The Notre Dame Fighting Irish are still scheduled to play Navy in Ireland in this season, even after cancellation rumors due to the Coronavirus possibly affecting the season.
The Notre Dame Fighting Irish were scheduled to start their season on August 29th, 2020 in Dublin, Ireland against Navy, but due to the Coronavirus, the game has been in doubt by many. There has been rumors of the game being canceled all the way to it still being a possibility.
As of right now, the game against Navy in Dublin is still happening. The issue becomes how Ireland handles things, as they’ve extended their ban on gatherings of more than 5,000 people to September. The game will take place just days before the ban would expire.
A few days doesn’t make a huge difference, right? Let’s hope not because postponing the game doesn’t help either team, as they’re booked for other games all year. Instead of postponing the game, they’d end up just playing in the United States.
The NFL has already pulled out of their games in Mexico and London that were scheduled for the 2020 NFL season. Look, I’m not complaining. The NFL games in Mexico and London are annoying for the players and fans.
A college football game in Ireland though is different in my eyes. It seems like an experience that the kids will only get to experience once. It’s an experience that will last a lifetime for the teammates on both teams.
Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said on Tuesday “At this point, it’s still on the schedule.” This is good news, for many reasons. First off, this is a game I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced.
If the game happens, this will be their third time meeting in Ireland, with the first two going in favor of the Fighting Irish.
It was expected that over 35,000 fans will travel from the US and Europe to “take part” in the experience of this game. That could be the only thing that ends up holding Ireland back and possibly canceling the game in Ireland completely. I mean, 35,000 is way over the 5,000 people limit.
My bet is that the game will be canceled and moved to the United States. I am making a prediction that Ireland will host the two teams in 2021, instead of the expected August of 2020 matchup.
The Chicago Bears have a weakness at running back, believe it or not. Ryan Pace has to do something about it.
A weakness at running back, you say? The Chicago Bears? Why, yes, they do have a weakness at running back. It isn’t something you would typically have thought going into the offseason, but it’s the absolute truth.
First off, I am a believer in David Montgomery. He was actually very good in his rookie campaign, considering how poor the Bears run blocked. He still forced dozens upon dozens of missed tackles and I think his sophomore season will show he’s more comfortable. Montgomery should be locked and loaded as the starter, and he’s going to be a good one. Count on it.
But, behind Montgomery is a bit of a mystery. In 2019, we all saw a Tarik Cohen who was much less deliberate in running the football. Sure, the blocking was bad. But, Cohen was also not much better. In fact, he didn’t look anything like his 2018 self.
Cohen was everything but decisive in how he ran the football. Was he used improperly? Was he over-thinking things? It could be a bit of both. But, he didn’t look like the compliment and backup needed for Montgomery.
Behind Cohen is, well, a couple of guys who are fighting for jobs. Ryan Nall, along with undrafted rookie Artavis Pierce, are going to battle it out for a spot behind Cohen, or so we think.
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Cordarrelle Patterson will be used more out of the back field, per Matt Nagy — and for good reason. Patterson is dynamic when he takes handoffs. But, he can’t be counted on to take too many. His best comes on special teams.
It just so happens that the Bears could solidify their back field with a veteran. A few are still unsigned, and they would make for strong additions to a roster looking to make a Super Bowl run. The fact of the matter is, if Montgomery went down, the Bears would be completely screwed — that’s simple honesty.
So, if I were Ryan Pace, I’d be giving one of these three a serious look in the near future.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – OCTOBER 10: Andrew Shaw #65 of the Chicago Blackhawks celebrates a goal against the San Jose Sharks during the second period of the opening home game at United Center on October 10, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
The ChicagoBlackhawks have a lot of good forwards but their defense is awful. They might be willing to move one to help their defense.
The Chicago Blackhawks have some skill at the forward positions. There are elite players like Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. These are legendary players that might go down as the best to ever play for the team. Some people have them at that status already. There are young players there like Kirby Dach, Alex DeBrincat, and Dominik Kubalik that could provide tremendous depth and eventually take over for the legends when they move on.
On defense, things are different. They traded away Niklas Hjalmarsson so their other mainstays in Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook are all that are left from the glory days. Keith is still a good top-four guy but he is already 36 and will be 37 by the start of the next season. Brent Seabrook just turned 35 a couple of weeks ago but he is much more worn than Keith. It is clear that Seabrook is a 5th defender at best right now.
With that all in mind, it is clear that they need some help. They made the bonehead decision to trade Henri Jokiharju to the Buffalo Sabres for Alexander Nylander. They have Adam Boqvist and Ian Mitchell ready to have a decent amount of ice time going forward but they need more.
The idea of the team trading away some forwards for defense is something they should really consider. There are some premium defenders that are going to be available via free-agency like Torey Krug and Alex Pietrangelo but they will be pricey. These are three forwards that might be able to land them a top-four defenseman via a trade:
With the Chicago Bulls’ new general manager officially on board, what are some potential impacts?
Late last week, the Chicago Bulls made official what had previously been announced days earlier, and that was the hiring of Marc Eversley as the franchise’s new general manager. It feels like this moment was a long-time coming for Bulls fans who have been clamoring for years for an end to the John Paxson and Gar Forman era. So now, the attention turns towards Eversley and what he will do in the coming days and months now that he is in charge.
To understand what that might look like, it would be helpful to understand a little more about him and how he has gotten to this point in his career.
Eversley most recently served as the Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers, who has had some experience with rebuilding a roster. However, Eversley began his NBA front-office career with the Toronto Raptors working under the successful Bryan Colangelo. Eversley went on to work in the Washington Wizard’s front office before reuniting with Colangelo in Philadelphia where he was hired by the Bulls.
But what is most interesting about Eversley’s background is what he did just prior to joining the NBA. Before doing so, he worked as an executive in their retail and marketing departments. Although Eversley has taken a bit of an unconventional route to Chicago, his unique perspective will certainly have some impacts on the team, and we take a look at what some of them might be below.
Taking another opportunity to crack a local, or at least nearby, beer while enduring our isolation. This time I propped up the iPad and shot one of my “One Take Beer Reviews.”
Odd Side Ales is located in Grand Haven, Michigan, between Holland and Muskegon. They were established in 2010, but have just recently been distributing in the Chicago market. They’ve garnered a reputation for unusual styles.
Their “whalez” release is an imperial stout under the tag “Hipster Brunch Stout.” The many variations are based on a stout brewed with maple syrup, and aged on coffee and bacon.
The Rye Hipster Brunch Stout won a gold medal in the “Specialty Beer ” category at the 2019 Great American Beer Fest. This variant is brewed with rye malt, and aged in rye whiskey barrels. I picked up a bottle for under $7 at my local, Orange and Brew.
The beer pours a thick tan head over a brownish-black beer body. Nose is rather sweet, with maple playing a big part. I could not identify anything that made me think of bacon, perhaps only a slight note of char. I could not note coffee at all, either in the nose or palate. But the taste is very nice. It has smooth malts for a relatively young imperial stout. Maple still predominates the palate, but the other additions give it a unique edge I don’t normally find in this style.
This goes down very well. I do feel slightly enervated, so there is some caffeine at work. This goes down very smooth and easy, and would go well with a fruit plate or other dessert.
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Meet The Blogger
Mark McDermott
Writer, trivia maven, fan of many things. I thought to learn all there is to know about beer as a way to stay interested in learning. It is my pleasure to bring Chicago’s craft beer scene to you.
These are just a few of the places where we’ve seen protests to reopen America. Most of the scenes have ranged from scary to surreal to ridiculous. One word sent people to the streets….Liberate
We’ve seen men carrying assault rifles into the Michigan statehouse. We’ve been treated to people carrying confederate flags, Nazi paraphernalia and MAGA hats. There have been surfers and sun worshipers storming the Orange County, California beaches. These are the people who dominate the news coverage. These are the faces of the protests.
But what about the people out there that we don’t see? What about people who own a small business or restaurant and the loss of a month or two of sales puts their livelihood in jeopardy? What about people who have lost jobs and are worried that their way of life will be destroyed by the Covid-19 pandemic? These are the people that are now struggling to pay their mortgage, put food on the table for their families and basically just trying to keep afloat.
How do you balance your family’s safety with it’s financial concerns? What would you do if you had to make this choice?
For me, it’s easy now to make that choice. I don’t have the concerns of the people I just mentioned. But recently, I wondered what I would have done if the Covid-19 pandemic had occurred twenty years earlier?
In 2000, I was fifty-seven years old. I had a wife and two young daughters, ages nine and seven. I was working for an advertising company. It was a family owned business with about one hundred employees. I had a sales position that had a good income. My wife was also working, but even with two incomes money was tight. For every step you took forward financially, something would come up that would make you take one or more steps back. I’m not complaining. That’s just the way it was twenty years ago. We weren’t the only ones. Plenty of other families had the same issues.
My job was straight commission. No sales equals no income. If you became ill and missed a day of work, it would put you in a hole. If you caught the flu and missed a week, that hole becomes fairly deep.
So what happens if a pandemic hits and the small company is forced to temporarily shut down? How does someone already living check to check survive? How can someone already living close to the edge overcome that?
The answer is sadly, they probably can’t.
That’s why no matter what you think of the clowns that show up on your television each night, you have to have empathy for the ones behind those gruesome scenes. Health vs work is a difficult choice for many Americans. It’s more difficult than many of us think. It’s easy to say staying home and safe is the only choice. It’s not nearly as easy if you’re faced with losing that home which keeps you safe.
The protests to open up America are going to continue. The news outlets will continue to focus on those that act the most outrageous. But when you talk about and hopefully condemn them, don’t forget the folks standing behind them…the ones you can’t see. They’re the ones whose stores you walk into every day. They’re the ones you should be talking about. They’re the ones who really need our support…not our shame. Those protesters are us.
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.
Marilla is a gentle, shy and sweet, one-year-old, female white patch tabby cat looking for a loving guardian.
This eight-pound girl was found living in a warehouse where she was being kept for rodent control. She lived with her momma cat, who has so far evaded our grasp. She is fine with all the other cats in my home when introduced. She does a little nervous growl but really nothing more. No biting or scratching. She lets me hold her in my arms and she has a very soft but consistent purr.
She’s timid and likes to hide high and low, but she doesn’t seem to mind when I drag her out for a snuggle session. She also uses her litter box perfectly.
She is very healthy, spayed, vaccinated for rabies and distemper, dewormed and treated with Revolution for fleas and worms. She has also tested negative for FIV/Felv and is microchipped.
Marilla’s adoption fee of $150 benefits the rescued pets of Friends of Petraits Rescue.
If you’re interested in meeting and possibly adopting Marilla, please contact [email protected] for an adoption application.
She is currently being fostered in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood.
1521 N. State Parkway, Chicago: $9,950,000 | Listed April 6, 2020
This 9,700-square-foot Gold Coast mansion has six bedrooms and eight bathrooms, and was designed by George Maher. Built in 1894 and set on an oversized lot, the limestone home has been renovated and includes plaster moldings, paneling and herringbone floors. A cove ceiling, one of six fireplaces, a custom dressing room and a marble bathroom complete the master suite. A second kitchen can be found in the penthouse-level entertainment room, along with a roof deck. Exterior features include a terrace, garage top deck, landscaping, a built-in grill and an outdoor fireplace. This home includes a one-car garage and a parking pad for a second car.
Agent: Jennifer Ames of Engel & Voelkers, 773-797-9500
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Yes, this is a joke. The Longpigs sound like the Hothouse Flowers, not the other way around.
But I found The Longpigs first. I’d always known of the Hothouse Flowers, and even liked a few songs of theirs from the ’80s, but I didn’t collect their albums until recently. So, to me, the Hothouse Flowers sound like The Longpigs.
I never saw any stylistic connection between the two bands until I heard “Trumpets. “ Then, holy shit, this song comes on Spotify Radio, and I’m thinking, “Cool, Spot hooked me up with some ‘Pigs!”
But, I’ve never heard this song. I check my phone and it’s Hothouse Flowers. What’s the degree of separation? 6? Yes, that’s it! Whoa!
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Thank god for weird algorithms and intrusive software that can read your thoughts and identify your likes. I mean how can any of this technology be bad when it’s helping music junkies like me tie two random bands together?
My family’s beloved 16-year-old Siamese cat, Webley, died in my arms last year. He’d been a sleek fat kitty before he got ill, but he’d lost weight and lost weight till he was little more than a bedraggled shadow. At the end he could barely lift his head, and then the vet gave him the shot and he couldn’t lift his head at all. I was scratching his ears as I’d so often done before, and suddenly they dropped, and whatever I was petting wasn’t Webley anymore. It’s one of the worst memories of my life.
I’ve been thinking about Webley a lot while listening to the new Fire-Toolz album, Rainbow Bridge, which comes out May 8 on local label Hausu Mountain. Angel Marcloid, a Chicago musician who records as Fire-Toolz (as well as under several other names), made Rainbow Bridge about her 16-year-old cat, Breakfast, also a Siamese, who died in December 2018. The album is an idiosyncratic collage of guttural death-metal roars, electronic bleeps, and vaporwave ambience. Bleak, sweet, and quietly unflinching, it slides back and forth between two emotional poles: one boils with rage and grief, while the other is steeped in a comforting lyricism as gentle as a cat rubbing its chin against your hand. “It’s been a while, but I think about her every day,” Marcloid says. “I still have moments where I feel her close and I just cry a whole bunch. I’ve got her ashes two feet from me right now. I have a tattoo of her on my chest. So yeah, I’m happy to honor her in my music.”
From as early as she can remember, Marcloid says, music made her feel things “that are just so abstract and visceral and hard to put your finger on.” She was born near Annapolis in 1984 to a music-loving family; her parents constantly played CDs of hair metal, the Beatles, and her all-time favorite band, Rush. Marcloid started making little drum sets out of pots and pans almost as soon as she could walk.
Her first public performance was when she was seven. Her parents knew a local bar band, and she sat in with them to play drums on a cover of the Black Crowes’ “Hard to Handle.”
“This is a smoky bar, women showing their boobs and stuff–it was not an environment for kids!” Marcloid says. “But I sat down with the drum kit and we played the songs, and they were just amazed. They were looking back at me while we were playing, like, ‘Holy shit! This kid’s actually keeping time!’ I’ll never forget walking off that stage, and all these drunk, smelly adults cheering me on, and a couple of people just gave me money. ‘You’re awesome, kid! Here’s 20 dollars!'”
Marcloid soon taught herself to play guitar and bass too, and her musical interests expanded. As a child she had a formative late-night exposure to Morbid Angel’s 1993 video for “Rapture” via MTV’s Headbangers Ball, and soon she was also listening to jazz and electronica. She performed in several short-lived bands, and in the late 2000s she launched her own label, also called Rainbow Bridge. Through it Marcloid released cassettes and CDs by other musicians, as well as a blizzard of her own music under various names–including ambient acoustic music as the Human Excuse, punky dream pop with the trio Shadow Government, and electroacoustic noise as Water Bullet.
Marcloid came to Chicago in 2012 to move in with a girlfriend, who owned several cats and had just adopted Breakfast. Like most Siamese, Marcloid says, Breakfast “has always been a little strange.” She was neurotic and disliked the other cats, and she never really warmed up to Marcloid’s partner. In fact she only had one clear favorite. “She took to me immediately,” Marcloid says, “and always wanted to be on me and just wanted to spend all her time with me.” When Marcloid and her partner split up, there was no question who Breakfast would go with. The kitty ended up spending most of her life in Marcloid’s bedroom to avoid other cats. “The rest of the house was just scary for her. There were too many other cat smells,” Marcloid says.
“On the one hand, it may seem weird or maybe even borderline cruel to keep a cat in a single bedroom for their entire lives. But that’s what she wanted; she was happy.”
Marcloid has featured Breakfast in tracks throughout her oeuvre. “Spirit Spit” from the 2017 album Drip Mental (Hausu Mountain), for example, is a short wordless suite in which Marcloid imagines the usually shy Breakfast grown adventurous enough to go exploring in the house during a storm. The track opens with Breakfast engaging in some Siamese vocalizing and squawking, with thunder in the background. The rest of the narrative unfolds through auditory cues. “She comes down to the basement and turns on her ancient computer, which ties into AOL,” Marcloid explains. “Then she puts on a Telepath CD, which is a vaporwave artist that I absolutely love. You can hear the CD drive opening, you can hear the Telepath song start. And then she types some stuff and is meowing. And then she turns off the computer and goes back upstairs.”
In 2018 Breakfast began to go into kidney failure. She was constantly peeing in Marcloid’s room, and she wasn’t eating. Eventually she was so uncomfortable and miserable Marcloid had to euthanize her. “And that was just so fucking traumatic for me, and so emotional,” Marcloid says. “It really energized the search for truth and meaning that I had already begun years ago.”
Marcloid began making Rainbow Bridge during Breakfast’s illness. The title isn’t just a callback to her record label (which she folded around five years ago) but also a reference to contemporary folk mythology about a rainbow bridge that, in Marcloid’s words, “our pets either cross when they die to go to the other side, or they go there and they wait for us.” The cover art, by Marcloid and Jeremy Coubrough, shows a Siamese cat sitting in a green field with her back to the viewer, looking at the prismatic steps of a bridge that leads upward into a kind of bloated growth of exploding colors.
The chaos of different hues fits the Fire-Toolz aesthetic. As Hausu Mountain cofounder Doug Kaplan puts it, “There’s just nobody else that sounds like this, and there will never be another. Each track goes a billion different places but has a strong sense of oneness.” Marcloid’s other projects often follow particular rules or fit into particular genres; Mindspring Memories, for example, is mostly slowed-down and otherwise manipulated smooth-jazz samples. A recent album under the name Path to Lobster Believers is processed feedback improvisation. But with Fire-Toolz, Marcloid says, “Anything goes. It’s a no-rules catchall; everything reports to it. It’s the top of the pyramid.”
The violent shifts in tone and genre on a Fire-Toolz track often feel exuberant and playful. On Rainbow Bridge, though, they create splatters of emotion: nostalgia, confusion, loss, hope. The opening track, “Gnosis .oo?Ozing,” starts out as ranting death metal, with Marcloid screaming distorted, virtually indecipherable lyrics: “Arms wrapped in neon like a warning / A rainbow bridge unfurling / And now I lay listening to nothing / I feel my organs locking up.”
By the second verse, she’s superimposed smooth-jazz keyboard flourishes atop the noise, so that it sounds like the metal is battling easy listening, anger struggling with happier memories. “Layers in grief not unlike stages of passing / There are many / Not too many / Not so much.”
The video for the song “Rainbow ? Bridge,” created by Marcloid with Armpitrubber (aka Christine Janokowicz), provides an intense visual analogue for the music’s smeared palette. This song too starts with a death-metal feel, pairing double kick drum with Marcloid’s throat-tearing vocals. “Please don’t be mad that I cut your cord / Fear lodged in my gums / Pressing into my face with fingerlike force / Breakfast!” she yells, as images of the kitty strobe and dissolve into colors, lights, emojis, a door opening, SpongeBob screaming. Tinkly new-age keyboard ambience plays over purple clouds and the on-screen words “Heaven! They say I can sit and soak you up.” A guitar solo fit for a classic-rock ballad cuts through the shifting landscape, and then the song briefly fades into ambience as Breakfast romps across the screen and dissolves. It’s a vision of a loved one disintegrating, perhaps into nothing, perhaps into memory or heaven, while pain and happiness alternate in spasms of glitches.
“Heaven has no location,” Marcloid howls near the end of the track. That’s a statement of spiritual hope; heaven is everywhere, Marcloid believes. “It’s not any particular place. It’s something that is all-encompassing,” she says. “I think that it’s everywhere and everything. It’s the flow of life.” You can hear that hope on tracks such as “[Mego] ^ Maitri,” which is all gentle surging keyboards and pattering electronica, encouraging you to gently drift into an ether of soft fur and purring.
A heaven without location can also simply be a heaven that doesn’t exist, though, and that fear and doubt is also part of Rainbow Bridge. On the jittery “Microtubules,” a throbbing beat loops around and around as Marcloid asks, “Were you afraid of crossing?” It’s an unsettling question: of course she’d worry about a cat who never wanted to leave the bedroom going off on a long journey alone.
“When Breakfast was sick, anxiety was a huge, huge part of it,” Marcloid says. “And even after she passed, and I knew that there was nothing to be done, there was still so much anxiety. I became frustrated because I wanted to know where she was, if she was anywhere. I just want the truth. I don’t even care what it is, even if the truth is we’re all just dead, and that when my body stops working, it’s completely over.”
Marcloid finished Rainbow Bridge months ago, and of course she didn’t know it would be released at a time when anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and isolation would be so pervasive. In the context of a pandemic, the album seems even more relevant, not just because of its grief but also because of its prescient reminder of the importance of pets: during the stay-at-home order, animal adoptions have broken records as humans turn to cats and dogs to keep them company, and keep them sane, in isolation.
Marcloid adopted another cat herself after Breakfast died, and she now has three. “It’s incredibly comforting to have them during a time like this,” she says. “They’re a solid rock for me to lean on. Especially lately, because they just don’t fight with themselves. They’re just such simpler creatures, and they’re so much more connected to reality than any human could possibly be because of how complex our lives are. When they’re in pain, they’ll react–they won’t like it, but they don’t conceptualize and theorize about it. They don’t get into this existential dread. They’re just in pain, and they just want the pain to go away. That’s all it is. It’s that simple. We are just hopeless cases in comparison.”
Marcloid’s music, for all its genre shifts and chaotic oddness, can also reach for that kind of simplicity of thought and emotion. The six-minute instrumental “Angel (of Deth)” is elegiac, oceanic Muzak–a soundtrack to play while the waves roll in, or while watching a kitty sleep. At its conclusion the track breaks up into electronic blips and warbles, as though the world were coming apart and something else were wavering into existence behind the static.
“It’s a mystery because we don’t know,” Marcloid says. “So I have to love and honor that mystery. I don’t even know what God is, or if God exists, but whatever it is, that’s what I love.” Marcloid’s tribute suggests that cats may know more about love than we do. They trust you even at the end, to help them die. Rainbow Bridge is not just a eulogy but an expression of hope that they’ll lend you a paw in turn when your time comes. It’s a comfort to think that when you start up those stairs, there will be a small someone to show you the way. v
Their “whalez” release is an imperial stout under the tag “Hipster Brunch Stout.” The many variations are based on a stout brewed with maple syrup, and aged on coffee and bacon.
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