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The Nooner | Chicago news and beyond | October 12, 2011
Chicago's own Windy City Rollers have made us proud. They could teach the Bears a thing or two about winning.
The Nooner: Chicago news and beyond
Today’s news is about roller derby. Yeah!
Chicago does have a winning team
Well, the Bears might suck, but Chicago does have one champion-quality team: The Windy City Rollers roller derby crew. The Rollers won the North-Central division for the third consecutive year this past weekend in Indianapolis, beating Minneapolis Minnesota’s Rollergirls 123-100. The champs earned themselves a spot at the national championships, which take place Nov 11–13 in Denver, Colorado.
In which I get all feminist up in here
The extended trailer for new documentary Miss Representation (which showed at Sundance this year) is like a mini-treatise on the exploitation of women in the media. It made the hair on my arms stand up. The doc premiers on Oprah’s OWN network at 8pm CST on Oct 20.
Rahms’ first budget is going to be a doozy
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is making some major cuts in his first city budget—including shutting down three police stations, increasing the cost of city stickers for SUV owners, bumping the city hotel tax up one percent, and increasing taxes on parking in downtown garages during rush hour. Libraries will also see their hours of operation cut. I love anything that makes it harder to own a car (and to own a big car, and to drive it into the Loop). And I can deal with the library cutbacks. But shutting down police stations? Please, no.
Seattle vigilante oversteps
So there’s a guy in Seattle who’s been dressing up in a gold-and-black suit and fighting crime. For a year, he’s been doing this, often with a camera crew in tow. But recently he got into some trouble—he pepper-sprayed some folks on the street. The crime fighter, Phoenix Jones (not his real name) says that he was breaking up a fight (and the video footage backs him up). The police say, fight or no fight, you can’t just pepper spray people. Part of what’s interesting about this story is that many news outlets—including CNN—are protecting the vigilante’s identity even though his real name is listed on his booking papers.
Eight of Gacy’s victims exhumed
I know this is not the first bit of John Wayne Gacy news I’ve covered lately—but they keep digging up the bodies of his victims. The Cook County sheriff’s office has secretly exhumed the bodies of eight unidentified young men who were found in the crawl space under Gacy’s house in 1978. Investigators are asking anyone who had a family member go missing in between 1970 and 1978 to come in and do a cheek-swab DNA test to see if it produces a match.
