Come meet “Fleshy”: a full-scale model of SUE in life

Today the Field Museum is unveiling “Fleshy” a full-scale model of SUE the T. rex .

The life-like model will only be on display at the Field until August 18 before going on tour.

BEYOND THE BONES

Until then visitors to the museum can view what SUE would have looked like in the Flesh.

The scientifically accurate model offers a realistic replica of what dinosaurs that wandered the earth long ago  would have looked like if you meet one face to face.

WHAT: SUE the T. rex in the flesh

WHERE: Stanley Field Hal in the Field Museum  (1400 S Lake Shore Drive, Chicago)

WHEN: Now through August 18, 2020

ABOUT SUE: SUE the T. rex was 40 feet long and 13 feet tall, and as huge as their fossil is, they would have looked even bigger with meat on their bones.

SAFETY NOTE: Masks are required at all times inside the building, and a  distance of at least six feet from all Field staff, visitors, and each other must be maintained. These new practices include capping daily attendance at 25% of the museum’s full capacity, installing floor markers to ensure social distancing, and designating one-way paths through the museum to guide visitor traffic.

As of July 24, the museum has been open to the public, with special provisions.

SPECIAL EXHIBIT

Apsáaooke Women and Warriors, the Field’s first major exhibition curated by a Native scholar, opened the day before the museum’s closure in March is back.  The exhibition explores the Apsáalooke culture, told by Indigenous voices.

TICKETS

Tickets are available on the museum’s website; purchasing in advance is recommended to reduce ticket lines.

CLOSED DAYS

The museum will be closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with plans to eventually reopen seven days a week. The museum’s hours will continue to be 9am–5pm.

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Recently on Quora, I asked: “Is it time to get rid of the “Natural Born Citizen Clause” to be president?  it got some heavily emotional responses.  Some were sane but a few were obviously Nationalists who worship the Founding Fathers and believe them inerrant. 

While I’m not formally lobbying for one position or another, I do have an opinion, which I will share at the end if it isn’t obvious by then.  My intent was that we should take a look at this clause and consider if it is still relevant, as the Founding Fathers believed it was then.  Remember, the forefathers gave us a means to change things if we decided we should.  Amendments babe!  We just have to have enough agreement and the political will to get it done.  Might be easier to put a person on Mars but hey, the option is there.  

Let’s review.  In a nutshell, the Constitution’s Natural Born Citizenship Clause states that:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President. — Source

So what is a Natural Born Citizen?  The U.S. Constitution is very specific when it needs to be and is otherwise very vague when it wants to be.  It uses but does not define the phrase natural born Citizen, and various opinions have been offered over time regarding its precise meaning.  In July 1787, John Jay (secretary of foreign affairs under the Articles of Confederation) wrote to “George Washington that only a ‘natural born’ citizen should be allowed to become president, arguing that this requirement would provide a check on the ability of foreigners to influence the young republic.“

For anyone who missed this in high school history class, there was concern that a wealthy foreigner (specifically European aristocracy) might immigrate and buy his way into power.  This was apparently a common thing back then.  I’m guessing the 3rd or 4th sibling who had no realistic chance of inheriting the throne of a country they really wanted might have tried something like this.  And let’s be clear, it would have to be a guy because women were not even allowed to vote in America back then, let alone own property or run for office.  Again that pesky let’s change the constitution to allow for modern needs and/or undoing errors our inerrant Founders ignored.

As the law stands right now, someone who was born in the U.S. but taken back to their parents’ native country as an infant, and who spends most of their formative years overseas before returning, would be considered eligible to serve as president, while someone who was born outside the U.S., came here as an infant, and grew up not really knowing any other culture but America, would not.

It just strikes me as illogical that someone born here, but spends 25 years in Australia, Europe, Africa, etc is better qualified to be President than someone who is born in say, Iceland, but then comes here as a 2-year-old and spends the next 33 years on American Soil?  This qualification relies on an hazy-defined term that renders some Americans in doubt about their eligibility to serve as president. It also deprives Americans of the potential service that would be given by otherwise able and qualified persons (we can find examples on both sides of the political aisle.)

Citizenship status seems a weak litmus test for loyalty to country, given that some of the greatest traitors in American history have been natural-born citizens (Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, and Alger Hiss come to mind.) Not to mention implying a caste system where Natural Born Citizen is more important than American Citizen.  The Natural Born Citizen requirement was a way of preventing foreign influence and ensuring the candidate has loyalty to the US first, and not another country.  And back in the 18th and 19th centuries, this might have been a problem.  But in today’s modern world, this concept seems a bit antiquated.   We are a much more mobile, global society.   Let’s nix the Natural Born Citizen requirement for being President of the United States.  We can shore up the requirements other ways to prevent any insincere candidates from running for office.

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Guinea Pig baby boy Bullseye is a four-week-old crowned or crested pig; his best buddy is a seven-week-old chocolate smoothcoat pig.

These boys romp and chase each other, but get along well and keep each other active.

Baby Bullseye was born on June 28th in a loving foster home where he was beautifully socialized from day one. Carob was dropped off at Chicago Animal Care and Control with a number of other guinea pigs.

They are sweet, extremely talkative and fun guinea pigs. They make adorable whistles, squeals, chirps, squeaks and purring noises-especially when they hear their food coming. And, they are fantastic and adventurous eaters.

Guinea pigs eat a diet of unlimited Timothy and Orchard hays, limited pellets, and fresh vegetables including romaine, red leaf and green leaf lettuces, cilantro, etc. Guinea pigs, like humans, can’t manufacture their own vitamin C, so they need to supplement with red pepper or other vitamin C rich foods.

Please read up on guinea pig care and diet before adopting by visiting this excellent web site http://www.guinealynx.info/.

They would love a home with people who will handle them daily, keep them well fed, and keep their habitat nice and clean.

If you’re interested in possibly adopting Bullseye and Carob, please contact [email protected] for an adoption application.

They are being fostered in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood.

Their adoption fee of $70 as a pair benefits the Friends of Petraits Rescue. For an additional $100, we’ll include absolutely everything you need to care for them including a huge cage, pellets, hay, litter, hidey huts and water bottles.

And, yes … Friends of Petraits is handling masked, minimum contact, socially distant adoptions during the pandemic.

Brad Boxberger
Brandon Kintzler
Jesus Aguilar
Jonathan Villar
Corey Dickerson

Those are among the most well known players on the current roster of the Miami Marlins baseball team. Last season the Marlins finished in last place with a record of 57-105. In 2018, they were 63-98, also in last place. We can go on and on and on. The last time the Marlins finished over the .500 mark was in 2009, more than a decade ago. Sad! They’ve made the playoffs only twice in their history and even though they won the World Series both times, it’s a horrible record of baseball.

This year was expected to be more of the same old thing. Now the Marlins are the first team that had their roster ravaged by Covid-19. Between players and coaches, seventeen members of the Marlins have tested positive. After only one weekend of play, the Marlins’ season has been on hold. They have postponed games for the next week.

The good news for major league baseball is it was only the Marlins. Covid-19 was not going to tear apart a team who would be contending for a championship…at least not yet. The better news is as of now, Marlins players have not spread to virus to any of their competitors. The game are continuing.

On Monday, baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred had this response,
“I don’t see it as a nightmare. We built the protocols to allow us to continue to play.”

But what would have happened if instead of the names at the top of this piece, they were replaced by Aaron Judge, Gerrit Cole and Giancarlo Stanley of the New York Yankees or Mookie Betts, Cody Bellinger and Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers or Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant and Jon Lester of the Chicago Cubs?

What if the biggest names of contending teams in the sport’s largest markets were the ones infected instead of the bottom feeder, non contending Marlins? Would MLB do anything differently? Would they have shut all teams down for one week instead of only the Marlins? Would MLB treat those teams any differently? What would it take to shut down the sport instead of only one team?

“A team losing a number of players that rendered it completely non-competitive is something we’d have to address,” Manfred said Monday. “Whether that’s shutting down a part of the season, the whole season. You get to a certain point league wide where it does become a health threat, and we’d certainly shut down at that point.”

In a year when a pandemic has shut down life events much more important than sports, the only reason baseball is being played is the money. Billions of dollars are at stake. Losing a team like the Marlins only affects that a little. Losing a team like the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs and a few others would be costly. Baseball 2020 is hanging on by a thin thread. When trying to decide the the fate of the 2020 baseball season, don’t follow the positive Covid-19 tests, follow the money.

Related Post: Remembering opening days from the past while wondering if the Coronavirus will cancel baseball in 2020.

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As Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is set to appear for an antitrust hearing before the United States Congress on Wednesday it’s symbolic of the emerging e-commerce hegemony.

Bezos, 56, is projected by some market evaluation tools and metrics to become the world’s first trillionaire sometime in 2026. With a current net worth estimated at $156 billion, if Bezos was his own country, he’d currently be the 169th richest nation on Earth. Yes, this is one man and his unfathomable wealth, at a time when the greater economy itself is plunging into freefall.

And while all stay-at-home economy discussions begin with Amazon, the contemporary version of John D. Rockefeller’s pre-Sherman Anti-Trust Act Standard Oil Company, there is a lot more to big commerce enterprise online than just Bezos’ globe dominanting entity. On both the business side and the consumer side, websites that thrive right now during the pandemic will likely continue to succeed once the coronavirus pandemic is over and our daily lives become less online and more IRL (in the real world).

BigCommerce, an enterprise provider with a suite of cloud-based ecommerce software solutions, is set for its initial public offering this wek. Backed with $225 million from a list of investors that include Revolution Growth, General Catalyst Group, GGV Capital and SoftBank, they’re hoping raise $130 million from their IPO and reach a valuation of $1.3 billion.

Meanwhile Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce giant with annual revenues of a billion and half dollars, not to mention 3 and half a billion dollars in total assets, just received a major boost in its fiscal outlook. Powerhouse financial firm Goldman Sachs upgraded their rating on Shopify stock from neutral to buy, stating their beliefs that the major shift to e-commerce will continue until at least 2023.

Goldman analyst Christopher Merwin believes this trend “is unlikely to reverse course, even as the country reopens, due to an accelerated pace of bricks-and-mortar store closures that will force even more commerce online.” Yes, while the COVID crisis has claimed many ledger sheet victims, including Pier 1 Imports, JCPenny, J. Crew, Brooks Brothers and Neiman Marcus, Amazon keeps on winning. Actually, they’re winning so much that it’s become unfair and they’re stopping others from playing; hence the Anti-trust hearing.

While Amazon lagged behind the S&P 500 and found themselves the second worst performing FAANG stock (behind only Netflix), 2020 has been great for them. COVID-19 has made Amazon even more indispensable than they already were, accelerating its customer growth. Given how many of us will prioritize convenience over just about everything else when shopping, one can expect a lot of those new customers to stick around for the long haul.

Eventually, however, something will have to be done about Amazon’s dominance, because simply put, it’s getting dangerous.

Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly contributes to WGN TV, Sports Illustrated, Chicago Now and SB Nation.

You can follow Banks, a former writer for Chicago Tribune.com, on Twitter and his cat on Instagram.

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Mike Royko in his Daily News corner office when old school ethics ruled journalism. (Tribune file photo.)

My initial post defending John Kass against the Chicago Tribune Guild’s bush league attack on him is here.

After being attacked by the left-wing, cancel cops on the staff of the Chicago Tribune, columnist John Kass didn’t fold. He didn’t go along–like so many Republican politicians–and suck it up, afraid to hand out a well-deserved whomping on those who attacked him.

He wrote a beautiful column that appeared in today’s Tribune, “What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?” He correctly called what the executive board of the Chicago Tribune Guild wrote in an open letter about a previous column “defamation” in that they falsely accused him “of religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories.” He then proceeded to do what real journalists do, dissecting the criticism with careful research, destroying the accusers’ bolloxed case that Kass had engaged in a wild conspiracy. In other words, pointing out that billionaire George Soros was funding left-wing causes and politicians was a matter of fact.

The profession once called journalism needs more John Kasses. More reporters, copy editors, assistant city editors, photographers, graphic designers, editorial writers, fact checkers, librarians and others to stand up to this assault on journalistic integrity.

Where, I wonder, are the derisively called “old school” professionals that I admired and who were

John Kass

my colleagues and friends to stand up to fight this scourge? Are there none left? I know that some of them don’t particularly care for Kass, not only because they don’t like his conservative politics, but also because they thought he tried to be another Mike Royko, the legendary Daily News/Sun-Times/Tribune Page 2 columnist.

I don’t know what style and tone Kass was trying to achieve, but he wrote in a genuine voice, reflecting his own background and experience in an immigrant, two-flat Chicago family. If he sounded like Royko, more power to him.

I’d remind Royko’s many fans that he did not bend to the wind of popular opinion. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched into segregated neighborhoods on the Southwest Side, Royko went after the “punk” stone-throwers with a furry. When a renegade crowd of self-appointed progressives, including a young Jesse Jackson, successfully displaced the duly elected Illinois delegation at a Democratic convention, he spared no words about the anti-democratic coup. When the head of the abortion industry’s association finally admitted that partial birth abortion was practiced, and widely so, despite denials by the pro-choice crowd, he spared no words of condemnation for the crowd’s lies and hypocrisy, in consecutive columns, as I recall. That was later in his career, when the emergent progressive cabal said that because Royko was taking a stance like that he was “losing it.”

John, don’t give up. Your many readers* are behind you. We admire your courage and your insight. I dare say that you are one of the few, if not the only one, who has the balls to call your own shots, free of the peer and lunatic pressure that seeks to cancel voices they despise.

You are the only one deserving to fill Royko’s shoes.

*Check out John’s Facebook page for plentiful statements of support.

Related: “When ‘j’accuse’ is just a smear.”

Once rain, nor snow, nor other barriers

Could stop the USPS carriers.

But now an existential threat

Appears more powerful than any met:

The President is its archfoe

And  has decided it must go.

I’d miss it like all other gramps

Who’ve through the years collected stamps.

When our nation had begun it

Ben Franklin was the first to run it.

So let us hope that in Ben’s name

Our mail delivery stays the same.