I want to take my kids to the Lake County Fair this week, but I'm not sure what would be the best day to go. Last year, I took them to see the motocross, and we spent the whole time watching guys getting carted away in an ambulance. Can you suggest something less depressing?
Pat's Blue-Ribbon
Dear PBR:
Less depressing? Hmmm, the livestock release on Sunday is always a drag, because the 4H kids who raised the animals from the cradle have to say goodbye and send them off to a Rotary Club steer roast ...
You also might want to steer clear of the Mutton Bustin', in which human children try to ride atop a sprinting sheep. Your kids will want to do it, and A) it costs more money and B) all it ends up being is arms and legs flying around for three seconds, followed by lots of "walk-it-off" pain ...
And the commercial buildings are fun to a point, because there's lots of free candy being handed out by the duct-cleaning companies, but there's also lots of politicians handing out stickers -- and, this being an election year, some old crank is bound to start a brawl over Obama being "a Mooos-lim" ...
Tell you what -- head on over Wednesday at 4 p.m. for the judging of rabbits. That should be safe enough, and you have not seen judging until you have seen rabbits judged.
What is that stinky smell at the corner of Washington Street and Route 21 in Gurnee? I got stopped at a light there the other day and I had to roll up my windows because it smelled like someone had lost their lunch on my tires.
Pepe Le Pew
Dear Pep:
When it comes to that particular stretch of Washington Street, we need to be very specific about what smell we're referencing. To do this, we'll have to be graphic.
To wit:
A) Is the stench something like what you get when your kid forgets to flush the toilet, and you then go on vacation and come back a week later and open the bathroom door?
Or ...
B) Is it something like either the regurgitation you mentioned, or cotton candy that's sat in the sun for a month?
If the answer is A), then you have picked up a whiff from the North Shore Sanitary District plant at Washington and O'Plaine Road, a facility that has undergone more odor control endeavors than Bigfoot's laundry bin, but still reminds us from time to time that it is, after all, a sewage processing plant.
If your nose says B), then you are enjoying the bouquet that is produced by the discarded food at Six Flags Great America, which has immense bins filled with gunk, hidden from sight behind the trees that line the northwest side of Washington and Route 21.
In both cases, all that stuff has to go somewhere. If you play, you pay, or sentiments to that effect.
But rest assured that both of them could be worse. And, with the dog days of summer heating up as of this writing, they most likely will be.
On behalf of the Lake County Rah-Rah/Yay-Yay Booster Society, we would like to gloat about the recent announcement that the county's tourism revenue topped $1 billion in 2007! We feel this is great and super! Please respond with an observation about how awesome this news is!
Sincerely,
The LCRRYYBS
Dear Boost:
It certainly isn't bad news. To paraphrase Bobbi Fleckman (Fran Drescher) in the classic motion picture "This Is Spinal Tap," money talks and baloney sausage walks.
But let's keep this in perspective: the only reason anything new tops anything old these days is because stuff costs more. Hotel rooms, restaurant meals, Gurnee Mills toys and clothes, tickets at the Genesee Theatre and the Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre, admission (and parking, and food) at Six Flags Great America ... all of these things cost more in 2007 than they did in 2006. And just wait until we see the tourism spending in 2008, when the trickle-down/avalanche from the higher energy prices will really kick in.
To stick with the movie theme, consider this: officially, the No. 1 film at the box-office all time is "Titanic," which has grossed $1.8 billion since it was released 11 years ago. But, adjusted for inflation, the No. 1 film is still "Gone With the Wind," which came out in 1939, when people paid, oh, a shiny dime for admission to the Oriental and the State-Lake. More people have paid to see Rhett and Scarlett, but people paid more to see Leo and Kate.
In other words, enjoy the moment, Lake County, but save the real excitement for when we catch and pass DuPage, which doesn't even have a theme park.
Last month you called on the Waukegan City Council to get rid of public comment time, and instead they came up with some list of "commandments" to keep people in line. Since they didn't listen to you the first time, what's your alternate plan?
Ferme La Bouche
Monsieur:
The most disappointing thing about Waukegan's new "comment commandments" is that, even though they were clearly going for a Moses/Mount Sinai thing, they only came up with SEVEN commandments. If the mayor and alder-people were really looking to make a statement, they should have poured some strong coffee, pulled an all-nighter and cranked out three more commandments. Or just called them "the seven deadly sins" or something.
Let The Swami show you how easy this could have been. Here, off the top of Swami's turban, are three commandments they should have thrown on the tablets:
VIII: Thou shalt not put the senior alderman to sleep during your allotted three minutes.
IX: Thou shalt not forget to state your name and address before speaking. If you forget or otherwise fail to do so, you will be summarily wrestled to the ground, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed and thrown into a concrete cell that hasn't been mopped in weeks.
X: Thou shalt not express moral outrage over anything less than homicides, criminal abuse of authority, and/or bona fide civil rights violations. Everything else is a pet peeve and you should already know that no one else cares.
There you have it. If you're going to go ahead and do something like allow public comment, you might as well do it right.
I'm outraged that the Grayslake mayor and police chief canceled the motorcycle show at the fairgrounds last weekend. Was this a legitimate threat, or was it just "biker" profiling by the cops?
Ticked on the Tri-State
Tick:
The short answer: A little from category a, and a little from category b. When the Grayslake village people called off the planned Ironhorse Roundup Bike Show, the natives were restless because it was done late on a Friday and, some say, the news was sent out by carrier pigeon.
When the full explanation came out, the situation was still testy, but at least there was a worst-case scenario to envision: If the Grayslake bigwigs were told about a gang threat on Friday and went ahead with an event on Sunday and violence broke out that left someone dead on Monday, there would be absolute hell to pay, not to mention many lawyers.
On the other hand, gang threats are not exactly rare things in this part of the world, and you can bet that basketball games and football games have gone off as planned, not just here but everywhere, after John Law received "information about circumstances which threaten the health and public safety of those attending the event." They just pump up the numbers of constables, keep an extra eye open, send people through a few more checkpoints, and the terrorists don't win.
So maybe the powers-that-be erred on the side of over-caution. Whatever the case, the Swami foresees that there will not be peace in the valley until Grayslake successfully hosts a motorcycle show and everyone forgets an angry weekend in May 2008.
Wait a minute ... maybe Vince Neil can act as a peacemaker ...
I see them DNA tests show that the dead Chicago cougar was the same one they spotted up there in Wisconsin back in January. Should we be angry or thankful that our neighbors let their wild animal invade our back yard?
Sincerely,
Puma Concolor
Dear Mr. Concolor:
Not that it took William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger to figure this one out, but The Swami predicted that the Chicago cougar was the Lake County cougar two long weeks before the forensics confirmed it (and, if the O.J. Simpson trial taught us anything, it is that DNA results are always a slam-dunk case).
Now that the self-congratulations are dispensed with, we move to your question: should we send Wisconsin a thank-you note or a flaming bag of dog waste? Before answering, it might be instructive to look back at the good things and not-so-good things that America's Dairyland has given to the world:
Good: Usinger's meat products; Chris Farley; Harry Houdini; the BoDeans; Danica Patrick; the original Schlitz's; Les Paul; Spencer Tracy; Johnsonville brats; Orson Welles; Frank Lloyd Wright; Harley-Davidson; and the guys who made both "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun."
Bad: Arthur Bremer; Jeffrey Dahmer; Ed Gein; Joe McCarthy; Kato Kaelin.
And the cougar? Because no one got hurt, and the late predator gave us a nice "Shark Week" episode right at the tail end of winter, The Swami hereby puts the cougar into ... the good catgeory, right next to Jane "Malcolm in the Middle" Kaczmarek.
Someone told me Waukegan is backing off that downtown parking plan that scared everyone away from parking (or doing anything else) downtown. When will they scrap the whole thing and blame it on an out-of-touch consultant?
Stevie, Wondering in Waukegan
Dear Stevie Wonder:
The Swami likes your thinking. It has been a public relations nightmare for Waukegan ever since some bean-counter told them to put the screws to on-street parking outside the empty restaurants and mostly-dark Genesee Theatre. The surest way to make sure people never venture east of Green Bay Road ever again is to hit them with a $20 parking ticket and make them feel like a sucker for taking a chance on Waukegan.
And Swami never saw the logic in sticking Hussey's Downtown Tavern on the south end of Genesee -- which is so dormant that you could fire a cannon and never hit a parked car -- and then nickel-and-diming-and-quartering its customers back to Kenosha County.
Talk about the law of unintended consequences. All those extra coins in the meters can never buy back a lost consumer.
But Waukegan's burgermeisters are slowly seeing the light. The 9 p.m. parking limit, enacted in November, became 7 p.m. in March, and now the business community is asking for that to become 5 p.m., along with cutting the fines in half and extending the free-parking window for people who want to gulp-and-git.
Using that geometric progression, your Swami predicts that the city, by September, will be paying visitors 25 cents an hour to pretty-please come downtown and see a show, maybe grab a bite. And it will be money well-spent.
Are you as outraged as I am that Waukegan would even consider putting a muzzle on we, the people, who want to get up and speak our piece during City Council meetings? What kind of police state are we living in?
Love Always,
Vox Populi
Vox, Vox, Vox:
Remain calm. Sure, the Waukegan Town Fathers have rattled their sabers about dumping Audience Time, but it might just end up being an empty threat.
But if there is any outrage to be had here, it is that there wasn't a simultaneous move to dump Aldermen's Time.
Seriously. Have you ever sat through a Waukegan City Council meeting? Neither has the Swami, who usually watches it on Comcast to battle insomnia. Two hours of people speaking just to hear themselves speak. The Usual Suspects, week after week, railing on about the same pet issues, while everyone who opposes them literally rolls their eyes to keep from falling asleep. This is not productive discourse. It is a squabbling family that has tuned one another out.
Realistically, the business of the City of Progress can be taken care of in a clean, quick 30 to 45 minutes. Gag the gadflys, collar the aldermen and put the busywork stuff like "APPROVE PAYROLL" and "MOTION TO PAY THE ANNUAL SPECIALIZED RESPONSE TEAMS MEMBERSHIP DUES" on this wonderful clearinghouse tactic called a "consent agenda." Ten unanimous votes for the price of one, bah-dah-boom, done.
This way, there will be no more counterproductive squabbling ... and everyone will get home for the second half of "Monday Night Football."
Why is it that every time I turn on the news or pick up a newspaper, I see stories about the Gurnee area bracing for flooding? Why do these idiots continue to live and work in a FLOODPLAIN, if they know they may get wet every year?
High and Dry in Highwood
Dear High:
Let's do what the nuns always told us not to do, and answer your question with a question. Several questions, actually:
Why do people build $800,000-plus brick mini-mansions 10 feet from the Tri-State Tollway at, say, Route 137 and Route 176?
Why are the Pritzkers getting millions and millions of dollars for land that commands a stunning view of that same Tri-State? And why do developers constantly knock on Waukegan's door looking to build dozens if not hundreds of homes within hearing distance of both I-294 and Route 120?
Why are there wooded estates smack dab along the mighty Union Pacific railroad tracks in noneother than tony Lake Forest?
Last but certainly not least, why did multi-multi-millionaire Michael Jordan build his Lake County mansion, oh, about a John Paxson three-pointer away from not only those Union Pacific tracks but also Route 41?
Don't ask the Swami. Ask Lex Luthor -- as portrayed by Kevin Spacey in "Superman Returns" (2006): "You can print money, manufacture diamonds, and people are a dime a dozen. But they'll always need land. It's the one thing they're not making anymore of."
There you have it. People choose to live by raging rivers, buzzing tollways and roaring frieght-train tracks because the world isn't getting any bigger -- and in the banquet of real estate, sometimes you have to go with the leftovers.
P.S. Let us know if you can do a shift or two on sandbag patrol this spring.
Dear Swami, can you help me find “B.B. of Waukegan.” I do not know for sure who it is, but I believe he, or she, officially maybe the dumbest person in Waukegan. Signed; The dumbest person in Gurnee
