Barely underway for four hours now, the Insert-Hyperbolic-Name-Here Blizzard of 2011 is already having deleterious effects on both of Chicago’s baseball teams.
On the north side, the Tribune’s “Chicago Weather Center” page reports early damage to the Home of the Cubs:
A section Wrigley Field’s roof was blown off shortly after 6PM. Some of the debris landed in the intersection of Addison and Clark. Police are attempting to clean up the debris.
A glimpse inside the studios of Wood Central in Jackson, MS, where six artisans pursue their craft.
It has to start somewhere.
As reported by Christopher Ketcham at Alternet and on Democracy Now: On the eve of the first anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s shameful and terrain-changing Citizens United decision, a call has come from the Vermont Legislature to restore a measure of political balance through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning “corporate personhood.”
Chris Hedges at truthdig recently criticized the liberal tendency to retreat into lofty conferences as the America of our imaginations becomes harder to square with an increasingly disturbing reality.
(To the tune of John Cooper Clarke’s classic, “Evidently Chickentown.”
Warning: Foul Language Ahead.)
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I wondered what kind of person she would have been had she used the thing. She definitely would have been more relaxed: she was a compulsive worrier. She would have had a better appetite. Even though Grandma had lost interest in men by the time she was forty, she still maintained her figure. If she had been a stoner, she would have ditched the whole Slim Fast gig and broken out the Oreos.
At a recent conference of the Council of Independent Colleges, college presidents expressed their growing fear that liberal arts colleges are facing terminal illness. This is particularly ironic given new data from the Social Science Research Council that says: “Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains… “
For a brief moment following the shooting in Arizona, it really seemed like a consensus was forming within the liberal (and parts of the mainstream) media and blogosphere; that the violent rightwing rhetoric which has become standard feature of our political discourse had finally gone too far, and that we as a nation were finally due for some rhetorical climate change.
We had organized our days for sightseeing. First on the agenda was taking the girls to see the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Instead of hippies, the place was full of skateboarders. There was still a lot of tie-die shirts and psychedelic art. Our plan was to start at Buena Vista Park and make our way past the Victorian mansions, the Magnolia Brewpub, and the former headquarters of the Symbionese Liberation Army toward Golden Gate Park.
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I just finished reading a piece of fiction that had been misfiled by the editors of the New Yorker under a category – feature? expose? – that is commonly associated with non-fiction. i.e. truthful reporting. The article, by Jon Lee Anderson …
Update: Here is the text and video of Malinda Seneviratne’s testimony.
Yes, on to Chicaco.