‘Tis the season to indulge! Make your holiday merry and bright by letting someone else do the cooking this Christmas. Check out these local restaurants and bars offering up festive takeout and drink kits in Chicago. 

2770 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60647

The cozy Logan Square cafe is celebrating the holiday with Savory Pies and Boxed Chai to-go for their takeout and drink kits Chicago special! The Boxed Chai are available in three sizes starting at $32 for 12 8 oz. cups of chai. The nine-inch Masala Chicken Pie or Kale and Potato Pie are available for $20 each. Or enjoy the best of both worlds with a combo savory pie and boxed chai starting at $50. Order at least 48 hours in advance for pick-up by calling 773-360-7541.

3369 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60657

Pop over to the Houndstooth Saloon for their first annual holiday market. Offered seven days a week until Christmas, the new market aims to support small, local businesses and will feature special Christmas gifts from local bakers, artists, and vendors. Grab a hot spiced beverage with your sweetie and pretend like you’re in a Hallmark movie because Houndstooth has one of the most underrated drink kits in Chicago. 

1335 W. Wrightwood Ave., Chicago, IL 60614

This Lincoln Park favorite is offering up mouthwatering meal boxes in December, available for pick-up or delivery. Options include a choice of turkey breast ($34) or oven-roasted lamb shoulder ($36) with inventive Greek twists on classic sides like a quinoa, lentil and chickpea salad with raspberry dressing or whipped potatoes with feta. Don’t forget to add on trays of Spanakopita, homemade spinach, leek, feta, and wild green pie ($35); Pastichio, traditional Greek casserole of pasta, ground beef, and béchamel ($45); and Baklava (48 pieces/$50). Order via Tock. 

15 W. Division St., Chicago, IL

Located in the Gold Coast, this popular tavern has partnered with its neighboring bars (The Lodge, Butch McGuire’s, and She-nannigan’s) to turn Division Street into a winter wonderland! With a festive and heated outdoor tent, a 31-foot Christmas tree, twinkly lights draped above the street, and flying Santa, the vibrant late-night strip is now a holiday spectacular you can’t miss for unbelievable food and drink kits.

740 W. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60661

Pepe Barajas opened his West Loop 2020 Michelin BIB Gourmand winning restaurant, to honor his late aunt Josefina “Josie” Villegas, a hard-working street taco entrepreneur. Many dishes at La Josie are influenced by Pepe’s time cooking with Josie including authentic Mexican tamales which they made together every year. Take home Pollo al Horno, Parrillada, Dos Huaraches V, or a dozen Tamales for a true family feast (serves 2-4). Order via Toast. 

Various locations

Kevin McCallister had Kraft mac & cheese on Christmas Eve. If you’re craving something similar (but WAY better) check out The Pasta Bowl. A dinner for two includes two pastas, a salad, an appetizer, and dessert for just $50. Add any bottle of wine for another $25 and you’re set! Order for takeout or delivery here.

Drink Kits Chicago Featured Image Credit: Avli Taverna

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A 15-year-old boy faces a murder charge in connection to the fatal shooting of a retired Chicago firefighter during a Far South Side carjacking.

The teen, who is unnamed because he’s charged as a juvenile, is expected in court later Thursday in the murder of 65-year-old Dwain Williams, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office said.

The boy was arrested Wednesday afternoon in south suburban Chicago Heights by the Great Lakes Regional Task Force, Chicago police said. The child also faces a count of attempted robbery.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Williams was confronted by four carjackers Dec. 3 after leaving the popcorn shop Let’s Get Poppin’, 11758 S. Western Ave., in the Morgan Park neighborhood, authorities have said.

Williams exchanged gunfire with the carjackers and was shot in his abdomen. He died later at Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

In the video of the shooting, which unfolded in a few seconds, Williams is seen walking toward his Jeep with a bag in his hand when a car pulls up and three suspects jump out.

Williams retreats behind his car as one of the suspects rushes toward him with a gun in his hand. Williams pulls out his own gun and is seen firing at the suspect, who falls to the ground before jumping back into the car and fleeing.

Investigators believe the suspects followed Williams to the popcorn shop after seeing his car earlier in the day, police said.

Williams was a Chicago Fire Department lieutenant who retired about two years ago after joining in 1992, officials said. He was about to return to work as a civilian employee at the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

A group of activists and organizations, including the anti-violence group “I’m Telling, Don’t Shoot,” have put up a combined reward of $34,000 for information leading to any arrests in his killing. It wasn’t immediately clear if someone claimed the reward.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

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Colorful names for teams are nearly as old as team sports themselves.

But as a growing movement aims to right the wrongs of the past, including notable successes with pro sports franchises in Cleveland and Washington recently, it reminds us history hasn’t always been kind — let alone fair — to marginalized groups.

“I don’t know where the momentum is going to go,” said Joshua Hunt, vice chair of The Committee of 500 Years of Dignity & Resistance, whose Cleveland-based organization joined a coalition of Native American activists who convinced the city’s baseball team to drop “Indians” — first adopted in 1915 — from its name.

“But we’re hoping,” Hunt added, “this will be a blueprint for professional teams like the (Atlanta) Braves, Kansas City Chiefs, Blackhawks and all the thousands of public schools that this is what happens when you take the time to actually listen to indigenous people.”

Danny Wirtz on Blackhawks’ name: “I respect the decision the Cleveland Indians made,” Blackhawks CEO Danny Wirtz said. “But we continue to deepen our commitment to our brand … and to make sure we provide that reverence and respect.”

By now, because of pressure from activists, the public or their corporate sponsors, most sports teams have shed overtly racist names of the past. More than a dozen major college or pro sports teams made the move over the last 50 years.

But a few have clung to Native American names and imagery, arguing they reflect honor and respect. History says otherwise.

Chariot-racing teams in ancient Rome first adopted colors and symbols — and later names — largely as a practical matter, to distinguish themselves from rivals during the actual events. Over time, though, those identifiers took on added significance. Like nations and religions, they became a marker to strengthen the bonds among followers and separate friends from foes.

As sports gained a foothold in America’s popular culture in the late 1800s, fans needed a way to differentiate the many teams playing the same sports in the same city. Sometimes, it was as uncomplicated as adding the name of the neighborhood or point of pride for its residents, i.e. the Brooklyn Dodgers around 1910, because pedestrians there were constantly forced to detour around streetcar lines.

Other times, the names were chosen to highlight the ethnicity of the players that made up the team, or to appeal to the language and culture of their fan base, like the Montreal Canadiens in 1909, because their francophone followers relished every chance to go up against English-speaking teams like the rival Wanderers.

Still other times, names were derived from chants that originated with fans or suggested by reporters at local newspapers. The New York Highlanders baseball team officially changed its name after moving into the new Polo Grounds in 1913, but the city’s dailies had been calling them the “Yankees” for nearly a decade by then, simply because it was an easier fit in headlines.

But as sports became increasingly popular and profitable at the turn of 20th century, owners sought to fire up the imaginations of their fans. It hardly helped marginalized groups like Blacks and Native Americans that those owners tended to be rich white men, who found their beliefs in cultural superiority reflected in the accomplishments being notched around the world by America’s growing might.

Many of those owners named their teams Indians, Braves and Redskins at the very moment the United States government was in the final throes of a largely one-sided battle to take lands from various Indian and First Nations tribes and isolate its people on reservations — attempting to effectively destroy their language and culture.

“It was a learning process for me,” Cleveland team owner Charles Dolan said in an interview with The Associated Press, “and I think when fair-minded, open-minded people really look at it, think about it and maybe even spend some time studying it, I like to think they would come to the same conclusion: It’s a name that had its time, but this is not the time now, and certainly going forward, the name is no longer acceptable in our world.”

But activists argue that there was never an appropriate time, and certainly not when they began to show up. At the specialized boarding schools where Native Americans were sent for “reeducation,” the unofficial motto was “Kill the Indian and save the man.” A number of studies since have established the psychological damage those policies and the continuing negative portrayals in popular culture have inflicted on Native Americans, among whom suicide is a leading cause of death.

“Shortly after the so-called ‘Indian Wars’ of the 1880s, that’s when we see sports teams start to use the names on a wide basis,” said Hunt. “It’s almost as if they did it to say, ‘After we defeated them, now we’re going to parade them around.’

“It’s sort of like a when a hunter kills a bear or a deer and puts their heads on a wall. ‘Look, we killed and conquered these people.’ And,” he said, “at the same time these mascots start showing up, the federal government has made it illegal for indigenous people to speak their own languages or honor their own customs.”

An organized pushback against offensive names and imagery didn’t begin in earnest until the 1960s, as groups like the American Indian Movement became part of a broader push for civil rights across the country. Coincidentally, the federal government’s relocation program had by then moved enough Native Americans into large cities, where many became fans of local sports teams and began to mount efforts to change those names.

Many of those activists credit the 1972 decision by Stanford University, a prestigious school with sports programs to match, to drop “Indians” from its name as an important first step. In 2005, the NCAA finally adopted a policy banning “hostile and abusive” names and mascots, excepting schools that had reached an agreement with particular tribes to use their name, such as the Florida State Seminoles.

“The hopeful thing is we see that when a respected institution merely announces it’s going to change, like we saw in Cleveland, that often leads to a flood of nonprofessional teams changing,” Hunt said.

“There’s no silver bullet. It can’t just be a top-down or bottom-up focus. … I think we’ve still got something like 400 teams with those names here in Ohio. We need local grassroots campaigns and high-profile groups and we need to advocate for change and support one another.”

“But,” he said, “what just happened here in Cleveland is already putting another shot in the arm.”

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Proviso East’s Three Amigos are an immortal part of the state’s high school basketball lore. Donnie Boyce, Michael Finley and Sherell Ford had the Three Amigos nickname in high school. They won a state title together in 1991 and then all three went on to be selected in the NBA Draft four years later.

Finley was picked 21st and went on to become the best professional player. Ford, the 1991 Sun-Times Player of the Year, was selected 26th and Boyce, the most highly-regarded early in his career and the group’s leader, was selected 42nd.

Boyce is the current head coach at Proviso East.

The three stars were matched up against Peoria Manual for the title in 1991. Remember the Rams and Howard Nathan? 1991 was the year of Hoop Dreams. Nathan and Manual play the villain in that landmark documentary. They knock off Arthur Agee’s underdog Marshall squad in the Class AA state semifinals.

That’s pretty much where the documentary left high school basketball. But the state tournament went on.

Nathan was compared to Isiah Thomas during the pregame show. At this point Manual had only won a single state title, back in 1930. Proviso East was a more established power, with championship game victories in 1969 and 1974.

The state was loaded with talent that season. Gordon Tech star Tom Kleinschmidt posted absolutely insane statistics, as did future NBA player Juwan Howard at Vocational. I read through the Sun-Times’ All-State team before the game and tweeted this:

Those Kleinschmidt numbers are incredible. A high school game is only 32 minutes long and he was accounting for 40 points pretty much on his own, on average.

But I have to admit that after watching the 1991 title game that Sherell Ford was very, very impressivd. The dunks, the drives to the basket coupled with a smooth little mid-range shooting touch. He had three or four big blocks and even some sweet passes out of the post. He played like a more polished Julian Wright or Darius Miles.

It’s easy to see why he was Sun-Times Player of the Year. That’s what happens when you tweet before watching.

Howard Nathan did not have a good title game overall but he came alive at the very end to turn what should have been a double-digit win for Proviso East into a closer final score.

“[Nathan] went to sleep for three and a half quarters. He’s wide awake now,” McReynolds said on the broadcast.

McReynolds and Dan Roan speculated that Nathan may have been tired. Peoria Manual played the second semifinal and remember back then both the semis and title game were played on the same day. Nathan played the entire win against Marshall, despite it being a 68-55 win for the Rams.

Finley’s size and athleticism on defense also clearly impacted Nathan. It’s not often a future NBA All-Star guards you in a high school game.

A few other tidbits:

-The win made Proviso East the first Class AA title winner from the suburbs since Maine South in 1979. I wasn’t aware the suburbs had that long of a big school title drought.

-Ford’s parents were in a car serious car accident on their drive from Louisiana to Champaign to see the state finals. Ford’s dad is interviewed on crutches early in the game.

-The Three Amigos were so unselfish. That’s probably the thing that impressed me most about the team.

-Why didn’t Jerry Hester play more for Manual? He’s just a sophomore in this game but it is so clear what he’s about to become

-Jerome Robinson could play. He’s also a sophomore in this game. He was so interesting that I did a little research on him. He transferred to Proviso East from St. Joseph and went on to have a spectacular high school career, even finishing third in Mr. Basketball voting. It’s strange I’d never heard of him before.

The starting lineups:

Peoria Manual
F Tony Freeman (22), 5-11 Sr.
F Sam Davis (50), 6-1 Sr.
C Clint Ford (54), 6-3 Jr.
G Mike Grayer (20), 5-11 Sr.
G Howard Nathan (34), 5-10 Sr.

Proviso East
F Donnie Boyce (20), 6-5 Sr.
F Ray Gay (34), 6-2 So.
C Sherell Ford (44), 6-7 Sr.
G Michael Finley (24), 6-6 Sr.
G Thaddeus Smith (10), 5-11 Sr.

Watch it all and read Dan Bickley’s story below:

Boyce has fine finale

BY DAN BICKLEY

CHAMPAIGN–When this group first started filling it up on the playgrounds of Maywood, Donnie Boyce was the man.

And eight years later, that’s exactly how Boyce ended his bittersweet career at Proviso East. The 6-5 senior scored all of his 15 points in the second half and added 11 rebounds, five assists, three steals and two blocks as Proviso toppled Peoria Manual 68-61 for the Class AA title.

“Donnie is our leader,” said teammate Mike Finley. “He always has been.”

However, after the first 16 minutes of the championship game against Manual, the most important game he ever had been a part of, Boyce was merely a frustrated basketball player . . . and a scoreless one at that.

“I had my man pinned, but the guards just weren’t getting me the ball,” Boyce said. “We yelled at each other. We weren’t making the right decisions, we were taking the shots too early. We talked about all of that – then we got back in focus.”

“This was it,” Boyce said. “There wasn’t anything left after this game, it was the last of my high school career. I wasn’t going to lose this game.”

“Donnie stepped it up,” Manual guard Howard Nathan said. “Donnie, Sherell (Ford), Mike (Finley) . . . they’re all great players. But Donnie took over.”

The seeds for this state title were sewn eight years ago when Boyce, Finley and Ford met in fourth grade.

Boyce was the star – and he remained that way until he broke his ankle as a junior and missed most of the season. In his absence, Ford and Finley emerged.

So from the first day of practice this season, Boyce was content to fill his role as team leader, totally abandon his perimeter game and relinquish the spotlight that was once his alone.

But after going an entire weekend without a field goal, critics said Boyce was not the same player he had been.

“Without question, Donnie has been the most maligned player on this team,” Proviso coach Bill Hitt said.

“Donnie does all the little things,” Finley said. “He was the spark tonight. He’s like the garbage man, but a lot more. His leadership has been incredible.”

And never more in demand than when Proviso trailed 28-23 at halftime against Manual.

Proviso had been relatively unimpressive in its victories over Carbondale and Libertyville and Boyce had scored only 17 points in the two games, including a four-point, two-rebound performance against Carbondale.

But that all changed in the final 16 minutes of his career, as he hit 6-of-7 shots and changed the entire complexion of the game.

“Donnie Boyce was a monster on the boards in the second half,” Hitt said. “Anyone who has followed us for any length of time knows that is no fluke. Donnie’s knee was sore at halftime . . . playing two games in one day is fatiguing. But he showed a lot of character . . . we all did.”

“I wasn’t as impressive as everyone thought, the whole team wasn’t,” Boyce said. “But we won . . . and that’s all that matters.

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The Rogue Road

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2021: Which wolf will you feed?

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By Genevieve,
today at 10:43 am

I just finished re-reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s lovely masterpiece on creativity, Big Magic. I read it years ago and found it inspiring, so I decided to pick it up again in the downtime I had while awaiting the arrival of another book I’d ordered.

Inspire me it did (lit a damn flame under my ass) and last weekend I found myself lying awake in bed in the middle of the night with a shiny new idea for a blog post thundering through my brain, refusing to let me sleep. Knowing my mind wouldn’t give me peace until I’d properly emptied it, I grabbed my phone and utilized my iPhone’s “Notes” application in all its Dark Mode glory (wonderfully easy on the eyes for 12 am), executing a full brain dump.

Relieved with all my ideas solidly noted, I slid into sleep almost instantly.

The next day, I opened my computer to copy my sleepily drawn up notes into a proper document. As my iCloud synced, I got just the briefest glimpse of that…before it disappeared completely. I mean, it was gone, like it had never existed – not in the “Recently Deleted”, not in my iCloud backups, just POOF, erased from existence. It seemed my brain had also erased it from existence, as I couldn’t call up more than half a sentence from my drowsy state the night before.

I was furious.

Not only was I furious, I spent the rest of my lovely Sunday (my favorite day of the week) in a snit, half of it trying desperately to reinstate that note, and the other half sulking about the fact that not only was the note truly lost, but now I’d managed to create additional technological stressors for myself with all my failed attempts to bring it back (4 copies of every Contact in my phone, anyone?)

Two Wolves

As fate would have it, my guided meditation the next morning provided a proverbial splash of cold water on my grumbling psyche. It received the old story of two wolves:

One day an old Cherokee man sits down with his grandson to teach him about life.
“A fight is going on inside of me,” he says to the boy. “It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil – he is full of rage, jealousy, arrogance, greed, sorrow, regret, lies, laziness, and self-pity.”
He continues, “The other is good – he is filled with love, joy, peace, generosity, truth, empathy, courage, humility, and faith. This same fight is going on inside the hearts of everyone, including you.”
The grandson thinks about this for a few minutes, and then asks his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replies, “The one you feed.”

I’ve heard this story before, or a version of it anyhow.

Against the grain, my husband and I both love the Disney movie Tomorrowland. Many people wrote this movie off for a variety of reasons, but we were able to work past some of the Disney cheesiness to perceive the movie’s more serious undercurrent – humanity’s future, once filled with wonder, that has now faded and turned into something much darker.

Tomorrowland was the first place I ever heard an abbreviated version of the story of the two wolves in a brief scene between the main character and her father. But it stuck. And my husband and I have endlessly quoted it back to each other and to friends in the many years since we first saw that movie.

Turns out…last weekend I was feeding the wrong wolf.

Choosing Thoughts

I read it or heard it said somewhere once that you should choose your thoughts the same way you choose your clothing every day. Or, more likely, that you should choose your thoughts with much more care than you choose your clothing every day.

We don’t give enough credit to the power of our thoughts, or to just how much control we can hold over them. That is, with a little bit of practice, effort, and discipline. Instead, many times we let our monkey minds run rampant over us, dragging us all around and completely exhausting us in the process.

No doubt 2020 has been a rollercoaster, even a change to the very essence of lifestyle for so many people. It’s brought us a global pandemic that, outside of how dangerous that truly may or may not be in and of itself, has created fear, panic, loneliness, and despair, delivered to every person like a drip IV via both mass and social media.

Mass and social media…the kings of feeding the wrong wolf.
Just as those who are absorbing and internalizing those broadcasted emotions…feeding the wrong wolf.

Now we find ourselves once again on the precipice of a new year, which is never a promise for change but yet often provides us with that emboldening feeling of a clean slate.

And I want to ask you, which wolf will you feed this year?

We all only have two choices in life when presented with an obstacle or challenge. To change it, or, if it can’t be changed, to change the reaction to it. That’s it. That’s all we get.

But think for a moment about what an awesome power that is.

This delivers control over our lives and our fates into our hands. Because while we’re often preoccupied with events that have passed or planning for events that have yet to come, life is truly made up of all those small, present moments in-between, the moment you’re experiencing right now. And if those moments are within your power to change, either via action or perception, then so is the very material of your existence.

So again I’ll present the question to myself, to you, to all of humanity: Which wolf will you feed?

Filed under:
Everyday Life, Mindfulness, Sparks

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2021, mindfulness, new year, two wolves

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Chicago Cubs: This is the perfect rotation for the 2021 season by Vincent Parise

The Chicago Bulls got their second preseason win in a row Thursday night, and the back court was on fire.

After a sloppy loss to open their preseason, the Chicago Bulls have now won two in a row before they finish up the 4-game preseason slate tomorrow with another contest against the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Thursday night, the Bulls took on Oklahoma City in their first of two with Billy Donovan’s former team. From the get-go, the Bulls were on fire offensively. It started with Zach LaVine, who poured in 16 in the first quarter, including three from long range.

At halftime, the Bulls were up double digits and, then, in the third quarter, Coby White decided it was his turn to take over. White then proceeded to drop 18 points in the third period alone.

By the end of the game, White finished with 27 points, five boards, three assists and a steal — in three quarters. Meanwhile, LaVine ended with 24 points, five assists, three rebounds, a steal and a block in the same time frame.

Coby White COOKED for 18 in the 3Q ?

He has 27 PTS on 11-17 FG pic.twitter.com/rjuvpsCvCc

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) December 17, 2020

White went 5-for-8 from three-point range, giving he and LaVine a total of eight made from that distance in three quarters.

In the team’s first preseason win over the Houston Rockets, the duo scored a total of 43 points. Thursday night, they upped it to 51. If these two can collectively average over 40 points per game this coming season, the Bulls should have a great chance at making it into one of the final playoff seeds in the Eastern Conference.

White is looking as though he’s picking up right where he left off back in March, when he started to get a chance at more minutes and as the team’s starting point guard. He’s going to be a guy, just like LaVine, who can light it up at any given point. The Bulls are fortunate now that they have two different players that can score in bunches on any occasion.

You have LaVine, who first and foremost, is on a mission to prove once and for all that he is indeed an All Star. But, at the same time, White looks like he’s already on his way to that level as well.

Imagine: The Chicago Bulls have two All Star guards in the near future. What a world we’re living in.

If somehow this squad can come together and show more cohesiveness, especially on the defensive side, they’ll be much better than most originally anticipated. Already, White and LaVine look like they’re cooking. Now, it’s up to the rest of the guys and the team’s defense.

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Bulls: The perfect lineup, rotation for 2020-2021

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Are the playoffs not only a realistic goal, but something Bulls fans should expect this season? Let’s keep watching as these two young, exciting guards lead the way.

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Chicago Bulls: Coby White, Zach LaVine look lethal in preseason win by Ryan Heckman

With the Chicago Bears refusing to make in-season moves, they could be missing out on an opportunity.

Over the past five season, Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Pace has taken the team on a rollercoaster ride full of hits and misses.

There’s been no bigger positive move than Pace trading a haul for Khalil Mack, working out a deal with the Raiders a few seasons ago. Mack has obviously worked out just fine, as he’s the no. 1 rated edge rusher this season, per PFF. You don’t need to listen to PFF, though, to realize just how impactful Mack has been in Chicago.

On the contrary, Pace has also made some moves which now look like they have set the Bears back a decade or more. We will never hear the end of the trade up to draft Mitchell Trubisky at no. 2 overall back in 2017, missing out on both Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes.

The quarterback position has been Pace’s biggest downfall, and unfortunately for the Bears, that’s the most position in sports — not just football. Trubisky has not panned out as a franchise guy. The Mike Glennon signing looks even more hysterical today than it did when it happened. Then, you have the case of Nick Foles, who actually took the offense backwards in 2020.

If he’s failed over and over again at this position, there is no reason to keep Pace around any longer. Like the Bears, other teams have had issues up top. The Houston Texans, Detroit Lions and Jacksonville Jaguars are all searching for a new general manager at this very moment.

The Bears should be looking to replace Pace, but likely won’t do that until after the season is over if they choose to do so at all. This team doesn’t make in-season moves, even if they’re staring them right in the face — and that could lead to a huge miss on the Bears’ part.

The hot name amongst GM candidates has become former pro safety Louis Riddick, who is a current Monday Night Football broadcaster for ESPN. He’s now getting looks from those three aforementioned teams.

One other note on MNF analyst Louis Riddick: Jacksonville has expressed interest in setting up a meeting with him about its GM job, but nothing has been scheduled, per @mortreport and me. https://t.co/rcs1aMGP4V

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) December 16, 2020

Many may not know this, but Riddick worked in an NFL front office for 13 years. He started with the Washington Redskins franchise back in 2001, as a scout. When his front office career came to a pause back in 2013, he was the director of pro personnel with the Philadelphia Eagles.

Some folks may only see him as a broadcaster, but don’t know the intelligence he possesses. With his experience spanning over a decade and his understanding of current NFL offenses and defenses, Riddick figures to be an intriguing hire for any team looking to fill it’s GM role.

It’s unfortunate the Bears are not going to make a move during the season, especially if they ride this small dose of momentum coming off the snapping of their 6-game losing streak against Houston.

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Bears: 3 desperation trades for Carson Wentz

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Riddick would be a great hire for the Bears, as he’s given us plenty of analysis of Chicago’s roster and front office over the last few years — and he always makes sense. He seems like the most logical, obvious choice to replace Pace. But, it looks as though the Bears won’t even be able to give him an opportunity.

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I’ve Got The Hippy Shakes

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The Trump administration legacy is one of death

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By Howard Moore,
today at 9:49 am

300,000 dead from Covid-19.
10 federal executions

The Donald Trump administration has a little more than one month to run. What will their legacy be?

It could be the administration of lies.
It could be the administration of grift.
It could be the administration of racism.
It could be the administration that tried to overturn a legitimate election.
It could be the administration that tried to subvert democracy.

What their legacy will be is the administration of death.

Because of their ineptness, more than three hundred thousand Americans have died of Covid-19. They were late in acknowledging it as a threat to the United States. They were late in closing up the borders. They were early in re-opening up the economy. They failed to listen to the science and scientists. All of this led to a spread of the disease that caused all the illness and loss of life.

In addition to this, the way they decided to attack the virus showed their lack of caring. Herd Immunity was their way to go.
“WE WANT THEM INFECTED” were the words from a high ranking administration official. When told this would lead to more infections, illness and death, “WE DON’T CARE” was the response.

The number of deaths in 2020 from Covid-19 has surpassed the military casualties from a decade of fighting in Vietnam. 3,500 died yesterday…sadly, a new record. Another 100, 000 are predicted to die before January 20.

Since July, the federal government has executed ten men. Five more executions are scheduled before the year’s end. The last previous federal execution was in 2003. Almost seventy percent of the country feels that the death penalty is barbaric and should be stopped. There is only one reason that the federal government resumed executions after seventeen years…..Donald Trump. Thirty years after taking out an ad calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were later found to be innocent, Trump gets to show his cruelty by putting ten men to death.

Historians will be talking about the last four years for generations to come. While they try to decipher what happened and why, they shouldn’t look past all the needless deaths caused by the current lame-duck administration. That’s the true legacy of Donald Trump.

Related Post: Twitter should shut down Donald Trump’s account

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  My so called friends think it’s time to edit this section. After four years, they may be right, but don’t tell them that. I’ll deny it until they die!
  I can’t believe I’ve been writing this blog for four years.
  It started as a health/wellness thing and over the years has morphed to include so many things that I don’t know how to describe it anymore.
  I really thought this was going to be the final year of the blog but then Donald Trump came along. It looks like we’re good for four more years..God help us all!
  Oh yeah…the biographical stuff. I’m not 60 anymore. The rest you can read about in the blog.

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• The Trump administration legacy is one of death

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I got a call recently from one of my oldest friends, a retired rancher in Montana. As iconoclasts go, Ansel set the curve. We became friends during graduate school at the University of Virginia. One time he was delivering a seminar paper on William Faulkner’s narrative techniques when he paused, dug in his thick, black hair and yanked.

“Tick,” he announced calmly, before tossing it in a wastebasket and finishing his talk. Later, he explained that he’d been squirrel hunting, not an everyday pastime for a Ph.D. candidate.

So it wasn’t a big surprise when he left academia to raise sheep in remote Highland County, Virginia. Over time, he kept moving farther from civilization until he ended up 17 miles from a town of 300 overlooking the Crazy Mountains in Montana — by then a world-class breeder of Suffolk sheep.

Most summers, I would load up a couple of basset hounds — a shared passion — and make the 24-hour drive to visit for 10 days of trout fishing, fence riding, baseball watching and late-night bull sessions. One year, I arrived while he was doing business on the phone. Without pausing, he slid a bottle of Irish whiskey down the counter and kept talking. His teenaged daughter was aghast. I explained that her father dislikes Irish whiskey; the bottle was a gift. My wife and his ex-wife remain the closest of friends.

Ansel alerted me to an extraordinary essay in Range, a quarterly with cowboys and grizzly bears on the cover. “The cowboy spirit on America’s outback” is how the publication bills itself. It features articles sympathetic to the Bundy family’s ongoing war with federal “tyranny.” The editors think there are too damn many grizzlies killing livestock in Montana.

And a remarkable essay it is. Ansel was hoping I knew a national magazine editor who could reprint California rancher Dave Daley’s saga of the Bear Fire, the catastrophic blaze that destroyed hundreds of square miles of forest habitat, killed 80% of the author’s 400 cows in the worst agony imaginable, and left him shattered, despondent and terribly angry.

Ansel said it squared with everything he knew.

Alas, I know no such editors, but as a former small-scale cattleman, I do have a limited understanding of Daley’s profound grief. Like any domestic animal, cows can get next to your heart: their unique, steadfast personalities; their strong emotional bonds.

A well-meaning friend asked Daley’s daughter if the family home had burned. No, she answered, but a house can be rebuilt. A way of life cannot. At least not during our lifetimes.

The author wakes up nights, crying.

“I cry for the forest, the trees and streams,” he writes, “and the horrible deaths suffered by the wildlife and our cattle. The suffering was unimaginable. When you find groups of cows and their baby calves tumbled in a ravine trying to escape, burned almost beyond recognition, you try not to retch. You only pray death was swift.”

Certainly, the author knows whereof he speaks. His family has been grazing cattle in what’s now the Plumas National Forest since the 1850s: taking them into the mountains after spring snowmelt and gathering them every October. He has a Ph.D. in animal science and is a past president of the California Cattlemen’s Association.

Much of Daley’s essay recounts the agonizing labor of family and friends — experienced local hands all — working with chainsaws and four-wheelers to find, and all too often euthanize, cows with agonizing injuries like burnt hooves and incinerated udders. The photos are harrowing.

And what the author believes is that these catastrophes don’t have to happen. Forest fires are inevitable and can be beneficial in clearing undergrowth that serves as fuel and sucks the moisture from the soil. But virtually all of California’s most destructive fires, he points out, have started on public land, where restrictions mean flammable fuel builds up.

“For those of you on the right who want to blame the left and California,” he points out, “these are national forestlands that are ‘managed’ by the feds. They have failed miserably over the past 50 years. Smokey the Bear was the cruelest joke ever played on the western landscape, a decades-long campaign to prevent forest fires has resulted in megafires of a scope we’ve never seen. Thanks, Smokey.”

Daley sees tree-huggers sharing the blame: “And, for those of you on the left who want to blame it all on climate change, the regulations at the state and federal level have crippled — no, stopped — any progress towards changing the unmitigated disasters facing our landscapes.”

Alas, it’s the “tragedy of the commons” writ large. Everybody’s got a claim on the national forest, but nobody’s responsible. Insofar as Daley offers a solution, it would be a return to local control, and to controlled burns like Native Americans used to manage ecosystems for 13,000 years before white men arrived.

But that looks politically impossible. For example, who qualifies as “local”? Hence, perhaps, Daley’s helpless anger and his elegiac tone.

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Cheating Death

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I resurrect my brother after 75 years gone and oddly, I see him more clearly than ever before

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By Howard Englander,
today at 8:00 am

Seventy-five years ago, when I was fourteen, my older brother by four years died in an automobile accident. I mark the event with a candle on the altar where ceramic angels and pictures of favorite gurus and swamis stare back at me when I meditate in the mornings. And for the first time in many years I think about my brother and the family we shared and the parts they played in my teen-age, growing up chapters.

The memories are dim, but I am grateful for the faint outlines of the images that appear, however scant and vague. I relish them. For so many years they were lost to the shock of the grim night when the phone call from a nameless coroner changed my family forever and wiped my familial memory bank, blank.

For decades, no matter how earnestly I traversed my brain’s frontal lobes for memories of mom and dad and sister and brother, nothing coherent emerged. Researchers studying the sea slug Aplysia californica would detect more simple forms of memory! What I conjured up were only vague images, more spectral that real.

It’s taken me a long time to recognize that I never allowed myself to fully feel the pain and to grieve for my lost brother. I simply denied the impact of his death; I blotted it out, along with the past he embodied.

As a teen, my awareness was limited to my range of feelings at the time. If I felt good, life was good. If I felt sad, life sucked. I was duped by my ego; I perceived the world as a reflection of my own self-imagined victories or defeats. My brother’s death was an explicit reminder of life’s transience, and I didn’t even blink. I was aware of the event itself but as far as its affect, I pretended it didn’t happen.

At the time I experienced the external world by my preoccupation with satisfying physical drives and appetites. My goal was to expand the range of my ego, not shrink it. The more I felt in charge the better, and to the extent I succeeded that’s how I evaluated success and failure; getting my driver’s license and aiming a hundred sixty horses down the highway, that’s what set me free.

Seventy-five years ago I was a young boy rocketing through life fueled by the wrong propellants, judging everyone and everything by the impact on my brittle self-esteem, ignoring life’s fragility even as my brush with my brother’s death demonstrated its fleeting existence. I was attempting to find my way without a map or moral compass. Circumstance dumped me in the wilderness like a domesticated wolf let go in the middle of Yellowstone Park, survival skills quickly acquired or dead soon after. It was a world of secular and pitiless practicalities. If I couldn’t see it, it didn’t exist. There was no inner light. There was just me.

Today, on my brother’s death day, how I view the early years of my life is vastly different. The memories still are scant, but the specters have taken form. I have filled in the blanks with sensory impressions that are heartfelt. I see my brother as a boy who struggled to find his center, buffeted by the shifts of our family’s circumstance. I can forgive his relative indifference to the kid brother as he grew into young manhood and became more interested in girlfriends than GI Joe action figures.

I see my mother fighting the depression that was so common among her generation of Jewish women, married young, in thrall to their husbands or scorned by the patriarchy should they dare protest. I’ve come to admire my father, a clever man, loyally fulfilling the role of family breadwinner no matter how it stifled his sense of joy and adventure. And not least, my beloved sister, forgotten in the chaos, struggling to be heard, ignored until validated by her acceptance into the freshman class of a prestigious member of the Seven Sisters… where, alas, like Icarus, naiveté and indiscretion took her flight too close to the sun.

Today, as I light a candle for my brother, the floodgates open to the forgotten cache of familial memories and the heartache and sadness suppressed for so many years. Eight-plus decades ago when my brother died, I was a lost boy.

Today, I can hear the celestial choir and the soulful hymn, “I once was lost but now am found.”

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  Howard Englander

  In the course of a long business career I held many titles familiar to the corporate world. But as I quickly learned the lofty nameplates no longer apply when your career comes to a close and you move from the corner office to a corner of the den. The challenge was to stay vital and active rather than idling on the sidelines. I had to create a new foundation upon which to build life’s purpose and joy.
  I stopped adding up my stock portfolio as a measure of my net worth and developed a healthy self esteem independent of applause from others.
  I am the co-author of The In-Sourcing Handbook: Where and How to Find the Happiness You Deserve, a practical guide and instruction manual offering hands-on exercises to help guide readers to experience the transformative shift from simply tolerating life to celebrating life. I also am the author of 73, a popular collection of short stories about America’s growing senior population running the gamut of emotions as they struggle to resist becoming irrelevant in a youth-oriented society.

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