Archive for October 12th, 2009
Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) crying about $300 million budget shortfall, despite stimulus money
One of the greatest mysteries in this world is what happens to all the money the government gives to the Chicago Transit Authority.
Every year, the CTA posts urgent messages on all its trains and buses claiming it will go out of business if people don’t call their representatives in government and beg them to give Chicago hundreds of millions of dollars more to make up for budget shortfalls.
It is Doomsday every day in Chicago with the CTA. Despite the fact it received millions in “stimulus money” from the federal government in March, when Dr. Utopia forced through ONE TRILLION DOLLARS in spending.
We were against that move and were hectored for it, but the reason we said it was a colossal blunder that would doom us financially for generations is because that money was largely put into the hands of spendthrifts and idiots.
Like the CTA.
Now they are threatening to raise train rides to $3, from the $2.25 they are currently (up from the $2 and even $1.50 we remember when we first moved here five years ago). That means an average working person would have to spend at least $30 a week just getting to work. $120 a month. It’s a lot of money to spend riding around in metal boxes homeless people use as toilets.
It’s also ridiculous when you think about how many millions the City of Chicago wasted on the failed Olympics bid. $60 million or so went into that. If the CTA really and truly claims it will go under without an infusion of $300 million…then they’d just need $240 million now.
What did Illinois’ share of Dr. Utopia’s spending free for all in March come out to?
Surely there was $240 million in that which could have gone to the CTA.
But, honestly, no matter how much money the CTA, or other similar entities in other cities, gets it will always want more, like that giant singing plant in Little Shop. Feed me Seymour. I’ve eaten and eaten but I still want more. For what, I don’t know, but I just want more.
That really seems to be the emerging motto of everything and everyone connected to government in the Golden Age of Obama.
Doesn’t it?
RAAACISM ALERT! Oprah only comes in at #10 in new list of worst celebrity flatulance.
This is indeed RAACISM in its worst, most vile form.
Oprah Winfrey only came in 10th – TENTH – on a list recognizing achievement in an area she’s worked so hard for, and seemingly mastered, the majority of her adult life: celebrity flatulence.
Tenth?
TENTH??
OPRAH???
This is more shocking than Chicago falling flat on its face with the IOC after Dr. and Mrs. Utopia gave long droning speeches about how much they wanted to have the Olympics near where they used to live, so that all the crooks they know in that neighborhood could make a fortune in real estate.
Maybe they didn’t cop to that last part, but it was there, hanging in the air silently, like one of Oprah’s own ripest zingers.
TENTH?
“Well, of course, that’s just RAAACISM!,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton when reached for comment outside yet another restaurant chain he’s trying to shakedown for donations to his diversity consulting firm. “Oprah should have won just as sure as Beyonce should have won and as sure as there should be Black Castle restaurants, and that’s why I’m here tonight, and that’s why Kanye should have one an Ignoble Prize too! Damn, dirty RAAACISTS everywhere!”
Rumor has it the Congressional Black Caucus is already meeting to declare Oprah the real winner of the celebrity flatulence listing…which would, sadly, be the most logical and worthwhile thing the CBC has done in a great while.
What will be the top Halloween costumes of 2009?
We’ve been asking people here in Chicago what they are going to dress up as for Halloween this year. The holiday falls on a Saturday, which means anyone going out drinking that night will have to wear a costume (as opposed to other years, when Halloween’s on a non-party night, so people who don’t like to dress up could avoid it altogether).
Some interesting things are going on with costume sales.
We talked to people like Brian Bowers at Halloween Hallway (3421 N. Southport, right by the Brown EL stop), who have been running costume shops for years to see how the economy’s been reflected in sales. Bowers says it feels like a lot of people are waiting until last minute to buy costumes, either hoping for clearance sales or still not being able to decide whether they want to spend the money to go out. In years past, Bowers says people were willing to dish out the cash to get the best costumes early before they were all gone. Not this year. It’s already two weeks into October and the shelves are full of great packaged stuff.
In Boystown, the Halloween Parade on Halsted will be Alice in Wonderland themed, with Miss Foozie (unofficial Mayor of Boystown and our own gay version of Mickey Mouse) the one and only Queen of Hearts. So, people are being ecouraged to wear Wonderland-themed costumes. We expect a lot of white rabbits (how RAAACIST), mad hatters, playing cards, flamingoes, and Alices of every gender to be in the parade. Other storybook characters would be fitting too.
What we really wonder is if any tall, buff guys will dare to be Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, in all his smurf-blue Playgirl centerfold glory. Legally, a guy couldn’t just paint his hot naked self celurean and call it a costume, but he could put on a blue bodysuit, shave his head, paint the exposed flesh, and add a blue dong to the front and go as Dr. Manhattan. Don’t worry. None of us here are tall enough to get away with that (it’s definitely a 6’4″ or so costume for the full impact of the requisite towering blue atomic-powered nakeness).
An interracial lesbian couple we know is going as Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. We’re trying to talk their other friends into going as Jackie Kennedy, Betty Ford (designated driver), and Mary Todd Lincoln or Grace Coolidge or some more obscure First Lady. That way, it’s more of a group theme instead of just Michelle and Hillary out for an adventure in BizarroWorld.
Themed costumes are always the most fun. We’re doing a theme ourselves here at Buzzquarters: Greek Mythology. It’s popular every year for women to reinterpret male costume for themselves, and make them sexier: like Captain Hook turned into a sexy pirate lady chasing around a female Peter Pan that’s more Katie Morgan than Mary Martin. The most bizarre examples of women sexifying male costumes are the Sexy Jason and Sexy Freddy Kreuger costumes out for women this year. It sounds like something we would just make up around here, but we swear these are real. Basically, they’re just shirt dresses inspired by the serial killers in those movies, one hockey themed and the other something that looks like you’d wear to sexily clean the basement. This whole women appropriating men’s costumes gave us the idea to take classic female characters from mythology and masculinize them. So, we’ll have a male Medusa (a Medudesa), a man-harpy, a male siren, a merman, etc.
We’ve always made our own costumes, which is something we encourage everyone to do. For the Medudesa, we just bought a whole bunch of plastic snakes and are crafting them into an Elvis pompadour style wig, paired with a tee shirt and jeans with snake elements, as well as rocking snake skin boots we got at the thrift store. The whole thing will be under $40, easy.
We thought the economy would inspire other people to make their own costumes, too, but Bowers at Halloween Hallway says that’s not the case at all. Instead of people trying to save money by buying supplies and making their own things at home, Bowers thinks people are going to just buy the cheapest off the rack costumes after procrastinating as long as possible to spend that money. So, in fact, if people are indeed putting off thinking about spending that money, then there will be even LESS homemade costume this year, since there won’t be enough time to make anything for Halloween if they put off the process for much longer. That Medudesay wig alone is taking hours to make, with a couple of structural problems we need to fix (as none of us our wigmakers, but, like with journalism, that’s never stopped us before).
Besides the Halsted Alice in Wonderland theme, different bars around Chicago have their own themes. These are clubs we never go to as we have to admit none of us are ever really comfortable or ever have a good time in straight bars (where guys get drunk and pick fights…as opposed to gay bars where guys get drunk and makeout). One bar, The Crimson Lounge (333 N. Dearborn) is doing a Roaring Twenties Theme, another, The Underground (56 W Illinois) is doing Vampires, and the W Hotel’s throwing a haunted hotel ball, where apparently people will be dressing up as hotels (or people who work in hotels, maybe, as we’re not sure about this one).
LaSalle Power Company’s Deadman’s Ball (500 N LaSalle) is going to be the most interesting, we think, because the theme is “timely, headline-inspired, controversial costumes”.
We’ve been wondering what “of the moment’ inspirations people are having. Last night, we asked people at Sidetracks what they were going as and one daytrader jackass said he thinks people will be going as Beyonce’s Single Ladies dancers, like Justin Timberlake did in that SNL video. Someday we’ll tell you the story of why that guy’s a jackass, but he did have an interesting costume idea that a lot of frat guys might run with. Bowers at Halloween Hallway says women like to dress sexy on Halloween while men like to go for laughs and be funny: the Single Ladies thing really strikes the right chord with that.
It’s hard thinking about what else people might be because we live in Boystown and our world doesn’t involve a lot of straight guys. We have no idea what they would think is funny.
We think there will be drag Farrah Fawcetts out there and know some of the black guys we know are doing Michael Jackson tributes. A group of girls we know is having a bachelorette party on Halloween, with the bride dressed up like Madonna from the Like A Virgin days, and her bridesmaids going as Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Joan Jett, and other female rock and pop stars from the 80s…hoping to bump into different versions of Michael through the night. All summer, we saw people out in Boystown with tribute tee shirts to MJ, so we can’t imagine he won’t be represented in the Halloween parade…maybe even in Thriller form (which, surprisingly enough, someone actually used as a Halloween-inspired fashion show this month, at www.LePassage.com). We also think people should dress as the surviving brunette Angels and carry around an old school telephone as Charlie, looking for the Farrahs that will be out.
Or, someone could be funny and dress up like part Egyptian, part plumber and go as “Pharoah Faucet”, which is a tribute wrapped in puns by way of what we’d think is funny here in Boystown for guys.
Some people say there will be Jon and Kate Plus 8 stuff, but we don’t even have a good idea of who those people are. There could be David Letterman masks with guys chasing any girl they’d see. There will probably be a lot of people dressed as either True Blood or Twilight vamps, maybe even holding bottles of True Blood (V8 juice cans?).
But, what else is really ripped from the headlines? How can the now meaningless Nobel Peace Prize be worked in? Will people in Chicago goof on the Olympics debacle? What are people doing for Halloween costumes near you?
It might be fun to continue to brainstorm on this so all of you out there can get some ideas of your own…with plenty of time to save money by crafting things yourselves.
The great race to de-Olympics Chicago
Olympics themed signs still littered around town
All around town, countless millions of dollars were wasted putting Olympics signage and decoration up wherever it could be emblazoned. Meanwhile, Chicago Public Schools have ceiling tiles falling on students and water dripping from roofs open to the elements.
Since disastrously coming in fourth place in the IOC vote, Chicago’s now racing to replace the Olympics signage everywhere with, essentially, what it had before. In many cases, however, fools were so confident in Mrs. Utopia’s claim that she “would bring home the Olympics no matter what” that they chucked the old signs and now have to remake them, as the Olympics signs are laughable today.
It will be interesting to see how long the Olympics bid legacy remains in Chicago. There are still storefronts around town that have Blagojevich 2006! signs up in the windows, coated in dust, littered with dead spiders and the like. How long will the Olympics haunt us like that?
The LGBTQ Community should stop backing the Human Rights Campaign immediately
Andrew Sullivan is what would happen if someone magically anthromorphized an ass and gave it a typewriter — not an ass like a donkey or a mule, but the other kind. Then, instead of spewing things directly into the toilet, Sullivan would whirl crap off into print. Which is what he does at The Atlantic.
Here’s a piece he just did on the big LGBTQ event Dr. Utopia attended hosted by the Human Rights Campaign (which we stopped abbreviating as HRC, because that’s what we abbreviate Hillary Rodham Clinton as…and these days we certainly do not want the two confused, as the latter’s someone we’d go to Hell and back for, gladly, eight days a week while the former’s an organization we have as much respect for now as we do the Nobel Peace Prize.).
Sullivan acts surprised Dr. Utopia is not really doing, or planning to do, anything for the LGBTQ community. As if anyone who’s been paying attention couldn’t see that. We’ve been telling everyone this for almost two years now. The anecdote we think most clearly brings this into focus is that Dr. Utopia, on June 29th 2008, refused to march in the Chicago Gay Pride Parade, the largest in the Midwest, because he wanted to get his haircut and play basketball that day instead. Just a month later, he chose to march in the black Bud Billiken Day Parade, because that was more important than a haircut and shooting some b-ball down by the East Bank Club.
Hillary Clinton marches in Pride parades. Senator Roland Burris marched in the 2009 Chicago Gay Pride Parade. Every major politician in Illinois (save for closet cases like Aaron Schock) march in Pride parades.
But never, not once in his charmed life, has Dr. Utopia.
Why is that?
Because he doesn’t give one damn about the LGBTQ community, knowing it will support the Democrat by default in every election without question.
We used to support the Human Rights Campaign without question, too. Back in 1996, one of us here was in New York City for his first Pride Parade. He hadn’t even come out yet, and hadn’t even been to a gay bar yet, and was in New York on unrelated business and just happened to literally stumble upon the rainbows, music, and sparkles as he walked up 49th to Fifth Avenue. That’s a sight he will never forget, being surrounded by so many other gay people that he was part of the majority out and about that day, not the secret minority.
One of the first people to come up and talk to him at the parade was a Human Rights Campaign volunteer, wearing a blue tank top and short 70s-style yellow silk shorts. He had a blue and yellow Human Rights Campaign headband on, and a curly mop of cherubic blond hair like Ryan Phillipe in “54″. Whoever sent him out to gather donations picked him perfectly from central casting, as he was moving in the delivery of his spiel and got $200 off one of us by way of that form on the street.
Collectively, all of us have more or less supporting the Human Rights Campaign every year since then, giving as much as we could every June for Pride.
That stopped in 2008 and we will never again give this organization a single dime.
Why?
Because Joe Solomonese made the executive decision to give all Human Rights Campaign donations from June through November in 2008 to Dr. Utopia’s presidential campaign. All the money given to the organization by people who wanted to see it make actual progress for the LGBTQ community was handed over to a narcissicist who we know full well has no intention whatsoever of doing anything for gays.
That money might as well have been funneled to the Rev. Fred Phelps. Dr. Utopia and Phelps are both Democrats who have done the same amount of positive things for the LGBTQ community — though Phelps has actually attended Pride parades (albeit screaming and yelling about how much God hates fags, while adoring crazed, dirty, zealots apparently).
Whenever the Human Rights Campaign sends its well-cast handsome, hipster donation collectors out at LGBTQ events in Chicago (and they’ll certainly be out for Halloween), we tell them, when we’re approached, that we stopped giving to the Human Rights Campaign in 2008 and will never give again — and we explain why. The reaction we get is always the same: rolled eyes and politeness while they stand and pretend to listen, but we can tell they’re just playing music in their heads (the way we do whenever anyone talks to us about something we don’t care the least about). As soon as they realize they won’t be getting a donation from us, they start scanning the crowd for approaching faces who might be the next $50 or $100 pledge on their lists.
But, still we make our point.
At whatever LGBQ event we go to in Chicago, if there’s a Human Rights Campaign table or presence, we also bring up Solomonese’ decision to fork over all that money to Dr. Utopia. Without fail, most people in the room don’t even realize he did that. Then they claim the organization always does that for Democrats…which is not true, since they didn’t do that for Kerry. That’s odd because the LGBTQ community claims George W. Bush was some sort of devil, and everything possible had to be done to defeat him and all his evil in 2004. And, yet, the Human Rights Campaign was not “all-in” for Kerry the way it bent over backwards for Dr. Utopia. We could get graphic and extend the Andrew Sullivan metaphor for what Solomonese really did for Dr. Utopia in terms of prostituting the Human Rights Campaign, but you get the idea (and, if not, then you’ve obviously never been to Steamworks).
And George W. Bush did more for HIV/AIDS funding than any president before him, including the Clintons, which is BEYOND IMPRESSIVE. A Republican president who knew he’d never win even the smallest fraction of the gay vote goes out of his way to do good for the LGBTQ community…and is still villified cartoonishly by bitter fops who have no idea what they’re talking about, only parroting what they hear played in comedy bits at Sidetracks on Thursday nights. ”Bush is a dumb chimp!”, “Bush is evil!”, “Bush is so stupid he can’t do anything right!”.
And Dr. Utopia, in contrast, is an enchanted Lightbringer who solves all the world’s problems, attains word peace two weeks into the job, lowers the oceans and brings equality and justice for all gay men, women, and transgenders.
According to the asses at the Human Rights Campaign, at least.
Monday Open Thread: October 12th, 2009
What’s on your mind this Monday?
What things will Dr. Utopia win today? The right to be on Mount Rushmore? A pyramid in the center of the National Mall? The Wooly Bear Festival’s Honorary Grand Marshall crown?
There’s a world full of awards out there to cheapen and bestow upon someone who did nothing to deserve them. What do you think the elite committees of the world will give Dr. Utopia next?
Why even have an Academy Awards next February…Dr. Utopia has already won them all, including Best Picture. He’s even won the special Animation Oscar — another historic first.
Truly, we behold The One and Only Lightbringer indeed.
*****
Unrelated to anything, but here’s a totally awesome remix of the new Whitney single — Million Dollar Bill. We are rooting for this wonderful woman to have the comeback of our lifetimes. With so much wrong in the world, and so many terrible things being done to this country by those in Washington, Hera knows we need a Whitney in top form sining and dancing and being fabulous, now more than ever. At least here in Boystown. When this plays in clubs, it gets everyone on the dance floor…and is kind of fun to groove to on a dreary Monday here in Chicago.
Where the Hell’s Whitney Houston’s Nobel Peace Prize for that?
