Thursday, Friday November 7-8, 2002

Like 99 seattle riots, 2000 DC protests, 2001 Genoa where one died. Now it's chicago's turn in 2002 for the trans-atlantic business dialogue. It will be at the Sheraton Tower at:
301 East North Water Street, Chicago, IL 60611 map

Sounds like an interesting photo opp for me.

Friday, November 7 at 4:30pm A protest march is being planned from Boeing's headquarters at Washington and Canal to the Sheraton Towers.

reports:
Chicago Tribune: Chicago is girding for an anti-global protest next week.
Chicago Sun-Times: 600 Arrested in D.C. - And They're Coming Here Next

Metra trains should have one car designated for entertainment.
* TV with movies or tv shows playing
* Live entertainment
* Board games, play a game of monopoly with a stranger
* Discussion groups with certain themes
* Vacation picture sharing
* Book club

Any other ideas? (and i'm not talking about the normal, bring a book or a cd player). It can just be so darned boring riding the dull train for an hour and fifteen minutes each way.

On premeire shopping strip in downtown Chicago, Michigan Avenue, they are installing new containers in front of the Hotel Inter Continental. Here's some ideas on what they will hold:
* Flowers / plants
* Swimming pool in summer, ice rink in winter
* Lizards (idea from dave rothkopf)
* Petting Zoo

What do you think they will hold?

The Anaheim Angels have the rally monkey / thundersticks.
Atlanta Braves have the stupid chop
The Minnesota Twins have the homer hanky.
The Chicago Cubs should have...

Paper Towels.

You can swing them in the air like stick. But then you could also fling them through the air, like toilet paper. And the motto could be: "We clean up".

One might say that it would make too much of a mess to clean up afterwords. But contar! It would help the cleanup process after the game, becuase they could use the papertowels on the ground to clean up the groud. They would have big balls of paper towels and they could just roll them around and clean up the stands.

The fans could use the paper towels not only to cheer with, but clean up the mustard they spill on themselves. And when it gets cold, the fans could wrap themselves in paper towels.

I think they should cover Wacker Drive's surface in gold. I was just looking out the window at wacker drive, and noticed that they are going with concrete instead of asphalt. I heard that concrete lasts much longer than asphalt. Maybe that's why they made that choice. But gold would be much more interesting. When you give directions to people, you can tell 'em to "Go for the Gold."

Yahoo's news story. I like lime green and gray. Do I like this logo?

I've found that when i tell someone that I'm a twin, I get some typical questions:
1) are you identical?
2) how far apart were you born?
3) can you feel your twin's pain?
4) what's it like being a twin?

I came up with a funny response for #2: "I think we were born about 4 minutes apart, but I'm not really sure, because I didn't have a watch on me at the time."

And a response for #4: "What's it like to be a singleton?" Okay, that wasn't really funny. But the word "singleton" is kinda funny. I haven't used this one yet, I just read it somewhere.

I know there should be a funny answer for #3, but I can't come up with one.

Today at lunch, there was an elderly fellow dressed in a clean sport jacket and khaki pants who was rummaging through the McDonalds trash cans outside. My first thoughts were that he was homeless searching for food. But then I thought maybe he had accidentally tossed something away. It's something how we immediately assume somebody is homeless, because they are going through a trash can.

It ends up this man was collecting french fries and tossing them to the pigeons. The manner of his actions was like he was on a search and destroy mission. He was very direct and immediate with his searching. Almost like he does this every day. Or perhaps he realizes that the McDonalds people will yell at him.

Then more questions popped up. What would make a man go through McDonalds garbage just to feed the pigeons? Is he doing it for his love of pigeons? But he wasn't really watching the pigeons eat. Maybe he doesn't like to see food go wasted. Does he have a background in working in a restaurant where he wouldn't be afraid of handling other people's discarded food? I wanted answers.

Once he finished his reclamation mission and sat down to rest. I approached one of the garbage cans to toss out my McDonalds trash, and to break the ice I said, "No french fries in this one" tossed away my bag and laughed. He sat motionless on the bench with his mouth open with no teeth. I needed to break the ice some more, so I said, "Yeah, no sense in letting all that food go to waste." (no response from him) "Might as well feed it to the pigeons." He sat there motionless without looking at me. I began to wonder if he was deaf. Only after a few seconds of silence, he muttered softly, "It ain't no big deal."

Too bad I didn't have my camera.

I went to the 25th Chicago Marathon this weekend and held up a sign. The sign had two sides to it, so I could turn it around to change my message (quite brilliant if you ask me). One side said "YOU CAN DO IT". Y'know nice message for the runners. The other side said "RUN AND HAVE FUN". I wore a bright orange vest and a huge yellow foam cowboy hat . That way I could stand out for my friend, Erin, who was running (and the fun outfit goes with the "have fun" message). One thing I realized was that the runners were reading both messages together. Which, I didn't think of. I thought of them totally separate. So it was like I was trying to convince them they could have fun: "Run and have fun. You can do it." It sounded kinda condescending, so I didn't rotate my sign as often.

What's the grossest cooking thing you do?
Here's two of mine:

Put 3 overeasy eggs between two untoasted pieces of bread, and put bar-be-que sauce on them!

When I run out of milk, you can put water on your Coco Puffs. Warning. This ONLY works on Coco Puffs. Don't put water on any other cereal. There's something about the new Hershey injected Coco Puffs that makes it work.

Cook County elections officials hope a new voter education campaign featuring a pair of cartoon characters ã "Chad" and "Dimples" ã will help local polling places avert the kind of chaos that occurred in parts of Florida after the last presidential election.

Chad and Dimples are the creations of Rob Janoff, a Chicago advertising designer.

"If we don't break free from this ballot, these votes won't count. Don't leave us hanging," the two characters cry in one animated commercial as they free fall from a giant floating ballot.

I think these characters are great. I want to pick up as much Chad and Dimple propaganda as I can. This is something that you will show your grandkids years from now. It's an event of our times.

A new page I just made. Check out the current books that I'm reading.
http://www.spudart.org/books/current

it's amazing what a roll of masking tape can do.

I think we could use some masking tape on the streets for the traffic in downtown chicago. I'll reroute all the cars so it is traffic free. Everything would be pedastrian walkways.

I think I'll route all the cars to go to the suburbs. No cars allowed in the city. I don't think there are enough cars in the suburbs now. They could use more. They love their cars.

Eventually there would be enough cars in the suburbs where they would be back to back enough where they would form their own street. And take into account that many of the SUVs are getting bigger and bigger. So this wall to wall cars would merely form a street for the SUVs to drive on. Much like a Monster truck rally. Then you could get people all over to watch Monster truck rallies happen on their own street. It would be a spectator's dream.

Then all the non-car people in the city would come to the suburbs to watch the constant Monster truck rallies. So then there would be no pedestrians in the city, so all the Monster trucks would come to the city, while the pedastrians take over the burbs. It would be a complete flip flop.

Besides, I think the scale works better to have big monster trucks in the city with all the big buildings. The formal qualities of scale would be more aesthetically pleasing.

spudart (12:41 PM): cuz dogsup is like for hot dogs, not hamburgers

Why do we say "I flunked a test"? Where does flunk come from? I think saying, "I dunked a test" sounds much better. Then you can say "I slam dunked that test!" Or if you really did bad, you can say, "I 360ƒ slam dunked it."

The whole lexicon of slam dunk language is available as a field of language to describe how you dunked a test.

JCPenney is selling this set. Conversation about this at plastic.com.