What will stop the 'trend' of mass mayhem?

& the case for 'Mow No Mo'

5-19-2022 (issue No. 36)

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For years now, large groups of Chicago teens have been using social media to organize “trends” — mass gatherings where boisterous, frightening and often illegal behavior breaks out in a party-like atmosphere. They often but not always take place in the Loop/Millenium Park/Magnificent Mile area. On May 11, the starting point was North Avenue Beach for mayhem that spilled over to the nearby intersection of North Avenue and Clark Street where revelers jumped on buses and cars, ran through traffic and accosted bystanders.

Police officers are significantly outnumbered and seem able only to contain the craziness, not stop it. After a “trend” turned tragic over the weekend with the shooting death of 16-year-old Seandell Holliday in Millennium Park, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that unaccompanied teens will not be allowed in that park after 6 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays and that the citywide curfew for minors will now be 10 p.m. on weekends, one hour earlier than before.

The legality of such a unilateral declaration is doubtful, as is the effectiveness of such measures. This report from the Marshall Project is four years old but likely still accurate as well as relevant:

A systematic review of research literature on juvenile curfew programs was published in 2016 by the Campbell Collaboration, a nonprofit that synthesizes research studies for policy-makers. Campbell examined over 7,000 studies on juvenile curfews and synthesized the 12 most rigorous studies. The report stated that, “evidence suggests that juvenile curfews are ineffective at reducing crime and victimization. The average effect on juvenile crime during curfew hours was slightly positive — that is a slight increase in crime — and close to zero for crime during all hours. Similarly, juvenile victimization also appeared unaffected by the imposition of a curfew ordinance.”

The Campbell findings followed a systematic review of juvenile curfew literature published in 2003 by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service. That review found that “empirical studies of the impact of curfew laws failed to support the argument that curfews reduce crime and criminal victimization.”

Long term, better neighborhood recreational opportunities, better housing, better physical and mental health care, better jobs and other upgrades in disadvantaged neighborhoods stand to alleviate the problem of bored, frisky kids exuberantly raising hell downtown. But we need short-term answers and fast so that downtown and the Mag Mile don’t become places where tourists and residents don’t want to be except during working hours.

Ask people who’ve been caught up in the groups of kids jumping on car roofs, running through traffic and accosting strangers — it’s scary and unpleasant at best.

I’m open to ideas — really! — but it’s not a viable option to indulgently watch all this unfold while blaming broad social factors and griping about the heavy-handed tactics of public officials. I don’t see a great alternative to countering this problem with a massive police presence at “trends” and the arrest (but not prosecution) of those who violate the law.

Again, if you have a better idea for getting this problem under control this summer, let me know.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping an open mind about the case against Marion Richardson, the 17-year-old charged as an adult in the shooting death of Holliday in Millennium Park. Here’s Tribune courts reporter Megan Crepeau’s account:

Before the shooting Saturday, Richardson noticed a group of people nearby that included a boy with whom he had gotten into a fight at a previous trend, (Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney James) Murphy said. That group at one point seemed to disperse, but then came back and began following Richardson, according to prosecutors.

A female started arguing with Richardson, and Richardson’s friend began to pull him away from the group, Murphy said. That’s when Holliday came up on Richardson from behind, jumped on his back and punched him in the head, Murphy said. Another male walked up and also appeared to punch Richardson, he said.

Richardson then pulled out a handgun and shot Holliday in the chest, then fled, Murphy said. …

As Richardson was being arrested, he told police, “You guys ain’t gonna do nothing anyways, a hundred (expletive) walking toward me, what am I supposed to do? You all just sitting there, bro,” Murphy said.

Illinois law says the use of deadly force in self-defense is justified only when a person “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or another,” and prosecutors who have charged Richardson with second-degree murder will argue, if the case goes to trial, that Richardson’s belief was unreasonable.

I haven’t seen all the videos or heard the accounts of the witnesses, but the case against Richardson — like the case against Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wis., or George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla. — looks as though it will turn on the definition of “reasonable” and the definition of “great bodily harm.”

Does being cold-cocked from behind as another antagonist approaches and punches you seem like the prelude to very serious ass-whipping by a group chasing after you? Or just an everyday fistfight that results in a few bruises?

Yes, Richardson was allegedly illegally in possession of a .380-caliber semi-automatic weapon with a laser attachment and an extended magazine with hollow-point bullets. And Holliday, who was unarmed, did not deserve to die for throwing a punch.

But in a society saturated with firearms, confrontations seem to escalate easily and quickly, and it’s never safe to assume that a combatant or antagonist is unarmed.

As I said, I’m keeping an open mind.

Last week’s winning tweet

Ordinary @OrdinaryAlso

i’m not procrastinating i was never going to do it.

The winner of the special Dad Jokes poll was this:

Adam Cerious @Browtweaten

farmer: how many cows got out? me: seventeen farmer: round em up me: ok twenty

Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or click here to vote in the new poll.

Brace yourselves, Illinois residents. Our state is about to become an abortion battleground

Yes, abortion rights will be safe for the time being in Illinois if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court — which now seems a certainty — and the issue will be returned to the states.

Some 10,000 women from surrounding states are already traveling to Illinois each year to obtain abortions, and providers are reportedly predicting they’ll see an additional 14,000 such patients when almost all the Midwest bans the practice.

Meanwhile, I’m predicting that energized opponents of abortion rights in these other states, lacking local clinics at which to demonstrate and hurl invective at patients, will organize regular, large road trips to Illinois in an effort to at least make life for doctors, clinic staff and patients as unpleasant as possible while they agitate to change our laws.

News & Views

News: Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, one of the greatest to ever play his position, has signed a 10-year, $375 million contract with Fox to be the network’s lead NFL analyst after he retires.

View: I don’t get it. I’m a fairly avid football fan and I enjoy intelligent observations from the broadcast booth, but in all my years watching on TV, I’ve never once made a viewing decision based on who the announcers are. I’ve never chosen one game over another because of the announcers, never turned off a game I was interested in because I didn’t like announcers, and never turned on or stuck with a game because I particularly enjoyed the announcers. For me, it’s all about the game and the matchup.

Does Fox think it will earn some $40 million more with Brady in the booth than it would with a competent no-name color commentator? And that’s not even getting to the question of whether the famously bland Brady will be any more insightful or eloquent than the hypothetical no-name color commentator.

“I covered Brady for almost a decade,” wrote Yahoo Sports columnist Shalise Manza Young. He “wasn't exactly candid in front of a microphone. Brady has admitted he rarely says what he feels in public settings and is ‘super flat’ in interviews on purpose. … It's not just whether Brady can convey warmth, humor or personality. It's also if he can translate what he knows and sees in a way that makes sense for others. Many of us may remember a math-whiz high school classmate who breezed through their assignments but couldn't help a peer who asked for help.”

News: As of Monday, the Chicago Reader is owned by the nonprofit Reader Institute for Community Journalism.

View: This transition was far rockier and more lengthy than it needed to be due to a preposterous tantrum by now former co-owner Leonard C. Goodman, who objected to the way editors wanted to handle a controversy that arose after publication of a column he wrote in November about COVID-19 vaccinations for children.

Goodman along with business owner Elzie Higginbottom pulled the venerable alternative weekly back from the brink of financial ruin in 2018 with a multimillion-dollar investment. He deserves great credit for that as well as for standing down in the end and not letting his feud with publisher Tracy Baim put the Reader into bankruptcy.

Baim told me that Goodman’s controversial column will stay up on the paper’s website because it is “now part of the historical record and been written about so much it should stand.” It will be accompanied by an editor’s note about the attendant fuss, Baim said, and Goodman will have no say in the wording of that note.

News: Imprisoned Drew Peterson’s former attorney Joel Brodsky tells WGN-Ch. 9 that he’s “thinking about maybe revealing what happened to (Peterson’s long missing ex-wife) Stacy and where she is.”

View: Brodsky and I are so antagonistic on Twitter that I almost feel I should recuse myself from commenting on this issue. But setting aside my feelings about the relentlessly vindictive Brodsky — it’s wrong for any attorney to betray the confidence of a client, no matter how heinous that client may be, except to prevent imminent serious harm.

Stacy Peterson vanished in 2007, and unproven suspicion is she was abducted and killed by her ex-husband Drew Peterson — now serving a lengthy sentence for murdering Kathleen Savio, another ex-wife. Assuming Brodsky knows where Stacy’s body is, that knowledge probably eats at him, given the comfort that closure might offer to her grieving survivors. But the possibility of having to carry around such emotional weight is a burden that defense attorneys have to assume when they take on certain cases and certain clients.

Never mind that Drew Peterson, now 68, will likely spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering Savio and for an additional conviction for attempting to hire a hit man to kill the man who prosecuted him. The structure of our criminal justice system relies on clients trusting lawyers to keep their confidences today, tomorrow and forever, and eroding that trust is a grave wrong.

And yet, as Heather Cherone of WTTW-Ch. 11 pointed out in this week’s recording of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast, to dangle this possibility in front of Stacy’s family and then not follow through would be unimaginably, gratuitously cruel.

An anonymous tip to authorities would have been one way to handle this, I suppose. Another would have been for Brodsky to visit Peterson in prison, appeal to his better nature, assuming against all evidence that he has one, and get permission to provide that small measure of solace to Stacy’s family.

12 days left in ‘No Mow May,’ and I’m thinking it’s time for ‘Mow No Mo’

My backyard, halfway through May 2022

“No Mow May” is an annual initiative launched in 2019 by Plantlife International in the U.K.

Lock up your lawnmower on May 1 and let the wild flowers in your lawn bloom, providing a feast of nectar for our hungry pollinators … just for the month of May. In this way, smaller plants like clover, daisies, dandelions, selfheal and clover will get a chance to flower and give pollinators a head-start.

Homes & Gardens endorses the idea:

“Wildflowers that give nectar and pollen to honey bees will grow and bloom if we do not mow them down before they flower,” explains Todd Hardie, considered the bee guru of the north country. …

“This food is important to honey bees and all pollinating insects as they need this nourishment for their families to expand in population in the early part of the season. May is an ideal time to not cut lawns as the grass has not reached the height that it will later in the season.”

H&G notes that some no-mowers may run afoul of local lawn-care ordinances. But not here on the Northwest Side, where I’ve noticed more and more homeowners are favoring groundcover, native plants, shrubs and other non-lawn alternatives. Such yards usually look fine and ought to remind us that the green, close-cropped lawn is highly overrated for anyone who doesn’t have children who need extra play space.

In “The Case Against Lawns,” author Michael Pollan writes:

America has more than 50,000 square miles of lawn under cultivation, on which we spend an estimated $30 billion a year. … Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. … Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. … We are poisoning ourselves with our lawns, which receive, on average, more pesticide and herbicide per acre than just about any crop grown in this country. … Lawns, I am convinced, are a symptom of, and a metaphor for, our skewed relationship to the land. They teach us that, with the help of petrochemicals and technology, we can bend nature to our will. Lawns stoke our hubris with regard to the land.

Gotta say, I’m sold.

Land of Linkin’

• “I watched male loved ones deny their hearing loss. Left untreated, it devastated their lives,” an op-ed in the Tribune by Dr. Louise Andrew, is the most important such essay I’ve read in a long time: Age-related hearing loss, she writes, “is the most common remediable cause of cognitive impairment, falls and depression. Johns Hopkins researchers found up to a fivefold increased risk in older adults of developing cognitive impairment, including dementia, when significant hearing impairment remains unaddressed.”

• In “The Multifaceted Race To Oust CTU Leadership Regime After 12 Years,” Patch columnist Mark Konkol analyzes Friday’s pivotal Chicago Teachers Union leadership election: “Two union caucuses challenging the incumbent Caucus of Rank and File Educators — CORE — both have concerns about how the union spends money pushing its political agenda without input or oversight from rank-and-file members. But only one of them — Members First— is running on a platform that calls for focusing the union's role on improving work conditions and pay for members. That caucus wants to move away from the current leadership's attempt to use contract negotiations and grievances as a platform to push for public school leaders to lobby for affordable housing, rent abatement and defunding the police department.”

• "It’s fantastic," declares Tribune food critic Louisa Chu in her review of the new Portillo’s plant-based Garden Dog. It "holds up as a top dog over a lot of the scrawny hot dogs around town." As a big backer of fake meat products, I’m thrilled to hear it.

• In “Starbucks Is Playing With Fire,” Steven Greenhouse of Slate suggests union supporters consider a boycott of the coffee giant: “Starbucks has repeatedly said it in no way seeks to intimidate workers into voting against the union. But one Buffalo barista, Will Westlake, told of being summoned to an hourlong anti-union session where it was just him and six managers, who told him ‘how great all the benefits are at Starbucks, and if we vote in a union, we may not have any of those benefits.’ Telling employees that their pay and benefits could get worse with a union—which almost never actually happens—is a common tactic companies use against organizing campaigns.”

• John Williams of WGN passes along 15 bits of advice for graduates just starting out in the work world from Tom Gimbel, the founder and CEO of the LaSalle Network.

• The final dance in “Dirty Dancing,” but they’re dancing to “The Muppet Show” theme.

• WBEZ-FM’s Becky Vevea has the most comprehensive look yet at the question “Has Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot kept her campaign promises?”

• “The US is poised to force the birth of babies we have no plan to invest in. Let these powerful statements inform how we spend the coming months” by columnist Heidi Stevens, who is breaking her long silence on the subject of abortion.

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Mondays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

The weird Republican gubernatorial primary race is just getting weirder

Last Friday, WTTW-Ch. 11 “Chicago Tonight” reporter and co-host Paris Schutz broke the story that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Richard Irvin referred to former President Donald Trump as an “idiot” and “bigoted racist” in 2018 text messages. “I hate Trump too!” he wrote.

This bombshell landed in the same week Irvin, the mayor of Aurora, was blasted in the media for ducking questions about his feelings for Trump during a news conference and when a WGN-TV/Emerson College poll showed 37% of Republican voters still undecided in the multicandidate race and 57% of them saying they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Trump (who has not yet weighed in on the race).

In a statement to WTTW News Irvin said, “I don’t recall sending those texts, and while there are areas where I disagreed, the Trump Administration delivered positive results for Americans like tax cuts, opportunity zones, and a focus on public safety – all of which we utilized to great effect in Aurora and are now a focus of our campaign to take back Illinois from the disastrous Pritzker regime.”

“I don’t recall sending those texts” is not the same as “I don’t recall thinking that Trump was an idiotic bigoted racist,” or even “I no longer think that Trump is an idiotic, bigoted racist.”

The latter assertion would of course invite the question, “What changed your mind?” And Irvin would rather simply attempt to attack his rivals as insufficiently conservative, a brazen attempt to use the schoolyard taunt “I’m rubber, you’re glue!” to confuse and mislead primary voters about the fact that he is clearly the most liberal, centrist Republican in the race.

Irvin’s backers have no doubt noted that it’s moderate Republicans who tend to do better in statewide races in Illinois — think former governors Jim Thompson, Jim Edgar and Bruce Rauner, former U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, former treasurer and comptroller Judy Baar Topinka and former treasurer Dan Rutherford — and are hoping that occupying a center-right lane will take him to victory in the general election race against incumbent Democrat J.B. Pritzker in November.

But those moderate Republicans were elected before the party fell into the Trump’s cultish clutches, and if that center-right lane truly were open, never-Trump U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Channahon would be riding in it. Instead he’s resigned from Congress and has taken a pass on running for statewide office.

The Democratic Governors Association nevertheless seems to feel that lane remains open and is investing millions in ads ostensibly attacking state Sen. Darren Bailey, who is running just four percentage points behind — 24-20% — despite Irvin’s massive statewide ad blitz in recent weeks.

Script: Republican Darren Bailey. An agenda too conservative for Illinois. 100% pro-life, Bailey wants to ban abortions and make it illegal here in Illinois. An NRA member, Bailey opposes sensible gun control and says he’ll protect the Second Amendment at all cost. And Bailey proudly embraces the Trump agenda, calling into question our elections and fighting for gun owners and the unborn. Tell Darren Bailey his policies are just too conservative for Illinois.

It’s a bankshot commercial, an effort to get hard-core conservatives to the polls to support Bailey based on the assumption that he’ll be easier for Pritzker to beat in November. And it’s quite similar to the “attack” ad Democrats ran in the 2018 Republican primary highlighting Jeanne Ives’ conservative bonafides as she challenged incumbent Rauner.

Script: When is a conservative leader too conservative for Illinois? Meet Jeanne Ives. She’s been rated as one of the most conservative in this state. Ives wants to ban abortions. She has an “A” rating from the NRA. Pushing to arm teachers and stop new gun laws. And on immigration, Ives marches in lockstep with President Trump, trying to eliminate protections for undocumented immigrants. Tell Jeanne Ives her conservative policies are just too conservative for Illinois.

The commercial didn’t quite do the trick — Ives lost by 3 percentage points — but Pennsylvania’s presumptive (now official) Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, invested recently in very similar “attack” ads against Republican state senator and gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano — ““If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for” and so on — and Mastriano cruised to victory in Tuesday’s primary.

This would all be very amusing were the phrase “be careful what you wish for” not haunting so many of us who remember secretly rooting for that oafish, preposterous narcissist Donald Trump to become the Republican presidential nominee because surely, surely, surely any Democrat running against him would win all 50 states.

I’m more amused by this more conventional spot from the Irvin campaign, recorded off my TV Monday:

Script: When I’m governor I’ll be using these a lot. We’ll cut wasteful spending, cut billions in debt, we’ll cut high property taxes, out of control crime and we’ll cut perks for politicians. Pass term limits too. One thing I won’t cut is Mike Madigan’s prison term. If he’s convicted, I’m not commuting his sentence. Because what Madigan and Pritzker have done to Illinois is criminal. I’m taking these to Springfield to take our state back.

Well, Mike Madigan is being prosecuted by the federal government not the state government, so the governor of Illinois will have no power to commute his sentence if he’s convicted. So Irvin is technically correct, a commutation for Madigan will be on the long list of things he will not do if elected governor, such as alter U.S. trade agreements with China, nominate liberals to the Supreme Court, declare war on Russia or, well, you get the idea.

“Cutting wasteful spending” is Lucy’s football for Charlie Brown Republican voters. Illinois is 37th in state per-capita spending, and Rauner, to cite a recent example, was able to identify very little in the way of waste in the state budget. Saving or cutting “billions” would require amending the state constitution to reduce public pension benefits, an idea that has very little political traction.

Maybe this is why Jesse Sullivan, one of Irvin’s rivals for the nomination, accused him of “treating the conservative base like they’re idiots” during the first debate among all six candidates Tuesday.

The event was a 100-minute joint endorsement interview before the Tribune Editorial Board that was not live-streamed as such events have been in the past. This is from the resulting news story:

Except for Irvin, the candidates … explicitly said they voted for Trump in 2020. Irvin, repeating a line he has used in recent days after WTTW Ch.-11 reported on texts in which he called Trump an “idiot” and a “bigoted racist,” said only: “I’m a Republican and in general (elections), I vote Republican.”

Irvin has sought to avoid any discussion of Trump in his limited public appearances, not commenting on the former president’s claim the election was stolen or on Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Instead, he contends such questions are a distraction being pushed by Pritzker.

On Tuesday, Irvin said, “there have been areas where I’ve disagreed” with Trump. But he added, “The Trump administration has done many things for the American people that were great,” citing tax cuts, public-private opportunity zones in economically depressed areas and his support for law enforcement.

But he also added that by discussing Trump, his rivals “are falling into the trap” and not talking about solutions.

But Trump — allegiance to or distance from — is an important consideration for many voters as the recent poll suggests and as primary results in other states also indicate. Witness that Trump’s endorsement almost dragged the manifestly unfit, frighteningly undisciplined and spectacularly incompetent freshman Congressman Madison Cawthorn over the finish line in a North Carolina primary Tuesday night.

Given that Tuesday’s gubernatorial gabble was the first (and perhaps only) clash among the candidates in the most consequential race in Illinois this year, the Trib should have at least provided an audio stream or a full transcript of the event. I know times are tight and exclusive content can be a plus, but this seemed small.

Mary Ann Ahern @MaryAnnAhernNBC

Trib not only didn’t livestream first time all 6 GOP Gov candidates together, they kicked me off their property outside. But, still found a way to get react. ⁦@DarrenBaileyIL⁩ ⁦@JesseSullivanIL⁩

I emailed Editorial Page Editor Chris Jones about the failure to offer a stream, and he replied:

Our top priority with our smaller editorial board is to continue the Tribune's proud and well-informed tradition of endorsements in the major political races, to serve our readers, and that was the purpose of this meeting. We did not know all six candidates were coming until hours before. We certainly hope there are other public debates where they all show up. This was not intended to be one of them.

The distinction between a “candidate forum,” “debate” and “joint interview” is a fine one, but OK. At last word, the conflict next Tuesday between the NBC-5 debate at 6 p.m. that Irvin will attend and the WGN-TV debate 7 miles away at 7 p.m. that Bailey will attend has not been resolved.

WLS-Ch. 7 and the Illinois League of Women Voters are reportedly planning to host a debate on June 2, but those LWV events tend to be highly structured and therefore not much more useful to voters than a visit to the various candidate websites to read campaign talking points. The far less formal Trib-hosted sparring matches have long been the gold standard for useful interchanges.

Finally, Tuesday night, the Tribune broke another damaging story: “As Aurora mayor, GOP governor candidate Richard Irvin said charges last year against girlfriend would be ‘taken care of’ at scene of her arrest in the suburb, police report shows.”

“When I told her that … things ‘would be taken care of,’ I meant that she would get a lawyer, which is what I helped her to do,” Irvin said. “I told her specifically not to argue or have any conversations with the police about it, that it would be handled in court, and that it would be taken care of, since that, you know, she’d be afforded a lawyer. And she does have lawyers, and they’re taking care of it from this point on.”

Do better!

As I told paid subscribers earlier this week, I have an aversion to the admonition “do better,” but I plan to overcome it.

The words are often used by censorious members of Twitter mobs as they pile on someone for some perceived deviation from ideological purity — “You accidentally misgendered someone! Do better!” and so on.

But I find myself muttering these words when I come across certain persistent fails, so I might turn “Do Better!” into an occasional feature at the Picayune Sentinel that incorporates reader suggestions/frustrations.

Or I might not. Many years ago, I ran occasional columns under the heading of “The Idea Oven” for which I solicited half-baked notions for inventions or business ideas. Those drew excellent responses from readers. But when I tried to revive the feature just a few years ago, I got crickets.

My explanation for the failure was that, with the advent of social media, those with such ideas no longer need third-party conduits to reach an audience for their notions. And that may prove to be the same with petty gripe. We’ll see.

I will reject any “do better!” scoldings directed at me, however. That’s what social media is for!

My inaugural “do better”is directed at the electronics industry for the maddening lack of consistency in charging cables and input ports. Android and Apple use different input jacks to charge phones, and Apple has a third style of jack for laptop charging.

In September, the European Commission announced a proposal “to require the smartphone industry to adopt a uniform charging cord for mobile devices, a push that could eliminate the all-too-familiar experience of rummaging through a drawer full of tangled cables to find the right one,” reported the Associated Press. “The main holdout is Apple, which said it was concerned the new rules would limit innovation, and that would end up hurting consumers.”

My first submission from a reader comes from Peggy:

Do better, easy-open bag tops! Your claims are fraught with lies. When I pull at the notch on the side, about a quarter of the way across, the strip tears off, leaving me with a bag that's impossible to open without getting the scissors. If we can put a man on the moon, you can make a better way to open your packaging!

I would direct this particularly at cereal companies, which don’t even bother with the “easy open “ concept for their inner bags.

Chicago mayoral candidate scoreboard

Keeping track of the field for the February 2023 race for mayor. Last Thursday saw the formal entry of state Rep. Kambium “Kam” Buckner, chairman of the House Black Caucus.

Who’s in:

• Lori Lightfoot, incumbent mayor (not officially declared)

• Willie Wilson, entrepreneur/philanthropist

• Ray Lopez, 15th Ward alderman

• Kambium “Kam” Buckner, Democratic state representative

• Frederick Collins, Chicago police officer, former Republican U.S. congressional hopeful

Who’s out:

• Mike Quigley, Democratic U.S. representative

• Arne Duncan, former U.S. education secretary

• Janice Jackson, former Chicago Public Schools CEO

Who’s still being talked about as a possible candidate:

• Anthony Beale, 9th Ward alderman

• John Catanzara, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police chapter

• Gery Chico, former board president for Chicago schools and parks

• Bill Conway, a former prosecutor and naval intelligence officer

• Melissa Conyears-Ervin, city treasurer

• Joe Ferguson, former city inspector general

• La Shawn Ford, Democratic state representative

• Judy Frydland, former Chicago building commissioner

• Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, U.S. representative

• Stacy Davis Gates, Chicago Teachers Union vice president now running to head the union

• Ja'Mal Green, activist

• Brian Hopkins, 2nd Ward alderman

• Janice Jackson, former Chicago Public Schools CEO

• Brandon Johnson, Democratic Cook County commissioner

• Sophia King, 8th Ward alderman

• Susana Mendoza, Democratic state comptroller

• Martin Nesbitt, local business leader and chair of the Obama Foundation

• Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, 35th Ward alderman

• Roderick Sawyer, 6th Ward alderman

• Jesse Sharkey, outgoing president of the Chicago Teachers Union

• Paul Vallas, former Chicago Public Schools CEO

Chuy Garcia seems to be out, but his demurrals have not been absolute, so I’m keeping him on the list of maybes for now.

Not on my list of maybes but people to keep in mind are those now running in the June 28 Democratic primary in the race to succeed veteran U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush. Hopefuls in that crowded field who fall short — perhaps Jahmal Cole, state Sen. Jacqueline Collins, 3rd Ward Ald. Pat Dowell, Jonathan Jackson, Karin Norington-Reaves, Jonathan Swain and Charise Williams — will have plenty of time to shift gears and launch mayoral bids. It’s also possible that one or two of the Democrats who don’t win the secretary of state primary race between Anna Valencia, Alexi Giannoulias and Ald. David Moore, 17th, will jump in to challenge Lightfoot.

I’ll add and subtract from this list every so often and will be grateful for your informed suggestions.

Fourteen names appeared on the general election ballot for mayor in 2019 (Lightfoot, Mendoza, Wilson, Ford and Vallas along with Toni Preckwinkle, Bill Daley, Amara Enyia, Jerry Joyce, Gery Chico, Garry McCarthy, Bob Fioretti, John Kozlar and Neal Sáles-Griffin) .

The mailbag, my correspondence with often dissenting readers, is a regular feature of the Tuesday, patrons-only issue of the Picayune Sentinel. This week I’ve taken down the paywall so everyone who’s interested can check out the back-and-forth about abortion rights, protest techniques and my argument that opposition to abortion seems animated in many cases by opposition to non-procreational sex.

Click here to read all that along with my harsh critique of recent “Saturday Night Live” episodes and the ever-popular visual tweets of the week. Then become a paid subscriber and help keep this publication going!

Minced Words

Host John Williams welcomed Heather Cherone, Austin Berg, Brandon Pope and me to “The Mincing Rascals” roundtable this week. We kept the focus mostly local — curfews, political ads, Joel Brodsky, pride flags in Arlington Heights — and ended with a discussion of what’s been in our media diets lately.

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

Re: Tweets

This week’s nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Goodnight supermassive black hole. — @pourmecoffee

• Crypto is Mary Kay for men. — various

• If the person driving right in front of me comes to a complete stop at a stop sign, I’m like “that was enough for the both of us.” — @baronvonbike

• Science tells us that guys over 50 think about bird feeders every five seconds. — @lloydrang

• Words you don't hear much anymore: “Persnickety,” “carbon copy” and “starring David Hasselhoff.” — @itsBABYSMITH

• When you tell me I'm acting like an asshole, you're wrong. It's not an act. — @chalzamora

•  I never know what day it is, so I got myself one of those wooden block calendars that you change manually. I can’t tell you how unreliable they are. — @curlycomedy

• Some guy with hair said I was bad at descriptions the other day. — @Home_Halfway

• My boyfriend bought a kazoo and in unrelated news he can’t find it for some reason — @nnnatchos

• Me: It isn’t Max on the original Mad Max movie poster. It’s his friend Goose. Priest: Would anyone else like to say a few words? Perhaps about the deceased this time? — @PoodleSnarf

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Today’s Tune

I prefer this version of “That’s My Weakness Now,” a 1928 vaudeville classic about new love, to some of the more famous versions in large measure because Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards’ lyrics are particularly daffy:

She likes vestibules
I never stood in a vestibule
But she likes vestibules
That’s my weakness now

Helen Kane and Bing Crosby’s renditions are better known, and a less amusing version by Russ Morgan and his Orchestra rose to No. 17 on the Billboard charts in 1949. These renditions do not reference vestibules, agreement about which surely augurs well for the long-term health of any relationship.

I only know of one other song with the word “vestibule” in the lyrics — “My Ding-a-Ling."

And, finally, you may want to impress your friends at the next cocktail party you attend by explaining to them the difference between a vestibule and a foyer:

A foyer in a residence is usually a small area behind a front door that separates a home's main rooms from the outside of the house. … A foyer located in a larger building like an apartment building, a hotel, a concert venue or a theater is essentially a lobby. … A vestibule is much like a foyer in that it's an entranceway to the main part of a building, but it's slightly different in that its primary purpose is to be a buffer between the inside and the outside in extreme weather. … In a bank, it may include an automatic teller machine that's accessible from the outside after business hours.

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