If it's March, it's time for the Tweet Madness tournament

& our survey results suggest a name change for this newsletter

3-7-2024 (issue No. 131)

This week:

• Here are the results of my readership survey

• Last week’s winning tweet

• Tweet Madness, our annual bracket tournament, begins!

• 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

• An update on what I’m paying for my Tribune subscription

• Mary Schmich — The column that, sadly, never ran

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week

• Quotables

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

• Good Sports — Another asterisk to affix in the college basketball scoring record books

• Tune of the Week — The highly risqué “Motherlover”

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.

Survey says …

Last week, I posted a six-question demographic survey of Picayune Sentinel readers and 1,700 of you responded. Thanks very much for taking the time. Here’s what I learned:

The features of the Picayune Sentinel that you enjoy:

• Takes on local and state news — 94%

• The tweets — 84%

• Takes on national and international news — 82%

• The links (Land of Linkin' and Squaring Up the News) — 65%

• Posts by Mary Schmich — 64%

• Correspondence with readers (Picayune Plus only) — 38%

• Sports chatter — 25%

• Tunes of the week — 21%

What brought you to the Picayune Sentinel?

• A mention in print — 40%

• A mention on the radio or on a podcast — 20%

• Social media post — 19%

• Other — 20%

Most readers live in the Chicago suburban areas, 63%, while another 22% live in the city proper. Only 15% come from outside the Chicago region. The male/female ratio is almost exactly 50/50.

Politically, readership here leans notably left.

• Moderately liberal — 51%

• Very liberal — 26%

• Centrist — 15%

• Moderately conservative — 7%

• Very conservative — 1%

• Libertarian — 1%

And, finally, my readership is … of a certain age. Some 87% of you are age 60-plus, which is what inspired the joke nameplate above. Twelve percent are in the 45-59 age bracket, and just 1% are under 44.

Takeaways:

I’m glad to know that readers value analysis and perspective on state and local news. It’s what I most enjoy writing and what I can offer that in some cases you can’t get elsewhere.

I also enjoy writing about sports and offering a tune of the week, and their relative lack of popularity doesn’t surprise me. I put these features at the end of the Sentinel every week to make them easier to skip.

That my readership tilts 77% to the left doesn’t surprise me, but I want to to make it clear that I value readers from the right — particularly commenters — and it disappointed me early on when several prominent conservative commenters from my old “Change of Subject” blog at the Tribune bailed out on this newsletter. I genuinely appreciate their perspective and their pushback, and I want them to feel heard.

The Picayune Sentinel is not intended to be an echo chamber.

How to get that word out, I’m not sure, but I’m open to suggestions and have a few ideas of my own.

I wish I had more younger readers, too. My guess is that my age demographics are similar to those of other legacy media outlets, such as daily newspapers and info-talk radio. And don’t get me wrong, I love the 60-plus crowd. They’re my people. We share cultural and historical references and certain life experiences.

But I like to think that much of the Sentinel would appeal to news-engaged adults of all ages, and I’m thinking of ways to reach out to younger readers in the coming months.

But I will not dance on TikTok.

Or will I?

Last week’s winning tweet

He wrote: “Your adorable.” I responded, “No, you’re adorable.” Now he thinks I like him, when all I did was point out his grammatical error. — Unknown

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

Source: https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/tools/image-fx

Tweet madness begins!

Today begins the Round of 64 in the 2024 Tweet Madness bracket tournament to name the champion social media jokes of the past year.

All the weekly winners, including the winning “dad tweets,” are entered in the written-tweets category, with a few of my favorites included to round out the field. Go here to select the winners in 32 matchups, and be sure click “Finish Survey” when you’re done.

If you just want to read the 64 finalists and follow the tournament as it unfolds, go here.

In Tuesday’s Picayune Plus, I’ll begin the visual tweets playoffs — the format is slightly different, as you’ll see.

We’ll have our winners just prior to the NCAA basketball championship game in early April.

News & Views

Profiles in pasta

News: The Illinois General Assembly appears ready to OK a plan to have Chicago elect 10 school board members in November. They will serve along with 10 members and school board president appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson.

View: Wet noodle Democrats in Springfield bent the knee to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s opportunistic flip on this issue.

From the Tribune:

Senate President Don Harmon of Oak Park agreed to the plan after pushing last fall for the election of all 20 board members in the first round of voting. During a Senate Executive Committee hearing Tuesday, he said that he went along with the House plan because it had the endorsement of Johnson, a former CTU organizer and a Harmon ally.

“Our solution in the fall was to propose an immediate election of all 20 members of the school board,” Harmon said. “I still think that’s the better opportunity, the better option. The House disagrees. The mayor and the city of Chicago disagree and we’re running up against a deadline.”

Johnson was for an all-elected school board before he won last year’s mayor’s race and took full control of the board. Now he likes the idea of delaying having a fully elected school board until January 2027, just months from when his first term will be up.

I think the mayor should control the school board so the voters can hold the mayor accountable and that 20 tiny elections for board members in a big city will be a cluster event dominated by big money from outside interest groups. But those who feel otherwise should have bravely held to their position and not capitulated to the mayor.

Just a little hot?

News: Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates says she expects the civic debate over what she calls her “defiant” set of contract proposals to “get a little hot in this city for the next few months” as negotiations get underway. But where’s the money going to come from to meet the union’s ambitious demands? “Stop asking that question!” she said. “Ask another question.”

View: I suppose this nonchalant, “fuck you, taxpayers!” rhetoric is consistent with her knowledge that her team will be negotiating with the administration of a mayor who is a former organizer for the CTU and whose campaign the union bankrolled.

I would have hoped, though, under these circumstances, that SDG would have struck a conciliatory, collaborative tone by acknowledging humbly that there are a lot of budgetary pressures on families and on the city. Instead she joked that what the union wants will cost the city “$50 billion and three cents.”

Mocking or dismissing those who want to know where the money will come from to satisfy the teachers’ demands rather than thoughtfully building the case that the spending will be a good investment in the city’s future is a sure-fire way to heat up the debate and spark regret among the electorate.

Pritzker’s 1% ‘shell game’

News: Gov. JB Pritzker says it’s “the right thing” to eliminate the state’s 1% sales tax on groceries “even if it only puts a few hundred bucks back in families’ pockets.”

View: Who’s doing the math for this guy? You’d have to spend $577 a week on groceries to save $300 — which would be a “few hundred” in my understanding — with this tax eliminated.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last estimated the annual household grocery bill at $110 a week in 2022, but that seems low. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated the weekly grocery bill in January of 2024 for a family of four with two teenage boys at between $270 a week for a “low-cost” eating plan and $403 a week for a “liberal” eating plan.

But the savings estimate for large, free-spending families assumes that the local governments, which receive all the current grocery-tax revenue and use to help fund police, infrastructure and other services, won’t try to make up the loss in some way. Pritzker himself suggested this by saying that cities “have the ability, will have the ability to reinstate a grocery tax locally, if that’s what they want to do.”

From the Tribune story:

(Far northwest suburban) Cary officials are reconsidering their budget in light of the surprise proposal. In a referendum that was planned previously, the city will ask voters in the March 19 election for home rule power to create a new 1% sales tax to pay for infrastructure improvements.

State Rep. Martin McLaughlin (said) … the grocery sales tax cut likely would result in service cuts. “This is not a tax cut,” he said. “It’s a political shell game.”

Yes. And a bit of grandstanding by the governor.

The Bring Chicago Home referendum is back

News: Wednesday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Illinois Appellate Court overturned a Feb. 23 Circuit Court ruling and re-authorized the referendum question on the March 19 ballot in Chicago.

The opinion held that an earlier ruling invalidating the referendum was “premature.”

“The holding of an election for the purpose of passing a referendum to empower a municipality to adopt an ordinance is a step in the legislative process of the enactment of that ordinance,” it said. “Courts do not, and cannot, interfere with the legislative process. Courts are empowered to rule on the validity of legislative enactments only after they have been enacted.”

View: This all should have been settled in January when the suit against the referendum was filed, and it’s still not settled because the plaintiffs are likely to appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that it’s not “premature” for a court to decide if a referendum question is legally unsound before Election Day and that waiting until after the votes are counted to weigh in on that question invites a significant public outcry.

If it is unsound, better to wait and vote on a re-worded referendum in November.

North Carolina Republicans nominate a nutjob for governor

News: Mark Robinson won Tuesday’s Republican gubernatorial primary in North Carolina with 65% of the vote in spite of his record of appalling statements:

Huffington Post:

Just four years ago, Robinson said he’d “absolutely” like to return to the days when the 19th Amendment didn’t exist ― when women didn’t have the right to vote. … (His) longing for the days when women couldn’t vote ties into his history of demeaning women and mocking feminism, especially on social media. He’s claimed that feminism was created by Satan. He’s said that men who identify as feminists are “about as MANLY as a pair of lace panties” and are “weak minded, jelly backed ‘men.’” He’s routinely referred to feminists as “fem-nazis” and, in one particularly colorful post, described those who support equal rights for women as “sexist, hairy armpit having, poo-poo hat wearing pinkos.”

“The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place, is a man who doesn’t know his,” he wrote on Facebook in December 2017.

Channeling the late televangelist Pat Robertson, he has claimed that Satan himself is using “lesbianism and feminism” to destroy traditional families. … There’s plenty more to revisit with Robinson’s attacks on women, including calling them “whores,” “witches” and “rejected drag queens.” There’s also his record of quoting Adolf Hitler, fanning Islamophobia, saying trans people should be arrested for using bathrooms, casting doubts on the Holocaust and spreading countless dangerous conspiracy theories.

He has criticized women who breastfeed in public, too.

“Shameless attention hogs,” Robinson posted on Facebook in 2016.

View: The way the Republican Party is going these days, I suspect he won because of such sentiments, not in spite of them.

The over-the-counter rebellion

News: “The first over-the-counter birth control pill will be available in U.S. stores later this month, allowing American women and teens to purchase contraceptive medication as easily as they buy aspirin” — Associated Press

“The two largest pharmacy chains in the United States will start dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone this month, a step that could make access easier for some patients.” — The New York Times

View: These mark significant victories in the culture wars. Make no mistake: Anti-abortion right zealots believe the pill should be banned as a abortifacient along with intra-uterine devices (IUDs), Plan B emergency contraceptives and hormonal patches, shots, implants and vaginal rings. Their larger agenda is increasingly transparent, as Rolling Stone notes in, “The Right Is Cracking Down on Abortion and IVF. Is 'Recreational Sex' Next?”

Of course it is. Not their recreational sex — sex for pleasure with no intent to procreate — but yours. That idea, not some great preoccupation with clumps of embryonic cells, has animated them since the dawn of time.

Land of Linkin’

• Writing for Neiman Lab, media consultant Jane Elizabeth takes an in-depth look at “What happened when the Chicago Sun-Times freed the news.” She writes, “It’s been two years since what a Northwestern University study called the ‘marriage’ of the 76-year-old newspaper and the 80-year-old radio station (WBEZ-FM) — supported by a $61 million dowry from a dozen foundations and individual donors. Now deep into the five-year grant, the combined newsrooms reach 2.8 million readers and listeners; newsletter subscriptions total 760,500; and the Sun-Times’ pageviews increased 55% over the past year. Staff sizes also have grown — crucial to producing more content — as have staff compensation and diversity. But management departures and rocky union negotiations have also marked the transition. And a membership drive last fall noted that membership revenue wasn’t covering the losses that occurred after the Sun-Times’ digital paywall was dropped.”

• I was particularly salty in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus complaining about the glacially slow pace of the court system when it comes to such urgent matters as whether the Bring Chicago Home referendum on the March 19 ballot is valid. Language warning. As noted above, the Illinois Appellate Court did finally rule on Wednesday, just 13 days before the election and 12 days after an earlier court ruling, which came six weeks after the suit opposing the referendum was filed.

• When my kids were slow to get up in the morning, I wish I’d known to shout, “All right, you fetid layabouts! It’s daylight in the swamp! Arise!” a line from “The Holdovers.”

• Speaking of the Oscar-nominated “The Holdovers,” I was keen to know how they made it appear that Paul Giamatti’s character had amblyopia, a condition in which a person’s eyes don’t track together. Vanity Fair had the answer in “How ‘The Holdovers’ Pulled Off Paul Giamatti’s Lazy Eye.” The TL;DR: speciality contact lenses.

• Picayune Sentinel podcast critic Johanna Zorn recommends the latest episode of “Song Exploder” featuring an in-depth look at the story behind Rhiannon Giddens’ Grammy-nominated single “You Louisiana Man.”

• Friday, Road & Track magazine posted, “Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain,” a 5,000-word take that was critical of the culture that surrounds that racing circuit. An hour later, the article disappeared from the Road & Track site. “A person familiar with editorial deliberations at Road & Track said the story, which had been in the works for months, was pulled after its publication at the order of Editor in Chief Daniel Pund on the grounds that it didn’t fit with the site’s editorial goals,” reported The Washington Post. But you can read the archived version here.

• How to edit a comment you’ve posted to Substack (hint: it’s easy but do it quickly!)

• “This month, I am observing the 20th anniversary of when I lost respect for U.S. Rep. Danny Davis,” From Tuesday’s Picayune Plus.

• Today (Thursday) from 4-5 p.m. I’ll be talking live with WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito. Listen live here.

• In case you missed it, here is retiring weather guru Tom Skilling’s classy farewell to WGN-TV viewers:

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 BBC has flagged dozens of deepfake images—some shared by a sleazy Florida radio host—showing Black people seemingly supporting Trump. The telltale signs: “Everyone’s skin is a little too shiny and there are missing fingers on people’s hands.”

■  Protect your Twitter X privacy. Heed the AP’s advice on how to protect your location info and cut the risks of spam and ID theft.

■ Consumer Reports flags doorbell cameras that let others spy on you.

■ Apple’s issued an iPhone operating system revision with an advisory to “update now” for protection from at least four security threats. Also: New emoji. And maybe now turn on Stolen Device Protection.

■ Diving deep into the transcript of the House Oversight Committee’s closed-door deposition of presidential son Hunter Biden, Wonkette’s Evan Hurst concludes that chair James Comer turned the session into “a real dick-stapling competition against himself.” Or check the AP’s, um, more reasoned take.

■ The Handbasket columnist Marisa Kabas finds Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated comment on the Super Tuesday vote … disappointing.

■ Stephen Colbert on Donald Trump’s rising incoherence: “Not sure what actually happened there, but apparently he can’t say the word Russia without climaxing.”

■ Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin says the Supreme Court “did Trump no favors.”

■ Ex-New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan explains why a leak investigation inside the Times newsroom is so disturbing.

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

Transparency: What I’m (again, still) paying for my Tribune subscription

I returned home from a recent two-week vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico, to a postcard from the Tribune telling me that while I was away, they had increased the price of my subscription by some 50% and billed my credit card accordingly.

The new price — $6.50 a month for seven-day digital access and Sunday home delivery — was more than fair for the service provided. A bargain, even.

But the paper’s pricing policies remain foul. Subscribers cannot look up online what they’re paying. And the fine print of the subscriber agreement says, “Your subscription may include up to 14 Premium Issues per year. For each Premium Issue, your account balance will be charged an additional fee up to $9.99 in the billing period.”

These “Premium Issues” — there used to be 12 a year; now there are 14 — are supplemental Sunday inserts along the lines of holiday gift guides, sports season previews, puzzle books and the like (that are never labeled “Premium Issue”). The idea that they are individually worth much more than a month’s worth of daily newspapers is, well, pick your adjective. Absurd. Offensive. Outrageous.

The same adjectives apply to the fact that nowhere on the informational postcard is the information that, if you call customer service at 312-546-7900 and ask to opt out of this sneaky upcharge of nearly $140 a year, they will gladly do it, but only for six months at a time. Because you might change your mind?

So I called. I didn’t threaten to cancel; I just said, “I want the old price back.” The operator put me on hold for 30 seconds and returned with the “good news” that he could still offer me my previous rate of roughly $4.30 a month.

I’m fine with introductory teaser rates — get customers in the door, hook them on the product, jack up the price at renewal time. It’s a strategy as old as time and well understood by consumers.

But I’m not fine with exploitation, which is what these subscription practices amount to. Until the Tribune sets fair, consistent prices, makes it easy for subscribers to find out what they’re paying and doesn’t make them play endless games to get the best rate, I’ll continue to try to shame them for how they do things and urge other subscribers to insist on getting the best deal available.

Mary Schmich: Alternative history

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

Not long ago a reporter in her 20s asked me if I had a favorite column among the thousands I wrote at the Chicago Tribune. I mulled. Maybe, I said, the favorite column I ever wrote was one that never ran.

The column with the headline “Hillary Wins.”

I filed that column on Election Day 2016, when the polls said that Hillary Clinton had a good chance of being elected president of the United States. I’d spent several days researching the history of American women until that moment. History that dismayed me. Still dismays me.

Then on Election Day, after I voted, I topped the column off with some reflections on the day and turned the piece in early, which I’d been asked to do because election nights are crazy in newsrooms and anything that can be done in advance needs to get done.

I knew my column might not run, but that afternoon, I went into an editor’s office and saw something amazing: There was the "Hillary Wins" column on the next day’s front page.

The page was a "mock-up" of what the page might look like. It lay on a table with two other mock-ups. One was of a front page saying the other guy won. One was a mock-up that said something like “IT’S A DRAW.”

We all know which of those pages made it into print.

But — as we face another Biden vs. Trump election — I still think about what might have been. In honor of Women’s History Month, here’s that column, about real women's history and the history that never happened.

Hillary wins

President Hillary Clinton.

Finally, 240 years after the founding of this country, after 43 men in charge, a woman.

After three Georges, four Johns, three Williams and a Bill. After two Andrews, two Franklins, five Jameses and a Jimmy. After Thomas, Martin, Zachary, Millard, Abraham, Ulysses, Rutherford, Chester, Grover, Benjamin and Theodore. After Woodrow, Warren, Calvin, Herbert, Harry, Dwight, Lyndon, Richard, Gerald, Ronald and Barack.

Finally, Hillary.

And we’re here to see it. Aren’t we lucky?

Many women, marking their ballots for Hillary, or hearing the vote count Tuesday, cried. Men, too. I did, wearing my mama’s yellow coat so that she could be there with me.

We cried for our mothers or daughters or ourselves, for all the women and girls who have been told, in countless ways, that they couldn’t, shouldn’t, never would.

Hillary Clinton, president of the United States of America.

She did it. We did it. Is it shocking?

Not as shocking as the fact that it’s taken this long.

Not as shocking as it would have been in the early 1800s, when married women didn’t have the right to own property.

Not as shocking as it would have been in 1920, when women finally won the right to vote.

It’s not as shocking as it would have been in 1947, the year Hillary Diane Rodham was born, when many states still refused to let women serve on juries; or as it would have been in 1969, the year she entered law school, when a man could still legally rape his wife.

And still, on this November day in 2016, it shocks. When a barrier explodes, the ground shakes.

We are lucky to be alive to see it, but Hillary Clinton’s victory wasn’t built on luck. It was built on work.

It was built on her work, the decades of being knocked down and getting back up, the months of slogging through this campaign’s long days and insults, many of them sexualized. Doing it in heels. With pneumonia.

More significantly, it was built on the work of the women who cleared Hillary’s road to the top.

An old friend of mine, a minister, has a name for all those people.

“When I cast my ballot today, and marked a woman’s name for president,” she says, “I felt surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, to use a Biblical term. All those women who have gone before us. My mom, your mom, other people's moms or women who weren't moms but who, in ways great and intimate, opened doors and blazed trails for us.”

Look around. You can feel the cloud of witnesses. Some are wearing bustles. Some are wearing mini-skirts. Some are wearing pantsuits.

I see my grandmother, who grew up in a south Georgia shack, with an outhouse in the back, and who found a way up and out by going to secretary school and marrying the boss.

I see my mother, who dreamed of being a writer, a pianist or an actress but who raised eight children instead, and who, though she loved her children fiercely, still dreamed those other dreams.

I see Emma, who worked for my Southern grandfather, and who carried the double burden of being black and a woman in a time when both were deemed lesser.

“Can you believe this?” I want to ask them, guessing that they would. They were women of faith, and faith is the belief in things unseen.

At the beginning of Hillary’s campaign, there was a widespread reluctance to talk of the candidate as a woman, of her campaign as historic. Clinton—former U.S. Senator, Secretary of State and First Lady, lifetime champion of women and children—could stand on her own, on gender-neutral ground.

But she is a woman. It is historic. And by the end, the campaign was all about women, thanks largely to her rival, a man who talked about women as anatomical parts, who shamed them for their ugly faces or fat bodies, who, for better and for worse, flushed the presence of the country’s deep misogyny into the open.

“Nasty woman,” he muttered to Clinton during a debate, inadvertently inspiring a rallying cry for her supporters. “Nasty woman” became shorthand for women who, like her, were tough enough to take the insults—fat, shrill, worse—and keep on going.

Clinton’s ability to survive the fight is a potent legacy of this campaign.

They punch you, honey? You stand tall. You’re tired? Push on through. If you need to punch back to stay in the game, you do, then you keep showing that punching alone isn’t enough.

In a recent New York Times poll of teenage girls, nearly a quarter said that Clinton’s candidacy makes them more likely to seek leadership roles. In the same poll, however, almost half the girls said Trump’s comments about women have negatively affected the way they think about their bodies. That’s the dark side of this campaign’s legacy, a reminder that in every age, the forces leading women forward collide with the ones pushing them back.

But today isn’t the day to revisit all the ugliness of the campaign.

Today is a day to appreciate.

We—those of us who wanted this moment—get to cheer a woman whose struggles for respect reflect our own, whose success we helped to make. We get to enjoy the idea that, at last, we have a president who understands from the inside out—from her life lived—what women mean when they talk of respect and equality.

Not so long ago, we were still debating whether the country was “ready” for a female president. Well, she’s here. She’s not the woman some voters, male and female, would have chosen to break the barrier, but she’s the one who did. She will be an imperfect president. All presidents are.

Her status as a woman, the thing we celebrate today, risks dividing the country even more. One of her biggest challenges will be to figure out how to tame that trouble, how to execute one of any president’s chief jobs, which is to set the right tone for the nation.

But before tomorrow and its troubles press in, we can continue to savor this day, so long in coming, and pay homage to our cloud of witnesses.

To the suffragettes who went to prison in their quest for women’s voting rights. The women who endured harassment as the first female on the police force, the construction site, the town council. The women who marched in the streets for equal pay, child care, the freedom to control and protect their bodies, our bodies.

To the girls who ran for class president when girls weren’t supposed to aspire to more than secretary. The girls who insisted that they, too, had the right to play sports. The girls who believed they could be more than their parents imagined they could.

I’d wave into the cloud to Miss Birch, my white-haired sixth-grade teacher, who told me I could be a writer.

I’d say “Formidable!” to Virginia Crosby, my college French professor and guide, who died this summer at the age of 99, just a few months before this election that would have thrilled her.

In my cloud of witnesses, I see men too, the ones who always knew women were their equals and whose belief buoyed me and others.

I see my dad, who didn’t recognize all women as equal but who let me know he believed it of his daughter.

What would the world be like now if women had always been treated as equals? If girls and boys had grown up seeing that a woman could be president?

We’ll never know. But the girls and boys who grow up today, with a clearer vision of what women can be, have a chance to make a fairer world.

We, the adults, will be their witnesses.

—Mary Schmich

Minced Words

Host John Williams was joined by Cate Plys, Jon Hansen, Austin Berg and me for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. We started by talking about recreational sex and moved on to talk about Wednesday’s Illinois Appellate Court ruling in the Bring Chicago Home referendum case, Stacy Davis Gates and more. 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

I grew up in Kentucky. I sold insurance door-to-door. I sold ladies’ shoes. I worked at an all-night liquor store. … I grew up understanding what it was like to not have health insurance for eight years. So this idea that I’m somehow the “Hollywood elite” and this guy who takes a shit in a gold toilet is somehow the man of the people is laughable. — George Clooney on Donald Trump in 2017

A Trump win will not push the Democratic Party to the left. It will not make socialist revolution possible. It will not free Gaza. It will not improve material conditions or "heighten contradictions." It will just destroy lives, freedoms, democracies and a livable climate. — David Atkins

Saw an anti-vax account on (Twitter) earlier with the name "Mrs. Doubtpfizer," and I'm afraid you simply have to acknowledge that's decent patter — Ross McCafferty

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:

• Me, first day as a bus driver: What are the wheels supposed to be doing again? — @benedictsred

• My girlfriend wants us to try couples counseling, and I said we should use my therapist because he already knows what's wrong with her.  — @GianmarcoSoresi

• Stores today are like, “Thanks for buying this pack of gum, please tip us 20%, apply for our credit card, and round up to save the children. Also fill out this survey.” — @simoncholland

• I love it when boxers go back to their corner to get advice between rounds. “Did you try punching him and not letting him punch you? You did? Then I don't know what to tell you. Keep doing that, but more.” — @SJKSalisbury

• I finally shaved my legs.Do I contact Locks of Love or do they contact me? — @kelly__le

• Me: (ordering for my date) What do you recommend for the lady? Hot dog vendor: A hot dog. — @Tommytoughstuff

• Hey, if I have to fuck around to find out, so be it. — @ddsmidt

• I heard someone refer to a person who likes multiple genres of music as "Polyjamorous" and that is how I'll be identifying from now on. — @erinh5995

• If I were in charge of Nike, I'd change the slogan to "Just Say You Did It. Nobody Ever Checks." — @MartinPilgrim1

• Fun fact: If Celine Dion sang only the vowels in her name, it would be in the lyrics to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” — @whingewine

Vote here and check the current results in the poll. And don’t forget to join in the Tweet Madness selecting the winners in 32 matchups of the previous year’s weekly winners.

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

Of course I was watching Sunday afternoon when University of Iowa women’s basketball superstar Caitlin Clark set the all-time major college basketball scoring record. Me and more than four million other TV viewers who made the game the most-watched women’s regular season basketball game in this century.

Hers is the best story going in sports these days, and it was a thrill to watch her approach, tie and then pass the record of 3,667 college career points set in 1970 by Pete Maravich of Louisiana State University.

The two-minute mash-up video below illustrates some eerie similarities in their games —

— but as I and many other have noted, it’s difficult to compare their records. Maravich played in just 83 games during his three-year college career— freshmen were not eligible to compete for the varsity in those days — and averaged 44 points per game before the 3-point shot and the shot clock. Clark has played 130 games in her four years at Iowa and averages 28 points per game.

Yet something else may stand out to you as you watch the video: Very, very few of Maravich’s opponents were Black, and none of his teammates was Black. It wasn’t until 1971 that LSU had its first Black player, and most of LSU’s rival teams in Southeastern Conference were also all white. Segregation diluted the talent of Maravich’s opposition, so if we’re affixing asterisks to career records — which we should! — that has to be one.

Tune of the Week

Tuesday’s visual tweets contest featured an allusion to Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg’s classic December 2006 “Saturday Night Live” song “Dick in a Box.” Here’s the uncensored version of the May 2009 sequel, “Motherlover,” which is not appropriate for my more sensitive readers:

It would be my honor to be your new step-father

The lyrics are here. And yes, that’s Susan Sarandon portraying Andy Samberg’s mom.

“Dick in a Box” is a Christmas song, technically, though I doubt we’ll ever do it at “Songs of Good Cheer.”

Monday night at the Irish American Heritage Center, assembled attendees at the Chicago Barn Dance Company’s regular Monday dance sang last week’s Tune of the Week, “Hope Lingers Here,” and I shot the video.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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