“Just what kind of garbage are the periodicals we most often read best equipped to wrap?” wonder the editors at Chicago’s Catholic bimonthly Call to Action News (June 1989). “The Wall Street Journal, we found, is best used for lamb chop bones, bits of parsley, and olive pits from two-martini power lunches. The National Enquirer, on the other hand, is better suited for fruit loops, limburger cheese, and (strangely enough) a variety of foods that are absolutely tasteless. Chicago magazine: Wine bottles, fancy pasta, Godiva chocolate wrappers, and caviar containers. Chicago Sun-Times: Twinkies, french fries, Ho-Hos, and other junk foods. Chicago Tribune: Almost anything grilled on a suburban patio (especially if from Lake Forest or Du Page County).”
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Don’t say we never gave you anything. Noted in Executive Fitness (March 1989): among the countries most likely to receive some of the 2.2 billion tons of U.S. toxic waste exported each year are Haiti, South Africa, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Japan, and Canada.
The best thing about Taste of Chicago was the 5,500 pounds of food you didn’t eat there, because it was spoiled and destroyed by city health-department sanitarians. Last year 7,000 pounds had to be done away with.
What’s white and white and read all over? The funnies in the Tribune, Sun-Times, and Defender, according to a Chicago Reporter survey of the May 1989 comic strips. During May, not quite 10 percent of the Defender’s comic characters were black, just 6 percent of the Sun-Times’s, and a mere 1.6 percent of the Tribune’s, writes Robert Cruz. And those few minority characters were concentrated in their own newsprint ghetto. If you leave out “Curtis,” “The Middletons,” and “The Amazing Spider-Man,” the three papers’ figures drop much lower. Nearly three-quarters of all the comic strips were lily-white during May.
