Say 'no' to the Bears grand plans for a do-over ...

not with our money, anyway. And get ready to welcome in the May-o

4-25-2024 (issue No. 138)

This week:

• If the Bears want a mulligan on their hideous stadium decision, fine. But let them pay for it

• Last week’s winning tweet

• 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

• Mary Schmich — On good aunts and secretaries

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week — The gang was not in agreement on the Bears stadium proposal

• Quotables

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

• Good Sports — The No! No! Sox

• Tune of the Week — “Hal and Tow” by the Watersons

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.

If the Bears want a mulligan on their poor stadium decision, fine. But let them pay for it

In recreational golf, many friendly foursomes allow each player one or two do-overs per round following particularly regrettable tee shots. This second chance is known as a “mulligan,” named for a person with the last name Mulligan, though word nerds aren’t sure which of several candidates it was.

The Bears want one. Some 22 years ago, they metaphorically sliced one deep into the woods with an ugly rebuild of Soldier Field that has one of the smallest seating capacities in the NFL and lacks a covered roof that would have made it a much more useful venue for the Super Bowl, the college basketball championships, concerts, monster truck rallies and conventions.

But at the time, the team preferred an outdoor stadium — as though there’s anything to the idea that “Bear weather” would give them an advantage or that fans enjoyed exposure to the biting elements along the lakefront. And rather quickly and predictably that renovation, paid for with more than $400 million in tax money, proved to be disappointing and inadequate.

As one who saw that coming and wrote several columns at the time griping about what was being called New Soldier Field, I’m hostile to the Bears’ current notion that public money should now help them build the stadium they should have been smart enough to build in the first place.

Mulligan Field — as we should refer to it until some corporate entity purchases naming rights — was unveiled as a concept Wednesday afternoon at a news conference (watch it here). And yeah, admittedly, the descriptions and artist renderings of the $4.6 billion project on land now occupied by parking lots and Still Rather New Solider Field were very cool.

Concept illustration

From the Tribune:

The stadium would cost $3.225 billion with up to $1.4 billion for infrastructure.

The Bears would commit more than $2 billion. … All of the team’s investment would pay for 72% of the stadium itself, with a Chicago hotel tax helping fund the rest plus all the infrastructure costs. …

The proposal includes 14 acres of athletic fields and recreational park space, with restrooms for the public. The area could be used for local youth sports, farmers markets, classes and graduations. … The stadium, by Manica architects, would have a translucent roof … similar to other newer NFL stadiums, and it would have a clear glass window on one wall with a view of downtown.

Also from the Tribune:

The 2% hotel tax [that goes to the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority to subsidize stadium construction] has fallen far short of paying off the existing debt. As a result, taxpayers still owe $629 million for past renovations of Soldier Field and Guaranteed Rate Field [opened in 1991], whose occupants, the White Sox, also are seeking a new stadium.

In the course of Wednesday’s lengthy news conference, the team and Mayor Brandon Johnson promised economic benefits galore that would make this iteration of a lakefront football stadium so advantageous that Chicago taxpayers wouldn’t really have to pay at all.

Yeah, no. Before I can get on board with Mulligan Field, I want to see an independent cost-benefit analysis and time taken for the public to thoroughly consider the plan.

Team President Kevin Warren said time is of the essence and asked for a quick OK from the General Assembly. His impatience reminded me of the hasty approval in Springfield of the previous renovation, which took place while nearly everyone’s attention was consumed with the vote recount in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, back in the day when losers conceded gracefully.

The Rev. Charlie E. Dates kicked off the event with an unusual invocation, the text of which I reprint in full below.

Several times, speakers indicated the belief that the stadium complex was consonant with Daniel Burnham’s 1909 “Plan of Chicago” because it includes playing fields as well as commercial venues. But Burnham wrote that the lakefront “should be treated as park space to the greatest possible extent” because it “ by right belongs to the people.”

But I’m not as concerned as many others are about the location. Sure, the lakefront is a precious civic asset and protected under the law, but the Soldier Field area already has a stadium and parking lots. Those seeking to tear most of the old stadium down and build a new one are very wealthy business owners. If they want to take the risks and reap the rewards, I’m fine with letting them take out the necessary loans and starting construction.

Last week’s winning tweet

Podcasts are like babies, they're too easy to create and not everyone should have one. — @marknorm

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

News & Views

News: Mayor Brandon Johnson blasts the Lakeview man behind an effort to recall him as “some dude from the suburbs.”

View: I would say “takes one to the know one,” since Johnson himself is a “dude from the suburbs” who grew up in Elgin. But Dan Boland, who has embarked on the daunting task of collecting more than 55,000 valid signatures to get even the concept of a recall on the ballot, tells reporters he’s lived in the city for 33 years, since Johnson was 15 and attending Elgin High School.

More troubling was Johnson’s characterization of Boland as someone “who is mad about the diversity and formation in which we have put forward” and suggested he is part of “the extreme right wing in this country (that is) not very pleased with the fact that 60% of my administration are women (and) 43% of those who make up my administration are Black."

Dude. Racism is real, no doubt. But dissatisfaction with your performance in your first year in office is widespread and not limited to the seething resentments of “extreme right wing” bigots who still aren’t over the mayorships of Harold Washington, Eugene Sawyer and Lori Lightfoot. And implying your critics must be racists is a sure-fire way of increasing their number.

I was critical of recall elections in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus — become a paid supporter for direct delivery! — and an overwhelming percentage of more than 450 respondents to a click survey agreed with my view that voters should be able to vote to recall elected politicians only when there is credible evidence of criminal conduct:

News: Numerous elected officials, including Cook County Comissioners and a state senator, are angling to be named to replace the late Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, who died earlier this month at 73.

View: It’s weird that these ostensibly clerical offices are elected rather than appointed. And that they are considered more desirable than actual legislative offices.

News: Pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University chanted, “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too” and urged the terror group to “burn Tel Aviv to the ground.”

View: I’ve pretty much kept my own counsel on this horrible and complicated conflict in the Middle East. I’d like the killing to stop, for the hostages and political prisoners to be freed and for the combatants to negotiate a lasting settlement, whatever that would look like. And I would like to see United States leaders using all the leverage they have to bring that about. But glorifying and celebrating Hamas? The group that “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” meaning the elimination of Israel, in its current charter? The group that broke the last cease fire with the October 7 attack? The group that likely shares few of the social values of these ostensibly progressive demonstrators?

Billy Binion in Reason:

The Israel-Hamas war has made political allies out of some unusual bedfellows. Yet the strangest pairing on display thus far is probably "Queers for Palestine," most notably because those protesters would risk summary execution should they take their demonstration to the Gaza Strip. … Gay and transgender people—both in Gaza and the West Bank—face an extraordinary level of persecution, persecution that may result in a yearslong prison sentence or even death. … In 2016, Hamas militants executed one of their own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, for allegedly having sex with another man. … "Queers for Palestine" is about as convincing as "minks for fur coats."

Sure. Protest for peace and for the rights of the persecuted and the oppressed. Demand that our government do more and do better. But don’t tell us that Hamas are the lovable good guys.

Land of Linkin’

• In a Twitter thread, Washington Post reporter Kyle Swenson offers an inside look at homelessness as the U.S. Supreme Court ponders the issue of criminalizing sleeping on the streets.

• Infant-parenting expert Devon Clement has just launched “Parenthood Prep,” a weekly podcast in which she will “cut through the overwhelming range of information out there, and get to what you really need to know, so you can maintain your sanity, approach parenting with peace and confidence and, most importantly, access sound sleep for you and your baby.” Clement, who shares her life with our eldest son, is the founder and CEO of the Manhattan-based Happy Family After, a company that matches infant-care experts with new parents.

• Author and political pundit Jonathan Alter is penning daily dispatches from Donald Trump’s trial at his Old Goats newsletter on Substack.

• An oldie but a goodie: Crash scenes from the “Thomas the Tank Engine” kids’ show set to the heavy metal song “Bodies” by Drowning Pool:

• Cat sees his owner for the first time in six months

• “Caught by the chap in the pajamas!” If uncomprehending Brits announced U.S. baseball games.

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:

■ As “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” heads to Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre during the Democratic National Convention in August, a spokeswoman says she expects seats to become available on the show’s usual ticketing site—which is right here.

■ LateNighter critic Bill Carter: Donald Trump helped Jimmy Kimmel prove he has “the best left hook in late night.”

■ The Washington Post delivers what Poynter’s Tom Jones calls an “unsettling and disturbing” statistical analysis of Trump’s social media posts since 2021.

■ Trump’s niece Mary: “As someone who has known Donald for almost six decades (oy), I can tell you that beneath the bluster, there lies a fear so profound, it consumes him.”

■ Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin: “Trump has never looked so small, so weary and so feeble.”

■ The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last, the sarcastically “proud shareholder” of DJT stock, reports that it’s “doing great.”

■ Columnist Dan Pfeiffer: How to talk about Trump’s trial with your MAGA-curious uncle.

■ Guidance from ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich “How to talk about Israel and Gaza on a college campus (or anywhere else).”

■ A Jewish student at Columbia University writes for Zeteo: “Don’t believe what you’re being told about ‘campus antisemitism.’”

■ FiveThirtyEight founder—and University of Chicago alumnus—Nate Silver counsels the college-bound: “Go to a state school.”

■ Washington Post columnist George Will: “112 ignoble, infantile Republicans voted to endanger civilization.”

■ Reader columnist Ben Joravsky on Mayor Johnson’s success in letting some of Chicago’s controversial tax increment financing districts expire and using that money to pay for programs to help the poor: “I should be happy, but all I do is cry.”

■ Welcome to the 21st century: If you’ve ever scrambled to find someone to notarize a document, you’ll be pleased to learn that Illinois is now the 48th(!) state to let that happen remotely.

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

Mary Schmich: On good aunts and secretaries

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

Did you know Wednesday was National Administrative Professionals Day, previously known as National Secretaries Day?

The word "secretary" always reminds me of my Aunt Mary Louise, who was profiled in the Omaha World-Herald in a story that began:

“What is a secretary? She is the pleasant voice over the telephone, the nimble fingers responsible for a neatly typed letter, the animated miracle through which her boss’s grunts are translated into written words. She is the unsung heroine of American business life.”

And that all reminds me of the column I wrote about Mary Louise when she died:

Aunts are underrated.

The nation never pauses for a day to shower aunts with presents or hustle them to brunch. Aunts are not the backbone of the greeting card industry. They’re not the heroines of country songs.

But a good aunt is among life’s great gifts.

Mary Louise Wiley was that kind of aunt, up until Sunday morning, when she died quietly in her bed at The Breakers retirement community in Chicago, a rosary laced between her fingers.

“Unexpected” is not a word generally applied to the death of 93-year-olds, but Aunt Weeze’s death was.

She had never used a cane or walker. She harrumphed at the idea of doctors, and after giving birth at 40, she didn’t visit one for more than 50 years.

Until her swift decline in the past few days, she greeted every day in mascara, lipstick and a white bouffant hairdo as neat as her apartment. She greeted every evening with a drink. When she got to laughing hard, she snorted.

In her 20s, Mary Louise went to Washington, D.C., to work as a secretary, but then her father died and she came home to take care of her mother.

“Don’t waste your life in Carroll, Iowa,” her mother pleaded, and so together they moved to Omaha, Neb., where she continued as a secretary. At 38, ancient for that era, she married.

After she was widowed at 83, Mary Louise moved to Chicago, closer to her three sons, and every couple of months, I’d take her out to lunch. She didn’t dwell in memories, but over her glass of white wine, if I asked, she’d tell a story.

“Tell me again,” I asked her recently, “how my dad became a Republican.”

I’d always thought my father was raised that way, until she told me otherwise. An aunt, among her other attributes, is a keeper of family stories and secrets. She can tell you things that no one else has or would.

Mary Louise had her flaws. She could be crotchety, impatient, unfairly critical. She was every bit my father’s sister, shaped by the German-Irish dogmatism of their childhood.

She was also fun, and if she loved you, she loved you fierce.

During the years that my family struggled financially, Aunt Weeze and her husband, Joe, helped us out, with food, with money, always with the merriment of Santa Claus.

They taught us, by example, that this is one thing aunts and uncles are for: to amplify the family circle, to share the burden and the bounty.

And Aunt Weeze never forgot my birthday. She had no daughters, but she somehow knew that the thing a 12-year-old girl wanted most in the whole, wide world was a locking diary.

In her final years, living alone, no longer able to drive, she was lonely. She didn’t say so, exactly. She didn’t have a large vocabulary of feelings.

But more than once during our lunches, with her fingers wrapped around the stem of her wineglass, she said, “I don’t know why God has left me here.”

To which I’d always say: “To have lunch with your niece.”

We had our last lunch in September, sitting on the porch at the Heartland Cafe. Her wineglass empty, she closed her eyes and lifted her small, pale face to the sun.

“Mmm,” she said. “That’s nice.”

Aunt Weeze was the last of my parents’ siblings, and when an aunt goes, so does a shred of your parents and your past, of yourself.

But I still have the diary, blue with a golden key.

Feel free to share your own aunts or secretaries stories here.

Minced Words

Cate Plys, Jon Hansen, Marj Halperin and I joined host John Williams for this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. There was disagreement about the Bears plans for a new stadium and confusion about why we don’t yet know more about the police killing of Dexter Reed. Some of us think we could serve as impartial jurors at Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal trial. Others (like me) admit that we could not be fair. 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'll never get over the fact that nearly half of U.S. voters support the most dishonest, disgusting, ignorant, vicious, treasonous person in public life. The last decade has been a devastating indictment of American values. — Mark Jacob

Donald Trump, he's not a good man. He's not a good person. He does not care about anybody in this world except Donald Trump. … His dark side is very, very dark. And very, very dangerous for this country. We can't let our democracy that we've worked for and we've cherished just disintegrate with the wrong leader at the wrong time. … Donald Trump is incapable of running anything, let alone the most powerful country in the history of the world. And God help us if he gets anywhere near that White House in the future. — North America’s Building Trades Unions president Sean McGarvey, who was once an enthusiastic supporter of Trump and considered him a friend of labor.

Will you bow your heads and pray with me please. Gracious God in Heaven, we thank you for today, a day that our city desperately needs your help with. We thank you because this is the day that you have made, so we’re going to rejoice and be glad in it. We need your help today as we make progress — and I want to thank you for our mayor, raising up a young man with such a significant heart for our city. Thank you for the McCaskey family. Thank you for Kevin. And now we thank you for all of the people who will benefit by the Bears staying in Chicago. I don’t know that you play football, but I am asking you to help us to win some games. Help us to get a Super Bowl here . Help us to play in the Super Bowl. And bring back the 1985 roaring, cheering fans we had for your glory and for our good . And on a more serious note, for all the people who will work here, who will thrive here who will come to experience significant family memories here, we give you glory and thanks. And If I’ve asked you for too listtle I pray you do something even bigger than what I’ve just asked you for . IN your precious name. Let the church say “Amen.” — Rev. Charlie E. Dates, Senior Pastor of the Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, kicking off the Bears press conference Wednesday at Soldier Field

The neighborhood where (Rev. Charlie Dates’) church resides is the neighborhood that I grew up in. There are plenty of people in that neighborhood and neighborhoods around Chicago that need prayer. And you chose to ask for God’s grace today for a stadium. You should be ashamed, pastor, and your congregation should be ashamed, too, that they follow you. If that’s what you’re giving out at Salem Baptist, shame on you. You need to repent. That is, wow! I’m offended as a citizen of Chicago. I am offended for people who try to serve and worship a God that you’re hoping shares his grace on the poor and the downtrodden. If we’re going strictly from scripture on this, that is no where you need to be today, pastor. You don’t need to be with the billionaires who are trying to take from the people of Chicago. The fact that you thought it was good idea tells me everything that I need to know about you and your relationship with scripture, your parishioners and God. This is ridiculous. What are we doing? I am so tired of people using God to put their hands in someone’s pocket. This is the worse possible example of this. … You are using the word of God to try and fleece the flock for billionaires. — Laurence Holmes on 670 The Score

And finally, this chyron regarding the trial testimony of National Enquirer publisher David Pecker was *chef’s kiss.* Though as Snopes points out, it’s a fake.

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:

• Three words no parent ever wants to hear when dropping their kid at a play date: “Come on in.” — @IHideFromMyKids

• Health insurance so bad, snitches only get Band-Aids. — @JayTorch1031

• I can’t imagine the mental torture it is to go through life with only some people calling you Maurice. — @YSylon

• They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian.  Well, they’re not laughing now. — @Ruth_A_Buzzi

• Me: Maybe AI can do my job, but it will never be able to do it with my unique personality and sense of humor. AI: Are you guys working hard, or hardly working? Whoa, I must have missed the memo about this being blue shirt day. Me: Oh crap. — @JohnLyonTweets

• Calling someone a “tough cookie” is not a compliment. Tough cookies are literally the worst cookies — @kryzazzy

• I got arrested for downloading the whole Wikipedia website. I told the detective, “Wait! I can explain everything!” — @Mariana057

• I don’t know what to say to a woman when she is angry, but it’s definitely not, “Whatever, Pippi Wrongstocking.” — @YSylon

• Nice trousers.  Where did you get them?  Forever 61? — @Shader70

• She was beautiful, silent, and mysterious…like the ‘d’ in Bundt cake. — @FScottFitzJesse

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. And I will continue to call the platform Twitter if only to spite Elon Musk:

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Good Sports

The no-no Sox

I am grimly fascinated by how terrible the 2024 White Sox are. After 24 games, the team stands at 3-21, which is just off the modern record for early season futility set by the 1988 Baltimore Orioles. That hapless team started the season with 22 straight losses — their first victory of the season was against, you guessed it, the White Sox — and was 1-23 after 24 games. But the O’s went 54-83 thereafter and finished with a 55-106 record.

The 2003 Tigers, the worst team in baseball in the last 62 years, also started the season 3-21 and finished with a 43-119 record. For the Sox to be sure they don’t set the record for futility in Major League Baseballs modern era — post 1900 — the team will need to win 39 games.

In “Chicago White Sox are losing in every category,” Axios Chicago’s Justin Kaufmann looked at some of the dreadful numbers as of Tuesday morning: “The Sox have 45 runs, which is 18 fewer than the second-worst team in baseball, the Oakland A's. That is an average of 2.05 runs per game! They're dead last in home runs, batting average, OPS and hits, too. They've been shut out eight times this season.”

At Chicago magazine, Edward Robert McClelland noted ,“The White Sox are the least successful franchise in baseball history, having made the playoffs in 8.9 percent of their seasons, less than any of the other 29 teams.”

Tune of the Week

May Day is six days off, but I’ve long loved “Hal and Tow,” an exuberant song that bids farewell to winter.

Hal-an-tow, jolly rumble O!
We were up long before the day-O
To welcome in the summer,
To welcome in the May-O;
For summer is a comin' in,
And winter's gone away-O!

It’s an oldie. Like back to the 1600s. And purportedly from Cornwall in Great Britain. “Hal and tow” appears to be a corruption of “Heel and Toe,” suggesting some kind of dance.

There’s a lot of material online about it, including:

• “Hal An Tow”: Some Intriguing Evidence on a May Song (Library of Congress)

• More About “Hal An Tow”: Early Evidence of a May Song (Library of Congress)

• Hal And Tow notes (Mudcat Cafe)

• Hal And Tow (A Folk Song a Day)

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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