A review of the weekend’s Bears-Packers pre-game hoopla
Harry Brignull/Flickr
Since sifting through dull newspapers, hyperbolic blogs, and overflowing RSS feeds for meaningful news can be an arduous process, News Net catches and compiles both the amusing and the significant reports that were overlooked throughout the workweek. Here are some things to think about as the weekend begins.
• To put a ribbon on the Bears season, let’s review the circus-like shenanigans in the run-up to yesterday’s NFC Championship game. A St. Paul bar prepared for the game and likely rankled animal lovers by roasting 180 pounds of black bear. The Tribune profiled 302-pound Michael Lyp, a Bears fan who paints his entire body in orange and blue before braving Soldier Field’s frigid temperatures, and described the physical details of smearing paint on his gelatinous body. (Real excerpt: “Lyp giggled as the brush grazed his nipples.”) Green Bay classic rock radio station 103.1 WOGB banned the band Chicago, presumably because Peter Cetera’s soulful tenor on “You're The Inspiration” made people start to think of Jay Cutler. And a YouTube video quickly went viral of the Lyric Opera’s Bryan Griffin singing “Bear Down, Chicago Bears,” riling up Bears fans everywhere with... my goodness, look at that beard!
• Huffington Post’s Will Durst has a way for apathetic types to pay close attention to Tuesday’s State Of The Union address: a drinking game. Drink twice whenever President Obama defends the health care bill, three times whenever the camera shows Joe Biden nodding off, and four times if “Soy Bomb” rushes the stage.
• Kanye West may have produced the best album of 2010, but the guy can’t make Chicagoland eat his burgers: Fatburger in Orland Park quietly closed last weekend.
• The Texas Transportation Institute released a study that confirmed what most of us already know: Chicago has the worst commute in America. Chicagoans spent about an extra 70 hours in commute in 2009—virtually three days.
• About 150 bathroom mirrors at O’Hare are about to be fitted with interactive “gender specific” billboards, each with sensors that can count “impressions,” or people that stare at the mirror/advertisement for an extended period like a buffoon. We may be just a few years away from the toilet playing the Subway “five-dollar foot-long” song every time it’s flushed.
