami, said that his firm reports negative test results to the FDA. Imperial mostly tests for pesticides in produce imported from Central and South America, Jalaeikhoo said. "Sometimes we lose clients because our standard operating procedure is that basically if something is ... in violation, we submit it," he said. "Some importers don't like that policy."
