Predictions for 2024, yours and mine

Plus 200 reasons not to vote for Donald Trump

1-04-2024 (issue No. 122)

This week’s table of contents:

• Last week’s winning tweet

• Best guesses: What we’re predicting for 2024

• News and Views — Stop glorifying the first babies of the new year! The ones to celebrate are the little tax deductions born before midnight.

• The stupidest, cruelest thing Sun-Times management has ever done, revisited

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Mark Jacob's list of 200 reasons to vote against Donald Trump — Read it! Share it!

• A video clip to remember the brilliantly funny Tommy Smothers

• Mary Schmich — On good things that happened in 2023

• “The Mincing Rascals” podcast preview

• Quotables — Max Zorn and Mark Jacob

• Re:Tweets — The winning visual tweet and this week’s contest finalists

• Good sports — My new occasional section of thoughts on sports. Some readers have told me they don’t care about sports and consider my items about teams and stars and games and rules to be an obstacle to their enjoyment. So I’ve decided to put all the sports commentary under one heading toward the bottom of the Sentinel to make it easier for those who aren’t interested to give it a miss. This week find the good luck of Jake Thaw and the astonishing skill of Caitlin Clark

• Tune of the Week — “Come and Get Your Love” a pick inspired by the Hulu series “Reservation Dogs”

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise

Last week’s winning tweet

Laundry: Washing = 45 minutes. Drying = 60 minutes. Folding = 7 to 10 business days. — @dougboneparth

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

Dall-e image

Best guesses: What we’re predicting for 2024

Last week, I posted a 36-question survey asking readers to predict (or guess wildly at) what the news will bring us in 2024. I disagreed with the hive mind on 16 of the questions, and if the past is any guide, the readers will prove slightly more clairvoyant than I 12 months from now.

Anyway, here, with my commentary, are the results, with the percentage of the reader vote in parenthesis.

The majority/plurality of readers and I agreed that …

Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan will be convicted in his upcoming racketeering trial. (74%) 

As I often said during the trial of former Ald. Ed Burke, the G doesn’t often lose at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse. Even though on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey pushed the trial date back six months to Oct. 8, pending a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on just what constitutes bribery of a public official, I would still expect a verdict before Christmas.

Bally’s will break ground on the large casino project at the River West site of the Tribune printing plant. (73%) 

The Tribune has agreed to vacate the 30-acre Freedom Center site by July, and a delay in groundbreaking for the casino, which aims to open in 2026, seems unlikely.

Chicago city Treasurer and former state Rep. Melissa Conyears-Ervin will be defeated in her effort to unseat veteran U.S. Rep. Danny Davis in Chicago’s 7th U.S. Congressional District in the 2024 Democratic primary. (85%)

Davis will be 83 when he seeks reelection to the seat he has held since 1990. He faced his only serious primary challenge in 2022 when community activist Kina Collins lost to him by a bit over 6 percentage points. Collins is making her third run against Davis, and Conyears-Ervin has been beset by accusations of unethical conduct in office.

Davis should retire and make way for a new generation of African American leadership in Illinois’ congressional delegation, but voters won’t retire him.

No major daily newspaper— the Tribune, Sun-Times or Daily Herald — will stop offering print editions on certain days of the week. (52%) 

The day is rapidly approaching when Saturday editions and then Monday and Tuesday editions will either disappear or be online only, as has happened in other cities. I’m sure of it. But I doubt it will be in 2024.

Former Republican gubernatorial candidate and ardent Trumper Darren Bailey will lose to five-term incumbent downstate Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Bost in the 12th U.S. Congressional District primary. (80%)

Bost has the national party’s endorsement and a big fundraising lead over Bailey, who is going full MAGA.

Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. (92%)

Biden, 81, should also step aside for the next generation even though he’s done a pretty good job as president. But he won’t.

Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president. (78%)

The MAGA cult has the Republican Party in its clutches, which may well be the Democrats’ best hope for November.

The Democratic candidate will win the race for president. (85%) 

I still believe this angry, paranoid, polarized nation has not gone so batshit crazy as to reelect the manifestly unfit would-be dictator Donald Trump.

The Democratic Party will win control of the U.S. House. (76%)

The abortion issue alone will be enough to tip enough close races to the Democratic side.

2024 will be the hottest year on record, breaking the record just set by 2023. (79%) 

I have no hope that the developed world has the political will to address the climate crisis.

The Republican House of Representatives will not impeach Democratic President Joe Biden. (63%) 

A few cooler heads will prevail and recognize that a futile effort to impeach Biden will alienate centrist, independent voters who may not like Biden much but really don’t care for spiteful, symbolic acts of retribution based on nothing substantial.

The average national price of a gallon of gas will be higher than $3 at year’s end. (71%)

Wednesday’s reported average was $3.09, and I’ll be surprised (and pleased) if it’s below that a year from now.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, now at about 37,500, will break 40,000 at some time during 2024. (74%)

The economy is doing pretty well, despite what you hear in right-wing media.

China will not attempt to annex Taiwan. (64%)

I doubt Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to risk his country’s economic standing in the world on a war over Taiwan.

Benjamin Netanyahu will not be the prime minister of Israel at year’s end. (76%) 

Wise people seem to think he’ll soon be gone. I’ll go along with that.

Vladimir Putin will remain Russia’s president. (92%)

Only death or serious disease is going to dislodge him.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will break up. (59%)

Celebrity romances are notoriously fragile in any case, but Swift’s track record suggests she moves on quickly. (See: “Taylor Swift’s Dating History: A Timeline of Her Famous Exes and Flings.”)

The majority/plurality of readers and I disagreed that …

Recently convicted former 14th Ward Ald. Ed Burke will not spend a day in prison in 2024 . (57%) 

Burke’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 19, and white -ollar convicts are typically given time after sentencing to get their affairs in order before reporting to the spa with no toilet seats. Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich got a little more than three months; Former Gov. George Ryan was able to stave off his day of reckoning by 14 months by unsuccessfully appealing his conviction.

The referendum seeking to increase the real estate transfer tax on Chicago properties worth more than $1 million will pass. (57%)

Heavily funded opposition will torpedo this sensible idea, just as it did the referendum on a progressive income tax for Illinois.

The next Cook County state’s attorney will be Democrat Eileen O'Neill Burke. (43% ) 

I say it will be Clayton Harris III, the party backed Democrat, so do 37% of participants in the survey. Stunningly, 20% of respondents think perennial candidate and former alder Bob Fioretti, running as a Republican, will win.

The Democrats will keep control of the U.S. Senate. (70%) 

CNN’s list of the 10 most likely Senate seats to flip in 2024 has seven that are currently held by Democrats.

Nikki Haley will be the Republican vice presidential nominee. (23%) 

I have an inkling that Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor who narrowly lost the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election and is currently running for U.S. Senate in that state, has the celebrity gloss that will appeal to Trump. Only 13% of readers agree:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders — 18% 
Kristi Noem — 15% 
Kari Lake — 13% 
Elise Stefanik — 12% 
Tim Scott — 10% 
Mike Pompeo — 4% 
Marjorie Taylor Greene — 2% 
Vivek Ramaswamy — 2% 
Byron Donalds — 0% 

Third-party/independent candidates will capture more than 3% of the 2024 presidential vote. (56%)

Voters who loathe and who love Trump will consider this election too important to cast a symbolic vote for what would amount to none of the above. It will be lower than 2%.

Elon Musk will still own Twitter at the end of the year. (78%) 

I’m surprised the goofy entrepreneur has held on this long

Hunter Biden will be convicted of or plead guilty to a crime and be facing prison in 2024. (59%) 

The president’s son is in legal trouble, for sure, but his case will not be resolved by year’s end. And win or lose, President Biden might well pardon Hunter as a big middle finger to the opportunistic hypocrites who’ve been banging on about his comparatively minor and in some cases imaginary offenses for four years in an effort to damage his father.

Former President Donald Trump will be convicted of one or more felonies in 2024 (83%) 

I don’t envision any of the criminal cases against him taking place this year.

Russia and Ukraine will not sign a peace treaty. (73%) 

My hunch is that the losses on both sides are mounting so heavily that they will come to some unsatisfying accord. 

See my new sports section below for sports-related predictions.

News & Views

News: Media outlets celebrated the first babies born in 2024.

View: The babies who should be celebrated are the last babies of 2023. Their parents can claim them as dependents for the entire year. Those who are born minutes or even seconds into the new year (and really, can we trust the timekeeping in the delivery suites at local hospitals competing for media attention?) are comparative burdens to their parents.

News: Amazon Prime to put ads on movies and TV shows for those unwilling to pay an extra $3 a month to avoid them.

View: The line between streaming services and broadcast/cable TV continues to blur, and more and more cheaper tiers supported partially by advertising seem inevitable. Hulu charges $10 extra a month for the no-ad stream. Netflix tacks on $8.50. Max is $6 more per month for the ad-free stream. We’re cheap Hulu subscribers, and I don’t mind the breaks. I mute the sound and go right to my phone to scan headlines or Twitter or my email. What’s your view?

News: Cannabis distributors have dropped a plan to turn Chicago’s former Rainforest Cafe into a dispensary.

View: It’s baffling to me that many in the public seem to regard pot shops as dens of iniquity when they’re less disruptive than taverns or liquor stores. See this from 2017: “More Crime Near Alcohol And Tobacco Shops Than Marijuana Dispensaries, Study Finds.” Which makes sense. Customers don’t consume marijuana at dispensaries as they consume alcohol at bars. Dispensaries typically have numerous security measures in place and, in my limited experience, are as quiet and orderly as banks. (Speaking of which, a 2010 article reported, “Denver pot shops’ robbery rate lower than banks.”)

A regrettable error

In his candid and amusing recounting of mistakes made at the Sun-Times over the years, Neil Steinberg wrote:

In 1990, pitcher Danny Jackson was signed by the Cubs. His previous teammates nicknamed him “Jason,” like the killer in the “Friday the 13th” movies. The sports desk thought it would be fun to superimpose a Jason mask over Jackson’s photo, and deputy managing editor for sports Alan Henry approved it. Clever illustration? Or unacceptable fabrication? Editor Dennis Britton obviously thought the latter; he fired Henry.

Sacking the talented Henry over an obvious photo illustration was infamously stupid and cruel. It was also insulting to Sun-Times readers, as if Britton thought they were too stupid to recognize an obvious joke.

At the time, under the headline “Dennis Britton’s Worst Decision?” Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner wrote:

The joke was a mumbled aside, buried inside Sports. It should have been plastered across the back page, with a headline that made it clear this was all in fun.

The next morning the editor of the Sun-Times didn’t come close to laughing. “It’s not fair to our readers,” Dennis Britton told us later. “There are too many people who believe what they see — they are not sophisticated processors of information. And there are newspaper conventions we ask our readers to accept. One is that we present things in as detached a manner as possible. That’s why we label ‘news analysis.’ And unless we tell them otherwise, we owe it to them to present a photograph as the shutter clicks.” …

The Sun-Times (then) fessed up publicly in an “editor’s note.” The Sun-Times “deeply regrets this lapse from standard practice, which will not be repeated.”

Surely, this handwringing more than atoned for so venial a sin. But no …

This incident sticks in my craw more than 30 years later, even though Henry wrote to me in late 2021 in response to a related query to say that he’d moved on. “Since then, both my personal and professional life have been nothing but good news,” he wrote. “But thanks for asking, Eric. I am happy for you that you have created a creative platform for your thoughts, though I will say I am much more of a John Kass fan.”

Land of Linkin’

• Musical satirist Tom Lehrer has “abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to (his) work and (has) injected any and all copyrights into the public domain.” The 95-year-old genius whose recordings were in heavy rotation in our house when I was growing up, invites his fans to stream or download his songs here.

• The man behind the Anonymous Family Foundation philanthropic organization has died, and is no longer anonymous. Read Rich Warren’s tribute to Philip M. Burno in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus.

• I don’t fully agree with Charlotte Badgley-Green’s Tribune op-ed, “Here’s what is wrong with high school admissions in Chicago,” but I was very impressed at the end to learn that this talented, thoughtful writer is “an eighth grader in Chicago Public Schools who is going through the high school admissions process.” I am prompted to renew my call for newspapers to put identifying information at the beginning rather than the end of guest opinion essays.

• Frequent “Mincing Rascals” panelist Cate Plys offers a multipart retrospective on legendary Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko starting here.

• What is the greatest virtue? I said empathy, but many readers had other ideas. See Tuesday’s Picayune Plus.

• “The Year AI Supercharged Misinformatiion” is NewsGuard’s 2023 in Review .

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ The Daily Beast says special counsel Jack Smith “has compiled a very curious list of theoretical misdeeds that seem to telegraph potential bombshells” at Donald Trump’s upcoming trial in Washington.

■ Chalkbeat Chicago: Three things to know about the Chicago Board of Education’s resolution on school choice.

■ Among the old-year-new-year items that took the spotlight: Lyz Lenz’s Dingus of the Year, Tedium’s Blog Post of the Year, Rex Huppke’s review of Republicans’ 2023 “weirdness and dunderhead-osity,” and columnist Mike Gold’s “scariest event of the past year.” 

■ Neil Steinberg’s 2024 resolution in the Sun-Times: “Preserve democracy”—the key to which, he says, is “fostering forgiveness,” even for benighted souls like failed Republican gubernatorial candidate and now Republican congressional candidate Darren Bailey, who “tweeted a strange photo of himself on New Year’s Eve.”

■ 404 reports that a real estate “visionary” has been charged in “a massive … Airbnb scam” that involved nearly 100 properties across Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and at least six other states—exposed by a 2019 Vice investigation that began when a reporter visiting Chicago for Riot Fest got word of a rental cancellation 10 minutes before check-in.

■ Popular Information dissects the key role senior adviser Stephen Miller’s playing in Donald Trump’s “poisonous campaign” to recapture the White House.

■ Variety’s Marc Freeman—author of a 2017 oral history of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”—recounts how the Smotherses “embraced the counterculture, defeated the censors and set the stage for “Saturday Night Live.” And here they are in a still-hilarious 1963 clip.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Share this list!

 Mark Jacob is a former Sunday editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune. He now writes Stop the Presses, a weekly newsletter about how right-wing extremism has exploited the weaknesses in American journalism and what we can do about it. He has compiled this long but non-exhaustive list of reasons to vote against former President Donald Trump as he again seeks the White House: 

1. He incited a deadly assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

2. He pushed the fake-electors scheme.

3. He called for “termination” of the Constitution.

4. He bragged about grabbing the private parts of women he’d just met.

5. He said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

6. He appointed extremist justices who took away abortion rights.

7 He invited the Taliban to Camp David.

8. He stole top secrets.

9. He left those secrets in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.

10. He had his lawyer lie to the Justice Dept. that all secret documents were returned.

11. He claimed you need an ID to buy cereal.

12. He called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.”

13. He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

14. He refused to visit a U.S. military cemetery, saying it was full of “suckers” and “losers.”

15. He helped the Saudis cover up the murder and dismemberment of a U.S.-based journalist.

16. He tried to extort Ukraine to announce a probe of Biden on false charges.

17. He used a Sharpie to doctor a government weather map rather than admit he was wrong about a hurricane hitting Alabama.

18. His administration separated migrant children from their parents and then lost track of the parents.

19. He mocked a disabled reporter.

20. He thinks windmills cause cancer.

21. He lied about COVID-19, saying publicly in February 2020 that “it's a little like a regular flu that we have flu shots for” when he was saying privately that it was “more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

… see the whole list here. Share it widely. Bookmark it to check for updates.

A Tommy Smothers memory

Photo by Mary Schmich

Mary Schmich: One good thing

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is her most recent offering:

Shortly before the New Year I was with some friends and we went around and named one good thing that happened to us in 2023.

One woman said she’d made new friends, not easy in her phase of life.

Another said she’d traveled a lot.

One said her daughter was about to have a baby.

One said she was grateful that her cancer recovery was going well.

Another said she has a child who’d had health problems and that she was grateful for the good medical care.

As you can see, the answers ranged widely. Good is an elastic word.

I knew that even the people whose answers seemed purely happy had gone through significantly hard times this year. But that’s why I like the question.

What's a good thing that happened to you in 2023?

Naming the good thing doesn’t mean there weren’t hard things. It just reminds you that even in the midst of tough stuff there’s usually something that keeps you going.

What’s your good thing?

This photo above is one of mine. I took it in November in Colorado. I’d never seen a full moon behind a pink cloud. Every time I look at it I think: I’ve been alive for a long time and I’m still discovering beautiful things I’ve never seen or imagined. (Mary Schmich)

This post drew more than 200 comments.

Minced Words

Brandon Pope, Cate Plys, Austin Berg and I joined host John Williams for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. We talked about new laws in Illinois, former Ald. Ed Burke’s conviction, the postponement of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s federal criminal trial, the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay and, of course, football.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Quotables

We visited Ann Arbor. The place seemed to be full of hydrogen and elliptic integrals. — My grandfather, mathematician Max Zorn, in the 10/28/66 issue of the original “Picayune Sentinel”

With all due respect to Michelle Obama, she was wrong to say, "When they go low, we go high.” If we stay high when they go low, that's when they take our knees out. — Mark Jacob

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Every group chat births a second smaller group chat without the annoying people. And if you think yours doesn't, I have some bad news. — @KylePlantEmoji

• Guess the woke mob finally won. Last week everyone was saying Merry Christmas and this week literally nobody said it to me. — @TheAndrewNadeau

• When I was little, I didn’t care what I wore. I just went along with what my parents chose. When I look in old photo albums, I realize that they didn’t care either. — @mariana057

• Boss: Hey did you ever end up going to that client dinner? Me: No, I ended up having a conflict. Boss: Oh? What conflict? Me: It conflicted with my desire to not go. — @_Jizzabelle

• “23andMe” is how Leonardo DiCaprio RSVPs for events. — @RobbySlowik

• One of my beggar buddies is trying to break into the world of choosing. — @camerobradford

• The airport is where I do some of my best judging of other people. — @13spencer

• Just once, I’d like for YOU to hold MY horses. — @benedictsred

• Shouldn’t it have been called “Fewer Misérables?” — @Bedlam_Beersie

• Magic Johnson wasted the world's best porn name on a basketball career. — @MsMurfie

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Good sports

A new, occasional section of the Picayune Sentinel

Thaw-t experiment: Michigan reserve came inches from eponymous infamy

Jake Thaw chases after the punt he fumbled (screen grab)

Jake Thaw is a senior backup wide receiver for the University of Michigan football team whose name will be the answer to a deep-cut trivia question:

Who is the player who muffed a punt on his own six-yard line in the final minute of a tie game in a 2023 college football playoff semifinals and came within a yard of sending Michigan down to defeat?

To set the scene: Michigan and Alabama were tied 20-20 with 54 seconds remaining. Alabama faced fourth down and four yards to go from its own 43. And the team had just one timeout left. Overtime looked almost certain.

Thaw stood with his heels on the 10-yard line waiting to receive the kick. Conventional wisdom in football is that a returner should stay away from any punt over his head as he stands at the 10 and hope that it bounces into the end zone for a touchback, which would give his team the ball at the 25-yard line.

The conventional wisdom may be flawed. The only statistical analysis I could locate found that “only 22% of all balls allowed to bounce between the 5 and 9 yard lines reached the end zone” and “the actual cutoff for where returners should typically fair catch a ball, balancing the risk and rewards of allowing the bounce, is around the 6 to 7 yard line.”

This is independent from the analysis that showed receivers fumble punts 3.5% of the time.

Thaw tried to catch the ball at his own six yard line, a risky decision at any point in the game but an appalling one with so little time remaining and the reward of slightly better field position utterly irrelevant. Michigan was going to run out the clock no matter what.

The relevant question isn’t “what was he thinking?” but “what was special-teams coach Jay Harbaugh, head coach Jim Harbaugh’s son, thinking?” No one should have been back to field that punt. Footballs take crazy bounces, and Michigan’s players should have stayed as far away from the kick as possible.

Thaw (and Harbaugh fils) lucked out. After the ball slipped out of Thaw’s grasp it somehow didn’t wobble into the end zone, where he would have been tackled for a safety and Michigan would have lost the game 22-20, and somehow didn’t end up in Alabama’s possession for a chip-shot field goal to win 23-20. Thaw was able to pick up the ball inside the one yard line and hang onto it while being swarmed by two Alabama tacklers.

Michigan ran out the clock in regulation and went on to win in overtime. Few people will remember the hapless Thaw. But if he had been tackled for a safety his name would have gone down in sporting history with Roy "Wrong Way" Riegels, Lindsey Jacobellis, Chris Webber, Robert de Vicenzo and others whose mental errors contributed to or caused defeat.

His name would have become an eponym, with coaches instructing their returners, “Be sure not to Thaw this punt” and announcers wailing, “that Thaw has really put the team into a deep hole.”

Had Alabama cliched victory on that play, young Jake would have become the gridiron’s Mario Mendoza — a Major League Baseball shortstop from 1974 to 1982 who failed to bat .200 in five of his nine seasons and thus established .200 as “the Mendoza line” for futility at the plate.

Jay Harbaugh would have unjustly been just a footnote to what would have been a Michigan defeat even more ghastly than the 2015 loss to Michigan State that will forever haunt Wolverine fans:

The stakes were lower and the coaching calculation less obvious, but I still will never get over that loss.

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Meaningless bowl games: You keep watchin’ ‘em, they’ll keep playing ‘em

Some have predicted that the expansion of the college football playoffs next year from four teams to 12 will spell the end of the bowl season as we know it, especially now that good players are entering the transfer portal at the end of the regular season and/or sitting out bowl games in order to prevent possible career ending injuries. (And who can blame them?) The result this year was that even promising games between ostensibly good teams — Florida State vs. Georgia in the Orange Bowl; Ohio State vs. Missouri in the Cotton Bowl — were massive duds.

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Caitlin Clark, you are ridiculous

Iowa women’s basketball standout Caitlin Clark is incredibly fun to watch, and her heroics Tuesday night — a game-winning shot from the midcourt logo to beat Michigan State — was yet another example. Check it out:

After the game, there was chatter on social media that she didn’t get the shot off in time, but that was the result of a slight mismatch between the onscreen clock and the actual game clock, as this photo proves.

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Sports-related prediction poll results

See above for the news-related predictions

The majority/plurality of readers and I agreed that …

The Cubs will win more games than the White Sox. (89%) 

I have such low expectations for both teams that I didn’t even ask if either would make the playoffs.

Michigan will win the upcoming college football championship. (43%)

Only 10% of respondents chose Washington — which advanced on New Year’s Day — among the four finalists at the time of the voting. My head and heart were always with the Wolverines.

Simone Biles will win at least one gold medal in the Summer Olympics. (87%) 

Assuming she stays physically and mentally healthy, this seems like a lock. 

The majority/plurality of readers and I disagreed that …

The White Sox will not announce a move to Nashville or a suburban location. (93%) 

They’re ready to shake things up geographically.

The Bears will not announce a move to Arlington Heights or other suburban location. (59%) 

The ground-pawing will end and the team will reach a deal regarding the site of the former horse-racing track. 

The Bears will move on from Justin Fields and select a quarterback with the first pick in the NFL draft. (56%) 

Fears that Fields will go on to become a superstar with another franchise will prompt the Bears to keep Fields and instead draft wide receiver Marvin Harrison.

Jim Harbaugh will remain as Michigan’s head football coach. (53%)

If Michigan wins it all Monday night, Harbaugh will dust off his hands, say his work in Ann Arbor is done and head back to the NFL to try to realize his dream of winning a Super Bowl. Even if Michigan loses I can see him moving on.

The free-spending Los Angeles Dodgers will not win the World Series. (71%)

Baseball’s lengthy playoffs plus the quirky nature of the game mean that even loaded teams with the best records (which the Dodgers almost certainly will have) usually stumble. But this team is going to be really loaded.

Northwestern’s resurgent football program will win seven or more games next season. (59%)

My hunch is that the program will revert to the mean. The Wildcats are playing Washington, Ohio State and Michigan in 2024.

Tune of the Week

We’ve been watching “Reservation Dogs”— a critically acclaimed Hulu drama/comedy about teens growing up on an American Indian reservation in Oklahoma — and the fifth episode in the first season features the catchy, memorable 1974 hit “Come and Get Your Love.”

The song was in heavy rotation when I was listening most avidly to pop music — it peaked at No.5 on the Billboard charts in April 1974, when I was a moony 10th grader hoping a girl named Margaret would come and get my love (reader, she did not). But I had no idea that the band, Redbone, was led by Indigenous brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas, and that their song was the most successful in history by Native American rockers.

The origins of the song are a point of pride to the characters in “Reservation Dogs,” and I was interested to see that the often-repeated cry in the song is “Hail!” and not “Hey!” as I had always assumed and as some online lyrics sites have it.

Here’s the official music video:

Hail! (Hail!), What's the matter with your feel right?
Don't you feel right, baby?
Hail, oh yeah, 
Get it from the main vine. All right.
I said find it, find it, go on and love it if you like it, yeah
Hail! (Hail!). It's your business if you want some, take some
Get it together, baby

Come and get your love
Come and get your love
Come and get your love
Come and get your love

The song got renewed attention with a hit cover version in 1995 by Real McCoy and a 2014 appearance in the movie “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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