Friday, September 25, 2020

The Write City Review

 From my e-mail box this morning...


Please show your support for your CWA friends!

Our third edition of The Write City Review is now on sale. It's a beautiful literary journal that includes writing and art from over thirty of your fellow writers.

Our CWA community (now nearly 1,000 members strong) is built upon a foundation of mutual support for each other’s work. We write in the hopes of having our work read, and we read to support that hope in others.

If each of us makes a commitment to buy just ONE COPY of
The Write City Review, our published authors would receive much-needed encouragement during these challenging times.

Please buy your Write City Review today. If you think a friend, colleague, family member or neighbor would enjoy a good read, BUY TWO copies!

Together we can ensure that The Write City Review continues to provide a meaningful submission opportunity, and a journal with the outstanding editorial and production values that have made it a work we can all be proud of.

Perhaps your work will be in the next edition.

Stay safe and healthy!
Sincerely,

CWA Board of Directors
Randy Richardson, Samantha Hoffman, Dan Burns, Charlie Monte Verde, Marcie Hill, Christina Rodriguez, Rick Kaempfer, Becky Sarwate, Shawn Shiflett, Sandra Colbert, Maggie Smith
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Ah...I feel better already

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Thursday, September 24, 2020

Bayern Wins Another Cup

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Free Kicks--Goal-A-Palooza

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Generals are for Joe

From NPR.com...

Nearly 500 national security experts – both civilians and former senior uniformed officers — have endorsed Joe Biden for president, saying the "current president" is not up to "the enormous responsibilities of his office."

Addressed to "Our Fellow Citizens," the 489 national security experts include 22 four-star officers. The letter never mentions President Trump by name.

Among those signing the letter is retired Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who stepped down last year as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Pentagon's No. 2 officer. Selva could not be immediately reached for comment.

Another is former Vice Adm. Michael Franken, who retired in 2017 and ran unsuccessfully this year for the Democratic Senate nomination in Iowa.

There's also Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who served as the Army's No. 2 officer before retiring in 2012.

Chiarelli, in an interview with NPR, said he was never involved in politics until now.

"I believe the current administration is a real threat to the republic," he said, citing the president's "attacks on institutions" and his "failure to lead," especially on a coronavirus response. Chiarelli said it "makes me ill" that the wearing of masks to prevent the spread of the virus has been politicized by the president.

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Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Minutia Men Celebrity Interview--Scott Petersen

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Orion Samuelson Retiring

 He's a local treasure who has decided 60 years in radio is enough. At the end of this year, Orion Samuelson is stepping down. Robert Feder has the details.

I met Orion several times over the years. He is a true gentleman. He even sat down with me on the eve of his 50th anniversary, and did a lengthy interview about his career. It's here if you'd like to read it.

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RIP Gale Sayers

 He had been suffering from dementia for a few years, so it wasn't a big shock to hear of the passing of Gale Sayers this morning. It's still a bummer. He was my first football hero. 

He was also the last football star to spend the majority of his career at Wrigley Field. I included Gale on my website Just One Bad Century. Here is his write up...

~Gale Sayers 1943-2020 (Bears in Wrigley, 1965-1970)
The greatest years of Gale Sayers football career were spent at Wrigley Field. He won the Rookie of the Year, scored six touchdowns in one game, and electrified the fans with his incredible open field moves. Sayers was a four-time Pro Bowler, a two-time rushing champion, the comeback player of the year, and his number 40 has been retired by the Bears. He also, unfortunately, badly hurt his knee–cutting his Hall of Fame career short. The movie about his relationship with Bears teammate Brian Piccolo “Brian’s Song” has made more grown men cry than any other movie ever made. (Photo: Topps 1969 Football Card)



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Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Wrigley's Past

 Wrigley used to be accessible by not only the L train. There was a streetcar that went right by the front door (as you can see in this picture). I think this is from the 1940s.

By the way, during the 1918 Pandemic they took out all the streetcar windows so that people could travel with fresh air. Hard to believe that we still don't have a better handle on that more than one hundred years later.




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Review of "Righteous Might" by Keith Conrad


 Windy City Reviews on Keith Conrad's Righteous Might. The full review is here, but this is an excerpt...


Righteous Might. Keith Conrad. Eckhartz Press, June 22, 2020, Trade Paperback and E-book, 260 pages.

Reviewed by Andrew Reynolds.

Have you ever had one of those ideas that, when you looked back at it, you wish you'd kept to yourself? If you have, then you probably have a good idea of how Rebecca Lasky feels as the events in Righteous Might unfold.

Rebecca is the protagonist among an ensemble of characters the reader meets as the story progresses. She has an idea for a way to make an object the size of an aircraft carrier invisible to radar. The fact that she works for DARPA, the Defense Department’s in-house research arm, means she’s in a position to try her idea out in real life. 

That’s how Rebecca, her boss, and a team of technicians end up on the Gerald R. Ford as it and its battle group steam out of Pearl Harbor. The equipment that she hopes will make her idea a reality has been installed on the Ford, but her task has expanded: it is now hoped that her experiment can hide the entire battle group from radar.

As far as the crew of the Ford is concerned, the test is nothing but an annoyance. They're on their way to the continental U.S. and their home port after a long deployment, and all the tests are little more than a delay to them. What none of them know is that their delay is going to be much longer than they thought.

The experiment works, but as the equipment is being shut down, things go terribly wrong. Everyone is rendered unconscious, but once they wake up, they find things have gotten much stranger. None of their satellite-based systems, from GPS to communications, is working. Even their normal communications channels are silent. It’s only when they dispatch a reconnaissance flight to Pearl Harbor that the magnitude of how much trouble they’re in becomes clear: Battleship Row is no longer an empty memorial—it’s filled with the ships that will be sunk on December 7, 1941.

Righteous Might delves into one of the most fundamental problems such a situation would present to its protagonists: What do you do when you can literally rewrite the future you know? Do you try to change history, or do you stand back and let the timeline develop as you remember it? Keith Conrad spins a good yarn, examining that problem through the eyes of his characters. He makes his main characters come alive, and it’s a story that’s easy to get lost in. 

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Monday, September 21, 2020

And John Oliver is wearing a Liverpool hoodie

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Yes, THAT Monica

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Amazon Finally Wore Us Down

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Replacing RBG

I have an outside the box idea to cool off the impending firestorm about the Supreme Court opening. Assuming they can't find four Republican senators to be consistent with their previous position of four years ago (the best-case solution), this might work...


1. Democrats should agree to support a compromise candidate, preferably a woman that is 65 or over (as Obama tried to do with Garland pick--he was an older compromise candidate).  Getting a huge vote--90 or more, would immediately calm the furor.

2. When they regain control of the Senate, Democrats should pass a law limiting a Supreme Court term to a maximum of 30 years. That's a very reasonable amount of time (maybe even too reasonable), but it would mean the next president would replace...Clarence Thomas (1991) and Steven Breyer (1994). The court would remain conservative, but it would be a 5-4 court, with an institutionalist 5th vote (Roberts) to reign in the crazy.

3. It also means the 2024 election would take place without an obvious Supreme Court opening, and thereby reduce the level of animosity there.

Why should both sides agree to this?

The Democrats won't get a better deal. They are not going to be able to stop McConnell, despite his bald and obvious hypocrisy. The Republicans would guarantee they at least keep a conservative majority, while avoiding the inevitable nuclear Democratic reaction (stacking the court). Don't deceive yourself. That nuclear reaction IS inevitable if the Republicans go full-asshole here.

Not that I think anyone will listen to this idea. But it would work in bringing down the temperature, which otherwise has the potential of breaking the new record just set in Death Valley.

Just a thought.
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