Sunday links

Following up on `Call Northside 777

The Hannah Eschrig challenge

Which GOP gubernatorial hopeful deserves the nickname, "Mr. Tea"?

The Fake AP Stylebook

Apostrophe abominations

More follow-up on `Call Northside 777'

Earlier this week I blogged on the movie "Call Northside 777" and touched on the true story behind the 1948 film classic shot in Chicago.

On that post, the son of the real-life prison inmate on whom the story turns, left an extended  comment, which I'll re-publish here along with a couple of old Tribune clips.

The character "Frank Wiecek" was based on a man named Joe Majczek. And Jim Majczek of Plano Center, born four years after his father was exonerated in the murder of a police officer and walked out of Stateville Correctional Center a free man, wrote this:

Dugan punts

Evidently serial sex killer Brian Dugan is taking a pass on the opportunity to testify at his own sentencing hearing. Tsk. After he tried so hard to speak out at one of his court dates, after he had a note slipped to the media, after he tried to arrange for a TV interview.

Now that he has a chance to talk in open court he's declining. Is it because he'd have to face hostile questioning from prosecutors?

I realize that being a coward is one of Dugan's lesser failings on the scale of his many failings, but still....

Still harboring doubts about the mysterious stroller incident

 
Shameful.

A mother reports undergoing an unimaginably traumatic experience: Watching her child in a stroller being dragged by a departing CTA train, her little head bouncing along the "L" platform until the stroller strikes a guardrail and flings the child onto the track bed.

The child is safe. But now the mother must endure not only the horrifying memories but also the scrutiny of the armchair skeptics who think her story's a hoax. How could they? Well, allow me to speak for the armchair skeptics.

To us, the relevant question is how could the CTA, the Chicago Police Department and many in the media not operate on the assumption that the widely reported incident at the Morse Avenue Red Line stop Monday evening was phony?

(photo of the stroller believed to have been the one caught in the train doors)

Fine line

Stop watching cable TV news and listening to politicians. Using them as a gauge of how divided we are is like using the National Hockey League to estimate the level of violence in America.... Steve Chapman

Sweet

This short video's going around. If you can watch it without getting a tear in your eye, you're made of sterner stuff than I:

The story behind this video is here (San Antonio Express)

CTA Tattler readers don't believe Stroller Mom

The CTA Tattler at ChicagoNow asks What's your opinion on what happened in the stroller accident? and posts the poll below showing (at the time of this posting) only 3 percent of 245 respondents saying they believe the mother's story:

Many of these responses and the comments (add yours to my thread on this topic here) may have come in before this story:

Traces of paint on a stroller appear to support a mother's claim that it was caught in the doors of a CTA train and dragged across the platform until it hit a guard rail, flinging her toddler down by the tracks, police say.

Does that change your view?

COMMENTS

We do not look good here

Illinois is mentioned far too often in The Impact of State Income Taxes on Low-Income Families in 2008

While some working-poor families get help lifting themselves out of poverty through exemptions from state income taxes, in many states they continue to face substantial state income tax liability... Six states — Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Montana, and Ohio— tax families of three or four in severe poverty, meaning those earning less than three-quarters of the federal poverty line. That income level in 2008 was $12,874 for a family of three and $16,513 for a family of four. While most states set income tax thresholds high enough to exempt from taxes a family of three where the employed person works full-time at minimum wage, seven do require such a family to pay: Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Montana, Ohio, and Oregon....The tax bill for a poverty-line family of four exceeds $200 in eight states: Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, and Oregon.

Via Progress Illinois

Narrow escapes

Good fortune:

A reader reminds me that the last one (above) is from a TV commercial. Here's the famous baby/stroller video from Australia:

And a couple more compilations. Some repeats here:

Tax Increment Financing -- A webliography

A collection of online resources to deepen your understanding of the TIF issue.

Neighborhood Capital Budget Group -- a TIF primer & Who Pays for the Only Game in Town?

Tax Increment Financing  (TIF)  -- a 97-page Civic Federation Issue   report

Ben Joravsky's TIF archive in the Chicago Reader. See TIFs for Dummies

Progress Illinois' archive of TIF coverage

Cook County Clerk's Office: TIFs 101: A taxpayer's primer for understanding TIFs in Q&A format. 

Policy Brief: Time to Throw a TIF- Invisible, Unaccountable Taxes You’ve Never Heard Of. --Illinois Policy Institute

Please suggest additional resources in comments.

Fine line

Inasmuch as this is an incident I did not personally witness, between colleagues I do not know very well, over a matter that remains partly conjecture, it would be inappropriate and irresponsible for me to comment on it. I will therefore try to limit my thoughts to a mere 4,000 words.... Gene Weingarten, Washington Post

Putting a little rat into Mickey Mouse

In  After Mickey’s Makeover, Less Mr. Nice Guy, the New York Times reports today that the Walt Disney Company is finally planning to restore some definition to the Mickey Mouse character.

Thirteen years ago, during what must have been the 30th time through the velveeta hip-hop tune "Mickey Mania" I  began to entertain a serious question about the subject of the song, the most prominent mouse in the world:

What's Mickey to me or me to Mickey?

Maybe the Florida sun was baking my brain. Maybe the weight of a 6-year-old perched on my shoulders for the duration of the afternoon parade in Disney World's Magic Kingdom was restricting the flow of essential humors. But soon another tune seemed to drown out the first.

M-I-C. . . . See if I care.

K-E-Y. . . . Why? Because Disney stopped making Mickey Mouse cartoons in 1953, 'The Mickey Mouse Club' went off network TV in 1959 and therefore he is a vague and uncompelling   fictional character to me.

M-O-U-S-E.

The thought may dismay those of you who grew up thinking of Mickey in the sort of vivid terms that kids today think of, say, Kermit the Frog, but for many of us under 60, Mickey Mouse is little more than a symbol.

He may be a plucky, cheerful, idealistic and somewhat innocent cartoon hero to you, but he is a logo to us--a mascot like the Michelin Man or the Jolly Green Giant, only with a much higher Q-rating.

World's Greatest Podcast -- Sexy acccents, the feel-good bakery & Stroller Girl

I called in sick today yet, somehow Mary Schmich and John Williams carried on without me. They did not mention my name for fear, I suspect, that it would cause them to burst into tears:

Doubts about the `Stroller Girl' story

OK, I believed this story at first but the more I hear it the stranger it gets...A commenter on the story "CTA and baby stroller: Questions arise after mother says girl thrown from stroller at Morse "L" platform -- Stroller had gotten caught in doors of departing train, mother says; 22-month-old suffers only minor injuries."

I'm feeling a little touch of the something today (let it be H1N1 and let this be the worst of it) and so maybe that"s why I can't square the reported facts of this story as they emerge. So many little things had to go exactly wrong and then almost miraculously right for this incident first to have happened at all and second not to have been a horrible tragedy. 

Am I wrong to think there are still some big, important details we don't know? Details that will exonerate the train operator (suspended without pay? Isn't it customary to pay suspended public employees while an investigation proceeds?)

If so, I'll shutup and go back to bed.

Saturday will be another, far worse date to hate for phone users

It was a more innocent time nearly 20 years ago when I wrote a column that began "We hate 708."

The metropolitan region was about to split into two area codes -- the classic, familiar, time-honored 312 for thr city and the new, dreaded, strange 708 for the burbs.

"708 costs us time," I griped about the split, which took effect on Feb 9, 1990. "About two extra seconds on a push-button phone, nearly six seconds on a rotary phone. Four seconds to listen to the recorded voice of the directory assistance operator say "area code 708" before the number. At least five seconds to redial after screwing up. Fifteen minutes to have a cellular phone reprogrammed."

Well, we all got used it and adapted fine to 708 then 847, 773 and 630. Now comes 872, an "overlay" area code that, starting Saturday will require all city dialers to punch all 11 digits (1-312-222-3232, for instance) even when calling a next-door neighbor.

And it will require a massive reprogramming of the numbers stored in all of our various telephonic devices.

872, we hate you.