Zorn: The stakes are low, but the political tactics are even lower

& a guest rant about I-Pass stickers

10-17-2024 (issue No. 167)

This week:

• Chicago school board elections are only going to get uglier

• Last week’s winning quip

• News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked

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

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go (and where Facebook tries to tell Meyerson where to go)

• Mary Schmich — Cheers for the slow pokes in the Chicago Marathon

• Cheer Chat — An update on preparations for “Songs of Good Cheer” features a preview of one of the great numbers we’re doing this year

• Can Mayor Brandon Johnson please just give us a straight answer?

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week — includes a colorful diatribe by Cate Plys on the I-Pass stickers

• Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Quips — The winning visual jokes and this week’s contest finalists

• Good Sports — On the astonishing accuracy of field goal kickers, the best month for sports, what you can learn looking at how TV presents the score of a game and the inaccuracy of the term “bye week.”

• Tune of the Week — “You Don’t Treat Me No Good” is an unheralded classic with several interesting local ties

• Why the comment threads are open to paid subscribers only — In the words of Michael Moore

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.

Schools election is ugly, and it’s only going to get uglier

Forces aligned with the the Chicago Teachers Union have been sending around mailers like these attacking candidates whom the union has not endorsed:

I was unable to reach Michelle Pierre because her campaign website does not contain contact information, but I read the answer to her Sun-Times questionnaire and saw that her answer to the question “Do you support having charter schools in CPS as an option for students?” —

Yes. I support having charter schools as one of the options available to families within CPS. Charter schools can offer innovative programs and specialized instruction that meet diverse student needs. However, they must be held to the same standards of accountability and transparency as district schools to ensure they provide high-quality education and equitable opportunities for all students.

— was substantially similar to the answer to that question supplied by Jennifer Custer, her CTU-backed opponent in the race in the 1st District where I live —

Yes. While I believe parents should have a choice on where to send their children and utilize the existing charter schools, I do not support the expansion of charter schools in Chicago.

Tying Pierre to the massive, dreadful agenda of Project 2025 is simply dirty politics, and I can’t get behind it. I mean, really, Democrats, if you want your brand to be honesty and transparency, fight fair.

Meanwhile, Ellen Rosenfeld, 4th District candidate, fought back with a statement that read, in part:

I'm a lifelong Democrat. I vote in every Democratic primary and deeply align with Democratic values. ... I am not a supporter of Donald Trump, nor do I align with or support Project 2025 or any of its agenda. I, like many elected officials, organizations and Chicagoans, share the belief that Mayor Brandon Johnson should not control the school board, and the Chicago Teachers Union should not be on both sides of the negotiation table. It is clear that these conservative organizations see me as the only candidate capable of defeating Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Rosenfeld does have an impressive list of lefty endorsements, including U.S. Reps. Mike Quigley and Jan Schakowsky. Attacking her as a potential puppet for Trump is grotesque and infamous. The 38th Ward Democratic Organization, which put its name on these flyers, should be ashamed, but probably isn’t.

In a Crain’s Chicago Business op-ed, my fellow Mincing Rascal Marj Halperin writes:

In nearly all districts, our choices are warped by money dropping on two kinds of candidates. On the one hand, we have the Our Schools Coalition, working for Chicago Teachers Union-backed candidates pledging to support fully funded, sustainable schools. On the other, we have the conservative-driven movement to replace public schools with charters, led by the Illinois Policy Institute and the Illinois Network of Charter Schools' super PAC, funded by billionaires and others who don't live here, including Palos Heights resident Paul Vallas, who lost the mayoral race to Johnson. They back candidates with a commitment to using public school dollars to support private schools by expanding charters and using a voucher system repeatedly proven to destabilize public schools.

Chicago Teachers Union-endorsed candidates:

• District 1: Jennifer Custer

• District 2: Ebony DeBerry

• District 3: Jason Dones

• District 4: Karen Zaccor

• District 5: Aaron “Jitu” Brown

• District 6: (two endorsements) Anusha Thotakura and Brenda Delgado

• District 7: Yesenia Lopez

• District 8: Felix Ponce

• District 9: Lanetta Thomas

• District 10: Robert Jones

Illinois Policy Institute-endorsed candidates

• District 1: Michelle Pierre *#

• District 2: Bruce Leon #

• District 3: Carlos Rivas *#

• District 4: Ellen Rosenfeld #

• District 5: No endorsement; only one candidate running

• District 6: Andre Smith *

• District 7: Eva Villalobos *#

• District 8: Angel Gutierrez *#

• District 9: Miquel Lewis*

• District 10: Karin Norington-Reaves *#

*— Also backed by the super PAC of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools.

#— Also backed by the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.

UPDATE; a previous version of this post had endorsements by the Republican party. Those no longer or applicable. Here is an updated roster of endorsements.

Remember, the stakes here are comparatively low. No matter how this election turns out, Mayor Johnson will still control at least 11 of the 21 seats on the newly expanded school board. Imagine the money and the dirty politics we’re going to see in two years when control of the board will almost certainly be at stake.

See also: “What’s my district?” and Block Club Chicago’s “Chicago School Board Elections 2024: Here’s Everything You Need To Know.”

Last week’s winning quip

Sometimes I think about the guy at my poker table in Vegas who the pit boss thought was too drunk. Security came over, and asked him to say the alphabet starting with “M.”  He replied: “Malphabet.” He was escorted out of the room. — @timjhogan

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

News & Views

News: Donald Trump declined to take further questions and wiggled to the music for nearly 40 minutes at the end of a campaign rally in Pennsylvania Monday.

View: Those whose hair was on fire about evidence of senescence in President Joe Biden’s behavior and utterances earlier this year really need to turn their attention to the mental and physical health of the man who will be the oldest person ever elected president if he wins.

News: “Federal Trade Commission Announces Final ‘Click-to-Cancel’ Rule Making It Easier for Consumers to End Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships.”

View: About time. Now make it mandatory for sites such as chicagotribune.com to allow customers to see online the terms of their individual subscriptions and memberships.

News: The John Deere company denies Donald Trump’s claim to a Chicago audience that it’s abandoning plans to manufacture farm equipment in Mexico in response to Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on the company if it moves.

View: I dunno, is it news when Trump lies? Assuming that by “news” we mean something that’s happened that changes anything, no. His supporters don’t care. CNN documented 19 lies/false claims Trump made during Wednesday’s one-hour town hall on Fox. Won’t matter.

But I guess the job of the media is to keep reminding Democrats and independent voters how important it is to get out and vote to keep this fundamentally dishonest man out of the White House. At this point, what else is there to do?

News: “Conservative politicians in states such as Oklahoma, Texas and Tennessee are questioning whether immigrants without legal residency should have the right to a public education.”

View: We fund the education of children not just for their own benefit but for the benefit of society in general. Keeping the children of undocumented immigrants out of school to save money is shortsighted, at best. With education,they are far more likely to become productive, law-abiding, taxpaying members of society.

Land of Linkin’

• A reminder to my lefty friends who think the Tribune Editorial Board leans too far right: In “Our endorsements for the US House, Part 1” and “Our endorsements for the US House Part 2,” the board endorsed 12 Democrats and just two Republicans. And I will be stunned (as well as infuriated) if they don’t endorse Kamala Harris for president one of these days very soon.

• My alma mater, the University of Michigan, has “by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university,” reports The New York Times. But, reporter Nicholas Confessore writes, “On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read. … Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm. … The strategic plan for Michigan’s renowned arboretum and botanical gardens calls for employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names, which ‘actively erased’ other ‘ways of knowing.’” If Trump wins, this kind of overearnest nonsense is going to be a part of the reason why.

• Asked to name three virtues possessed by Donald Trump, Kamala Harris basically drew a blank. So did I.

• Mehdi Hasan and Eylon Levy hotly argue the question, “Were Israel’s Actions in the Gaza War Justified?” on the “Open to Debate” podcast.

• Michael Moore: “Stop. Obsessing. Over. The polls.” He concludes, “Nothing is as it was. Nothing is as it seems to be. Except… Trump. He’s toast.” Yes, Moore is a hyperpartisan liberal, but he famously predicted Trump’s victory in 2016.

• The heralded prize for economics is not “the Nobel Prize,” despite what every headline writer and most journalists in America seem to think. Grumpy Eric explains.

• Rich Miller: “Fact-checking Mayor Johnson after he blasts Springfield lawmakers.”

• Sun-Times: “WFMT host Dennis Moore, off the air since March, says he was fired.” Moore’s Facebook page has more details, but the story remains unclear.

• “Netflix's 'Will & Harper': Behind the Scenes of Making the Documentary.” We enjoyed this new documentary and this Indiewire story answered some of the questions I had about how it came about.

• Should newspapers dump those ridiculous horoscope columns? Results here on my reader poll.

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:

■ In another sign that Facebook really, really wants Chicago Public Square to stop sending readers its way, the company’s repeatedly removed posts sharing the Sept. 30 edition, which among other things featured news of The New York Times’ presidential endorsement for Kamala Harris. Facebook says, “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.” And/or: “Spam.” As with previous rounds of censorship, Facebook parent Meta provides no way to offer a personalized defense and no way to reach a human for answers.

■ Want to protest this capricious crackdown? Share (or try to share) this link on Facebook, Threads and other Meta-brand social media (Zorn note — I tried this … see below*). Or try this link to the Mailchimp email dispatch of that edition: 

■ “Bonkers”: That’s how journalist Aaron Rupar describes Donald Trump’s appearance before the Economic Club of Chicago, for which Rupar’s Twitter X thread provided running commentary and video clips.

■ The Sun-Times’ Tina Sfondeles says a “receptive” audience “often applauded the former GOP president’s digs at moderator John Micklethwait, Bloomberg editor-in-chief, and at the ‘fake media.’”

■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich: “Elderly golfer gets smacked around by a journalist who won’t take bullshit for an answer.”

■ Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow eavesdrops on a trio of Trump supporters: “We’ll just have to choose what we want to believe—and ignore everything else!”

■ The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser: The presidential campaign’s “all but over and the one question anyone wants answered cannot be answered.”

■ ProPublica: The far right’s vision for local governing has come to life in Texas’ third-largest county.

■ Puck’s Dylan Byers recaps an ostensibly “confidential” staff meeting to discuss “a fast-metastasizing, five-alarm shitshow” at CBS News—over an aggressive interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates about the Mideast war.

■ Drugpocalypse: CNN explores the factors sending thousands of the nation’s pharmacies into oblivion.

■ Also screwed: Chicago-based hardware wholesaler True Value.

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

*Zorn — I tried posting Meyerson’s link to Facebook and then this happened:

Misleading? I requested a review of this decision and will let you know.

Mary Schmich: Cheers for the slow pokes

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

Along about hour four of the Chicago Marathon I decided to get off my butt and go watch the entertainment.

I live just a few blocks off the course so I ambled over to Sedgwick Street, where I found a happy mob.

Runners huffed and puffed, elbow to elbow, along the pavement. From the sidewalks people cheered and rang bells and waved posters. Giant speakers blared.

A few cops stood vigilant at the edge of things.

I bumped into one of my neighbors and we did what all human beings who have ever run a marathon feel compelled to do when they’re not running the current marathon: We traded stories of marathons come and gone.

He said he’d run three, all in Chicago, the last one in 1997, after which his doctor told him that if he kept it up he’d be too crippled to keep golfing. He chose golf.

I told him about running a marathon in 1978 in Palos Verdes, California, and how one was enough for me. I loved it—the hard goal, the community, the journey, the T-shirt—but afterward decided I could scratch those itches in ways that wouldn’t ruin my knees for life.

After I watched the mobs on Sedgwick for a while, I started walking against the tide, meaning north, toward the slower runners.

I passed a senior living home where people in wheelchairs watched the race from the picture windows.

I passed a Spanish-speaking family taking a photo of the Wiener Circle sign that said, “Immigrants eat our dogs.”

After a while, the crowds thinned. The runners had turned to walkers. The cheerleaders were few and far between.

Mary Schmich photos

These were the people who inspired me most.

These slow pokes who kept going, even as the race organizers were packing up the water tables and sweeping up the litter. Also, the people who stuck around to cheer for the slow pokes, calling out: “One step at a time!” “You can do it!” “You’re amazing!”

As I walked home at my lazy pace, I had the lofty thought: Wouldn’t it be great if we could muster this feeling for the rest of life? For the way we manage the country? Everybody—every race, age, body shape, ability—moving in the same direction? Cheering for the first and the last, the fast and the slow?

Then I congratulated myself for getting my 10,000 easy steps for the day and went looking for that old T-shirt.

Cheer Chat

An update on preparations for the 26th annual Songs of Good Cheer winter holiday sing-along programs at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

We’ll be reviving this wonderful Christmas song by Beverly Smith for this year’s show:

We watched the night skies for signs and wonders
That would guide us on our way
To the innocent baby the heavens told us 
Would be born on Christmas Day

Will you know him when you see him? 
Will he look like any other man?
Will you recognize your savior? Will you know your redeemer
As the child in Bethlehem? 

Led by Paul and Gail Tyler. Photos in the video by Ken Carl.

Come sing along with us! Shows are Dec. 12-15, and tickets are now on sale online and at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Is that a yes or a no?

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s inability to give straight answers to questions was on display in his recent interview with Politico’s Illinois Playbook editor Shia Kapos.

Politico: Is it frustrating, though, to have idealistic goals come face to face with budgetary realities?

Johnson: I think about Chicago’s history. If you’re an immigrant — an Irish immigrant, Italian immigrant, a Polish immigrant — was it idealistic to cross the shores to come to Chicago with the hope of a better life, versus looking at the realities that if you, when you got here, that that would not be something that you could achieve overnight — was that idealistic? ... Was it idealistic for an immigrant or a descendant of slaves to believe [in a better life] even though the reality in front of them meant that they would be met with severe opposition and trepidation?

John Williams, Eric Zorn, Cate Plys, Marj Halperin

Minced Words

Host John Williams welcomes Marj Halperin, Cate Plys and me to “The Mincing Rascals” podcast roundtable for this week’s chat about the news. We talked about the presidential election, of course, and the coming school board elections. But we also went down the rabbit hole of tollway transponder stickers to the point where I announced that we’d received a cease-and-desist order from the estate of Andy Rooney.

Here is Plys’ full, unexpurgated take that prompted our discussion:

I-Pass transponder sticker bullshit

By Cate Plys

So the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority just sent my husband one of these new transponder stickers to replace his small plastic transponder, which they now refer to as being “boxy.” I’d heard about the stickers earlier in the year, when I-Pass was trumpeting how great they are and how we’d have to put them on our windshields, while assuring us we could keep our old “boxy” transponders if we wanted. I did the rational thing and ignored it. 

I had no intention of going out of my way to get a sticker, and no intention of putting an I-Pass sticker on my windshield instead of keeping the ability to bring my I-Pass with me in any car I choose to drive or ride in. But now it looks like the I-Pass people are tired of waiting for people like us to accept the brave new world of stickers. They’re sending them out with the helpful note that if the sticker isn’t activated via a QR code, in about 30 days the old transponder will stop working. 

OK. So I activated the transponder and gave it to my husband with strict instructions: “I-Pass wants you to put this on the windshield. Fuck them. We will put our transponders wherever we want. Put it on the old transponder and hold it up as you pass through tolls, the same way we’ve always done it.” He agreed. Fuck them. 

The next morning, I turned on WGN and heard John Williams saying that he’s just gotten a letter from the Illinois Tollway Authority informing him that he’s been caught on video by their all-seeing cameras five times with his transponder sticker not in the right place. In other words, he was holding the sticker up—as John himself admitted on-air—instead of plastering it to the windshield. 

And if John keeps it up, says I-Pass, they’re going to start charging him full price on his tolls. 

I call utter bullshit on this. The I-Pass website claims these stickers are wonderfully convenient for us, glancingly mentioning that “like before” the transponder must stay with one car–-a complete lie, we used to move transponders around all the time. The I-Pass website also mentions, again glancingly, that the transponder sticker lasts for the life of your windshield–as if this is a good thing. Really? Have they never had to replace a cracked or dinged windshield? I need to replace my windshield right now. 

When we talked about this on The Mincing Rascals, and I have to say I’m not sure everybody took this as seriously as I do, Eric pointed out that this means somebody is actually looking at tollway videos of people whose transponders have worked correctly, to make sure the transponder stickers were on their windshields. That is just creepy. 

Eric mentioned that he couldn’t imagine a reason for this whole stipulation unless I-Pass wants to keeping track of people’s movements. His words, not mine. 

The main thing is I don’t like people telling me what to do. Twelve years of Catholic school will do that to you. Right after I activated my husband’s sticker transponder, I got an email from I-Pass informing me that they’re sending me a sticker now. I will follow my own instructions to my husband. 

Plys also gave us a favorable report about the concert by her prospective son-in-law.

Subscribe to “The Mincing Rascals” 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.

Read the background bios of some regular panelists here.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you. — Isabella De Bruno

(Donald Trump) is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country, a fascist to the core. — Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair and retired Gen. Mark Milley

“Trump’s newest vision of MAGA is to Make America Germany (in the 1930s) Again.” — Jimmy Kimmel

A frighteningly large percentage of Republicans are more interested in finding a strongman to defeat their enemies, restore a bygone era of white power, legitimize misogyny and prevent non-white immigrants from “poisoning” our blood, than they are in finding a decent, honorable person to lead the country and set an example for our children. — Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post

I was just saying what was reported (about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents of Springfield, Ohio). And eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to eat. All I do is report. I have not — I was there, I’m going to be there, and we’re going to take a look, and I’ll give you a full report when I do. But that’s been in the newspapers and reported pretty broadly. — Donald Trump

Current state of the Nation: Record high stock market even when adjusted for inflation. Low unemployment. Crime at 50-year low. No service members deployed in foreign wars. Domestic manufacturing is booming. Inflation is back under 3%. But MAGA says America is over if Trump doesn’t win. — Various sources

To look at cities that used to be served by newsrooms of 300, or 500 journalists, now reduced to virtually nothing, is terrible. This is the way democracy decomposes. We're sleepwalking into an absolute disaster. Jefferson had it right almost 250 years ago when he said he'd rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers. — The Atlantic Editor-In-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg

(“Fox and Friends” is) a cheery cryptofascist kaffeklatsch. — Justin Peters, Slate

Natural is a bizarre word to use for the process by which a substance meant for baby cows leaves their mothers’ bodies at 101.5 degrees and ends up hundreds or thousands of miles away, refrigerated in plastic, to be consumed at 40 degrees by a different species. Natural is an inappropriate descriptor for a drink that requires days in the massive vasculature of manufactured chill, which ships cold air around a warm country 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The milk in your refrigerator is a small monument to industrial machinery, the result of centuries of human intervention. There’s basically nothing natural about it. — Ellen Cushing of The Atlantic in “Shelf-stable milk is a miracle. Why don’t Americans drink it?”

Having a gay child doesn’t mean you failed as a parent. Disowning your gay child means you failed as a parent — unknown

This year’s $9.9 billion balanced budget and our strong financial position aren’t by chance. They are the product of smart policies year after year. We avoid using one-time revenues for recurring expenses, don’t borrow more than we need, and don’t spend more than we have. — Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in a rather pointed budget address

Conservatives believe the government can't do anything right except regularly carry out massive conspiracies. — @InternetHippo

(Trump supporters are) a confederacy of the ugly and malicious, the toxic and terrified. Fear junkies and rage addicts of every race and nationality. Subjugated if pious women who want all their sisters to join them in permanent second class citizenship. — Neil Steinberg

The weather used to be famously the only noncontroversial topic even deadly enemies could chat about. Now the weather is a political live wire with insane conspiracy theories. Good job, America. — Talia Lavin

As a committed progressive, I am willing to let Donald Trump spend the next four years filling federal courts with religious zealots if it will teach the Democratic Party a lesson. — @DougJBalloon (parody account)

Does anyone actually believe that kids are getting transgender surgery in schools? Or babies are being aborted after birth? Or immigrants are eating your pets? Or Democrats are controlling the weather? And you wonder why we think you’re all a bunch of fucking idiots. — SassyKadiK

Quips

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 Quip of the Week:

• Actually, I would like to stop thinking about tomorrow, Fleetwood Mac, but thank you. — @Brock_Teee

• Might start signing off emails with “Well, I hope you’re happy.” — @Ann_Hedonia1

• I never even considered Dr. Pepper could be a woman. Maybe I'm a bad person. — @graetgalaxy

•  I’m bringing back the word “homeslice,” and you can’t stop me. — @NotTodayEric

• Marriage is when a man and woman become one. The trouble starts when they try to decide which one. — @iGreenGod

• Miracle Whip is really playing fast and loose with both of those words. — @benedictsred

• It's the order of mankind's accomplishments that fascinate me. In 1969, we put men on the moon. In 1970, we put wheels on luggage. — @WilliamAder

•  I’m going to create a website called “Older Fans” and it’s just me telling you what part of my body hurts today and what minuscule task I did that caused that. — @SamInspired

• One day, all of your laundry will be done. You will be dead though, and unable to appreciate it. — @LoveNLunchmeat

• This Temu sushi tastes off. — @WilliamAder

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Why the new name for this feature? See “I’m rebranding ‘Tweet of the Week’ in a gesture of contempt for Elon Musk.”

Good Sports

The astonishing accuracy of field goal kickers these days

Watching football this season, I’ve been struck by how accurate so many of the field goal kickers are — drilling the ball right through the middle of the uprights from outside of 50 yards with great frequency. I still remember the days when attempts that long were mere prayers — when the long-standing NFL record was 56 yards until Tom Dempsey of the New Orleans Saints shattered it in 1970 with a 63-yard, last-second kick to beat the Detroit Lions 19-17. The NFL record is now 66 yards (Justin Tucker of the Baltimore Ravens in 2021, also to beat the Lions 19-17), and the Division I NCAA football record is 67 yards (Russell Erxleben of the University of Texas and Steve Little of the University of Arkansas, both in 1977). The small-college record is 69 yards (Ove Johansson of Abilene Christian University in 1976).

NFL kickers now make 86% of their kicks, according to Pro Football Reference. Compare to past decades:

• 2014 — 84%

• 2004 — 81%

• 1994 — 79%

• 1984 — 72%

• 1974 — 61%

• 1964 — 53%

At the same time, the average field goal attempt has risen from a little less than 30 yards in 1964 to roughly 40 yards today.

NFL kickers hit nearly 70% of their kicks from beyond 50 yards in 2023 — Yahoo Sports reported that “as recently as 2007, the league’s kickers missed more field goal tries than they made from 50 yards and beyond.”

Sportico reported last week that NFL “kickers are on pace to make 251 field goals from 50-plus yards this season, which would shatter the record of 158 set just last year.”

It seems inevitable that a 70-yarder — frequently accomplished in warmups and attempted only several times in history — will make it over the crossbar during a game before long. I’m going to predict by the end of this decade.

What are the theoretical limits? “What is the Longest Field Goal Possible?” is a video that calculated the human limit at 93 yards, though robot kickers have exceeded 100 yards. A while back, Wired magazine posted a video that explains “Why It's Almost Impossible to Kick a 90-Yard Field Goal.”

Why are kickers better now than they were?

From ESPN:

Nick Novak, who kicked for five teams over a 10-year career and now works with many NFL kickers in the offseason … said many kickers, including most he has worked with, are now using technology and equipment that golfers have used, including TrackMan and other swing apps. They use them to fine-tune their leg swings, looking to find a little more distance as they try to maintain the accuracy that will allow them to keep their jobs. …

Then there is the matter of the ball. … The kicking balls don’t come out of the box until 45 minutes before games,

Soccer-style kicking and smoother playing surfaces also explain why kickers of today are so much better than their counterparts of yesteryear. When the NFL moved the extra-point try back from 20 yards to 33 yards in 2015, the success rate dropped only slightly the following season, from 99.3% to 94.2%.

Is all this accuracy and length a problem or an opportunity? I see mostly upside, but I’d like the value of kicks over 50 yards increased to four points from three — similar to basketball’s three-point shot that awards a bonus for distance. I’ve seen other suggestions such as narrowing the uprights from their current width of 18 feet, 6 inches to make field goals as difficult as the game’s inventors imagined, or adding an inner goal about six feet wide to reward perfectly straight kicks with an additional point.

Additionally, I renew my call for broadcasters to take advantage of the clever technology that tells us exactly how far a home run flew and exactly how high a golf shot went to calculate the potential length of every field goal. When a 45-yard kick sails over the uprights, a measurement of the height, speed and angle of the ball should tell us that, for instance, it would have been good from 55 yards.

This is my best idea since the forever stamp.

Are we now in the middle of the best month for sports?

The panelists on Slate’s “Hang Up and Listen” sports podcast floated the idea this week that October is the best month for sports: Both college and pro football seasons are in full swing. The Major League Baseball playoffs will culminate in the start of the World Series a week from Friday. The NBA and NHL seasons start this month. And the WNBA finals are underway (watch Sabrina Ionescu of the New York Liberty hit the clutch game-winning three against the Minnesota Lynx Wednesday night.)

Sounds right to me, but I could also make the case for January, which now features most of the college football playoff games including the championship along with most of the NFL playoff games. March, with all its basketball madness, is fun as well. But your preferences likely will reflect which sports you like to watch.

CBS generated this graphic (“post season” in the PGA seems to indicate major tournaments) to help inform your choice:

Since the polling tool on Substack allows me to give you only five options, I’ll list the consensus top five from a bunch of different ranked lists I found online:

I never realized this

Wikipedia explains:

In any context where a game score or the pair of teams meeting in a game are mentioned, the team mentioned first (left or top) is the home team, except in the United States, Canada, and Japan, where home teams are mentioned second. The North American and Japanese practice of listing the home team second likely derives from baseball, in which the home team bats after the visiting team in each inning.

Bye-bye ‘bye week,’ please

The Bears will not play this Sunday, but it makes no sense to refer to it as a “bye” week. The online etymological dictionary tells us that the use of “bye” in sports comes to us from the sport of cricket where, since the 1700s, it has referred to “a run scored on a ball that is missed by the wicket-keeper” — in other words, a benefit for a team that occurs without any particular action taken by that team.

Borrowing from that sense of automatic advancement, the word “bye” began being used in the 1860s in bracket-style tournaments to refer to a situation in which certain teams or players, usually those with the highest seeds, are allowed to sit out a game or two in early rounds of the tournament while the other contestants battle to move ahead. In that sense, a “bye” is a presumed victory against an imaginary opponent superimposed onto a larger.

When I wrote/ranted about this five years ago, the earliest reference I could find in the news archives to “bye week” as a synonym for “week off” was a 1932 article about high school football in the Los Angeles Times. Writer Irving Eckhoff used it to refer to a gap when all teams in the Los Angeles city league were idle.

I found scattered usage of “bye week” in the archives until the mid-1960s, when the National Football League discontinued the practice of giving teams open dates during the season. The term increased in popularity in the 1990s when the NFL resumed taking weeks off and many college teams followed suit. It now appears in the official NFL schedule and has been blessed by The Associated Press Stylebook editors.

But the Bears won’t be credited with a victory over an imaginary opponent or gain some other advantage while taking their rest this Sunday. It’s just a break, a day off — a fact that’s acknowledged in the terminology we use for basketball, baseball and hockey teams when they’re between games.

Tune of the Week

I’ve been opening up Tune of the Week nominations in an effort to bring some newer sounds to the mix. I’m asking readers to use the comments area for paid subscribers or to email me to leave nominations (post-2000 releases, please!) along with YouTube links and at least a few sentences explaining why the nominated song is meaningful or delightful to you. But this week, I’m going back to the 1990s to feature one of my favorite songs of all time, “You Don’t Treat Me No Good” by the Chicago-based rock/soul/funk band Sonia Dada.

You used to love me in every way 
But now I'm givin' it up 
I'm tired of cryin' all day
I can't stand it no longer 
It hurts me to say 
But I'm packin' up my bags
And goin' far away

Lover, lover, lover
You don't treat me no good no more
Lover, lover, lover
You don't treat me no good no more

The story goes that local music producer Jim Tullio spotted the trio of Paris Delane, Michael Scott and Sam Hogan harmony singing for tips along Michigan Avenue in 1990 and recruited them to sing and act in a beer commercial. When he mentioned this to his friend, musician Daniel Pritzker, Pritzker said he’d also seen the young men singing on the CTA subway platform and was interested in adding them to a band he was already working with.

Pritzker — he’s a cousin of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker — wrote the catchy “You Don’t Treat Me No Good,” which was released in 1993 and became a chart-topping hit in Australia, but for some reason barely registered in the U.S. I became familiar with it only because the band’s keyboard player, Chris “Hambone” Cameron, lives behind us on the Northwest Side.

Sonia Dada is the name of Pritzker’s wife’s childhood friend, a girl from Jordan. “I thought it sounded musical and mellifluous,” he told the Baltimore Sun.

Singer Jerrod Niemann took this cover — titled “Lover, Lover” — to the top of the U.S. country music charts in 2010.

Cameron added a few more details for me:

• Sonia Dada released six albums from 1992 to 2004, and the band’s last show was on New Year’s Day 2005.

• Paris, Michael and Sam — the original trio discovered while busking — initially went by the name Rough, Smooth and Silk.

• Paris, the one with the deep voice, died in February 2020 “from pneumonia, probably COVID-19 related.” Sam returned to his gospel roots and is now a practicing minister at a church in northern Wisconsin. Michael Scott, along with vocalist Shawn Christopher who was part of the band, continue to perform and record with Cameron’s band, Jambon.

• Dan Pritzker went on to write and direct the 2019 feature film “Bolden,”

  which “imagines the compelling, powerful and tragic journey of Buddy Bolden, the unsung American hero who invented Jazz.” He also directed the 2010 silent film “Louis,” billed as “an homage to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin, beautiful women and the birth of American music.”

Why the comment threads are open to paid subscribers only

Michael Moore puts it just right at the bottom of his Substack:

In order to have a troll-free, hate-free comments section — and because if there’s one thing I know about my crazy haters, they would rather spend an eternity in hell with Marjorie Taylor Greene than send me $5 if forced to become a paid subscriber — my comments section here on my Substack is limited to paid subscribers. But, not to worry — anyone can send me their comments, opinions and thoughts by writing to me at mike@michaelmoore.com. I read every one of them, though obviously I can’t respond to all. The solution here is not optimal but it has worked and my comments section has become a great meeting place for people wanting to discuss the ideas and issues I raise here. There is debate and disagreement, but it is refreshing to have it done with respect and civility, unfettered by the stench of bigotry and Q-anon insanity.

The Picayune Sentinel is a reader-supported publication. Browse and search back issues here. Simply subscribe to receive new posts each Thursday. To support my work, receive bonus issues on Tuesdays and join the zesty commenting community, become a paid subscriber. Thanks for reading

Contact

You can email me here:

I read all the messages that come in, but I do most of my interacting with readers in the comments section beneath each issue.

Some of those letters I reprint and respond to in the Z-mail section of Tuesday’s Picayune Plus, which is delivered to paid subscribers and available to all readers later Tuesday. Check there for responses.

If you don’t want me to use the full name on your email or your comments, let me know how you’d like to be identified.

If you’re having troubles with Substack — delivery, billing and so forth — first try “Picayune Sentinel Substack help, Frequently Asked Questions.” If that doesn’t work, check out the Substack help page. An if that doesn’t work, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to help.