By being in no hurry to tell us what happened, Channel Five was telling us nothing much had. Jordan was exploring an ownership role with the Washington Wizards, something newspaper readers had known since breakfast. The next day reporters hit the street for public reaction. In other years the place to go would have been Michael Jordan's restaurant, which, alas, has closed its doors. So Channel Five interviewed passersby on the sidewalk outside the shuttered restaurant.
Habits die hard.
A Glasgow poet named Donny O'Rourke came to Chicago for a time and in 1991 published a collection of poems, Second Cities , that should be better known here. O'Rourke is coming back to town this weekend for various festivities that observe the 241st birthday of Robert Burns, and he'll be reading publicly from Burns's and his own works Monday evening at the Lincoln Park Book Shop. These fine lines prompt a question. The new movie The Hurricane plays fast and loose with the facts of some young Canadians who tried to spring Hurricane Carter from prison. Nelson Algren was a seedy old fart long past his Beauvoir days when he pulled up his socks in 1975 and headed east to write a book about Carter.