Blogging Chicagoland

Two essential abilities these days are (a) identifying the truth inside the gaffe, and (b) laughing until you cry, because what else is there?

My former colleague Whet Moser has both, which makes Chicagoland one of the few non-genealogical blogs I check every day. Here's his take on the Chicago Tribune's new "innovation officer," an AOR and satellite radio guru who thinks news and information might be the new rock and roll.

News and information:

* Produces great wealth for old dudes who are kind of afraid of it

* Produces modest wealth for a few middle-aged guys who have been playing their greatest hits for the past ten years or so, eg. David Brooks

* Is increasingly the provenance of balkanized groups of alienated young quasi-amateur urbanites

Read the whole thing, and the rest of them too.

Camelot in one sentence

My former colleague Whet Moser has the best one-sentence summary of the mysteriously deified Kennedy administration:

apparently the sex-addicted son of a Neville Chamberlain sympathizer gave America the sense of national possibility it needed to get into the Vietnam War, leave a bunch of Cuban exiles for dead as part of the worst coup attempt ever, run to the brink of nuclear apocalypse, and help install the Baath party as the ruling party of Iraq.

I'm up for some more of the same, applied to outrageously overrated graven images like Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. If nothing else, telling truth in one sentence might just take the snooze out of history class.