Like most high school athletes, Lauren Huber saw her usual schedule go out the window because of the pandemic.

Like most high school athletes, Lauren Huber saw her usual schedule go out the window because of the pandemic.

Huber lost her junior track season when the Illinois High School Association canceled all spring sports in 2020 as COVID-19 took hold.

When her senior year began last fall, Huber didn’t know if she’d be able to cycle through her usual sports of volleyball, basketball and track. So she decided to improvise.

The result was likely the busiest and most ambitious schedule of any prep athlete in the state. For the 2020-21 school year, Huber has competed in six sports: tennis, bowling, volleyball, basketball, track and softball.

As her hectic year winds down against the backdrop of sports returning to a semblance of normal, she regrets not a minute of it.

“We’ve been waiting all year for things to open up,” she said. “You can’t be unhappy about being too busy.”

Here’s a look at how Huber’s school year unfolded:

When volleyball was pushed back indefinitely as a higher-risk sport, Huber opted to play tennis, one of the few fall sports that proceeded on schedule.

“That ended and there was a while we were thinking basketball might not happen,” Huber said.

So she joined the bowling team. When the IHSA abruptly announced in January basketball was coming back soon, Huber found herself juggling two sports.

That segued into volleyball, which was a spring sport according to the state’s revised four-season calendar.

Now it’s the IHSA’s summer season and Huber is nearing the finish line of her personal marathon by juggling track and softball.

Many schools wouldn’t let an athlete try so many sports, but Glenbard East is the exception to the rule.

“They’ve been really flexible and understanding,” Huber said of her coaches. “Our athletic director (D’Wayne Bates), he played four sports in high school, so he’s supportive of it.”

Girls basketball coach Nicole Miller isn’t surprised Huber — who will play that sport at Illinois Wesleyan — has been able to pull this off.

“She’s the best female athlete that’s walked through our doors,” Miller said, “Incredible, incredible work ethic. Amazing athletic skill, jumping ability, speed, endurance.”

Huber led Glenbard East’s girls track team to the first conference title in program history Thursday, winning the 800 meters and 300 hurdles and taking second in the shot put.

The 800 is Huber’s best event. But she had never competed in either the shot or hurdles before this spring.

“She can do any event,” girls track coach Molly Gstalter said. “She’s such a quick learner, such a coachable athlete.”

Huber credits her parents for helping make it all work. That includes driving her from one event to another this spring, sometimes while she’s changing uniforms in the car.

Much as Huber enjoys staying busy in sports, she’ll be ready for a break when track and softball wind down in a few weeks.

“It’ll be weird having no schedule,” she said. “(But) I think we’re trying to make up for lost time (with) family vacations.”

More multi-taskers

Huber isn’t the only local athlete with a heavier workload this school year.

Libertyville senior Andrew Clark has juggled five sports: cross country, basketball, swimming, water polo and track.

Clark, who is heading to Georgetown with hopes of competing in club cross country, has done that sport, basketball and water polo throughout high school.

This year, the stars aligned to do more

“I’ve always been interested in doing swimming and track,” he said. “The seasons kind of lined up.”

Like Huber, he was pessimistic about basketball as months passed without word from the IHSA.

“I honestly didn’t think it was going to happen,” Clark said.

But it did, and as he nears the end of a busy but rewarding year, Clark has no regrets.

“It’s definitely been exhausting at times,” he said. “Overall, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s been rewarding to meet a lot of new people.”

Unlike Huber and Clark, Elk Grove senior Joe Gaskill isn’t doing any new sports this year. But he faced some challenges when the sports calendar opened up all at once.

“We went from almost nothing, (then) there was a point I was doing three (football, wrestling and track) in one week,” Gaskill said.

An excellent student with a 4.5 grade-point average on a 4.0 scale. Gaskill plans to play football and baseball at Illinois Wesleyan. Right now, he’s wrestling at 170 pounds and playing shortstop for the Grenadiers.

“I don’t mind being busy,” he said. “I was like, if I have the opportunity to (do all three sports), I’m going to go for it.”

After all those idle months, how could it be any other way?

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Is anyone surprised at how well the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox are doing at this point? The Cubs? Maybe it’s a bit unexpected. The White Sox? Now that’s a team who had high expectations going into the season. Ones that they’re living up to, by the way. Both teams are playing phenomenally right now. And their dominance is coming at the perfect time with 2021 MLB All Star voting right around the corner.

Javier Báez.
El Mago.
The Magician. pic.twitter.com/yZX7HgUFCU

— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) May 27, 2021

The Cubs May Heyday

May was nothing short of spectacular for the Cubs. No, they didn’t throw any no-hitters, but after 27 games, our Northsiders posted a 19-8 record in their climb to the #1 spot of the NL Central. It all started early in the month when they swept the Dodgers in a three-game series. One of those games was seven innings long due to a postponement, and one took 11 innings to get the job done. The Cubs started to really get things going in back-to-back series against the Nationals and Cardinals, where they only dropped one game in each. Things got even better after they faced the Pirates next when El Mago pulled another trick out of his magic bag as he danced up and down the first baseline in what should’ve been an easy out. Instead, Baez’s antics led to a run scored with him on second. He would then go on to score himself in the inning. 

But it wasn’t only the offense that found their groove, as the Cubs bullpen lit up the mound from mid-May. It would take 38 and ⅓ innings before the bullpen finally gave up a run to the Reds on May 30. The stretch of dominance ended up setting a franchise record.

The White Hot White Sox

Even the White Sox couldn’t help but wreak havoc on their opponents in May. Through 29 games, the team went 19-10 and currently hold the top spot in the AL Central. Unfortunately, while they were doing damage to their opponents’ records, the injuries started doing damage to their lineup. Luis Robert and Eloy Jimenez went down with injuries, but both are hopeful at returning this year. To make matters worse, it didn’t help that old-school manager Tony LaRussa found himself making headlines for all the wrong reasons. We won’t dive too heavily into the details, but we will say two things. One, baseball’s ancient unwritten rules are stupid and two, as a manager, don’t trash your young, talented players who are winning you ballgames. It’d take a catastrophe to see things go south for the White Sox, and LaRussa’s style doesn’t do anything to help those odds. But don’t count on it. This team is good, just like their northern counterparts. Expect them to stay hot as the temperatures continue to rise in Chicagoland.

When Does 2021 MLB All Star Voting Begin?

Voting for the MLB All Star Game is set to begin on June 3rd when the ballots are released! Expect to see plenty of Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox on the 2021 MLB All Star voting list. Chicago baseball fans, this is where you can make your voice heard to get as many of our guys playing in the game. We know we’ll be doing our part to get every Cub and White Sox guy into the MLB All Star Game. Make sure you do the same!

The post Chicago Cubs & White Sox Dominate Ahead of 2021 MLB All Star Voting appeared first on UrbanMatter.

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“Let me tell you ‘bout a different Rio / The one I’m from, but not the one that you know,” Brazil’s biggest pop star, Anitta, sings over a trap beat.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Chauffeured in a classic Porsche, the Brazilian beauty steps out into 1960s Rio de Janeiro. The pastel pastiche is easy on the eyes, and so is the pin-up girl tracing twirls as a guitar strums the city’s hymn: “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Then the bass drops, and the viewer is whisked ahead to the present day — and the decidedly B-side of town.

“Let me tell you ‘bout a different Rio / The one I’m from, but not the one that you know,” Brazil’s biggest pop star, Anitta, sings over a trap beat. The music video has her descending, bikini-clad, from a bus to an artificial pool beside Rio’s international airport.

It’s the latest twist on the placid Bossa Nova song that, more than a half-century after its creation by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, still isn’t played out — and continues to feed foreigners’ captivation. The girl from Ipanema’s journey – from Rio to the United States and back to Rio again – shows what can change, and also what endures, as culture crosses borders in an age of globalization.

Anitta’s “Girl from Rio” retains only the melody from the original track. Her lyrics convey reality: that the city’s women have fuller figures than the tall and tan one about whom Frank Sinatra crooned. Its video features a beach barbecue and bleached body hair, plus no shortage of booties and deep kissing, and mostly casts Black stand-ins for the original muse.

The new take is a long way from Rio’s golden age of glamour, an era when Brazil was churning out Volkswagen Beetles and on track to its second straight World Cup title.

‘IPANEMA’ THEN

It was the early 1960s. Rio had just lost its status as the nation’s capital, but nobody could steal the picturesque Copacabana and Ipanema beaches that served as backdrop for the Bossa Nova music movement — and the locale where Jobim and de Moraes, a composer and a poet respectively, often saw their muse walking while they sat by a bar’s window.

“There really is a secret — an enchantment,” says de Moraes’ daughter Georgiana, a singer who often performs “The Girl from Ipanema.” She’s heard it countless times, she says, yet somehow it never spoils.

Trouble arose when it came time to translate the song to English. Lyricist Norman Gimbel strongly opposed the word “Ipanema,” which he thought called to mind Ipana, the now-forgotten toothpaste brand. In comments published in Jobim’s biography, “Cancioneiro Jobim,″ the Brazilian recalled arguing with Gimbel in a Manhattan taxi. Even the cabbie whirled around to take Gimbel’s side.

AP

“All I wanted was to pass along the spirit of the girl from Ipanema, that poetic Rio thing. I think we managed a little, but it was an ugly fight,” Jobim wrote. “Americans will never understand our ‘beach civilization.’”

Translating from a Romance language, whose words end in soft vowels, saps some of the soothing sway, according to Jobim’s son Paulinho, a musician.

But the English lyrics tweak the scene, too, said Sérgio Augusto, who wrote “Cancioneiro Jobim” with access to the artist’s writings. In Portuguese, a passing girl lifts the spirits of a lonely man admiring the fleeting beauty she brings to the world. In English, a pining man bemoans unrequited love from a girl who won’t give him so much as a glance.

“There’s a big difference,” says Augusto, “between indifference and disdain.”

And the English lyrics, especially, could be received as unseemly by a modern audience more attuned to unwanted male attention. Brazilian guitarist Toquinho, who played alongside de Moraes for years, in 2019 questioned whether even the original would’ve been rejected today.

Ruy Castro, who wrote the authoritative history of Bossa Nova, said Gimbel’s work was — unfortunately — necessary.

Gimbel was one of many “professional American lyricists who put English lyrics to foreign songs without knowing what they meant, and wound up earning more than the original authors,” Castro said in an email.

“But,” he added, “that’s how the system worked, and it’s clear that, without English lyrics, those songs never would have broken through American provincialism.”

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Over the offseason, the Chicago Bears’ primary focus has been on the quarterback position. For weeks on end, there were rumors of the Bears going after certain veteran quarterbacks via trade, or potentially in free agency, and no rumor was bigger than the Russell Wilson sage. In the end, Chicago general manager Ryan Pace opted […]

Chicago Bears Rumors: Nick Foles put stop to potential Eagles trade – Da Windy City – Da Windy City – A Chicago Sports Site – Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Fighting Illini & More

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French multi-instrumentalist James Kent, who makes music as Perturbator, has a lifelong history with synthesizers—his parents were in a band that used them—and he negotiates the possibilities of his instruments as fluently as a native tongue. Though Kent has a background as a black-metal guitarist, he prefers to work alone, and as he told Tunecore in 2016, he found electronic music to be the best genre for that.…Read More

In his tragically short life, Ron Haydock careened through rockabilly, monster magazines, pulp novels, and exploitation films.

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.…Read More

The woman and her son were at home in the 5200 block of West Congress Parkway when a man fired at them.

A woman and her 1-year-old son were wounded when a gunman fired through the window of their apartment in Austin on the West Side Tuesday night.

The shooting happened around 11:45 p.m. in the 5200 block of West Congress Parkway, Chicago police said.

The woman was grazed by a bullet and was taken to Stroger Hospital in good condition, police said. The boy was struck twice in the legs, and was taken to the same hospital where he was stabilized.

No one was in custody.

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