Ad Categories: City Life

While Rod Blagojevich spins long yarns about his life, important legislation is making its way out of Springfield on the big issues of the day.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, Rod Blagojevich’s rambling testimony can be easily digested through entertaining, 140-character dispatches from the weirder side of politics.

ComEd just got approval to implement a rate hike that will cost customers about three bucks a month, or 36 dollars a year, in order to implement a “smart grid.” No one likes paying more, and no one likes having to work to pay less, much less do math for it. But there’s evidence that a smart grid, and the irritating pricing structure that accompanies it, might have broader benefits.

In the time of stormchasers, we’re pretty familiar with watching tornadoes from a distance. Less often do we get a sense of what a tornado is like from the inside. Here’s a recording from inside a convenience store walk-in refrigerator as the tornado passed overhead.

In 1954, a suburban housewife in Oak Park caused a small stir by announcing that aliens from the planet Clarion had told her the world was coming to an end. It didn’t, but the little stir she caused on Cuyler Avenue led to one of the most important breakthroughs in psychology and social science in the 20th century.

The Emanuel administration pulls TIF data out of its inflexible PDF jail, making it sortable and downloadable; meanwhile, the Illinois Senate Redistricting Committee puts the process on Google Earth.

In short: the brakes heat up to 2,500 degrees, and the tires immediately deflate to keep from exploding. Then the brakes burn.