Results tagged “racist”

Northern Illinois University is closed today after police found racist threats written on a wall in a women's bathroom Saturday night. According to the university's website, Written in black ink on a restroom wall in the Grant Towers D complex were two separate entries claiming that “things will change most hastily” in the final days of the current semester. “Tell those n---ers to go home,” the first entry reads. “ME / OUT … Die...

Using racist slurs and donning a tablecloth and pretending you're in the Klan won't get you fired from your City job. Joseph Annunzio, you're having the best, most inappropriate and offensive week ever! Congrats on retaining your $77K per year gig with the City's Department of Transportation. If the name "Annunzio" sounds familiar, it's because Joseph's uncle was 14-term Illinois Rep Frank Annunzio. The HR review board decided that Annunzio did make "racist, derogatory and...

Chicagoist just got off the phone with Gregory P. Longhini, assistant secretary of the Chicago Transit Board, who wanted to give us the CTA's version of the rumor about CTA board member Rev. Charles E. Robinson's visit to Miranda Smith, the CTA employee accused of identity theft.

Gothamist learned about the craziest urban nightmare come true: A huge python found in the bathroom pipes. It was also a nightmare for some Yankees fans, as manger Joe Torre declined to come back and manage the Bronx Bombers. At least the city's attempt to give some direction to subway riders was interesting, pranksters went shirtless at the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch and the I Heart Brooklyn Girls calendars came out. And just...

A request for a street named in honor of Chicago author Saul Bellow was denied due to controversial remarks and writing by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Bellow's University of Chicago colleague and friend, Richard Stern, made the request to Ald. Toni Preckwinkle. Stern told the Chicago Tribune that Preckwinkle sent him a letter saying she had heard Bellow made racist comments and so would not endorse a memorial to him. Raised in Humboldt Park from...

Chicago has a lot of newspaper columnists. We've been watching them ebb and flow for years. But the good ones, or at least the ones we like, have stuck around. Mary Schmich at the Trib is one of them. Her columns inform, provoke thought, remind us to wear sunscreen, and usually cause us at one point or another to laugh out loud. On the Brown line. During rush hour. And then everyone stares.

Daley’s reign over the city may seem impenetrable, but there’s one thing even he should keep in mind: Don’t mess with moms.

It was about time Mayor Daley entered the fray surrounding the Chicago Children’s Museum’s proposed move to Grant Park. To exactly no one’s surprise, he favors the plan. Loves it so much he’s enlisted his good buddies false choice and specious reasoning. Make no mistake: if you oppose the Museum’s move to Grant Park, you hate children. You want them to grow up miserable, lacking any sense of civic pride or patriotism, addicted to meth,...

Former WKQX-FM 101.1 radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller filed a lawsuit Tuesday against his former employer, saying radio officials disparaged his show and blocked him from getting other work. We are getting pretty sick of the cell phone drivers, but we are always amazed at the cell phone bikers (not in a good way). Yesterday, an 19-year-old woman who was struck and killed by a garbage truck on the Northwest Side, was apparently talking...

The saucy singing puppets of the Tony Award-Winning Avenue Q will finally be coming to Chicago, but not for a long run. And it’s going to be a while before they call Chicago home. As part of their national tour, which began this July, the puppets will spend two weeks from May 27 to June 7, 2008 at Cadillac Palace Theatre as part of the Broadway in Chicago series. Inspired by Sesame Street, the show’s...

According to an unnamed "top official," the Sun-Times reported yesterday that Wal-Mart is prepared to build as many as five South Side supercenters in six to twelve months, maybe sooner, but is also scouting sites in neighboring wards in case local aldermen resist. "We're making an active effort to speak with [the local] aldermen. We can't move forward without them. If it is proven in the near future they're not interested — maybe they don't...

This week, the Cubs announced plans to build a statue of Ernie Banks outside Wrigley Field, honoring Mr. Cub himself. The new statue will be in place before the 2008 season. While discussions about erecting a statue honoring perhaps the greatest Cubs player ever had been going on for a while, Jess Jackson recently got the ball rolling with a public petition, appearances on the Mike North morning show, and a publicized meetings with Tribune...

Chicagoist got a blast from the past yesterday when our man in Dirksen, Patrick Fitzgerald, announced the indictment of former 10th Ward Alderman Fast Eddie Vrdolyak on charges of federal fraud and bribery in connection with an alleged scheme to collect kickbacks in exchange for the sale of choice Gold Coast property. The charges allege that Vrdolyak conspired with businessman Stuart Levine to defraud the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science of the full...

The internets were buzzing this weekend with Rush Limbaugh's latest parody of liberal self-loathing. Riffing on a column by LA Times writer David Ehrenstein, the song, sung from the perspective of civil-rights activist and sometime presidential candidate Al Sharpton and set to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," has quickly become controversial. A sociological term devised in the 20th Century to describe a black character that appears dramatically to save a white protagonist, the...

Just days before he faces Naisy Dolar at the ballot box in Chicago's 50th Ward, Bernie Stone is facing a different kind of challenge in his ward: public art, and the tension it can create in the community. Muhammed Ali, a British Muslim artist who is touring the US in conjunction with the Arts Council England for his “Arts and Islam” tour, came to Chicago this past weekend. For the Chicago portion of the tour,...

In the latest round of skirmishes over power in this city, aldermanic candidates have seen the labor movement in Chicago flex it's muscle. In the 21st Ward, incumbent alderman Howard Brookins is being challenged by Leroy Jones, a community activist and member of SEIU Local 73 and UFCW Local 881 member Toni Foulkes is running against Felicia Simmons-Stovall for an open seat in the 15th Ward. In fact, this election cycle, more than any other...

With the sun out, the temperatures high, one can only think of one thing-- what's going on in the World of the -ist's? Bostonist dug deep to uncover Barack Obama's unpaid parking tickets, their Governor's latest ethical lapse, and a plagarizing sports writer. Chicagoist had everything in twos: two views on having the Olympics, losing two members of their Super Bowl team, and two music festivals. DCist put their noses in legal books as...

Joel Bleifuss, of In These Times, released a "‘how-to’ guide to avoid offending anyone" offering wordsmiths around the Chicago area the opportunity to offer their expertise on political correctness (PC) and how PC has shaped the way we communicate. Rinku Sen from Colorlines, Tracy Baim from Windy City Times and Lott Hill from Columbia College in Chicago In These Times, by far one of the boldest of the cities publications, focuses mainly on the cultural...

That new TV show, "Armed & Famous," where they train Z-list celebs to be cops ... it's in Indiana. Figures! Some racist assholes with a pro-Chief Illiniwek page on Facebook made threats against a Native American University of Illinois student. Suggested one person, "I say we throw a tomahawk into her face." A lady from Florida is suing Kraft because Capri Sun says "All Natural" on the label. When did she figure out that...

It looks like Porno Claus has been busy in the electronics sections of stores this season. We told you about the porno Zune, but it looks like other new devices suffered the same problem. One family purchased a first computer for their kid and found the default web page to be set to a racist hardcore page. Not only does Philadelphia's NBC 10 have all the details, they created a slideshow describing the event in graphic detail.

In a perplexing marketing move, some of the cast of The Real World Denver will be at Crobar on Friday for a “Premiere and Holiday Party.” Now, we’re not here to make fun of the higher-ups at MTV for having a premiere party three weeks after the actual premiere. We’re not even here to poke fun at Colie for making out with Alex and thinking they were actually going “steady.” And we’re still not here...

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Londonist wants you to know where to...

If you're hiking, consider charging up your iPod, as Seattlest finds out that a man lost during a hike was found by the glow of his iPod. That cleverness seems to be devoid in cops who were using police cruiser instant messaging clients - although we imagine IMs "so are you nakie" to be included in cop shows, just for realism. If only the cops were busting the Hummer-driving jerk who made a poor...

Being the mayor of a big city can be stressful. Sometimes you need to vent a little to someone who will listen. Luckily, Mayor Daley has lots of folks like that. They're called the press corps. For instance, Da Mare wants to see more college dorms downtown because nothing makes the Loop seem young and vibrant like a bunch of kids in hoodies smoking and text-messaging. He also thinks faculty and staff should live in...

College is a social powder keg. Students meet classmates from places they’ve only seen on a map. Members of the entitled class share rooms with the scholarship students. Freshmen meet people who look different, worship different, and think different and, if they’re humanities majors, engage theories about what it all means. Professors and administrators don’t make things any easier. Forests are sacrificed for underinformed theses about “the other” in literature and society. We shouldn’t be judged by the color of our skin, unless financial aid or heritage awards are at stake. Racial discrimination is petty and wrong, but so are some of the remedies dreamt up to combat it.

Book burning, gay bashing, kicking a homeless woman out of a library for freeloading public resources? It sounds like the Holy Trinity of turn-ons in one of Rush Limbaugh's wet dreams, minus maybe a pharmacist handing out endless prescriptions to Oxycontin. But it turns out a fire at the John M. Merlo branch of the Chicago Public Library on 644 W. Belmont back in June was a little more pedestrian. Erica Graham, a 21-year-old homeless...

It seems as though not a week goes by without an alderman doing or saying something that makes Chicago look like just another parochial, hick town. If they're not banning foie gras, or passing a smoking ban that allows bars a time frame for compliance that more resembles an exit strategy from Iraq, then they're feuding with each other on the Council floor, passing salary increases for themselves, and getting caught in the occasional compromising...

Where's Bakken when we need him? This is tailor-made for his unique wisdom. This story is fresh in our minds mainly because we saw Wrestlemania last weekend. Jim Hellwig is best known by his wrestling moniker "The Ultimate Warrior". Hellwig takes that a bit too seriously, having legally changed his name to "Warrior" years ago and posting his life philosophy on his insane website. These days Hellwig and his angry inch travels the campus lecture...

The student paper at NIU has jumped into the controversy by running the cartoons this week.

Two Bears gone wild this week, plus a bunch of dumb college students and an even dumber criminal: Bears defensive lineman Terry "Tank" Johnson was sentenced to 18 months probation and 40 hours of community service for a gun violation. He was carrying a handgun in his lap in his SUV on his way to a club back in June, and thoughtfully put it in the center console before having a valet park it. The...