Illini At Wrigley Field

Dan and I went to the Illini at Wrigley yesterday and it was a lot of fun. I obtained these tickets by purchasing four end-zone season tickets from Northwestern for $384, which allowed me to buy up to 8 seats for this game. An excellent trade, especially because I took my parents to the Northwestern home opener (they are alumni) and others had a great time with the Iowa game and my brother took his son to the Purdue game and toured the campus.

I thought there might by a fly-over so I recorded the end of the national anthem, sung by Blackhawks singer Jim Cornelison, which was great. There was no fly-over but here is the video nonetheless which gives a good feeling for how close we were to the action on the field.

We were in the end zone that the offense played away from because of the bleacher walls. This didn’t impact the game as badly as we thought it might; we did see some cool drives that started deep in their own territory as well as the TD return by Northwestern. At that point it was obvious how many Northwestern fans were in the seats relative to Illini fans; they were the clear majority. The seats were absolutely right by the field which was fantastic for us and we really liked the view.

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Around Chicago November 2010


 
Upper left – a lot of the higher end or craft brewers are starting to sell their beer in cans. This is a “Gossamer Golden Ale” from Half Acre Brewing Company, a local Chicago micro-brewer. Good stuff. Upper right – funny to see a Smart Car parked on the sidewalk on Wells street under the “El” tracks. Lower left – over in Wicker Park “Brooklyn Industries” has their wares plus pre-emptively put up graffiti on half their building to boot. Lower middle – I can’t believe how low the jeans are on the shorter guy on the left side of the picture. They honestly would go down to about my knees. I am not a fashion expert but if you are already short wearing pants that make you seem EVEN shorter wouldn’t seem like a good plan. Also if you enlarge the photo you can see that he has his wallet in those pants too which for some reason I find funny. Lower right – on Michigan Avenue they are still building new condos. UNBELIEVABLE. These are Ritz Carleton residences, you’d figure that if they can’t even sell out the Trump that they’d give up on building more high end residences. Or maybe they are way smarter than us and betting that the debased US currency will enable foreigners to use their Euros and other valuable currencies to snap up real estate, especially prime real estate on Michigan Avenue. You never know.
 
Cross posted at LITGM
 

Before, During and After the Election

I have a ritual on elections. I volunteer to be a pollwatcher. I have done this several times. It makes me feel like I am “doing something” even though it is probably, on the margin, nothing. I am in a state of suppressed hysteria and can’t sit still or focus on Election Day, anyway.

This time I signed up with the Republican Lawyers Committee. They had a meeting a week or so before the election at the Union League club. It was a class, basically a primer on election law. It had CLE credit, too. Woo hoo. I went to that, and it was pretty good, and I met some cool people.

One guy there was acting really weird, demanding to know why he could not challenge a voter who did not speak English and “does not belong in this county.” His demeanor was all wrong. He slumped in chair, talked too loudly and was offensively argumentative. Other people argued back against him in a sane way. Maybe it is not paranoid to think he was a plant, from some Lefty blog or something, fishing for a chance to talk about how the Republican lawyers are bigoted against Spanish-speakers. He got nowhere, and left in the middle of the presentation. Strange.

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End of Summer, Chicago Loop, 2010

Coffee, afternoon,
Daley Plaza, Picasso,
Kids laughing, sliding.

Tired, harried lawyer
Walking fast, shirttail half out.
Thirty years, for this?

Hipster, purple shirt,
pinstripe pants, too young to know,
He can get fired too.

Young women. Skirts. Shorts.
Bare legs. Thighs. Knees. Calves. Ankles.
Here, there, everywhere.

Excellent analysis of Chicago Mayor’s race

This piece is from Greg Hinz, from Crain’s Chicago Business, who is usually good. Kinz lays out the potential candidates to replace Da Mayor. His blog has several good posts about the mayoral race. I will be checking it out from time to time.

I tend to agree with the commenters on the post I linked to. The Chicago business community is looking disaster in the face here.

My WAG: The money is going to rally to someone early, probably Rahm, who can promise stability.

Things are very bad. The recession is hitting hard here, on top of a very unfriendly, uncertain and even punitive climate for business in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois.

The business guys I know (small and medium-sized) all say they would leave if they could, and would never move here if they weren’t here already.

So, the people who have large investments here, who are committed to the place due to real estate holdings and other fixed investments, and cannot uproot themselves, need to fend off an exodus that a weak or worse, anti-business mayor, would cause. That means they need someone in there who will be up to the job and not just get rolled.

Then, long term, they need to stop the bleeding and make it worth doing business here. That will not be easy. It may not be possible.

One of the jokes circulating among my friends is that Blago should run. My response was, what is Lee Kwan Yew doing these days? We could use him there.

My wife’s first reaction: “We should have sold our house when we had the chance. Now we are going to turn into Detroit.”

A lot of people have to be thinking this way.

[See also The Last Boss, from Zenpundit.]