Fighting a fire is part mental and part physical, part team effort and part individual achievement, somewhere between tearing down a house that's aflame and winning a football game where you risk dying if you're not careful and sometimes even if you are.
Firefighters will refer to some fires as "good fires" while worrying that outsiders might think they are glad a building burned, when of course they aren't.
When I was in London earlier this fall, I stayed in a hotel directly across the street from Hyde Park. My schedule was hectic, and before I knew it, my week was almost up, yet I had not found a moment to step even once into the park, which seemed a lamentable lapse, since it was right there.
Garrison Keillor’s 19 previous books are listed in the front of his latest novel, A Christmas Blizzard, and any one of them would probably provide a richer, more nuanced experience. But if you’ve read them all and enjoyed them all, then you’ll probably enjoy this one too, at least a little.
Did you notice Mayor Daley blamed the media for Oprah Winfrey deciding to end her show? He believes this, apparently, because the press raised its usual, rote, Journalism A01 questions when the Queen of the Universe kicked off her 24th season in September in the middle of Michigan Avenue, asking things like, Geez, should we be closing the Magnificent Mile for a TV show? And who's paying for this?
Three hours early. My central memory of appearing on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" is they asked that I show up three hours prior to taping, just so I'd be there, ready when they needed me.
Gary Griffin keeps the sleeves of his charcoal sweater pushed up to his elbows, like a magician. And as with performing magic, there is a lot of handwork to directing a play, at least the way Griffin does it.
Reset your mental landscape to Sept. 10, 2001, and ask yourself: What did New York City do to draw al-Qaida's wrath?
'A lot of people, they come by here, they see it, but they don't know what it is," said Mike Carson. "We get a lot of that. They've been driving by here for years, and they get a day off, vacation or whatever, and they say, 'What is this thing? I've been coming by here for years. What is it?' And we tell them what it is."
When a professional sports franchise has a season as spectacularly lousy as the Bears are having this year, its fans begin searching for occult explanations. The Cubs have their famous goat curse, athletes on the cover of Sports Illustrated face the cover jinx. But what have the Bears done to invite this doom?
'Sing me something," says Charles Holliday as he buzzes Roger Honeywell through the stage door at the Lyric Opera of Chicago shortly before 10 a.m. Monday.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years ago today, is one of those rare historic moments that freeze in amber -- you always remember where you were when it happened.
See? This rampage by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan who shot dead 13 people at Texas's Fort Hood Army base Thursday, confirms everything I've been saying all along -- psychiatrists are dangerous, unbalanced individuals; they go into the profession seeking the mental help that they themselves need . . .