The Week That Was: Spam, Cockroaches, And Other Unpopular Things
By Staff in News on Oct 26, 2014 9:00PM
I love this time of year because I’m not a very popular guy. And yet U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider (D-10th) NEEDS me. He tells me so several times a day while using terms such as “pleading’’ to explain my importance to him. He gets his friends Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to write me, too.
He’s not alone, of course. Gov. Pat Quinn writes me with some frequency, as do a few people I don’t know. So I’ll be sorry when this campaign is over and I’m not so in demand.
It made me wonder, though: who else is feeling popular or unpopular this week?
Jay Cutler’s popularity is trending downward. If you just moved to Chicago, you might not realize Brian Urlacher once played for the Bears, and even was Cutler’s teammate. Since retiring, though, he has become a full-time Cutler heckler. As if that weren’t enough, Mike Ditka and Dan Hampton both came out and criticized the Bears this week, making Cutler the most unloved of a whole squad of the unloved.
But don’t worry. I’m sure a trip to New England to play against three-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady will fix things up for us. (Wait, what happened???)
One nearby young man who definitely is feeling popular is Notre Dame freshman wide receiver Justin Brent, who released to the world a selfie of himself in bed with porn star Lisa Ann, a woman about his mom’s age who once starred in an adult film spoofing Sarah Palin. His stat sheet for last week says he was a non-factor as a receiver in the battle against Florida State, but analysts are pretty sure he caught something in New York.
Bruce Rauner was probably feeling like the most popular kid in school last week. He bullied the Sun-Times into writing the most transparent endorsement ever in a non-Eastern Bloc country. Then he got his old rag to lean on a reporter who was causing him headaches. But there seems to be what the covert operations people call blowback. One endorsement from a paper with a no-endorsement policy and one meddled story later, the Rauner campaign generated more negative press than Leopold and Loeb.
The respected reporter, Dave McKinney, quit the paper, the union members have asked for promises regarding journalism ethics, and papers around the city and around the country have commented on foul aroma coming off the river.
It was a comeback week of sorts for Bristol Palin, who fought her status as more of a punchline than usual. She argued that being ridiculed for a drunken brawl with Ma and Pa Palin and the whole damn fam was really liberal media hypocrisy. Never mind that every eyewitness account, including her own sister’s, claims she was the aggressor in a melee worthy of the Hatfields and McCoys. She even compared herself to Chelsea Clinton, claiming the media never would mock her like that.
Perhaps that is a fair comparison, once you get past the fact that Chelsea Clinton wouldn’t be caught dead in a stretch Hummer. Bristol Palin comes from a family that preached abstinence-only education, which worked just splendidly. She has developed a reality TV career and earns a lot of money talking about responsible sex—apparently in the how-not-to-do-it category. Chelsea Clinton is a woman who attended Oxford, Stanford and Columbia, earning several degrees including a doctorate, and sits on the boards of several important charitable and non-profit organizations.
If you’re like me, you are having trouble telling them apart, too.
One man who is desperately unpopular, though, is Faisal Khan, the city’s embattled and ignored Inspector General. Things are so bad for this man he filed a lawsuit to get attention—and money—from his peers, and all they could do was mock him. If you see Mr. Khan this week, he needs a hug. And possibly a few bucks.
Finally, it’s been a good couple of weeks for pests, and that’s not a joke about the City Council. After learning last week our city was overrun with rats, the City Council was hearing commentary from the man whose job it is to control pests when out crawled what one alderman called the biggest roach he’d ever seen. What many don’t realize is the little-known tradition in Chicago. Every late October a roach emerges in the chamber. If he sees his shadow, we’re about to start election season.
And that was the week that was.
—Tony Boylan
'The Week That Was'' is a satirical, yet informative, look back at recent news. We consider it to be mostly accurate