3 April 2003
Election and marriage in one week. Three cheers for Manny Flores! (It isn’t often noted, but most 1st Ward residents are not Latino–proof that voters, even in Chicago, don’t always vote their race.)

1 April 2003
Today’s the day to make fun of the Cheneys, or maybe to point out the obvious: that Chicagoans live in an imperial banana republic, complete with “tanks rumbling down the main street of a Third World capital on their way to a pre-dawn coup.” (RedEye actually had the most amusing take: “Daley uses his super powers to shut down Meigs.”)

28 March 2003
All double taxation is not created equal.

27 March 2003
Have a death wish out there? Try ObitMessenger and make sure you know exactly when you’ve outlived your rivals! (The little graphic of someone’s Outlook inbox piled up with death notices is particularly odd.)

20 March 2003
“This is not PlayStation… this is innocent people being killed.” Andrew Refshauge, deputy premier of New South Wales

20 March 2003
“There are many good reasons to get rid of Saddam,” Mr. Randall said. “But when did the events of Sept. 11 get transformed into going to war with Iraq? Why war with this one country, right now? I can’t figure out how we got to this point.” NYT. There are more ruthless, more evil, more heavily armed, more America-hating, more Islamist dictators. So why this? Why us? Why now?

19 March 2003
“the developers need to pay attention to design. Their consulting architect is James Loewenberg, whose work is now in the city’s cross-hairs because of negative reactions to his new buildings in River North. The project will test City Hall’s stated will to hold developers to higher architectural standards.” Sun-Times

12 March 2003
HOPE VI was an idea with much promise, but it, like most other redevelopment programs, was doomed by underfunding and cynical implementation. Case in point: the wholesale relocation and abandonment of Chicago’s public housing families, driven by the politically expedient need to sweep deep-seated social ills under the rug. Of course, those same expediencies got us into this mess in the first place.

10 March 2003
No, one cannot buy happiness on an individual basis (at least without reducing overall happiness), but it may be possible for societies to collectively decide upon policies that promote overall happiness.

28 February 2003
Alex Star, the editor of the fondly remembered Lingua Franca (oh, how its passing left a hole in my life), is back with Ideas, a reinvented Sunday magazine for the Globe. But although some story ideas are strong, it (as well as the Times’ Arts & Ideas or the features in the Chronicle) suffers from newspaper brevity.

18 February 2003
Two efficient lightbulbs per trans-Atlantic flight sounds like a bargain, carbon-wise.

17 February 2003
This morning’s death of a score of Chicagoans in a stampede to poorly marked fire exits comes just shy of a century after the Iroquois fire, where bodies were found piled ten deep at the gallery exits.