Jerry Boyle

When your brother is the biggest crush in Hollywood, every media shill lines up to suck your dick.

Be a good boy, like Tom Foley and Walter Mondale — accept your electoral irrelevance, and fade into dignified obscurity.

When Biden won in 2020, it was hilarious to watch the media tout him for Transportation, then Commerce. In the end he had to settle for the booby prize, exile in Japan, a time-honored sinecure for washed-up Democratic pols.
He didn’t get the message. Everyone else did.

So Rupert Murdoch wants Democrats to vote for Rahm you say?
You’d have to be a fool to take that bait.

This man is ballot box poison, a relic of a bygone era. But the media props him up to curry favor with his brother.

It’s significant that there is now a palm reader in the Loop again. It’s been a long time since they could afford the rent.

But we survived a much more calamitous White Flight in the 70s. We’ll survive this. And we’ll lose a lot of gentrifying jerks to the burbs. Good.

There *is* a lot of pent up supply. Investors don’t want to recognize the losses, and lenders would prefer to defer the write-offs for a while.
Lower housing cost is only a problem if you’re invested in housing.

And it’s not the only bath Griffin took on his condos. He runs a successful hedge fund, but he sucks at real estate investments.

Political Rivals, Real Estate Partners? JB Pritzker Buys Ken Griffin's $19M Gold Coast Condos Money talks, even between political rivals. After years of multimillion-dollar campaign battles and public spats, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker purchased two luxury condos from Citadel founder Ken Gri...

The rich have always been skittish, going back to the invention of the North Shore.
This sale illustrates my point. Ken Griffin takes a $15 million bath, and skips town. It throws off the average, but what’s not to like?

Chicago: lower home prices in core, soaring prices around Map showing same.

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect the darkness in the center is the ultra-wealthy market cratering, skewing everything else. But that’s exactly the kind of White Flight we want. And office-to-residential conversions will offset that in the long run.

Photo of cat. Reasons cats are better than babies: Pepperwolf When you're done holding cats you can just drop them on the floor.

I ❤️ babies, but it *would* be cool if they always landed on their feet.

Header: "Where do you see yourself in five years?" Image: Armed, hooded insurgents walking in alley.

Glad I’m not looking for a job now.

autism is a spectrum

Post an iconic horror movie image.

Chinoceros: A White Rhino, whose two horns are the Sears Tower and Hancock Tower and is chewing on an L train, standing knee deep in Lake Michigan with a cloudy sky behind. The Chino's side is decorated with the four six-pointed stars of the Chicago flag.

Happy 188th birthday, Chicago

It’s an obscure one, by an obscure Beat poet. I ran across it many years ago.

Pervert Glasses

“Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I
knew again that never will the
Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparalleled
monstrocity. It
Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a
blind, red, rhinoceros.
It’s already running us down.” — Lew Welch

Props to Shawn and The Reader for calling out Pritzker’s hypocrisy.

“Ayatollah Khamenei is dead! Long live Ayatollah Khamenei!”

Israel is *our* proxy, not the other way around.

They steel man an ignorant autocrat to address their own insecurities.
Iran *was* the ultimate target for our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It doesn’t matter that our pincers blew up in our face. This too will blow up in our face. It’s just a matter of time.

*Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton.’ They’re designed to exhaust.

They’re *all* distractions.
“Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration”*

"We called London a war zone and moved to Dubai by mistake"

Fascism gaslights and exhausts. If you look for consistency, you search in vain. It operates arbitrarily, at the whim of the will to power.

Chicago Kościuszko monument.

We do have a monument to Kościuszko on our lakefront.

And, yeah, before product differentiation became a thing in the beer industry, most folks were either Budweiser or Old Style. Chicago was an Old Style town, a vestige of our historic rivalry with St. Louis.

Upside down Old Style beer tavern sign.

Taverns are pretty ruthless about attracting their customer base.
I’m old enough to remember when gay bars hung their signs upside down. A discursive metaphor was risky, so they went with a symbolic metaphor instead.