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One of the biggest, glaring weaknesses for the Chicago Bears this season has been in their secondary. Dating all the way back to their offseason moves (or lack thereof), the Bears have had a void there. It was no secret, yet general manager Ryan Pace refused to address the issue. Wednesday morning, the Bears saw […] Chicago Bears can’t miss their second chance at Stephon Gilmore – Da Windy City – Da Windy City – A Chicago Sports Site – Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Fighting Illini & MoreRead More

The Chicago Blackhawks won their preseason game over the Detroit Red Wings on Monday by a final score of 6-4. Scores don’t matter in the preseason but evaluating things does. In this game, the Red Wings exposed something that has been a problem for the Blackhawks over the last few years. Detroit had no business […] Chicago Blackhawks: 1 major issue is still there in preseason – Da Windy City – Da Windy City – A Chicago Sports Site – Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Fighting Illini & MoreRead More

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Monica Lewinsky, narrator of “15 Minutes of Shame,” calls herself “Patient Zero” of internet-based destruction of one’s reputation. | HBO Max

Monica Lewinsky narrates the examination of how one error can result in a firestorm of hatred from which a person can never recover.

“I think social media is a good idea, but people ruin everything.” – Author, professor, commentator and influencer Dr. Roxane Gay in “15 Minutes of Shame.”

You might not recognize the name Matt Colvin, but there’s a good chance you remember reading or hearing about the New York Times story from March 2020 about the guy in Tennessee who bought up thousands of bottles of hand sanitizers on the day after the first reported COVID death in the United States with the intention of making a tidy profit. That guy was Matt Colvin.

“He has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them,” was the headline in the Times, which reported Amazon had cracked down on coronavirus price gouging, leaving Colvin and other sellers holding the bag (or the plastic bottles, in this case).

As we see in the invaluable, nuanced and sobering HBO documentary, Colvin became a “magnet for worldwide shame,” was pilloried on national media and bombarded with hate texts and e-mails and even had to temporarily move out of his home with his family after his address was made public. “15 Minutes of Shame” catches up with Colvin more than a year later, as he explains his prices weren’t nearly as high as others, noting the article “said I was selling a single bottle for $70, but that was a pack of multiple bottles,” and says shipping alcohol-based sanitizer is pricey because it’s considered a hazardous material.

Did Colvin, an Air Force veteran who got into the reselling business in part because he could work from home and avoid stressful situations, go too far and get caught up in the moment? He acknowledges as much. Did he deserve a level of vitriol that included people publicly wishing for him and his family to die?

What do you think?

Directed by Max Joseph of “Catfish” fame and narrated by Monica Lewinsky, who wryly comments, “Trust me, I know a little about [public shaming]” and calls herself the “Patient Zero” of modern-day, internet-based, mass efforts to destroy someone’s reputation, “15 Minutes of Shame” alternates between interviews with authors, psychologists, researchers and journalists — and revisiting the stories of a few “regular” people whose lives were turned upside down by one incident or a couple of Facebook posts.

Emmanuel Cafferty was driving his San Diego Gas & Electric Truck in June of 2020 when a man thought he saw Cafferty making a white power sign, chased Cafferty, goaded him into making the hand signal again and snapped his picture. When the man, who was white, posted the photo of Cafferty, who is Mexican, it was the beginning of end for Cafferty, who was fired from his job and was raked over the coals on the Internet, even after his accuser reconsidered that he might have misinterpreted Cafferty’s initial gesture and took down his posts.

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Emmanuel Cafferty recalls on “15 Minutes of Shame” how he lost his job and was pilloried on the Internet after a photo seemed to show him making a white power sign.

Then there’s Laura Krolcyzk, who was frustrated with Trumpsters denying the effectiveness of ventilators and posted on Facebook, “Trump supporters need to pledge to give up their ventilators for someone else.” Even though Krolcyzk’s Facebook group was private, somebody shared it and it was catapulted into the world, and soon the likes of Republican operative Michael Caputo and Fox News host Sean Hannity were ripping into Krolczyk, who even after issuing an apology was receiving threats of murder and rape and was fired from her job as an administrator at a cancer treatment center.

“15 Minutes of Shame” also delivers a brief history of cancel culture and public shaming, which has been around since the advent of civilization, and features insights from experts such as Mary Aiken, who is an expert in forensic cyber psychology, works with Interpol and U.S. authorities to track down cyber criminals and talks of the “online disinhibition effect,” i.e., “You do things online you wouldn’t do in the real world.” Ain’t that the truth.

We also see that in the earlier years of Twitter, most of the #hashtag movements were about calling out powerful corporations and individuals for wrongdoing, but in recent times the trend has shifted to include singling out everyday people who make an error from which they can never recover. We’re even told about a study that found soccer fans experience a greater degree of joy when their rivals fail than when their favorite team succeeds. “People are very punitive,” says author Roxane Gay. “There’s no tolerance for mistakes or nuance.”

At the outset of the documentary, Lewinsky says, “How did we get here, and where the f— are we going?”

One thing’s for certain: Wherever we’re going, there’s no turning back.

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One person was killed, and seven others were wounded in shootings Oct. 5, 2021, in Chicago. | Sun-Times file

A man was fatally shot and crashed in East Garfield Park.

One person was killed, and seven others were wounded, in shootings Tuesday in Chicago, including a man who crashed his car after he was fatally shot in East Garfield Park on the West Side.

The 36-year-old was in a vehicle about 12:15 p.m. in the 200 block of South California Avenue when someone opened fire, striking him in the head and neck, Chicago police said. The man crashed his car into a nearby fence, and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. He was identified as Jarrett Watson by the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

In non-fatal shootings, a man was shot and seriously wounded in West Elsdon on the Southwest Side. The 21-year-old was inside a vehicle about 3:45 p.m. in the 4400 block of West 55th Street when he was struck in the arm, chest and leg, police said. He was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he was in serious condition.

About an hour later, two teenage boys were wounded in a shooting in Englewood on the South Side. Just before 5 p.m., the boys, 14 and 15, were near the front of a home in the 6800 block of South Peoria Street when they were shot, police said. The younger boy suffered a graze wound to the head and a gunshot wound to the ankle. The older boy was struck in the ankle. Both boys were taken to Comer Children’s Hospital in good condition.

Four others were wounded in shootings citywide.

Three people were killed, and eight others were wounded, in shootings Monday in Chicago.

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The Red Sox’ Kyle Schwarber watches his home run sail into the right-field seats in the third inning. | Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

Xander Bogaerts and Kyle Schwarber homered off Yankees ace Gerrit Cole to help the Red Sox advance to the AL Division Series against the Rays.

BOSTON — As the ball sailed over the center field fence, landing 427 feet from the plate in a horde of happy Red Sox fans, Xander Bogaerts turned to the Boston dugout to flex his muscles before resuming his home run trot.

This is the matchup the Yankees wanted.

And the Red Sox were ready.

Bogaerts and Kyle Schwarber homered off Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, and Nathan Eovaldi took a shutout into the sixth inning in the AL wild-card game to help the Red Sox beat New York 6-2 on Tuesday night.

Bogaerts also cut down Aaron Judge at the plate in the sixth as Boston advanced to the best-of-five AL Division Series against the Rays.

Game 1 Thursday night in St. Petersburg, Florida.

“Now we go to the next one, and we’ve just got to be ready to face a great baseball team,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. “Coming into the season, everybody talked about them being the best team in the big leagues, and we have a huge challenge. But we’re ready for it.”

The Yankees, who lead the majors with 27 World Series championships, have not won it all since 2009. After angling for a matchup with the Red Sox in a potential tiebreaker, the Yankees wound up in Boston for the wild-card game instead.

And the Red Sox beat them in the postseason for the third straight try.

“Guys are crushed,” New York manager Aaron Boone said. “The ending is really cruel. But there’s nothing better than competing for something meaningful.”

A year after baseball took its postseason into neutral site bubbles to protect against the pandemic, a sellout crowd of 38,324 — the biggest at Fenway Park since the 2018 World Series — filled the old yard to rekindle one of the sport’s most passionate rivalries. Enough Yankee fans were among them to fuel a raucous back-and-forth of insulting chants.

“The Bogaerts homer in the first inning — I mean, talk about a pop. And, you know, the crowd went nuts, and you feed off that energy,” Schwarber said. “You thrive for that, and Red Sox nation brought it tonight. We needed it, and you can’t say enough about the crowd.”

It was the fifth playoff matchup between the longtime foes, with Boston taking a 3-2 edge. That doesn’t count the 1978 AL East tiebreaker — technically regular season Game No. 163 — that the Yankees won thanks to Bucky Dent’s homer into the net above the Green Monster.

Boone was a New York third baseman when added to the heartbreak with his 11th-inning walk-off homer in Game 7 of the 2003 AL Championship Series.

The Red Sox haven’t lost to them since.

They got their revenge the next year when they rallied after losing the first three games of the ALCS to eliminate the Yankees, then went on to win their first World Series title in 86 years. They won three more championships, in ’07, ’13 and in ’18 when they knocked out the Yankees in the divisional round.

Any lingering pain disappeared into the center field bleachers in the first inning on Tuesday night.

Unlike Dent, who barely cleared the left-field wall that sits just 310 feet from home plate, Bogaerts drilled a line drive 427 feet to straightaway center. And unlike Carlton Fisk, who contorted his body to will the ball fair in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, Bogaerts interrupted his home run trot only to flex for the Red Sox dugout.

With Dent in the crowd and Aaron Boone in the Yankees dugout, the Red Sox chased Cole in the third after he allowed Schwarber’s solo shot and put two more men on with nobody out. In all, he was charged with three runs on four hits and two walks, striking out three in two-plus innings.

Cole said he felt “sick to my stomach.”

“This is the worst feeling in the world,” said the star who signed a $324 million, nine-year deal to join the Yankees for the 2019 season.

Eovaldi only allowed two hits through five innings before giving up a solo home run to Anthony Rizzo — Schwarber’s teammate on the 2016 Cubs championship team — that sparked the first excited cheers from the Yankees fans in the crowd.

With Boston leading 3-1, Judge followed with an infield single that finished Eovaldi, and reliever Ryan Brasier gave up a wall single to Giancarlo Stanton. Mistakenly waved home by third base coach Phil Nevin, Judge was easily thrown out at the plate — 8-6-2 — by the team that led the majors with 43 outfield assists during the season. (The Yankees made 22 outs at home this season, tied for the most in baseball.)

“That was better than a homer for me, personally,” Bogaerts said. “I mean, if that run scores, it’s 3-2. Stanton is at second base, the whole momentum is on their side. The dugout is getting pumped up.”

“As Judge was out at home, I saw Stanton was pretty mad. He probably wanted a homer there, but also an RBI, and he didn’t get that, and he probably felt like he didn’t do much because that run didn’t score. But that changed the game,” he said.

In all, Eovaldi allowed one run on four hits in 5 1/3 innings, striking out eight.

Alex Verdugo hit an RBI double in the sixth, driving in a hustling Bogaerts from first, to make it 4-1 and then singled in two more in the seventh to give Boston a 6-1 lead.

Stanton, who singled high off the wall early, hit a solo homer in the ninth to make it 6-2. Joey Gallo followed with a deep drive to right that was caught at the warning track by Hunter Renfroe.

With one last “Yankees suck!” chant echoing through the ballpark, Garrett Whitlock got Gleyber Torres to pop up to center to end it.

The Red Sox poured out of their dugout and bullpen to celebrate at the pitcher’s mound as “Dirty Water” played on the speakers. A few Yankees stood in the dugout and watched.

The teams swapped places twice in the last 10 days of the season, starting with the Yankees’ three-game sweep in Boston Sept. 24-26 that moved them into the first wild-card spot. At one point, Major League Baseball ran through the tiebreaker scenarios and the Yankees had to choose whether they would want to play in Boston or Toronto to break a four-way tie.

They chose Boston.

Although the tiebreakers weren’t necessary when both teams finished ahead of Toronto and Seattle — with identical 92-70 records, Boston earned home-field by virtue of a 10-9 head-to-head record — word of the Yankees’ decision inevitably made it to the Red Sox clubhouse.

“We knew about it. We don’t really talk about it because we had some business to take care of ourselves,” Red Sox center fielder Kike Hernandez said before the game. “They wanted us and they got us now, so win or go home. That’s it.”

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Radio host Eric Ferguson has been accused by three women of inappropriate behavior. | 2006 handout photo

Melissa McGurren, former morning co-host on WTMX 101.9-FM, accused Ferguson of creating a “hostile working environment” in a court filing Tuesday, Chicago media columnist Robert Feder reported.

A third woman accused popular Chicago radio host Eric Ferguson of inappropriate behavior in court documents filed Tuesday, Chicago media columnist Robert Feder reported.

Melissa McGurren, former morning co-host on WTMX 101.9-FM, filed documents to the Cook County Circuit Court calling Ferguson the “serial abuser of women” at The Mix, Feder reported. McGurren worked at the Hubbard Radio Chicago station for more than two decades before leaving in 2020.

“For many years, Ferguson has grossly abused his power, and his conduct was the major reason the station became a hostile working environment,” McGurren said.

In a note to employees Tuesday, Jeff England, vice president and market manager of Hubbard Radio Chicago, said Ferguson would not be on air through the end of the month, according to Feder’s report. England also said in the note, “we do not agree with Melissa’s characterization of events.”

McGurren’s statements were added to a lawsuit previously filed by Cynthia DeNicolo, a former assistant producer on Ferguson’s show, Feder reported. According to DeNicolo’s lawsuit, Ferguson “coerced sexual activity” and made “unwanted demands for oral sex.” DeNicolo was fired May 1, 2020, and in the lawsuit alleges Ferguson was behind her firing.

A third woman, former sales employee Kristen Mori, said in a court document that Ferguson groped her at a station Christmas party in 2003, Feder reported. That statement, along with other allegations of misconduct, was included in DeNicolo’s lawsuit.

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A 4-year-old was struck by a car Tuesday evening on the Northwest Side. | Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Police responded to a call of a hit-and-run about 7:30 p.m. and found a child on the ground on West Foster Avenue and North Pulaski Road, police said.

A 4-year-old boy was struck in a hit-and-run Tuesday evening in North Park on the Northwest Side, according to Chicago police and fire officials.

The child was walking with a family member about 7:30 p.m. when he was struck by an unknown vehicle on West Foster Avenue and North Pulaski Road, police said.

He was taken to Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where he was in serious-to-critical condition, according to a spokesperson for the Chicago Fire Department. Police later said that the boy was initially reported in good condition.

The driver of the vehicle went into the 17th District police station as police continue to investigate.

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The second-year player has been sidelined with a sprained left ankle, but according to coach Billy Donovan, there’s a good chance Williams will be ready for Detroit if the ankle can withstand cutting and lateral movement.

There are still some obstacles Patrick Williams has to pass the next few weeks if he wants to be in the starting lineup when the Bulls tip-off the regular season in Detroit.

Coach Billy Donovan sounded fairly confident on Tuesday that the second-year forward will answer that bell.

That didn’t seem to be the case when fall camp started and Williams was nursing a severely sprained left ankle, but if he shows that he can make lateral cuts in the next week and has no setbacks, the Bulls will indeed have their projected starting five ready to roll out for the start of the year.

“I think we’re pretty optimistic,” Donovan said. “What they really want to make sure is that the sprain has healed adequately, so we’ll probably be a little bit more on the cautious side just because I think once he starts randomly cutting they’ve got to see how he responds, and I think with as explosive and as powerful as he has been, one of the things they don’t want to do is have something where he’s not quite stable, he does something and tweaks it, and now he’s having to manage that in the middle of the year.

“There’s been nothing said to about, ‘Hey listen, this guy is going to miss the first week of the season, regular season.’ There’s been nothing like that.”

Great news, especially as far as Williams goes.

The former first-round pick from the 2020 NBA Draft had an excellent offseason, especially as far as working on his aggressiveness on the offensive end, and more importantly, getting his conditioning to the next level.

It’s that condition aspect that Donovan sees as the key for Williams to take that jump to elite two-way player.

“The biggest thing for me is I think it was really, really eye-opening for him,” Donovan said of Williams’ rookie year. “You think about a guy 19 years old, plays one season in college, came off the bench, probably never really played in a 40-minute game where he played the whole college game, so his minutes were whatever they were. Now all of a sudden he goes from that and he’s guarding some of the guys we know he’s had to guard. There’s an endurance component for that where even though I think he worked really hard, I think he has a much better awareness of the kind of conditioning he does need to be in.”

Welcome back

Lauri Markkanen wasn’t the only former Bull making a return on Tuesday, as free agent Denzel Valentine was also wearing a Cavs jersey.

The versatile wing signed a two-year, $4 million deal this offseason, and called the change a scenery part of the journey.

“Everybody’s journey is different,” Valentine said. “If it was perfect or easy, everybody would be doing it. I’ve gone through trials and tribulations. I’ve shown glimpses. I know what I’m capable of doing. I’ve done it here [with the Bulls]. I’m finally healthy now. This is going to be my second season coming in healthy, so I feel like my best basketball is ahead of me.

“I have no grudges, no nothing here. I don’t feel any type of way. Things just didn’t work out. But still I had great moments and great opportunities here and I had great teammates. I was blessed to play here.”

The replacements

With Williams sidelined, and also Derrick Jones Jr. (ankle) a late scratch, Donovan opted to start Javonte Green against the Cavaliers.

Jones’ ankle was expected to be short-term, while Donovan also announced that Tony Bradley was scratched, dealing with back soreness.

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