Check your brain at the door
Untitled Document Let’s be honest — there’s a part of every moviegoer that likes popcorn movies, those guilty pleasures that deliver pure mindless and novel entertainment. But until I saw Transformers — a film wonderfully devoid of swarthy pirates or irritable ogres — I’d almost given up hope with this year’s crop of summer flicks. As…
What vacation days?
Untitled Document Last year Mary Lou Eckart took her first vacation in five years, a trip from her home in Decatur to see her grandchildren in Florida. But the Illinois state government, which pays her to care for a severely disabled teenage girl, provides her no paid vacation time. So Eckart took the girl —…
Hot spots for early July
Untitled Document Before you dive into this week’s installment of the greatest story ever told, make a note to check out the blog entry about yours truly at www.MySpace.com/scotteeerock. I’m not exactly sure how this member of the Lost Boys discovered my deepest, darkest desires, but now the whole world knows about my love of…
King horror
Untitled Document The haunted-hotel-room thriller 1408 is the latest release from the cottage industry known as Stephen King. Aren’t most of his stories set in cottages? King has churned out enough books and stories to keep Hollywood busy for another century. The Internet Movie Database already lists 107 adaptations of his work, with varying degrees…
Flouride flustered
Untitled Document Why do some people complain about fluoride in drinking water and toothpaste? I thought it was beneficial for dental health. Communities began adding fluoride to water supplies in the early 1940s after decades of studies of why some Colorado residents were exhibiting a discoloration or mottling of the teeth but at the same…
Dirty pretty things
Untitled Document Enough coal sits under Illinois, the nation’s largest producer of bituminous coal, to power all of the households in Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, and Finland until the year 2508. That’s a lot of potential power, and therefore — the Sierra Club concludes in a report released late last month — it comes with…
Circus act
Untitled Document Dozens of workers hustled this week to give shape to the city-block-long Carson & Barnes Circus big top, staking ropes, raising poles and installing cables — but even at this point in the proceedings the elephant was the star of the show. Carson & Barnes booking agent Gene Hembree says that these big…
Why not “drink local”?
Untitled Document In a triumph of marketing over reasoning, the bottled-water industry has turned us into conspicuously silly consumers. Controlled by a handful of global conglomerates, the water industry has created the fantasy that if it’s in a bottle it’s purer than what comes out of the tap. But wait — the EPA stringently regulates…
Resumé padding
Untitled Document It’s a beautiful day, normal people are doing normal things, and I’ve just finished a three-hour online debate with five twentysomething college-student slackers in their seventh year of undergraduate study. I’m 66 years old, and I’m basking in the glory of victory. I won the day with my answer: “The funniest thing on…
The great scape
Untitled Document This is another one of those columns that will urge you to drop what you’re doing and hightail it to the farmers’ market. An early-summer treat is in town but only for a few weeks, and Mother Nature does not play around. When it comes to garlic, she really keeps to her schedule.…
Some Tastes are better than others
Untitled Document We’d wanted to do it for years, but the timing just never was right — but then one year my family and I finally took the plunge. Taste of Chicago is billed as the Midwest’s largest summer festival and the world’s largest food festival. Started in 1980 as a one-day replacement for Chicagofest,…
Beat the clock
Untitled Document Steven Kren’s passion for the past goes well beyond his stint as a tour guide with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and his possession of such antiques as his circa-1850s wood-burning stove. Last week it carried Kren as far as City Hall, where he pleaded with local officials to give him more time…
A new try for trash reform
Untitled Document People who have lived somewhere else are best at understanding how complex and cumbersome Springfield’s trash system is. When Ward 2 Ald. Gail Simpson lived in Chicago, she simply put her garbage out and it was picked up. No bill, no questions, no problem. That’s the way it works in most cities, large…
Letters to the Editor
Untitled Document We welcome letters. Please include your full name, address, and telephone number. We edit all letters. Send them to Letters, Illinois Times, P.O. Box 5256, Springfield, IL 62705; fax 217-753-3958; e-mail editor@illinoistimes.com. POEM JOGGED RADIO MEMORY [About Jacqueline Jackson’s “maydaypoem #1,” published May 3:] For many years, once a year on the Arthur…
Beetle mania
Untitled Document Japanese beetles have invaded our gardens again. The first beetles were noticed around June 15 in the Springfield area, and the phone at the offices of the University of Illinois Extension Sangamon-Menard has been ringing off the hook ever since. These half-inch metallic green beetles with coppery wing covers wreak havoc on the…
One big glorious grin
Untitled Document In his essay-cum-manifesto “The Fullness of Time,” the composer Carl Nielsen cautioned against the pursuit of novelty for its own sake: “. . . [T]he smaller and slenderer the talent, the more careful must it be to abstain from seeking great originality. Nothing in all art is as painful as unsuccessful originality. It…
