Columbus Drive & Roosevelt Rd, Friday, September 20, 2019, 11 AM to 1 PM. “We will meet at the south end of Grant Park at the address provided at 11AM and march to Federal Plaza where we will hold a rally featuring performers and speakers.”
Month: September 2019
Neck Less
Photo by Roman
The Stained Club
Inclusion, exclusion, identity: all crucial aspects of being a social creature. This is a nice bit of work that’s been getting featured on a number of “best of” channels, so here it is,
World Apart
Graphic by Roman.
I posted this graphic about a year ago. Here it is again. Because I like it. That’s why.
Speaking of the whirling world, the Chicago Climate Strike rally will start at Columbus Drive & Roosevelt Rd, Friday, September 20, 2019, 11 AM to 1 PM. “We will meet at the south end of Grant Park at the address provided at 11AM and march to Federal Plaza where we will hold a rally featuring performers and speakers.”
At the Jackson Red Line Station
The Jackson Red Line platform is sometimes a pretty good place for live music. On those occasions, I regret not hanging around to take it in. Not too many people do, it seems. On other occasions, the music can be pretty lame, not to mention exceedingly loud.
The platform actually stretches from a bit south of Van Buren to about Lake Street, and it was the longest railway station platform in the world when it was built, even if it served four different stations along its length.
Since then, the Washington station was closed back when Daly the Younger made the ill-advised decision to pursue the idea of an express CTA train to O’Hare. This involved creating a track and station that would link the Blue Line subway and the Red Line. Never finished, it was something like $200 million down a hole, so-to-speak.
It actually isn’t a totally nuts idea, apart from the “express” aspect. There was some talk and planning done in that direction back when the Dearborn subway was originally constructed. Who knows? Maybe one day there will be a CTA train route linking O’Hare and Midway, just as the current Red Line link to the Dan Ryan tracks uses tunnel stubs that were left in anticipation of a never completed Archer Avenue subway. (We got the Orange Line, ultimately, instead.)
There are, incidentally, a similar set of tunnel stubs north of the Clark / Lake Blue Line station in anticipation of a Lake Street subway, also never built.
Bwah-hah-hah-haaaah
Photo by Roman.
Joan Miró’s “Miró’s Chicago” from this angle seems so… possessive. And come to think of it, that would be a good one word description of Chicago’s Loop. This may be a somewhat underrated bit of public sculpture, ya think?
Beef
Photo by Roman.
September 11, 2019: “The Carpenters Union is currently engaged in a labor dispute with Level Construction, Inc. concerning their failure to pay area standard wages and benefits to their carpenter employees. We are appealing to the public and are not seeking to encourage anyone to cease working or make deliveries.”
Just so you know.
Listen Up!
I wish I could claim credit for the graphic, but its origin seems to be a post on one or another reddit.com “community.” I got it from author John Scalzi’s Twitter feed. (No, I’m not on Twitter, but I sometimes watch from a distance.)
With some exceptions, trolling is just rude and offensive behavior. I usually try to be polite. This graphic was just too cute for me to resist. As a lefty, I’ve heard “love it or leave it” too many times to not contemplate possible answers to a jibe that really doesn’t merit a reply, seeing as the jibe is from a closed, cramped and hateful mind. And of course, Our Dear President recently used this line of “argument.”
But I say to the “love it or leave it” crowd: No… don’t leave; America wouldn’t be the same without you. Not unless you really want to. In which case, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Future Ghost
magical thinking for september
Photo by Roman.
Who says ghosts must be the dead from the past? What if ghosts could be the dead from the future?
For that matter, if reincarnation happens, why assume that your next life — be it human or otherwise — will be in the future? What if it will be as a Saurophaganax millions of years ago? What if your next life were to begin yesterday, or indeed at any time during your current life? Maybe your lover is really you. Maybe you mugged yourself in that half lit alley. What about that squirrel you ran over last week? And that intolerable colleague at work? Could that cockroach fleeing in terror across the floor know the futility of its plight because it remembers precisely what you are about to do?
Or worse yet, your next life might not be a new life; it could be yourself redux, over and over, time and again, squeezed out once more, once more, once more into the cold world in an endlessly repeating variation of your life until you get it right, goddammit!
Hell is said by some to be the absence of God but possibly, for some, it is merely the permanence of oneself.
Hey! I’m okay. What about you?
Greg
I get mistaken for someone other more often than seems reasonable so I can imagine this happening to me. This case of mistaken identity from Will Dennis:
If this ever happens to you, call the station attendant.
Yip Abides 