Nothing like the Bears game to ruin a perfectly good Thursday night. There’s not enough time to recover from a Thursday night humiliation. The game was over by the 4th pick. Sorry, but if you win with 4 picks and 11 penalties (or whatever it was), it’s lucky. And nobody wants to win lucky.  Leave that for the Northwestern football fans.

That’s all I’m doing on the Bears:

• Gubernatorial candidate Jim Ryan does something very rare in politics…he says he is sorry.
• The Republican Party has stopped providing insurance coverage to its employees for abortions.  I’m trying to keep objective here, but the law says you can have abortions but the political work-a-round is to ban/force insurance companies not to offer coverage? What’s next? What if a political party found a moral problem with diabetes? Or cancer treatment? This is becoming a very big issue.
• Another big story to watch in Chicago has to be the State’s Attorney vs. Northwestern students over the alleged paying of a witness. This is gold. This story has so many plot lines. So you have an upstart, scrappy collegiate program exposing prosecutors, police and government over wrongful convictions. They make huge news, win all sorts of awards and even force a public policy change. It dies down after a few years and we find out that the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office alleges that students paid witnesses for their testimony. So maybe the students were wrong? But then again, the leaders of the Medill Innocence Project at the school are crying foul – suggesting retaliation. This is going to be a great, great story. Aspiring investigative journalists, unite! Form of…the truth.
• My buddy Sandy (and fellow Schadenfreuder…) has a blog post about a little known economic indicator: light starch.
• TA’s have authorized a strike at the University of Illinois. Wait, is this to impress an undergrad they want to date? I guess they want more pay and better hours so they can afford high-end scotch at the local dive bar where they read their new leather bound copy of Atlas Shrugged while wearing new tweed jackets and turtlenecks from the vintage shop. Does that sum it up? I’m joking of course. Would you like to joke with me? What am I missing?

Tonight is the night! I’m pulling out the ole’ VCR to go retro in recording Bill & Walter back on Channel 2. Memo to CBS: put some show into it. Don’t just have them do today’s news. Bring back the old video-toaster intro and the heavily bearded directors/producers. Bring back the fly lapels! Have them smoke/drink on the air.

Here’s an awesome clip from the duo from the day John Lennon died.