* Bernard Stone leaves City Council in a trail of quotables. My favorite: "I will be satisfied with what I’ve done to help the people in the 50th Ward and I feel sorry for them from this point on, but I wish ’em well." Look for "I used to be the machine" on a forthcoming episode of The Chicago Code.
* Stone, as quoted by Ben Joravsky in the Reader‘s regular "Aldermania" roundup, in 1991:
"[Former alderman] Tom Keane once told me, ‘You can’t do a goddamn thing about education. But you can do things for people in your ward. You can keep the streets clean and the alleys in repair.’ That’s good advice. Mr. Average Joe cares about the 30 feet in front of his house and that’s about it. All they care about education is what kind of education their kid’s going to get. And that’s the truth."
* Sure enough, in 2009 Stone found himself talking about a new public school on Devon to a cranky group of constituents. One was upset about TIF money being used for the school. The rest were upset about… traffic. Joravsky:
If parents driving their kids to school block your street and make it hard for you to get to work on time, then that’s what ‘s going to get you to a meeting on very cold Wednesday night. Not overcrowded classrooms in other kids’ schools or a massive, hard-to-understand property-tax scam.
* Stone in 1981, during a debate on remapping wards: "I fought for myself, not the people, so don’t make me throw up."
(Actually, can’t the Chicago Code people just hire Berny Stone as a writer? Let’s make this happen.)
* Gossip Wolf on Jim DeRogatis: "After flirting with it for a decade, DeRo has officially become Chicago’s Andy Rooney…."
* A tour of Lane Tech, from the wonderful A Chicago Sojourn blog.
* "One of my favorite things about baseball is listening to old men talk about it."
* Steve Chapman quotes Scorecasting (by a U of C economist and a Sports Illustrated writer, i.e. Freakonomics + sports), which suggests that attendance at Wrigley has very little to do with the Cubs and very much to do with the price of the beer you drink when you watch the Cubs. Knowing the ambiance there it makes sense, but I still don’t think it squares with the popularity of the Cubs when they’re on the road.
* A picture of Chicago. Foreground: the International Space Station.