Letters to the Editor
J T
Published Letters: 295 Editor's Choice: 26
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Not quite a campaign logo
[Read the article: May the best logo win]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've always liked this particular logo that an enterprising web cartoonist put together.
http://www.goats.com/store/rfv.html
I work in DC with several politically oriented people of both parties, and have a bumper sticker on my office wall. Most of my coworkers have to look twice at it to realize that it's a joke instead of a real campaign logo.
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Chicago stadium names
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Heck, most of the people I know still say the White Sox play at Comiskey Park (You need a diction coach to say "US Cellular Field" without sounding like Sylvester the Cat), and that park, which replaced the original Comiskey Park, went through the names Sox Park (still on the Red Line, or Jackson Park-Howard, stop name) and New Comiskey Park before getting it's corporate name in 2003.
Oddly, for some reason for a while I didn't realize that the United Center, where the Bulls and Blackhawks play, was a corporate named building until a saw a picture of the roof, with the large United Airlines logo painted up there. It may have been too clever for them to just go with the feel-good, all inclusive sounding United Center instead of the United Airlines Center. For a long time I thought it was named in the spirit of people coming together, not after the airline. I find it one of the more clever stadium names around, actually.
Then, there is Soldier Field. When the spaceship landed on it, there was a lot of talk about naming rights which led to a lot of protests. "How can you rename a stadium honoring our nation's soldiers?" everyone said. So the Bears got creative, and spent at least the 2004 season officially knows as "The Chicago Bears Presented by BankOne". That deal was supposed to go on for 10 years, though I don't know if they still use that (updated to Chase, who purchased BankOne) anymore though.
If they go renaming Wrigley Field, they'll get a lot of complaints, especially if they remove the Wrigley name completely. But people will go right on calling it Wrigley field. If they just add something to the name, like Wrigley Field at Stadium, there will be less grumbling, and people will go on calling it Wrigley Field. Their best bet is unlikely to happen, which would be for the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company to pay for the naming rights. But why should they start paying for something they've gotten for free for decades?
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cups and cans and turbulence, oh my
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm all for recycling in the cabins of airliners, when possible. I always figured that on longer flights that everything (cups, cans, trays, whatever) was collected between services in case of turbulence, so there would be less items flying around the cabin.
We're at a point where most people are somewhat conflicted over cleanliness and environmental concerns. For decades we've been taught that for things to be clean they must be encased in plastic, and single use items are even cleaner because they haven't been infected by previous users then gone through a possibly questionable washing process. That, and it's cheaper to just hand out a single use plastic utensil set, wrapped in plastic with a wet-nap, napkin, and salt and pepper packets, than to pay people to separate washable items, wash them, and distribute them as individual pieces on each tray. This combination of cleanliness and inexpensiveness is in conflict with reduced resource usage. There is a mindset change that needs to happen somewhere.
As an aside, when you mention the cleaning crews, I often lament that more people don't treat airline seats (or other similar places, like movie theaters) like they teach Boy Scouts about camp sites, leave it like you were never there. As much work as those cleaning crews do, and the bags of stuff they haul away, they invariable miss things, usually that piece of gum under the armrest you stick your finger in, or a sticky spot on that tray table. I'm not blaming the cleaning crews, they have a tough job to do and probably not much time to do it in. If people would just take their own waste to the receptacles rather than rely on others to pick up after them, it would be much nicer.
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you spin me round round...
[Read the article: Clinton campaign: Forget what we said earlier]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's spin. We all know that, all politicians do it, and will continue to do it. We can't change that, as much as we'd like to. But the best spin isn't obviously spin, it seems like the straight truth. This bit of spin makes me feel like they're campaigning from a merry-go-round. If you can't do this well, what other important political skills are you missing?