Jerry Boyle

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.

Tavern sign for Old Style beer. Footer: CERVEZA FRIA

And I thought Cerveza Fria was the guy who had the monopoly on taverns in Mexican neighborhoods.

It’s pretty far West, so yeah, it gets stroady.

Tavern sign for Old Style beer, with footer: ZIMNE PIWO

As a boy growing up isolated in Irish neighborhoods, I thought Zimne Piwo was the guy who had the monopoly on taverns in Polish neighborhoods.

YouTube video by Larry Coryell - Topic Polish Reggae

This one’s always my earwig on Pulaski Day.

Was the Revolutionary War Hero Casimir Pulaski Intersex? A new Smithsonian Channel documentary may affirm long-standing suspicions about the Polish fighter’s identity

I’m conflicted about this one. On the one hand, if this was his identity, we should absolutely celebrate it. But in recent years I worry about “transvestigation” of folks with gender-ambiguous physical features.

I don’t know if it’s still true, but when I was growing up it was said Chicago had more Poles than any city outside Warsaw.
We’re an immigrant town, but immigration has always been an issue here. Each succeeding wave of immigrants faced resistance.

Street sign from the dividing line between bigotry and humanity, Showing Crawford Avenue one way, and Pulaski Road in the other.

In the suburbs, it’s still Crawford Day, the fucking bigots.

Can’t blame the Poles for doubling down with an honorary street designation on a street already officially named after Pulaski.
It took a hell of a fight to overcome prejudice against Poles to get that road named after Pulaski.

Street signs in Chicago: N Pulaski RD Honorary Casimir Pulaski Way Footer: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

The first Monday in March is when Illinois and Chicago observe Pulaski Day, for the Polish founder of the US Cavalry. He came here to fight the Brits in the Revolutionary War. What’s not to like?

I say better than Patrick because all he did was convert Irish to Christian, and whether that was a good thing remains controversial in some quarters of the Irish community. I’m Christian, but acknowledge the ambivalence of Patrick’s legacy.

Columbus Statue In Little Italy Park To Be Replaced By One Of Mother Cabrini, Park District Says Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American saint, easily won a public vote to determine a replacement for the Columbus statue that was controversially removed by the city in 2020.

A recent positive development was replacement of one of the Columbus statues. I told my Italian friends: “Do like Irish. Pick a Saint, a good one, and you’ll never regret it.”
Mother Cabrini is a beloved figure here, a champion of the poor and oppressed, even better than Patrick.
I voted for her. 🙏

It was unfortunate that, just as Italian immigrants here were struggling to gain acceptance, the politics back home in Italy were fascist. So an Italian fascist aviator, Italian Balbo, landed in Chicago to much fanfare. That was before WW II broke out, of course. Doh!

It’s so controversial it was moved to an obscure corner of the campus of our Police Memorial, perhaps the most heavily-surveilled piece of real estate in town. Cops didn’t object to having a fascist monument with their memorial. I wonder why?