It’s getting old. We haven’t left the Chicago area since February–and no plans to go anywhere. So Chicago songs are in my head. I was going to list ten of them, but in the great Chicago tradition, my late grandmother voted for an eleventh. So in no particular order, here are

The Les is More Sounds of Chicago

• Let’s start with the schlock! Paper Lace’s The Night Chicago Died imagined Chicago’s own most-wanted, Al Capone, in a shoot-out with the Chicago Police Department. Incredibly, this hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Englands’s Paper Lace a true USA one-hit-wonder.
• And talking about bad Chicago dudes, who can forget Jim Croce’s Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown from the South Side of Chicago. What’s the only thing wrong with this #1 hit? It was a poor knock-off of Croce’s own You Don’t Mess Around With Jim. If Croce had lived longer, maybe he would have sued himself.
• Another slickster to move through Chicago, traveling from L.A. to Key Largo was Sade’s Smooth Operator. Ladies beware, this dude was only out to break your heart. As far as I know, Sade never sang about such a cool villain, or Chicago, again.
• Someone else just passing through Chitown? Good ole boy Lido in Boz Scaggs’ Lido Shuffle. Another drifter looking for a big score in the City of Big Shoulders (and easy marks?)
• Listen carefully or you’ll miss the reference to the “city by the lake” in the Smashing Pumpkin’s Tonight, Tonight. For a Chicago born boy like Billy Corgan, what other city or what other lake could there ever be?
• With the end of the Democratic National Convention, and as we await the beginning of the Republican’s revver, let’s not forget Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Chicago, love-song to our fair city (not)–forever memorializing the battles in the streets during the Democratic Convention of 1968 and its courtroom aftermath. “Won’t you please come to Chicago for the help that we can bring.”
• Then there is the sweet little number also titled Chicago, by the slightly unusual Sufjan Stevens. The number is on his album Illinoise which as you might have guessed is all about the 21st state to enter the Union. Does any radio station in town besides ‘XRT play this song?
• Who remembers the Ides of March? Their biggest hit was certainly Vehicle but for my listening pleasure, their best song was the under-appreciated L.A. Goodbye with beautiful harmonies on the lyric “from the West side of Chicago,” perhaps a salute to the town of Berwyn, the birthplace of the band.
• While we have vehicles on our mind, a shout out to Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah’s classic Lake Shore Drive. No, there is no name-check of Chicago, but there is no doubt what this song is about.
• When should you come to Chicago? When the Levee Breaks, of course. An old blues number about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, but Led Zeppelin made it their own.
• The only choice with which to wrap up this list? Its got to be  My Kind of Town (Chicago Is.) Did Frank Sinatra care a whit about Chicago? Who cares! At least he isn’t singing New York, New York.

That is my list. What would be on yours?

photo credit: dharder9475 City in quarantine, sad in gray via photopin (license)

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Since the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day, most of the nation has been subjected to a daily reality that America is a place where white cops harass, brutalize, assault, and kill Black Americans regularly and with impunity. It actually got to a point that still exists for some folks, where if you said that “all lives matter you were considered racist and somehow were demeaning the Black Lives Matter movement. One Facebook post that I read said that any friends who said All Lives Matter were racist and would be immediately canceled and unfriended. Imagine the thinking that saying ALL LIVES MATTER WAS SOMEHOW RACIST AND SHAMEFUL. For Christ’s sake, all lives do matter regardless of skin color, religion, gender, or any other differences that separate us. To suggest otherwise is totally insane.

The cultural elites in America that have constantly spewed the rhetoric that cops have targeted Black folks because of skin color has been fed by a steady stream of hysterical news reports most times before even a semblance of an investigation began. The “HANDS UP DON’T SHOOT MOVEMENT” is a prime example. After an investigation by no less than 5 agencies including the United States Department of Justice, the officer was exonerated and “hands up don’t shoot” never happened. But not before several days of rioting and looting. I’m not writing this to be a cop defense attorney or trying to excuse or exonerate bad police behavior. To suggest it doesn’t take place is equally insane.

The call from these anti-police groups such as BLACK LIVES MATTER and many more is to defund the police and build an elite group that will be able to seamlessly deal with all of society’s ills, including violent and abhorrent behavior, sexual predators, killers, people with mental illnesses, and the other hundreds or so incidents cops come into contact with on a daily basis. The reality is we might reach that DREAM of AN ELITE GROUP in MAYBE a 1,000 years, especially in a big city like Chicago. Anytime you have HUMAN beings in places of authority and trust you wind up with HUMAN FLAWS. There are levels of fear, levels of reaction, levels of empathy, all the strengths, and shortcomings that humans beings bring to the job. Robots are programmed for every situation, humans are not as yet. The Marine Corps trained and trained us for months on end and we still wound up with that 2 to 3% that never measured up.

What the anti-police crowd is calling for when the shouts of police reform are resounding, is actually a shout for HUMAN REFORM. The perfect human simply does not exist, most especially in a profession where a split-second decision means life or death, the decision to shoot or don’t shoot is an excruciating decision unless one has been faced with that, no Monday morning quarterback is going to be able to explain it and indeed it sometimes takes months for investigators to make a decision of right or wrong that had to be made in a split second. Cops are NOT trained to retreat or flee when met by dangerous and unknown circumstances that occur on a daily basis in the life of Law Enforcement Officers if that were the case why even have cops and laws? A perfect group of people simply do not and will never exist and it’s not a reality but simply nonsense to suggest it is going to happen no matter how much training an individual is subjected to.

The police officers across America that most of you are exposed to on a daily basis fall into that 2-3%. What you do not see is the other 97% who get it right. Getting it right is boring and uninteresting so you NEVER hear of or see the results. Who the hell is going to read a paper or watch the news listing every time a cop does something right? Nothing is more despicable or abhorrent to good, hard-working, honest cops than a BAD COP. Whenever I hear the talk of police reform after an incident of police bad behavior it makes me ashamed of that 2-3% that caused you to think like that.

In Chicago this year, cops have been involved in nine shooting incidents, all have been thoroughly investigated to be sure and no wrongdoing was uncovered. Consequently, there have been 2,653 people wounded by gunfire and over 490 souls murdered, the overwhelming number of murder victims have been Black and the overwhelming number of shooters have been Black. The Gangs in Chicago literally have an entire City living in fear, and yet I ask the question, where is “BLACK LIVES MATTER”?  There is no outrage by anybody in that movement. There are no marches, there are no demonstrations, to save those neighborhoods or those folks living in fear. It seems there is only outrage when opposite skin colors are involved in incidents with the police.

We have seen lootings, rioting, arsons, and cops being assaulted with bricks, skateboards, frozen water bottles, bicycles, and even Molotov cocktails thrown at police vehicles while occupied. Over 100 Chicago cops have been injured and over 50 hospitalized in 6 weeks. The irony is those demonstrators against police brutality have turned into the monsters they say they are protesting against. The following was an editorial I wrote for the Chicago Tribune published a few days ago. “WHEN PROTESTING POLICE BRUTALITY, LET’S ORGANIZE AND GO HIT THE POLICE OVER THEIR HEADS WITH SKATEBOARDS AND  FROZEN WATER BOTTLES? SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG WITH THAT WHICH NEEDS SOME THOUGHT. BRUTALITY IS BRUTALITY, NO MATTER WHICH SIDE OF THE ISSUE YOU’RE ON. WHEN YOU BECOME THE VERY MONSTER YOU ARE PRETENDING TO FIGHT, YOU ARE NO BETTER……… ALL LIVES MATTER! WISE UP. OF COURSE, THEY DO….

Dingbat. F** capital of the world. Distractions. Yellow shoes. Joe Biden is just Hillary Clinton with a smaller dick.

Those were some of the words we heard and read on various sports outlets in the previous eight days. Five times in a little more than one week.

Mark Grace. Thom Brennaman. Mike Milbury. Paul Tracy. Bruce Levine.

One right after another, after another. Naturally, after each incident comes a clumsy apology. The apology always sounds forced and desperate. Remember when a person shows you who they are, believe them!

You’d think someone would learn after hearing the outrage after one of these incidents, but almost immediately afterward, it occurs again. After Mibury offended Hockey wives and partners to accomplish the hat trick of offensive statements, I wondered who would join them on the Mount Rushmore of horrendous sports takes? It took only a couple of days for Tracy and Levine to climb that mountain. Now we only need to figure out who to leave off so it will be a foursome.

Hmmmm….maybe unlike the real Mount Rushmore, which Donald Trump desperately wants to join, we leave room for more….and a lot more. Because in spite of the deserved negative feedback from the past week, we know there’s more of this behavior coming….and sadly, expect it to be sooner rather than later.

So, who’s next?

Related Post: If Mark Grace is a treasured member of the Cubs family, Sammy Sosa should be, too

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The last post ended with my mulling over whether to join Facebook to be able to rent a car from Getaround. Before I came to a decision, my thoughts had gone in a different direction.

But first, in case you’re curious: it is possible to be a “lurker” on Facebook — a member who doesn’t participate actively. The articles “Sick of Facebook? Set Your Account to Read-Only Mode” and “Is there a way to use Facebook without giving up my privacy?” explain how.

Despite what I suggested last week, however, Facebook isn’t going to be the subject of this post.

Before going to the Facebook registration page, I recalled a post from back in January that I titled “Advice for the frugal: find an appealing spending option. Mine is car rental.”

Quoting from that post: “Frugality is common among retirees, financial advisers report. For some retirees, meager social security checks require it. But others, myself included, could afford to spend more and don’t. . . . I like the advice for retirees in a Kiplinger article: Don’t try to splurge across the board; pick and choose where you want to spend more. ‘You may have no interest in fancy restaurants or luxury cruises,’ the author wrote. ‘Find appealing spending options.’”

My choice of an appealing spending option was renting a car. I made that my 2020 New Year’s resolution and soon forgot about it. Now, more than eight months later, I need to drive to visit my mother because the limited public transportation possibilities during the coronavirus don’t work for me. Rather than being freer about spending, however, I was frittering away hours comparing the costs of car-sharing companies based on estimated usage. My usual penny-pinching self was leaning toward Getaround, a peer-to-peer service that requires Facebook for screening, simply because it looked to be the most economical.

The chance to finally act on my 2020 resolution and indulge myself was staring me in the face, and I almost missed it. Fortunately, I paused and thought about considerations other than cost.

As much as I like the idea of peer-to-peer sharing, there are drawbacks when it comes to cars. Each Getaround transaction would be susceptible to the car owner’s conduct. I wouldn’t know how conscientious the owner is about maintaining the vehicle, how honest the owner is about admitting there were preexisting dings and problems, or how reliable the owner is about honoring the reservation (a car owner on Turo, another car-sharing company, once canceled on me at the last minute).

Zipcar is a commercial company with late-model cars that it owns and maintains. Although Zipcar would be more expensive than Getaround, the chances that it would be more reliable seem better. It’s also convenient: Zipcars are accessed and returned to designated parking spots near me, not to the street, where many Getaround car owners leave their vehicles.

As I was patting myself on the back for finally making a decision for reasons other than cost, I learned that as an AARP member, I will get 40 percent off the Zipcar membership fee and a $40 driving credit. My frugal side felt gratified.

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UPDATING INFORMATION ABOUT INSURANCE FOR CAR RENTALS

In my 4½ years of blogging, 249 posts now, “Insuring a rental when you don’t own a car” has gotten the most hits.

I looked back at that post while thinking about car sharing. I hope that anyone who finds it notes that it was written in 2016. Here are some updates.

Before a trip starts, car renters have to decide whether to accept or waive the company’s collision damage insurance. When I rent a car from a traditional company like Budget or Enterprise and pay with my Visa card, I waive collision damage coverage because Visa provides it. Visa may not cover a Zipcar rental, however, because it considers Zipcar a car-sharing company rather than a car-rental company. Visa was sued over its policy and agreed to a class-action settlement, but you still can’t get a yes-or-no answer from Visa about coverage for a Zipcar rental.

“If you submit a claim, you would have to prove that the car you were driving is owned by Zipcar,” a Visa representative told me. “We have Zipcar listed as a car-sharing service. Visa doesn’t cover cars that are owned by private individuals.” Zipcar owns its cars but describes itself as a car-sharing service.

Zipcar’s collision damage insurance has a $1,000 deductible, while Visa coverage would pay for up to $50,000 of damage without a deductible. Still, I think I’ll go with Zipcar’s insurance to ensure coverage. I’d hate to be told by Visa that I wasn’t covered after totaling a car.

There is an additional reminder of why a car renter should doublecheck insurance. If you pay for a rental with a Discover card, you no long have collision damage coverage. Discover dropped it two years ago. I had been thinking of giving up my little-used Visa card, but I’ll keep it for the next time I rent from Budget or Enterprise.

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ANTI-TRUMP COMMENTS: 126TH IN AN ONGOING SERIES

“It seems like only a matter of time before Trump starts marketing ‘Make America Great Again’ electronic ankle monitors.”

— Rex Huppke, Chicago Tribune