Me and Rahm

Jimmy Gabacho
4 Min Read

It was the Saturday before the mayoral election in the Windy City, and my wife and I were in Chicago running errands.  Once a month we make our escape from the desolate cornfields and head to the Second City for shopping, groceries and dinner.  Over the years we have started to buy organic, so we always hit Whole Foods Market on North Avenue before heading for home. When we arrived, the parking lot was so jammed packed that it seemed like they were giving away food.

I was already in a pissed-off mood.

Chicago, Jimmy Gabacho

Wisconsin Digest — 2/21/11

TomT
4 Min Read

At our gracious host’s suggestion, I’ve thrown together a roundup of (hopefully useful, or at least interesting) info on what may be the last stand of the Badger state’s middle and working classes. (All due credit to Meteor Blades and the other folks at Daily Kos, David Dayen at Firedoglake, and the Milton Education Association, Milton WI.)

TomT

The Hive-Mind Zeitgeist

John Hicks
3 Min Read

A few hours after I fired off my last post (“True Grit”) to B2L2, I cracked the February 14 & 21, 2011, issue of The New Yorker and discovered, to my great delight, a piece by staff writer Adam Gopnik titled “The Information.”

I was delighted because “The Information” addresses the curious state of being I’d touched on in my previous post – the calm and, well, happiness I’d begun to feel after several days of life without the Internet.

John Hicks

Notes from 5 Years Later: A Forum on the State of Public Education in NO

G Bitch
4 Min Read

5 Years Later

  • The opening prayer oddly asked God to still or help instill “self-control” and “punctuality” in the students under discussion, and he was not talking about Holy Name or Lusher.
  • Asher’s teacher-blaming started from her opening words–that the children haven’t failed, it’s that “adults have failed to teach” them.
  • Guttierrez calling the RSD the “ultimate accountability” body was rich considering recent news.
Education, G Bitch, New Orleans

Untitled Fiction Thing #2

Grant Bailie
1 Min Read

He first saw Alfia Furst on the corner of First Avenue and First Street. It was May Day and the sun was shining on her in a way it was not shining on the parking meters or the grey and melting snow banks that still lined the street.

He followed her all the way to the coffee shop, and then continued on without her to the dry-cleaner, which had been his original intent. At the dry-cleaners there was a clerk he had always found attractive but this attraction was significantly diminished today. He accepted and paid for his pressed shirts with no more than the required amount of friendly banter.

Fiction, Grant Bailie

True Grit

John Hicks
3 Min Read

It was freezing in Vicksburg. The sky was bright blue, banded with cirrus clouds. Up on the bluffs, in the military park, I saw the raised ironclad hulk of the USS Cairo for the first time. They picked it up from the bottom of the Yazoo River a few decades ago and built a museum around it.

There’s something that never gets old about seeing a big ship that’s been dragged up on land. In its day, the Cairo slithered down the river like a gigantic smoking robot alligator, blowing things to pieces. I imagine people ran the other way when they saw it.

John Hicks

Unknown regions [Updated]

Francis Illington
1 Min Read

Describing—let alone defining—the act of death is a fool’s errand. After all, how does one speak of eternity, whether spent in unremembered inky nothingness or fluttering around on angelic wings?

Still, some of us come closer than others in peaking behind the epistemological, spiritual and otherwise cosmological curtain separating the living from the dead. I’ve always liked the term “the sweet hereafter,” even if it’s hard to beat German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who called death “the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”

Francis Illington
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