• Informatica and salesforce.com. More entertaining than a box of rocks. #
• Ah: jangling keys! Fun at 18 months, fun at 38 years. #
• commute in. the metra guy missed me on the pass punch pass. oh wait he’s on his way back and just got me. oh well. #
• first reply from a japanese tweeter the other day$ that was fun. wish i could read the ole double byte on the blackberry browser but it chok #
• Note to guy ahead of me: bright yellow coat and bright yellow gloves with a bright yellow hate – that’s quite a look!! #

Ah, the many joys of other people. Note that the sign maker is actually doing a really nice thing.

No, for the record, I didn’t write the note on the tape at the bottom.

Just a thought for those who are upset that they have to press 1 to activate English:

How are you going to feel when English is no longer even the first choice?

It’s coming.  Sooner than you think.

(The prompt for this? Some junk email from a friend. Now: coffee.)

So I just found this little paperback from 1951. It’s by two guys, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, who wrote three of these books. (Not LA Confidential — that was fiction.) Lait was almost 70 at the time and died before they were made into movies. What is it?

“A cheeky, impudent, uncensored, shocking account of the fast fabulous city.” “complete and unabridged”

“The facts are told… the names are named… it’s sensational … it’s shocking…. the spare-nothing, spare-nobody, expose of the big town” (from the back)

The whole “complete and unabridged” thing is cute. Not sure if that’s just to satisfy people that it includes all the naughty bits or just to say that this little pb isn’t the reader’s digest version.

Favorite parts so far:

• the names of the head waiters at a variety of swanky restaurants. This should help me get a great table next time I go for dinner at the Drake. His name is “Frank”. Yeah — just one name.
• the name and address of 26 strip joints under the listing “Bare Babes: Stripping is illegal, said the cop, as he directed us to one of the following Palaces of Peel”.
• “Chicagoans are informal. During the summer its okay to appear on the street or even in some smart cocktail lounges without coat or tie.” Really? Oh wait: it was 1951.

The introduction gives a very interesting perspective on how the city has changed and where it was at that time. For example:

” In 1910, Chicago breezily and confidently expected to surpass New York by 1950; in 1950 it no longer talks of growing bigger than New York–it wonders when it will be smaller than Los Angeles.”

From early on, Lait and Mortimer’s basic hypothesis is that Chicago was then on the way out. Interesting because, according to WikiP, population of Chicago peaked in 1950 at 3.6 million. (Today it is 2.8 million. LA today? 3.6 million).  People who could were moving to the suburbs and only came to the city to work. The next generation of the civic greats — those who helped Chicago recover after the fire — they were just sitting on their heels.

There are detailed chapters on the Levee, Chicago’s old red light district, Bronzeville, The Crime Cartel, Police Corruption, etc. The language is very much of the time, as are the attitudes about ethnicity, skin color and gender.

Always good to get a little history, even when it is sensational.

Now it’s time for work.