Alex is in town and we spent a good chunk of last night discussing the upcoming Chicago mayoral election. Alex's question was, if Daley's administration is so corrupt, why is he such a shoo-in for re-election?

I guess I've gone native because 1)The question seemed strange to me-corruption? Yeah, so what's your point? and 2)I compared it to Clinton/Lewinsky where part of the country was outraged that he got blowjobs and lied about it and the rest of the country shrugged and ignored it. But it's one thing to cheat on your wife and another thing to oversee tons of graft, a crumbling mass-transit system and wretched public schools, to name three things off the top of my head.

The aldermen are up for election as well and this year, according to the LA Times, (and why do I have to go there to read the story rather than locally?) there are 4 guys on the ballot who were aldermen, got arrested and served jail time for political corruption and now are out of jail, running again.

Fun fact from the story: Chicago has more FBI corruption investigation units than any other city. We're number 1! We're number 1!

Okay, they closed down Lakeshore Drive because of the snow and sent us home from school. If not a snowpacalypse then perhaps a major snowfu.

Snow! Yes, to the apparent shock of everyone with a media job in Chicago, it snows here! Sometimes quite a lot! Or, as the Daily Southtown put it:

Snowmageddon has arrived!

Goodbye Anna Nicole. It seems to me you lived your life like a candle being urinated on by a drunken frat boy.

I hope things work out better for you in the next world. This one seemed pretty rough.

Find your own pose!

I suck at predicting the future. For instance, there was a period last spring where I went on and on to my dad and brother about how I thought Joe Biden really seemed plausible as a candidate for president. Although while on the presidential timeline, I'm going to say that McCain will exit the race because of his role in the S&L crisis of the late 80's, not because of Iraq or being insufficiently conservative for the wackos or whatever.

If you had told me a year ago that I would not only run for exercise but that I would be so eager to run on a Friday evening after a stressful week that I would brave 6 degrees Farenheit (before calculating the considerable wind) to do it, I would not believe that prediction. Nevertheless that is what I did yesterday.

I did stop on my way home from work at a yuppie but not dreadful Army Navy store for one of those ninja mask thingies. The clerk was not a dick when I kept calling it a "baklava" which I think is a prudent approach for someone selling a $30 piece of lycra.

I saw the play Fat Pig last weekend and it's taken me a while to process it. It 's by Neil LaBute and it turns out he's one of those artists that people have a definite opinion about. This opinion is very often, "Ugh, no." I can understand why someone would think that although I find him entertaining although I don't wish he and I could hang out or anything.

The play is about a guy who falls in love with a woman who is really fat. His friends, who were mean to him before this woman, become especially mean once they find out that she is fat. It's a bit much to label this a "spoiler" but he dumps her so that he can be lonely instead of teased. The End.

I have been thinking of this as "Goddamn you fat woman for being so desirable, yet fat!" and one more example of LaBute's, uh, conflicted feelings towards women. But I've realized, after just reading the introduction to the published version of the script, that he himself is considerably overweight which is both stressful and also a point of pride because he believes that his writing and his girth are interconnected somehow. Kind of like artists being enamored of bourbon as a muse or Camel Lights but for him it's Pringles. So now I've refined my opinion as "Women should really restrain themselves because they'll get fat but I don't want to restrain myself because it's restraining."

Tom Shales, television critic of the Washington Post, thinks W's necktie was blue. So perhaps my theory is all fucked up. Anyway he has this note:

CBS viewers, especially those who are always suspecting the network of tilting left, may have been jolted by the recorded announcement played during the closing credits of "Armed & Famous," the show that preceded the president's speech on the network. Said an announcer: " 'Criminal Minds' is next, here on CBS."

I haven't heard this in a long time, but when I was a teenager, I remember hearing conservatives complain that the word "gay" had been unfairly appropriated by homosexuals and that there was now one less adjective available for use by ordinary, non-sodomites. "They took a perfectly good word and hijacked it."

I thought of this while looking at pictures of W's speech on the web (I listened on the radio since he's somewhat less infuriating without the visual) and I saw his purple tie. A gay tie? No, for purple is now the symbol of democratic blue states and republican red states blending together in a puppy pile of purple. Too sneering to wear a red tie, too pandering to wear blue, too unfashionable to wear gold.

I like the color red and I feel like they took a perfectly good 33% of the primary colors and hijacked it!

The press can hardly say enough good things about James Brown and rightly so. As for poor Gerald Ford, well the NY Times does a classic job of damning with faint praise:

He might have been the nice guy down the street suddenly put in charge of the nation, and if he seemed a bit predictable, he was also safe, reliable and reassuring. He placed no intolerable intellectual or psychological burdens on a weary land...

60 MINUTES did a story this past Sunday about a find of documents created by the Nazis during the holocaust. I'm assuming that the timing of this story had more to do with refuting the recent Iranian holocaust-denial-palooza than with bringing up lousy memories for the tribe at Hanukkah. I mean, it's different to imagine 60 MINUTES doing an expose on The Crusades, say, at Christmas.

That's not the point. The point is that there was one especially awful piece of narration. I have the podcast for use in transcription:

And just look at the names of the executed. Crowded onto pages, single-spaced. It must have been tiring just to write this, let alone kill them all.

That's the thing about genocide-- it's tiring. Especially the paperwork, geez!

The best part about having one's superpowers be cuddles is that you get to wear cut off sweats and tube socks instead of a lycra caped thingy.