Second Thoughts

 In my 2014 column “Name-calling” I explored the question of whether it is more appropriate to call Springfield residents Springfieldians or Springfielders.” I considered briefly same question as it pertains to residents of the U.S. but not to those of Illinois. I learned today from the Washington Post that the good folks who live in Vermont are known as […]

 They’re having a right-to-exploit — sorry, “right-to-work” debate in Missouri too, as we learn from a recent dispatch to the Washington Post. A bill embodying measures backed by our Mr. Rauner was voted on and passed. There the legislature is Republican and the governor a Democrat, and Republicans were hopeful of winning enough “yes” votes […]

 The nature dioramas at the Illinois State Museum I mentioned in my recent column about such displays “Making dead hyenas come alive”) do not offer the bravura displays of taxidermy            that one sees at the Field Museum in Chicago. While Robert Larson, who painted the background murals for the big displays is well known at […]

 I have a little more about Springfield’s first public market I mentioned in my piece about farmers markets, “Sustainable agriculture.”  Produce and meats were sold in a building erected for the purpose on the square in 1832. Paul Angle reminds us that a larger market house was built in 1843 on Sixth Street between Washington […]

 In a 2014 column (“Why did the pedestrian not cross the road?”) I noted that merchants and property owners in downtown Springfield had been fretting out loud about automobile drivers – most of whom are speeding through the center of Old Springfield to get somewhere else – imperiling pedestrians in the form of shoppers, diners, tourists […]

 As I noted in another post, the topic of this week’s disquisition over at Dyspepsiana is farmers markets. In that piece, I note that such events have grown in popularity to such an extent that national supermarket chains mimic the off-the-back-of-the-wagon ambiance of the market in their produce sections. Well, it was only a matter […]

 I meant to comment on it the moment I read about it – “it’ being the grand bargain being worked out between Michael Madigan and Bruce Rauner that would result in the orphaning of the Lincoln Presidential library and museum and the abandonment of our historic preservation agency to the Babbits at the Department of […]

 Next week I will be examining the phenomenon of the farmers market. The focus is on Springfield’s Old Capitol market, which has been operating continuously for some 20 years, after some years at a different location in the 1980s. Of course, Springfield’s is not the only venerable market of this type. This year will be […]

 Goodness me, has it really been five and a half years? In November, 2009, I devoted a column to new ways of dealing with the fact that when our loved ones go away forever, they leave one last mess to clean up – their corporeal remains.  In a follow-up post to my Second Thoughts blog, […]

The three or four readers who in 2014 shared my exasperation with the universal use of “for” (see All for one – and ‘for’ for all) might find amusing this mock web quiz at Clickhole intended to reveal whether you are a grammar nerd.   Like all good parody, this quiz is only barely. I […]

Tomorrow is tax deadline day, which is why the most recent edition of Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States makes such depressing reading.  The left-of-center Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the Washington-based research organization that focuses on tax fairness, found that Illinois is among the Top Ten […]

 Edmund Burke might forgive me for adapting the following passage from his “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) to make it more plainly relevant to the revolution that is, haltingly, underway in today’s Illinois.  Circumstances . . . give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are […]