Anachronistic question of the week, from the Chicago-based newsletter Generation (June): “Was Jesus ever put in ‘time out’ by Mary? As a real-life baby in the care of a real-life mother, it’s hard to see how it could not have happened.” Uh huh–we can be sure she never laid a hand on him or did anything else that enlightened American parents of the 90s wouldn’t do.
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“Currently, there are 38 Jewels, 18 Dominick’s, 3 Omni Superstores and one Cub Foods in the city of Chicago, with the majority of them concentrated on the North, Northwest and Southwest sides,” writes Maureen Ryan in Chicago Enterprise (July/August). The chains continue to build new 60,000-square-foot superstores, and “underserved urban communities continue to lose full-service, low-cost stores as the chains pursue easily obtainable land and more affluent customers in the suburbs. An 18-square-mile chunk of the West Side–bounded by North Avenue to the north, Ashland Avenue to the east, Cermak Road to the south and the city limits to the west–is without a major chain grocery store. The situation in some South Side neighborhoods is not much better: The closing of the Englewood Jewel means that there isn’t a chain store in a 20-block radius.”
“Our problems begin and end with the man who sits on the fifth floor of City Hall,” Metropolitan Water Reclamation District commissioner Joe Gardner told a June 25 community forum on the proposed theme park-casino complex (reported in a Publicity Works press release). “This is his futile attempt to try to compensate those big ticket, big time contributors who have given $25,000 during his re-election. And as you know he tried land-based casinos, struck out on that; he tried a third airport, struck out on that. So this is for him a kind of last train from boot hill to be able to justify the kind of support that his contributors have given him.”
