Rules of the game. “Contestants must spit their pit within 60 seconds of the time they are called to the line by the tournament judge. Three spits are allowed. The longest of three is recorded as the official score. If a pit is swallowed or lost, that spit is forfeited.” That’s rule six of the Annual International Cherry Pit Spit World Championship, held July 7 at the Tree-Mendus Fruit farm in southwest Michigan.
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A long, strange trip. “On the elevated and subway trains of the Chicago Transit Authority I have traveled to date (and I’m not done yet) a total of 191,724 miles,” writes Joel Wells in the Critic (Summer 1990). “I’ve been on trains that caught fire; I’ve had rocks and even bullets pass through windows, inches from my head; I’ve seen fights and wanton copulation; I’ve been vomited on and gone to sleep on; I’ve been stung by wasps and drenched with bags full of water tossed on the train by feckless children… I’ve even been involved in an attempted act of terrorism when a deranged man leapt to his feet on the Evanston Express, brandished a very hard bagel and demanded that the train take him to Cuba.”
What difference did Industrial Revenue Bonds make? Not much, according to a study by Bob Giloth reported in the Neighborhood Works (June/July 1990). No matter what the recipients of the low-interest funds promised, they rarely delivered: “The 81 manufacturers in this study [who obtained IRBs in Chicago between 1977 and 1989] promised a total of 5,576 new jobs within three years after their IRB investment. Nine firms went the other way, and closed their plants. Even excluding these nine, IRB manufacturers overall only gained 115 net new jobs between time of investment and 1987.”
