Blog category: Chicago

Ok Go! and Another Complex Vid | March 2nd, 2010

The latest from the Chicago dudes behind the infamous treadmill video:

Stephen Colbert on Our Chicago Congressional District | February 13th, 2010

Stephen Colbert profiled the Illinois 5th Congressional District the other night, including an interview with our Congressional Representative here in the LP, Rep. Mike Quigley. The interview doesn’t seem to be online — if I find it, I’ll update this — but I did appreciate the props to the Wiener’s Circle.

The View Out the Window | December 22nd, 2009

Strangely my East Coast friends got a lot bigger snowfall so far this year than we did out here in the Midwest — it’s snowed a bit in Michigan, but today in Chicago is the most this year that I’ve seen. Works for me; I’m on break now and got nothing better to do than stare at it while I down mugs of Barry’s tea.

Well, that and getting ready to beat up the field at trivia tonight for the first time since summer.

Megabus and the Real-Life Ethical Dilemma | November 9th, 2009

Damn, I felt today like I was in the boat scene from The Dark Knight.

Most of you dudes know I split my time these days between school in Ann Arbor and home in Chicago. The best way to get back and forth is Megabus, which I took yet again today.

(For anyone interested, here’s a quick cost-benefit analysis of the transportation links between Ann Arbor and Chicago:

1. Megabus – Cost averages $25, mostly comfortable, takes 4.5 hours including stop for food — though sadly, only at Hardee’s. Nasty.
2. Amtrak – Cost is $29 on weekdays but $75 on weekends. Most comfortable option, but delayed so often that it averages six hours per trip.
3. Driving – Cost depends on MPG (about 3/4 tank when I take the VW) but you can’t really do any work. Takes about four hours, and you then have to find parking.
4. Greyhound – Hellz no.)

To finally get to the point of my post, today we hit the food break at the Love’s truck stop — the one with the Hardee’s — at mile marker 110, which not only has just one fast-food option but also plays Fox News in the dining area. (Megabus used to stop at the truck stop in Sawyer, Mich., which has a Popeye’s, BK, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut Express. Now that is a quality junk-food spread. I think Love’s must have started paying them to subject us to Hardee’s.) I ate a Thickburger anyway and we left 30 minutes later.

Next up was the exercise in group morality: The driver came on the intercom about 20 miles past Love’s and announced that a passenger was left behind at the truck stop. Whoops. The driver had made several announcements when we stopped that everyone had to be back on by 3 p.m. EST, but whoever this person was somehow failed to note the time. The driver initially said he was going to turn around despite his anger and pick up the person, which would have resulted in us being about 40-50 minutes late in arriving. A bunch of passengers told the driver to keep going anyway — because hey, screw that anonymous guy — so he then announced he was not turning around.

I and the passengers around me found this a bit heartless — anybody who plans an urgent event based on a bus’s on-time arrival is an idiot — so I went downstairs and told the driver he should go back, and despite us both being pissed at the passenger, I could tell he felt the same way. He went on the intercom one more time and said he was turning around, but then enough people howled in protest that we ended up heading to Ann Arbor as scheduled, leaving the unknown passenger to fend for him/herself until the next Megabus comes through. With that bus not leaving Chicago until 4:45 p.m. CST, that comes out to an almost six-hour wait at the truck stop if there isn’t some other ride available. Ouch.

So what was the right course of action? After all, the passenger was at fault for not paying attention to the multiple announcements about being back to the bus on time. How would have you voted? Drop some ethical knowledge in the comments section and let me know. Also, give me a ride next time so I can avoid these philosophical quandaries.

Six Flags Great America: Go Late (In The Year) | September 2nd, 2009

A tip to my Chicago readers: if you’re planning to head up to Great America, the time to do it is right before Labor Day.

At first, it seems like a tradeoff: they’re only open from 10-6, rather than 10-9 p.m. or so. But it turns out they only get tiny crowds — yesterday they said they had 1,500 — so you walk onto every ride. I got in a total of 15 roller-coaster rides in just under six hours (we got there at noon), which was so many in such a short time that I had to slow it down towards the end lest I lose my overpriced hot-dog lunch. G managed a full 20 rides, including four in a row on the Raging Bull. For three of those, she didn’t even have to get up from her seat before riding again.

So for those wanting to hit up some bankrupt corporate roller-coaster action, be sure you do it right before Labor Day. Just watch out when you compress two days’ worth of rides into six hours — clearly, as No. 9 on this list would indicate, I’m an old dude.

Lollapalooza 2009: The Recap | August 10th, 2009

Yesterday I made it to Day 3 of Lollapalooza 2009. I had a great time reliving 1993 with Jane’s Addiction and Snoop — Lady of Rage even made an appearance — though the organizers did throw in some solid bands from 2009, too. Ranking the bands that I saw or mostly heard:

1. Jane’s Addiction (probably a given, being that it’s my list, but very exciting. Also, Eric Avery really looks like Dennis Quaid)
2. The Raveonettes (the surf-guitar thing works great live)
3. Snoop (great show and he was smart to get a live backing band)
4. Cold War Kids (haven’t heard much of their stuff but liked it)
5. Kaiser Chiefs (like them a lot but they missed a few songs I like)
6. Silversun Pickups (good stuff)
7. Vampire Weekend (not a very exciting show)

See the Grooveshark widget down below if you want to hear some tunes from each.

Some photos for ya:

Entering

The Raveonettes

Some serious tats

Quite a crowd

Chicago

One of the surprisingly few costumes

Cold War Kids

Surfing

S-N-double-O-P

Lady of Rage

Jane’s Addiction stage

Rocking out

The original foursome

Still got it, even getting up there in age

And the tunes:

The First Media Pay Wall, Obama as The Joker, Chicago Trib Redesign, and Where Vick Will Go | August 7th, 2009

• The trend has been building, so it had to tip at some point, for better or worse:

  News Corp. to Charge for All Websites, Business Spectator (Australia)

  In America, this could work to an extent, because News Corp.’s two big properties here are the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, both outlets with a dedicated (read: rabid) readership that turns there for a specific take on things that really speak to them. But outside the U.S. and for most of the company, I think this is a really bad idea: I don’t see anybody paying to access Sky News online, or junk tabloids like The Sun or New York Post (American, but more reminiscent of a British or Australian News Corp. publication).

  I don’t think the blanket approach is a good way to go, and this type of drastic change should have been evaluated on a per-publication basis. (Maybe it was and they went with this anyway, but that would be puzzling.) TIME.com tried this when I was there, and it was a big failure — TIME is going for such a wide volume of readers that they don’t create a really targeted, “I need my fix” demand, and Sky News isn’t exactly media crack, either. Even the NY Times couldn’t pull this off with their opinion section, and that’s at least at the heroin-level of punditry.

  More reaction roundup from the NY Times.

• I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post criticizing the Obama-as-Joker poster, in which the author argues that the poster is playing on racial fears and says that this poster isn’t as effective as the “Hope” one from the election.

  That seems wrong on two counts. First, even the article itself takes a way long rhetorical path before it can make a connection between the Joker and racial fear. The Joker has always been a white guy, except on the ’60s Batman TV show, when you could possibly say he was sorta-Latino thanks to Cesar Romero. This article just doesn’t convince me that there’s anything about the Joker that links to blackness at all — if you want to break this Joker dude down racially, Heath Ledger clearly depicted him as a source of random violence, a.k.a. terrorism, and I’d say there’s a defined ethnic group that has a clear monopoly on being considered terrorists. Also, the Joker is a sociopathic serial murderer, and “weird middle-aged white guy” is the depiction that immediately springs to mind with that term.

  Second, the Joker poster is totally blunt, but that’s not really ineffective: the great bulk of people are going to think, “Joker bad and socialism bad, so Obama bad”. I’m already seeing it as online avatars, so clearly it’s blunt enough to work on some level. You could get into the fact that probably 70% of people who dislike socialism have any knowledge of the topic besides negative word association, but the point is the poster ties the president pretty effectively to two things Americans dislike. Fair or not, it’s effective, and it’s not racist.

• The Chicago Tribune launched a redesign today. I’m struck first off how much the top navigation looks like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette site. (Check out the two local-news pages, which for the Trib is the one I read the most.) But they did do a good job of cleaning it up a bit, particularly the headlines toward the bottom of the local-news page that used to get lost with no context, a.k.a. subhead, and the fact that the flyout links under the top navigation bar seem to be pretty flexible for spotlighting new stuff.
• My pick for Michael Vick’s ultimate destination: the Oakland Raiders. Here’s why:
  1. JaMarcus Russell is not exactly a showstopper;
  2. Jeff Garcia is too old;
  3. Oakland likes to take slightly older players with something to prove — think Daunte Culpepper;
  4. Al Davis is a total jagoff and probably hates puppies.

  This guy seems to differ from my opinion, but I think he will be surprised in the end. Or I will. The point is, surprise will happen at some point.

Trivia! Burgers! $800! | July 14th, 2009

Props again to Here Comes Treble to pointing me to trivia at State Restaurant — tonight my team won the competition and the $800 prize that comes with it. Nice! Check out State on Tuesdays if you like trivia and live in Chicago.

The Best Chicago Trivia-Night Blog Ever | June 15th, 2009

As a trivia-night fan and former webdev pro, I tried to write an SEO-friendly headline for this one because it deserves so much promotion:

http://herecomestreble.wordpress.com/

Some friends and I are out looking for trivia bar nights in Chicago right now, and this website is a gold mine. Visit it!

So Much for “The Party of Lincoln” | February 12th, 2009

Happy 200th birthday to Honest Abe, the greatest President the United States has ever had and namesake for my ‘hood in Chicago. I probably shouldn’t use the term “hood” to describe arguably the most yuppified area in the country, but that’s how we do it in streetz of LP — Chads and Trixies fo’ life.

There’s been a lot written about how every generation reinvents Lincoln as an ideal President for today’s theories and challenges, and that often requires a pretty huge leap in logic. But as this Salon article points out, it’s really a stretch when the modern G.O.P. tries to claim that the tall lanky dude would fit in well with today’s Republicans:

How Would Lincoln Vote Today?

The author sums it up best himself in this paragraph:

Can anyone believe that a contemporary Republican politician who refused to join a Christian church, who was described by friends as “an avowed and open infidel,” who had written a book mocking the miracles in the Bible, who described evangelical voters as “priest-ridden,” and was a “warm advocate” of evolutionary theory, could be nominated for president by today’s Republican Party?

I’m gonna go ahead and answer “no” to that question.

And one more Lincoln link: This 2005 Atlantic profile of Lincoln and depression was really powerful and stuck with me.