More Chicago Stuff

So if you watch the television you see a the occasional celebrity who is from Chicago, but doesn't live here any more. Once people get the money and the option to leave this city, they do. They always put on some bravado tuff guy / gal image as if merely being from the city makes them innately capable of kicking any other persons ass. Of course this is usually so much mendacity. People who claim to be from the city are in fact from some suburb forty miles out, whose idea of urbanization is there is a five or six story building in there down town area. Or worse yet they could be north siders. If you are not from Chicago you can not understand. South siders are taught early on that the north side is filled with bad people and Cubs fans. We think they are all wealthy pretentious and cubs fans. Even if you don't like baseball you understand that north side = bad. (There is also the entire boys town thing but once you get old enough to understand that gay doesn't mean bad, you get over that particular fear of the north side). North Siders may feel differently but we don't ask them. They may be Cubs fans.

Chicagoans also have a pale shade of the civic pride that used to exist back in the days of the book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
by Erik Larson. This can be seen in how we allow King Richard II (Mayor Daley) to spend vast amounts of cash on improvements to the parks and streets. We may have lost our labor friendly status these days as almost every contract with unions in this city end up going to arbitration so that we can keep taxes relatively low, but wow check out the parks at the lake front and around the city some time.

Now we grow up loving the look of the city and our particular neighborhoods. Then you get old enough to realize that between the lake and the cold air coming down from Canada, anyone who has the least bit of arthritis doesn't particularly like the city so much as they could. There are many a Chicago expatriate soaking up the Sun on a Florida beach or enjoying the lack of humidity in the Arizona heat.

And here are the Chicago Blogs I've been reading lately:
Geektastic No longer a news based blog. I rather enjoy this new incarnation.

Chicago Sheri Great photography, some fun links and mash up links.

Chicagoist I give this a half hearted recommendation. It wants to be quirky news. It doesn't quite make the cut. A little to focused on entertainment.

South of North Tom puts up a couple rants a week. Always lets you know what's in his sink.

Of course Mental Multivitamin even though she is now reporting from outside the city, her blog is just too smart to miss.

And that's it I was surfing around the Chicago bloggers web rings but there are a lot of dead blogs or just plain boring Chicagoans.

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