Archive for October 26th, 2009
It was bound to happen eventually: someone had a GOOD idea for how Chicago can raise money, one not involving selling public assets
Times are tough for everyone these days. Many of us here have been getting by selling books, DVDs, art, and vintage designer clothes on eBay and Amazon…whatever we can sell to make some extra money. We’re picking up catering and bartending gigs wherever we can, in addition to working full time day jobs and, in two cases, holding down second jobs waiting tables too. People we know are selling their TVs, cameras, scooters, you name it on Craigslist.
And the City of Chicago’s in on the Great Fire Sale too...first selling off our parking meter collection and now trying to sell the City’s water supply and wastewater treatment rights.
Ridiculous.
Unlike that Donna Karan jacket that’s rarely worn (and, truth be told, fit best 15 years and 25 pounds ago), the City of Chicago actually NEEDS its water supply and public utilities.
The Olympics and parking meter mess was bad enough. Mayor Daley needs to knock it off with the reckless selling of assets.
That’s why we were heartened this evening when we ran across this piece in the Tribune about soliciting corporate sponsorship and naming rights for the city’s train stations.
It is a brilliant idea we support whole-heartedly for many reasons.
For starters, the public art in all of these train stations is hideous. It’s thst schlocky, faux-funky, forced multicultural, abstract, bright colors garbage that big cities force upon commuters.
Hideous.
Madison Avenue can do so much better.
Miracle Whip does a small sponsorship of the Addison Red Line Station by Wrigley Field that’s really good, actually. There are interesting Burma Shave-style signs here and there that are fun to read, on the floor of the station, on the ceilings, walls, wherever. Just imagine if Miracle Whip or Heinz Ketchup or whatever could actually sponsor the entire station and pay for a remodel, making it a big ketchup and hotdog or sandwich-themed funhouse. We’d love it.
Apparently, Apple is in talks to pay for the renovation of another station, which it would presumably look Apple inspired, with naming rights.
We say bring it on.
Get Coke to sponsor another one and create something Times-Square worthy and imaginative.
Have Disney do another one and blow the other stations out of the park.
In Cleveland at the turn of the 20th Century, every millionaire in the country had a home on Euclid Avenue, known then as Millionaire’s Row. Rockefeller. Carnegie. Mellon. You name them. And each one competed with the guy next door to create the most opulent, awe-inspiring house possible. One mansion had an indoor skating rink. Another was built with an observatory. Down the street, yet another one looked like a giant wedding cake. The street was lined with linden trees for strolls in the spring and in the winter horse drawn carriages took riders on a tour through an American Wonderland.
None of that remains, of course, but the creativity and potential for awe inherent in competition remains.
The City, if it was smart, would enthusiastically goad corporate America into creating a REAL stimulus. The Coca-Cola Station could top the Apple Station. Nike could swoop in and best the rest. McDonald’s could dazzle with something imaginative and food-themed.
It could really be incredible.
And, though commercial, a DRASTIC improvement on the generic, pedestrian, and sometimes filthy stations we have now.
Whatever we can do to encourage this sponsorship deal, we are totally on it.
Republican Congressman Aaron Schock needs to work with publicist Howard Bragman
Howard Bragman is a name you’ve probably never heard, but he apparently, according to Nikki Finke over at Deadline Hollywood Daily, is THE consultant to hire when someone in the public eye needs to develop a coming out strategy.
Bragman’s never brought a major film or music star out of the closet, yet, but has helped several actors and athletes come out.
The lines between Hollywood and Washington blur so often, politicians should think about using Bragman, too.
Congressman Aaron Schock of Peoria, in particular, needs to give Bragman a call. He sure deserves better advice than the people around him in Peoria can give, and much, much better than the GOP in Illinois can muster.
An out and proud Aaron Schock, in our opinion, would be UNSTOPPABLE in 2014 when he could take Dick Durbin’s Senate seat.
All Schock would need is 4% of Cook County here in Chicago. Gays and the LGBTQ-supportive in Boystown and Andersonville alone are easily 4% of Chicago. They might not pull a lever for a Republican, but Bragman might be able to convince them to sit the election out and let Schock beat Durbin.
And after that, who knows what can happen. A term in the Senate and it could very well be Palin/Schock in 2020…either our first or second female president and our first openly gay VP.
On rainy days, just imagine how that would make heads explode on BOTH pole of the political spectrum.
In a word, it would be fabulous.
And today we learned about a publicist who could help Schock take the steps to make it happen.
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Essentially unrelated, but not worthy of its own post, Levi Johnston’s “manager” Tank Jones announced today that Johnston will indeed pose full frontal for Playgirl.com next month…for the photos to be ready for Christmas. Just what everyone wants to see, a stocking that needs stuffing.
Johnston is the father of Bristol Palin’s son, Trip. The Palin family was very good to Levi, even letting him live with them, and he’s repaid them by hamming it up with the likes of Kathy Griffin and doing everything he possibly can to harm the people raising his son.
All that money Hollwood’s paying him to attack his baby’s grandmother has been going to new cars, travel, and all sorts of adventures for Johnston.
We’re very pleased to learn Johnston will indeed showcase his shortcomings in Playgirl in December, but not in the way Aaron Schock would be.
It’s really hard for even MSNBC to use Johnston as a weapon against the Palins when he’s buck naked on a website.
Hopefully it will be his very last payday.
For him or his teeny ‘nanner.
Enormous F-U? Rio posters popping up all over Chicago for new movie "2012"
We’d love to know what’s the real story here: new posters for the Roland Emmerich Mayan calendar-comes-to-an-end-and-with-it-the-world-itself disaster epic feature Rio DeJaneiro getting DeJanclobbered are popping up all over Chicago.
On EL platforms.
On kiosks that used to have posters promoting the 2016 Olympics bid.
On Oprah’s enormous, bulbous, butt (though, technically, those billboards weren’t intentionally put there, but were absorbed into the Charybdis of Lake Michigan’s DeRriere when she had to “sit down and rest a spell”, like so many small villages and strip malls before them).
We wonder if someone in the PR firm promoting the pic did this deliberately, as a nod to Rio’s triumph over Chicago for the Olympics…so it’s playing off the feelings roughly 12 Chicagoans have who are still upset Rio beat us for the Games.
Or, did the ad firm put these posters up everywhere, so it has nothing to do with Chicago at all, and is just because people are talking about Rio since it won the Games.
But, there are posters of the White House and LA being destroyed that are online, but nowhere to be found in Chicago.
The only shots we see are of Rio biting it big time.
But, what’s really funny is that the FIRST thing we thought of when we saw this poster on an EL platform was actually Dr. Utopia and the end of the first Special Edition of Return of the Jedi back in the 90s, where George Lucas screwed with the ending to insert a shot of Emperor Palpatine’s massive statue being torn down on Coruscant. Yes, totally geek-out moment there, but the image of the giant statue being torn down was employed during the invasion of Iraq, where a photo op showed Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled in the same way in the middle of a major square.
We are 100% certain that if anything happens to Dr. Utopia during his term in office a giant statue like this will be erected of him somewhere…right on the National Mall if his followers have their way. It would be horrific to have this monstrosity in Chicago, but surreal to imagine that happening in relation to Rio’s own giant statue of a messiah.
But, the poster makes us wish for the day we think is fast-approaching when the cult of personality the MSM has built around this president collapses and all of his followers, drunk on Kool-Aid, are swept away on a wave of reason, for the first time actually seeing him for the flawed, promise-breaking, egomaniac we know him to be.
We laugh because none of this is what the movie poster is meant to do: which is make us want to go see the movie. We’re sure we’ll see this eventually, but most likely on video.
With the world already falling apart under Dr. Utopia’s determined de-exceptionalizing of America, we don’t need to watch everything go to pot metaphorically at the multiplex as well.
Chicago Tribune reporting on Dr. Utopia's Presidential Library and Museum: takes on new importance after Olympics disaster
We’ve been reporting on schemes here in Chicago to land Dr. Utopia’s presidential library and museum since last year.
Part of Chicago’s Olympics plan was to use all the private and federal monies that would have poured into that to construct the parking, security, and other support structures for the Utopia Presidential Library and Museum in Washington Park, on the City’s southside, using the “temporary” Olympics stadium designed for the 2016 Games as the initial occupant of that land.
Chicago saw a way to get a jump on Honolulu, which remains where we believe Dr. Utopia will eventually want his library (since he has no real love for Chicago, and just used the City to get where he is, expertly so. Chicago will be tossed away in the end, like everything else with this man).
Chicago would have claimed repeatedly the Olympics stadium was only temporary…which in truth, the stadium itself would have been, but the LAND in Washington Park would have never been returned to the people. Those support structures, parking garages, and infrastructure leading to the stadium site would have been successfully marketed as the PERFECT SPOT — it just so happens, imagine that! — for the Utopia Library and Monument to Hope, Change, and Unicorns.
If you live in this city, you can see the scams and schemes coming miles away.
Now that the Olympics disaster cost Chicago this route to the library, there’s a scramble to come up with Plan B, and that appears to be the University of Chicago…which argues Dr. Utopia taught there, that he bought a house a few blocks away with the help of convicted felon Tony Rezko, that his wife, Mrs. Utopia, was given a cushy job at the hospital there to divert the sick and poor to substandard medical centers to save UofC millions (while simultaneously receiving over $200,000 in pay increases when her husband became a Senator)…and so the library should be there.
They make a very good case, actually. But with endowments down at all the Big Thinking schools (Harvard bet everything on hedge funds and has recently lost large chunks of its investments…not sure how UofC is doing, but the Big Thinkers there most likely blindly followed Harvard’s example and are probably in trouble too), we wonder how they’ll be able to afford the project if they get it.
We are in a Depression people. This “Great Recession” nonsense is wishful thinking. By 2012, people are going to be in truly bad shape here in Chicago. Especially if Mayor Daley succeeds in selling the city’s remaining assets and utilities off in a fire sale.
Where are all the donors going to come from to pay for the Utopia library?
Will Liberals still be wild about him in 2012, especially after he becomes the first one-term Democrat since Carter?
It just feels to us like Dr. Utopia will move to Hawaii after the White House. If the Norwegians and other foreigners still love him, maybe he’ll achieve his ultimate goal of becoming “President of Earth”. He seems intent on weakening America and surrendering our sovereignty for SOME REASON. Perhaps it’s to subjugate the US to the UN enough that the Mos Isley cantina of international diplomacy will be comfortable enough to allow an American to become Secretary General.
Dr. Utopia has used every position he’s had as a stepping stone to the next one. Now that he’s the POTUS, we wonder if he’s dreaming of becoming Secretary General or Pope…or if he’s just content being a demigod in his own mind, or in the hearts and addled minds of his most devoted followers.
It’s a given endless things will be named, or renamed, after this man when his presidency ends in 2013. In Chicago, we expect Orchard Avenue (parallel to Martin Luther King) to be renamed Obama Avenue…with Midway Airport ultimately becoming the Barack H. Obama International Airport (that, or Gary’s Airport will be renamed for Obama…which would meet less resistance, because the remaining WWII vets will (and should) raise holy Hell if they try to change Midway’s name).
Orchard Avenue, incidentally, just so happens to border Washington Park…where that Olympics stadium would have been…with MLK on the other side. That construction plan just writes itself if Utopia’s followers can get away with it.
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PS – Be sure to read the comments on the article posted here. It’s interesting that people are saying what they are, in a Chicago publication. The Nobel Prize really hurt Dr. Utopia more than even we realized…people are noting the Emperor has no clothes, at last.
Our favorite comment thus far was someone noting that presidential libraries are things people talk about at the end of a presidency, which puts people in mind that Dr. Utopia’s best efforts and days are already behind him. He won the Nobel Prize for doing nothing besides speechifying. And now they want to start building monuments and libraries to a man who is all about NOTHING.
How long before people start putting it together that this is Affirmative Action at its zenith? Endless reward and adulation just for showing up, because he’s part black. A Nobel Prize. The grandest of all libraries. Everything imaginable being renamed for him.
The blowback on all of this is going to be fierce when it comes.
Monday Open Thread: October 26th, 2009
Happy Birthday Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State.
The first female Senator to represent the state of New York.
The most accomplished former First Lady of the United States in American history.
The first woman to win a presidential primary.
The woman who received more votes in a presidential nominating contest than anyone in history.
The first sitting First Lady to march in Gay Pride Parades.
The first occupant of the White House to employ an openly gay staff member.
Incredible mother.
Devoted daughter.
Supportive wife.
Lifelong friend to more people than anyone can count.
You are an amazing woman, Madame Secretary.
And we believe in our hearts you are a future President too.
You turn 62 today.
In 2012, you will be 65. In 2016, you will be just 69.
And a very young 69 at that.
Who knows what the future holds for you, but every day you wake up and do all you can to make this country better for all Americans.
And those of us who support you try our level best every day to learn more, to network, to do whatever we can to strengthen ourselves to be able to help you more…to remain your army of supporters in winter quarters waiting for you to one day return to politics so we can campaign under your banner again.
Happy, happy, happy birthday to you — with so many more to follow.
