Eat my message. Target Marketing, quoted in the Progressive (August 1990), describes the patented process developed by Chicago’s Viskase Corporation, which has developed a way “to print messages on the frank casings it manufactures, using an edible food material.”
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Congratulations! You will soon be paying for a town hall and fire station for a village of 400 people in Bowdre Township in eastern Illinois, as part of the grossly overextended Illinois “civic center” program. According to Illinois Tax Facts (July 1990), there are now 56 legislatively authorized civic-center authorities in the state. “Even after the original goal of providing civic centers for large downstate communities had been achieved, the General Assembly has continued to propose and fund new civic centers. And when the need for large civic centers had obviously been exhausted, legislators simply changed the rules of the game, allowing for smaller projects in smaller communities”–without setting any limits or policy rationale. “An increasing number of projects carry the earmarkings of influence-peddling and legislative wish-list fulfillment…. If the civic center program has indeed become ‘grease’ to keep the machinery of government running more smoothly, the price of the lubricant has become far too costly.”
“Nobody lives around here anymore, but our Masses on Sunday are packed,” says Father George Ruffolo, pastor of Saint Francis of Assisi Church at Roosevelt and Newberry (Claretian Newsletter, August 1990). “This was once called the Cathedral for Mexicans, and it’s still a hub for Hispanics…. They come from different parts of the city; they come in buses, in cars, and on trains. Somehow the word gets around; they might even hear about St. Francis in Mexico before they come to this country.”
Census of the fittest. “I think of it as statistical Darwinism,” gripes Nate Lee in New City (July 19-August 1). “If you’re too stubborn, lazy or stupid to be counted, you don’t deserve to be counted. And if the rest of us have to suffer, well, we’re used to suffering all the stubborn, lazy, and stupid people that don’t count, anyway. You probably don’t vote so you’re not represented and you cost the rest of us infinitely more than $400 a year in your attitude alone.”
