A Chicago Blog

This is not the first time my train has caught fire. Anyone have any idea of why this happens? (PS, My camera work is pathetic in this video)

CBS2 has a great feature on actors from Chicago or who have worked here significantly. Steve Colbert? Really?

Yeah, that hurts. If you haven’t seen the repay of Soriano getting hit in the hand by a fastball, it’ll make you whince. The question is not whether the Cubs can get by without him for six weeks. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the Cubs’ talent is far to deep. One injury simply [...]

In a lot of ways the American electorate, and punditocracy, are fraught with contradictions. One of which is that we want presidential candidates to be role models and to “do the right thing,” but we want them to look cool doing it.  I’m no Obama fan, but if he had been caught riding around without [...]

And is anyone really going to miss him? Check out his game stats from 2007:

Looking for Chicago City Employee Salaries? The Better Government Association has them. I sure wish they’d let me download the whole database in CSV. These user-friendly online databases are hard to deal with.
[Hat tip: CapitolFax]

While we’re on education today, I want to comment briefly on the absurd column by Alice Armstrong in the State Journal Register yesterday. In her column, Alice criticizes Collin Hitt (Disclaimer: I’ve co-written several articles with Collin) for allegedly “oversimplifying” the issue when he suggested that Illinois’ charter schools have been successful and that it’s [...]

Seriously. This is only partly invective. Today the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is busing 30,000 kids to Soldier Field to rally for more school funding. But Chicago already spends more than $11,000 per student on average. The real problem is that Chicago school budgeting ensures that most of the resources are sucked up by schools [...]

Man I have to get a new camera. For the last few weeks I’ve been using the camera on my phone since my CyberShot crapped out on me. It just doesn’t cut it. Believe it or not, Johnny Depp is in the picture below. He’s in town shooting a movie and I happened to find [...]

Did you know Congressional staff salaries are available online. Me neither. But for kicks I downloaded Dick Durbin’s staff. Hmmmm. I wonder why he needs so many people. Don’t get me wrong I think Senators need staff. But 64 people in one year? wow. But I guess I can’t complain too much, Barack Obama had [...]