Bill Maher, the acerbic comic whose “Politically Incorrect” television show launched a thousand controversies, played the Chicago Theater for one night only on Friday, July 25^th and delighted a sold-out crowd.

Where to begin with an analysis of Maher’s ability to offend with his cynicism? He aimed many barbs at politicians, of course…even Illinois’ own Barack Obama, although, this night, he did end his stand-up routine with the comment, “Thanks for the candidate.”

Poor John McCain received the butt of the ribbing, with age-related comments that I won’t repeat, as they were pretty much what was to be expected. What was not expected was Maher’s criticism of some of Obama’s votes, and his follow-up comment, “I don’t make this stuff up, Folks. I just report it.”

In the middle of the show, Archer Midland-Daniels was mentioned, and a loud shout of support rose from a crowd member, whom Maher then crucified, expressing a great deal of dislike for the giant corporation. He also came down hard on corn. Yes, corn. He doesn’t like corn, apparently, whether it is as an alternative fuel or a foodstuff. He just does not like corn. What can I say? Take it up with Maher.

About the time that he was ragging on corn and farmers (whom he criticized as the biggest welfare queens) and all corn-related topics, someone heckled him from the midwestern crowd filling all the seats this night. Maher looked calmly into the crowd, found the heckler and said, “Now, that really didn’t add anything to the show, did it?” very calmly, as though this happens to him all the time. Cool.

I used to go to a chat room online called “Hollywood Café” and some of Maher’s writers were not glowing in their praise of him. However, his riff on religion and marriage, both topics he has addressed on his show (to say he is “a confirmed bachelor” is putting it mildly) were familiar and funny.

We were 3 rows from the top of this many-tiered palace of entertainment. I had just made a trip to the restrooms located in the bowels of the theater, which were another 3 to 5 flights of stairs. By the time I had climbed from the basement to 3 rows from the top, I needed oxygen. I don’t think I was alone. I could almost touch the Indian mural on the ceiling and the chandelier near it. Maher looked like a speck onstage, wearing what appeared to be a tan tee shirt with some sort of logo that I would have needed binoculars to make out.

His voice, however, rang out loud and clear, as did his lampooning of everything from gas prices to the demise of George W. Bush (let’s understate his comments and say that he is not a big Bush supporter), to why his married friends’ wives don’t like him hanging around, reminding their husbands of what they are missing.

It was vintage Maher on his one stop in the Windy City, and, Democrat or Republican, Christian, Jew or Muslim, there was enough material in his act to offend everyone at least once, and all of it was funny.

    A quick look at Chicago’s news, where I now report from, tells me that there are some issues in Chicago that have not made the local Quad City newspapers. For instance, there was a shooting near the Taste of Chicago, which Mayor Daley is trying to play down as having had anything to do with that massive annual event. The cab talk is all about whether it will have a negative effect on Chicago’s bid for the Olympics. If the shooting outside Grant Park and off the Festival site doesn’t do it, then will the 10.25% sales tax deter visitors to this fair city?

     Another city vignette: a newborn baby boy was found abandoned in the courtyard of an Uptown apartment building at about 2:00 a.m. The 5 lb. Baby boy left in the 4600 block of North Beacon Street inside a grocery bag amid shrubbery was crying to save his life (which it did) in the 70-degree temperature. His body temperature had dropped to 86 degrees in the cool night air and he might not have survived if one of the apartment’s residents had not gone outside to investigate, found the child, and taken it to a nearby fire station. The child had cried for at least two hours before anyone thought to investigate, but it was after 2 in the morning.

      A third interesting story detailed how a Lake Hills man known as Edward F. Bachner IV tried to hire a hit man to kill his wife, after he had taken out a $5 million dollar life insurance policy on her. The odd thing is that the wife didn’t know about the “hit-for-hire” until she found out in court, and the method that the would-be murderer eventually settled on to do her in: Pufferfish.  I just wrote a story entitled “Pufferfish.” Who knew that Pufferfish venom is among the most deadly of poisons? Dr. Frank Paloucek, clinical expert in toxicology, says that the Tetraodontidae family of poisons (specifically, the deadly poisonous pufferfish) “would be a terrible way to die, in my opinion, because you could be very easily conscious at the time you stop breathing. You wouldn’t be feeling that you weren’t breathing, and you would be conscious of it, and you would die because you would pass out. The death is a respiratory death. Your lungs stop working and your brain loses enough oxygen for long enough, and then you’re dead.” Yup. That’ll do it. Stay away from Pufferfish. Edward F. Bachner IV had apparently pretended to be someone who had a legitimate reason for owning pufferfish poison, and he had a bunch of it! He also had 50 knives, garrotes that could be used to choke people to death, a gun, two passports, and a phony CIA badge. Wow! The Pufferfish Conspiracy has made all the papers, and I’m thinking that I was way ahead of THAT learning curve with my little story! Just so you know: “If it was a 220-pound person, you would need one-thousandth of a gram, or one-32,000^th of an ounce to kill an adult” with Pufferfish poison. Another wow, there. The reason given? Marine animals have to be far more poisonous than land animals to kill their pretty, because they are operating in 3 dimensions instead of 2. (I’m not sure I understood that last part, but I’m just here to report the news of the day in Chicago by the Lake.)

      There was also a story about a 96-year-old man who has a lot of opinions (Garrison Keillor) and a happy story about a young boy who was lost for hours, but was found unharmed. That, at least, was a “happy” ending.

     Two incredible airline stories were reported, one by Abha Malpani on May 14^th, when she reported on four adults, rushing to board an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Winnipeg, who accidentally left their 2-year-old behind in the airport. The quartet (quintet, if the baby is counted) had only 10 minutes to make the plane and each adult thought one of the other adults had the child. Air Canada saved the day by figuring out who the child was, where the parents had gone, and putting the baby on the next flight to Winnipeg.

     Then there’s the story reported by Grant Martin on May 20^th regarding a Pinnacle Airlines pilot, Jeffrey Paul Bradford, who was out for the evening partying hearty with one of the flight attendants, Adrianna Grace Conner, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when the pair, both 24, decided to “go do it in the woods,” according to Lower Swatara Township Police Sergeant Richard Brandt. Somehow, the pair became separated.

     The flight attendant found a fireman’s vehicle parked in his home driveway and made enough noise getting in it to rouse the owner, who inquired about why a nude woman was in his firetruck. Adrianna was later charged with theft from a motor vehicle (she took a flashlight) and public drunkenness.

     The pilot, clad only in flip-flops and a wristwatch, who was found hiding behind a shed, was not quite as lucky. Although he did make contact with another woman and asked her to bring him a pair of shorts, she called 911, instead, which brought a helicopter and authorities (rather than the pair of shorts the drunk  naked pilot had requested) and charged him with all the things you would think he would be charged with: public drunkenness, indecent exposure, public lewdness, etc., etc. etc.

     Pinnacle Airlines is owned by Northwest Airlines, which also owns Compass Airlines. Just last month, a Compass Airlines pilot set fire to his plane rather than fly a route he didn’t want to fly.

     So, in other words, it’s just another day in the friendly skies.

Change Is On the Way…..Food for Thought

1) Light sweet crude oil for June delivery has reached a record of $126.20 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Trouble with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela could drive the prices even higher. One expert predicts $6 a gallon gas within two years.

2) In the year 1950, whites made up 28% of the world population and Africans 9%. The ratio was 3-to-1. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same, but the colors will be reversed.

3) People of African ancestry will make up 25% of the world’s population by 2060, according to the National Policy Institute in Augusta, Georgia.

4) By 2060, 200 million white (Caucasian) people—1 in every 6 on Earth—will disappear. [That is a number equal to the population(s) of France, Britain, Holland and Germany combined.]

5) People of Arabic heritage numbered 94 million in 1948, when the state of Israel was formed. At that time, Arabs were outnumbered 7 to 1 by Europeans. Arabic peoples will rise to 743 million by 2060, which is 10x more than now. They will make up 75% of the white population.

6) By 2050, one-fourth of all the people of Eastern Europe will have vanished.

7) The Ukraine will lose 1/3 of its population.

8) Russia had 150 million people when the Soviet Union broke up in the Reagan years; today, there are 142 million people in the Ukraine and they will decrease to 108 million. This represents a population loss that is greater than the genocide that Hitler and Stalin, combined, perpetrated on those countries.

9) By 2050, Iran’s population will have risen from the 71 million of today to 100 million.

10) Pakistan will add 84 million to reach 300 million people (about the same as today’s United States).

11) Afghanistan’s population will increase threefold, from 27 million to 79 million.

12) Iran will go from 29 million to 62 million by 2060. (Most of the population in Iran is young).

13) The Hispanic population of the United States will triple to 127 million by 2050, with Mexico’s population increasing to 130 million. Some sort of merger with Mexico would seem to be in the cards, and one cannot rule out a merger with our neighbors to the north, either.

As readers of my blog know, I just did a story on the Weinermobile, a 27-foot vehicle that visited the Quad Cities recently, with its 2-month-old baby brother in tow, a 13-foot smaller weiner, built on a Mini Cooper chassis. [See blog archives.]

But how many Quad City readers are aware that, back in 1922, a local business (Hallas & Mead) built a giant shoe thirteen feet long that weighed about a ton and was an exact metal replica of a work shoe of the day, for advertising purposes for the Mendel Shoe Store?

Back in December of 1978, Jim Arpy (now retired) of the Quad City Times interviewed the then-77-year-old creator of the giant shoe, Harry Hallas, a sheet-metal fabricator for 25 years for his brother, George. George, along with Arthur Mead, owned Hallas and Mead Company (24^th St. and 3^rd Avenue.) Harry Hallas worked there for 47 years, but building the Big Shoe was among his most unusual job chores…right up there with prying six bullets out of one of John Looney’s vehicles following a gun battle.

The Hallas and Mead Company is long gone, but listen to Harry Hallas talk about one of the prototypical vehicles that the Weinermobile is based on, and a vehicle he helped build:

Harry Hallas:

“I can’t for the life of me remember where Mendel’s (Shoe Store) was located, but one day he (Mendel) came into the shop and said he wanted us to make a shoe large enough to be mounted on a Model T Ford chassis. We’d never done anything like that, but we were the only place in the area equipped to do it, so we took it on.”

[Hallas and the partners worked for about a year to complete the shoe, which had a driver who sat in the arch behind a windshield and steered conventionally, separated from the rear and uppers by a compartment door. The shoe also had eyelet hooks (three of them) on each side and four similarly-situated large holes for the same purpose and was painted work-shoe brown.]

Hallas: “It sure stirred a lot of interest. I don’t think we would have accepted any more orders like that. We didn’t want that kind of business, because it was too much work and took too much time. We didn’t make a dime on it. In fact, if the truth were known, we probably lost money, but it was a challenge we wanted to try.”

Every weekend, Mendel, (the shoe store owner), would come to the shop and create more of the shoe shape out of wire.

Hallas: “Then, following Mendel’s pattern, we’d take the wires out and replace them with one-inch channel iron every four inches. The skin was riveted galvanized iron. When we were done with it, it went to the paint shop and was painted to look just like a big brown work shoe. I never did hear what happened to it, but I’d sure like to know,” said the 77-year-old Harry Hallas back in 1978, when the original Jim Arpy interview was conducted. [If Harry Hallas were alive today, he’d be 106, so it’s probably safe to say that he never saw the Big Work Shoe again.]

If anybody knows the whereabouts of Mendel’s Giant Shoe, drop me a line.

The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile is all over the Quad Cities and was in the parking lot of the Hy-Vee Food Store at 2351 West Locust from 2 to 5 p.m. on Friday, May 9th. Three “hotdoggers,” Bill Blansett, 23, a graduate of Pennsylvania State in Advertising, Stephanie Geidel, 24, a graduate with a degree in sports management and a Master’s in Education from the State University of New York at Cortland who plans to teach, and Nick Osiecki, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, were the three “hotdoggers” driving the two vehicles in the Quad Cities. The Oscar Mayer hotdogger team is comprised of 12 individuals who are chosen from recent college graduates. They travel the country, handing out whistles and small hot dogs and other Oscar Mayer paraphernalia at stops arranged by sponsors.

The concept of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile began seventy-two years ago (1936) with a thirteen-foot metal hot dog on wheels in Chicago. The small hotdog mobile is the eleventh design and is built upon the frame of a Mini Cooper. The small fifteen foot car gets about 25 to 30 mpg. The larger Wienermobile, at 27 feet with a sky roof, gets only 10 to 15 mpg and costs about $115 to fill the 32.1 gallon tank. Normally, the team travels about 500 miles per week.

In addition to the sky roof, there is a hot-dog-shaped instrument panel, a 27-inch color video monitor, seating for six in relish-colored seats, two exterior cameras, illuminated Oscar Mayer logos, a gull wing door and condiments decorating the carpeting of the vehicle.

The three in town on Friday described it as “a good thing to do for a year if you aren’t sure what you want to do permanently.” Mr. Blansett was interviewing by phone for a job while present in Davenport. Nick Osiecki has been thinking of going into television sales (after abandoning writing as a career) and Steph Geidel, whose mother is an elementary school teacher, thinks she will teach.

Hot dog Kudos to all!

     Here’s a little bit of humor to make the bad news seem less, well, bad.

    If you’re not a baby-boomer, you’ll still probably think it’s funny.

Uploading pictures can be a fun, exciting and thankless task.  Among things that can inevitably go wrong: incorrect picture sizing, attaching to undesired location on the webpage and an invitation to wild bear attacks.

Several tips to help with uploading pictures:

1) Select a picture you actually want to upload

2) Keep eyes open at all times

3) Using a mouse to assist with uploads can decrease the time spent uploading by 98%

4) Uploads are best done with a computer

5) Do not try to upload pictures directly from a non-digital camera

6) When uploading pictures, best to leave pants on

Who doesn’t love a nice kitten upload?  Satan, of course.

www.FamilyWatchDog.us

This is a site that gives you criminals living within any distance of your home, and the crime for which they were convicted. It can be a valuable tool not only for adults, but to warn young children of potential danger. Check it out!

Try out this web-site: www.paulsadowski.com.

 It has interesting facts about your birth date and more.

 Enjoy!