Cover Story
Green New World
Just taking a photograph at Nature’s Grace and Wellness in Vermont, about 75 miles northwest of Springfield, can be tricky. Fire away, you’re told in the grow area, where glare from high-pressure sodium bulbs makes ordinary cameras go nuts, drawing excessive amounts of blues and purples from rows of lights above hundreds of pot plants…
“There’s nothing sneaky here”
Time is short to put together a proposal for a university campus in downtown Springfield, according to Andy Van Meter, chairman of the Sangamon County Board. If a package isn’t ready within two months, Van Meter said, the project that could turn four blocks over to Southern Illinois University and the University of Illinois Springfield…
SJ-R veteran reporter set to depart
Dean Olsen, longtime State Journal-Register reporter, is leaving the paper for a job in media relations and communications for Memorial Health System. His last day at the paper will be Dec. 13. Olsen has worked at daily newspapers since 1982 and at the SJ-R since 1999, starting out as a statehouse reporter and becoming the…
Why I love venison
I’m frugal. Just once have I tried buying the house a round. It happened about 15 years ago. I was a few miles south of Bend, heading north and trying to make up for a late departure from Vegas. It was a beautiful autumn night, the moon nearly full, the two-lane highway empty, the eastern…
REMEMBERING
The holiday season holds dark days for those who will be missing a family member for the first time this year. Telling a loved one’s story makes things a little brighter. It is an Illinois Times tradition to use our last edition of the year – Dec. 26 this year – to remember those local…
WE WIN AGAIN
For the second time, Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge Raylene Grischow has ruled in favor of Illinois Times in our quest to figure out what the heck was going on when Secretary of State Jesse White hired Candace Wanzo, a convicted felon who’d embezzled more than $233,000 from Southern Illinois University before she landed a…
Baumbach and cast dig deep for Marriage Story
Director Noah Baumbach doesn’t have to search far for material when making a film – he’s brave enough to use incidents from his own life. Whereas 2005’s The Squid and the Whale examined his parents’ divorce and its wide-ranging ramifications, his latest, Marriage Story, puts his own divorce under the microscope. Brutally honest in the…
Stocking stuffers for cooks
Looking for budget-friendly gift ideas for someone who loves to cook? Needing a stocking stuffer? Gifts that will actually be used and appreciated? Here are my recommendations for the 2019 gift-giving season. Because my restaurant gig gets me home after midnight, my wife tends to watch PBS documentaries during her evenings alone. A documentary that…
Dark Waters a portrait of true heroism
Robert Bilott does not wear a cape. I don’t think that he’s impervious to bullets or fire and I’d be willing to bet that Kryptonite, were it to exist, would have no effect on him. Yet, he is a hero in the truest sense of the word, a man who goes out of his way…
Decembering now
Here we go into the days of December, gearing up for the big holiday hoopla with plenty of marvelous music to supplement the adventure. Along with normal pub performances, be mindful of downtown Holiday Walk music and other special stuff for the season listed in our listings. Would you like to spend an evening, specifically…
Editor’s note
Something’s afoot downtown, as the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance is hatching a plan that could put a law school, a so-called innovation center and who knows what else on four blocks stretching from Second to Fourth streets and from Washington to Monroe. Southern Illinois University and the University of Illinois Springfield would bring a long-sought…
Julian Davis and the Situation
In tried-and-true fashion, this young man calls himself a “traveling musician” spending his precious time “plying his trade through guitar and mandolin on the roads of this country” and that surely is just what he’s doing. Julian Davis started his music a-rolling in 2016, convinced that bluegrass is a wide-open genre with room for a…
Why start a business when you can start a movement?
This column proposes a powerful, practical, if highly unconventional, way to start a national conversation, even a movement, that could possibly help restore a healthy American democracy and solid economic future, and maybe even replace one of our two bankrupt political parties. Politics and policy are today focused on supporting old coots like me –…
Holiday Open House
After being closed since early October for renovations, the Illinois Governor’s Mansion will be reopened just in time for the holidays. Built in 1855, the Illinois Governor’s Mansion is one of the oldest and most historic governor’s mansions in the United States. The mansion serves as the official residence of the governor of Illinois, a…
Democrats reform campaign practices
Another relic of Tim Mapes’ days as House Speaker Michael Madigan’s chief of staff has passed into history. Mapes could be a kind and generous man to his friends and family. He was often the delightful life of the party when he chose to go out. But the dude also had a wide and nasty…
Songs of the season
Individuals of all ages are invited to sing holiday carols accompanied by the carillon bells during the 38th annual Caroling at the Carillon event at the Thomas Rees Memorial Carillon. Seasonal interludes will be provided by the Trinity Wind Ensemble while guests enjoy a roaring bonfire plus complimentary cookies and hot cocoa. Santa will visit…
archival find poem #32
in 1919 my grandpa installed cow drinking cups in the round barn they were set between every two cows making the cost $2.50 a cow before they’d drunk only from the barnyard tank and spring brook he wrote an unsolicited (I think) letter to the james cup company giving figures for how much more milk…
Letters to the editor 12/5/19
GAMBLING, WEED HAVE CONSEQUENCES Thanks to Daisy Contreras and IT for your supportive article about anti-gambling activist Anita Bedell (“State’s anti-gambling lobbyist is one tough ‘Church Lady,'” Nov. 21). The massive expansion of gambling to support our state’s finances in lieu of traditional tax revenues also set off alarm bells for me in recent years.…
Demanding action on Pillsbury
A community group wants the city of Springfield to take over the Pillsbury Mills Plant, tear it down and redevelop the site. But, first, they want the city to make sure the area is closed off to trespassers. “It’s a partially demolished old factory that has some level of asbestos contamination still on site. And…
