CHICAGO CARLESS

(Photo: A new day dawns for Chicago public transportation, but headaches from the dark night of budget woes remain. Credit: karla kaulfuss.)

No one could be more thrilled than me about the end to the CTA operating funding impasse. For transit users like me, the draconian cuts threatened in January would have essentially confined me to my neighborhood (although a happy downtown neighborhood it is), and most likely have pushed me out of Chicago.

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(Photo: Back then they managed to build this building and fund a newspaper without the help of massively annoying web ads.)

What on earth is Bill Adee thinking? The Chicago Tribune’s associate managing editor in charge of online operations announced today yet another slew of changes for the paper’s website. If anyone misses 1990s-era websites, have no fear: the Trib has your back with these changes. From a clunky Times font and a space-wasting blocky layout, to big, ugly ads and ad boxes intruding in places they shouldn’t, the new Trib sites has it all…except news, that is.

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(Photo: The modern Chicago skyline…at least according to one of many hopelessly outdated exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry.)

Why are Chicago museums so inconsistent? It’s always either feast or famine, a balance of the sublime and the craptastic. Sure, we have the world-class Art Institute, Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, heck, I’ll even throw in the Chicago History Museum and National Museum of Mexican Art.

But why must we continue to suffer through a contemporary art museum that is a legend in its own mind? A planetarium passing off 1990s technology as cutting edge? Or the biggest civic tithe of cultural mediocrity in the midwest, the Museum of Science and Industry?

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(Photo: Sometimes you just have to jump in the fountain and dance. Nikki in the Garden at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Credit: Kudzu Planet.)

Sometimes in life we don’t learn our lessons until a little too late. Last weekend, my boyfriend brought me back to reality. This weekend, I’m afraid we’re saying good-bye, and I wonder how much of that is my fault and how much is simply to do with a love that went faster than maybe it should have.

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(Photo: Controversial Sun-Times opinion page editor Cheryl Reed has left the building. Credit: PostPunkKitchen.)

In December, the former editor of the Sun-Times Opinion page, Cheryl Reed, and I threw down here on the pages of CHICAGO CARLESS. I called Reed out on a series of shallow comments she made at a December 5th forum sponsored by the Publicity Club of Chicago to discuss how the city’s major dailies vet the views to publish on their opinion pages.

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