Know Your Station

I noticed a little something while checking out news coverage of an event held at work last week. Here's the picture at the top of the Mount Pleasant - Sturtevant Patch.com site:

It's a shot of the Sturtevant Amtrak station. Nice enough picture: blue skies, spring greenery, and the Waxdale windmills towering in the distance. I suppose that the station, which opened in 2006, is the most distinctive building in Sturtevant or Mount Pleasant other than the prison. It appears on the Sturtevant village letterhead, village sign, and village web page, (The lone image chosen for Wikipedia's Sturtevant page is of a warehouse with a caption informing you that "Distribution warehouses are a common sight along the western side of Sturtevant.")

And here's the picture atop Patch.com's Caledonia page:

That building on the left? It happens to be the old Sturtevant Milwaukee Road/Amtrak station, which was moved to a Caledonia field on Five Mile Road just east of State Trunk Highway 38 in 2009.

P.S.: Sturtevant's logo is actually based on the old train station, as shown in this photo from 2003. The new station was built to specifications so that the village wouldn't have to change all its signage and stationery.

P.P.S: Even Attica, New York doesn't use its prison in its town logo.

Speculantur Amicti de Septimanae Huius

Hey!

We're over here!

Never mind. We'll just look over your shoulder.

Q Toon: Pardon the Interruption

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate÷Jun 12, 2013 EditorialCartoonists.com

Since all the news today is about the massive database amassed by the U.S. government of every phone call, fax,  instant message, tweet, Facebook post, Google search, and garage door code for every person in the world, it's quite possible that you have forgotten the news items at the heart of this week's cartoon.

But rest assured that there is someone at the National Security Agency who remembers Ellen Sturtz, the woman who heckled Michelle Obama about employment non-discrimination, and they know what the PIN for her credit card is, how often she uses her microwave oven, and where she drove yesterday. If it's not someone at the NSA, then it's at least some high school dropout tech geek who got a job at some NSA subcontractor by virtue of his skills at Tomb Raider.

And, as that NSA subcontractor geek well knows, Chris had our TV tuned to the French Open on Sunday morning watching Rafael Nadal beat David Ferrer when one of the antigay yet homoerotic Hommen protesters stormed the court with a flare. Which was a great thing as far as I was concerned, thanks to the fifth law of editorial cartooning: Two Things Make a Cartoon. It's also been months since I've had an excuse to draw a guy without his shirt on.

It's also been over a year since I've had any use for my high school French.

Peter Barca's Outreach

64th Assembly Representative Peter Barca held a listening session at Mount Pleasant Town Hall last night. Three people showed up. 

Republican commenters on the Journal Times page twitted Barca for drawing so few constituents, particularly since the front page of the JT reported that over 400 people came to a simultaneous event at Emmaus Lutheran Church, where Sheriff Christopher Schmaling and other local officials addressed the concerns of the Latino community about allegations of racial profiling of brown-skinned drivers.

"Pete,,,,,You need to coordinate better. Dickert and Voces had almost 400 future voters turn out at Emmaus Lutheran Church for their rally. Best you could do was 3? Word is that Dickert has his eye on the Governors race. You better get with the program Pete. Three people....too funny." -- "ordmm"

But check out the map.

Republicans drew a tiny portion of the Village of Mount Pleasant into Kenosha Democrat Barca's district in 2011. (The lion's share of Barca's district extends well south of this map, with another leg stretching west from central Kenosha out beyond I-94.)

The Mount Pleasant Town Hall is located at the little pink star up at the top center of the map. Even for those people who realize that they are no longer represented by anyone from Racine County, the Mount Pleasant Town Hall is a considerable drive from anywhere in Barca's district. (What, the Taylor Complex Building in Elmwood Park wasn't available?)

And considering how much of the Mount Pleasant appendage of Barca's district is Latino, some of those people had somewhere else they wanted to be on that particular Monday night.

Le coup d'oeil furtif de cette semaine

Gosh, I missed the Tony Awards last night. I had to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones to make sure that Bran, Sansa and Arya didn't suddenly get wiped out by a rogue ice dweller or something.

But, hey, if Game of Thrones: The Musical ever comes to Broadway, I'm there with bells on.

Not As Fun As Ex-Gay Birds

Gay 'cures'? There shouldn't be an app for that. But there's a new one called "Setting Captives Free," available in ... Google Play stores, meant to teach you how to stop being gay.
It's a 60-day course that tells gay people they are not "born this way" and offers to help them find "freedom from the bondage of homosexuality." 

-- AllOut.org 

The app had also been available from Apple's iTunes, but no longer.

By the way, hasn't anybody else wondered why the aliens in Close Encounters go to such great lengths to abduct little Barry Guiler in Indiana only to send him trotting back to his mother when their spaceship lands a week or so later in Wyoming? Why are we so sure that's really little Barry?

Joseph Parrish cartoon

The subject of this week's cartoon has written to ask for the original, which is as good an excuse as any for me to share this photo from our recent vacation through the Shallow South:

It's a framed cartoon by the Chicago Tribune's Joseph L. Parrish in the Oscar Getz Whiskey Museum in Bardstown, Kentucky. This was my best angle to minimize the reflection of the window across the room without shooting it from too oblique an angle. You can click on the picture to embiggen it; the caption is "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain" (the name of a pop tune). The moon is a jug of moonshine (get it?), rising over the mountains of "High Liquor Taxes" while the moonshiner is heading to the hills.

The card in the frame erroneously credits the cartoon to Maxwell Parrish; perhaps someone is thinking of the painter Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966).

Joseph L. Parrish began his career in 1925 drawing for the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Tenneseean, moving on to the Chicago Tribune in 1936. In addition to his editorial cartoons, he contributed to "Dick Tracy" and created the "Nature Notes" cartoon series. He was a staunch Republican, as was any Tribune cartoonist in the McCormack era. He retired from editorial cartooning in 1970 (continuing the weekly "Nature Notes" until 1982), and died at the home of his daughter in St. Louis in  September, 1989 at the age of 84.

The museum also has a framed copy of the December 5, 1933 front page of the Chicago Daily News on this wall, with the banner headline "Legal Liquor Flows Today." I happen to have a reproduction of the same front page at home!

There were no prohibition era front pages from any of the Kentucky newspapers of the day anywhere in the museum, oddly enough. These particular exhibits must have come from a Chicagoan. I'd have thought that the end of prohibition would have caught the attention of editors in Bourbon Country.

H

I'd also like to share a comment about my cartoon this week left on the AAEC site by a reader in Bozeman, Montana: "On a day when another cartoonist made me so angry I could hardly see straight, what I then saw was your 'A record number of Lutherans will know who their bishop is?' cartoon. That laugh saved the day for me. Much thanks, Paul."