Summer in Chicago is technically over, but winter seems not to have gotten the memo and the The Greatest Ninety Days in any city seems to be rolling on.

As such, the sidewalks are alive with a simple game. It is called baggo, or bags, or bag toss, or as it is most unfortunately known around these parts: cornhole. (The bags are filled with corn kernels, you see.) Any game that enables you to play it while holding a beer in one hand and making endless sodomy jokes is bound to be good fun, no?

All it takes are two boards with holes, placed about 25 feet apart (the standard width of lots in the city — handy), and a couple of bags. Oh, and beer. See I believe this game was made specifically so that you could engage in a competition without putting your beer down. Which makes it perfect for tailgating and frat boys. But damn is it fun. The rules are simple: three points in the hole, one for on the board, you can knock others off, first one to 21. (There is a cancel-out variant of the rules where you have to do better than your opponent per turn to score at all, but that’s just, you know, complicated.)

But the real reason I like it is that it is an engine of social interaction for passersby. You’re blocking the sidewalk and the game makes a natural conversation point. I have met more neighbors in the past months playing baggo than I have in the past five years. Recently one evening when I was playing with my father-in-law (there’s a streetlamp right in front of our house) two drunkards spilled from the corner bar and slapped $5 on the far board. They managed to say something near “sink it in one throw.” I did. Not sure how I did, but I did.

Of course if you play on a weekend night you’re going to encounter idiots. One of the tactics in baggo involves deliberately trying to get your opponent’s bag off the board with no hope of scoring yourself. This involves an overhand throw, pitching-style. Of course, if you miss, the bag sails down the sidewalk.

This is precisely what happened a few weeks ago when, as our annual neighborhood party let out for the night, a few inebriated revelers strolled by. Can you piece together what happened next? The fellows thought we were trying to hit them. Took the bag and walked. Luckily I had a gigantic brit friend in town and he was right behind me as I negotiated the return of my precious corn-bag. Friend stared and grunted menacingly behind me, like a thug from a Guy Ritchie film. Bag returned, all OK. The magic of cornhole.

As with anything simple, it can be made less so with gadgets. Wife has not allowed me to purchase the LED tubing to light the hole at night, but damn it is tempting. And where is pimpmycornhole.com? That is money on the table, people!

You ask, all good fun, but is there a governing body of this nascent sport? But of course there is.

Post title from Stephen Colbert. Here’s the (w)hole truthiness.

A few years after the Wacker Drive demolition and rebuild the little Vietnam Memorial plaza on the Chicago River is open for passersby. Between State and Wabash on the south side. It isn’t exactly a full-on riverwalk, but it does make the waterway seem less like a gulch. Really quite nice.

This is right across from the former location of IBM in Chicago. Makes me miss the area all the more. What a great place it would have been to get away from the office hubbub. Might have even been able to rig a Wifi repeater to shoot across the river. Oh well. I’ll just sulk in the skyscraper canyon we’re now in.

For Chicago River fans out there, here’s a video of me taking the water taxi east on the main branch to the Michigan Avenue quay.

Sluicing through the blog archives I am struck at my obsession with this river. Go with the flow:

Brita City (re-engineering the river)
Escher streetscape (watching the drawbridges let sailboats in)
A unique phone call (floating past a bridge on fire)
Tipping Point (the Eastland disaster)
Available: loft apartment w/ lake and river view (man who lived in the Michigan Ave. bridge)
Man vs. sailboat (outrunning the drawbridges)

Not sure why it has taken me to so long to upload this, but here’s a great time-lapse video from the winter of 2004-2005 of the deconstruction of the Sun-Times building from the IBM building. A monument to the pre-Trump era. Click for video.

Thanks to Jack Blanchard and Jeff Berg.

Man, I miss that view.

Continuing down the checklist of things I’d like to see/do at Wrigley Field (lounge in the outfield, check; witness drubbing of Sox in crosstown match, check), Tuesday night was my first game viewed from a building rooftop outside the park. Those of you who don’t follow baseball may not know that Wrigley, being a 93-year-old urban ballpark, is tightly surrounded by a residential neighborhood. Three-flats line left and right field and, except two that display advertising, each of these buildings have for years hosted private groups on their rooftops. It is a unique vantage, this outsiders’ view inside.

I remember watching a game with my grandfather in the late 70’s when Bill Buckner hit a home run out of the park and shattered a window in one of the buildings. I thought, wow, someone is going to come home from work and find a great surprise. Of course, these days very few come “home” to these buildings. The homes have been almost completely taken over by the “clubs” which perch atop them. Many are owned by local bars, nearly all are managed by the same company. (After a nasty battle involving the erection of screens to partially obscure the view from the roofs most of the clubs agreed to give the Cubs 17% of their revenue annually.) There’s one private club too. A few years ago my wife tried to get tickets for me up on a roof for my birthday. It was next to impossible because the roofs are really for groups, corporate outings, and the like. Sorta like a skybox, except across the street.

I was invited by a friend who was in with some Chicago society of CPAs. Yes, I was on a Wrigleyville rooftop with a bunch of accountants: good times! I tried to keep out of conversations — which was easy given the free beer and food and the fact that I was there to watch a baseball game. And that’s the thing about the rooftops. Many people hardly notice what’s going on in the ballpark. (It is, in that way, very much like a skybox.) Most are corporate types, many are not Cubs fans or even baseball fans. Of course, you get this in the park too, but on a rooftop quarters are tight — tighter than I imagined — and you’re kinda stuck with these folks.

The rooftops all have high-def TV’s sprinkled around, but the broadcast delay makes it almost useless for anything but replays. I was grabbing a beer in an area where I could not see the park and I heard a cheer go up. I looked up at the screen and the camera was on the pitcher, scratching himself. To make matters worse the audio is off and they are playing the radio coverage of the game, which has no delay.

The view is great though. Not that much worse than some of the cheap seats in the upper deck. The only thing you can’t see is activity on the track near the ivy. But you use the cheers or sighs from the bleacher bums to determine what happened there. And of course it is just fun conceptually: I’m watching a live baseball game and I’m not in the park.

In the end I suppose the idea is a bit better than the experience. Of course, I didn’t pay for the ticket (which was at least $90) — and perhaps it would have been more fun with a roof full of friends — so I can’t complain really. It just wasn’t the raucous time that the park delivers. I think I’d rather be inside.

Saturday I attended possibly the most enjoyable baseball game I have ever seen in person. My father-in-law was in town. Our family schedule parted as miraculously as the Red Sea and living within walking distance of the park, I proposed going to see the Cubs versus our crosstown rivals the Sox. Nevermind that we didn’t have tickets. Nevermind that it was the nicest day for a baseball game all season. Never mind that it was the first series with the Sox. We figured we’d get taken by scalpers, but in fact the Cubs have a licensed reseller (read: official scalper) selling gameday tickets on location. We got tix four rows from the field on the Cubs side. Cost: um, more than face.

It was perfection. Suffice to say that the wind was blowing out, no one held a lead for very long, and a certain beloved Lee (not Elia, bless his profane heart) who was on the bench with a neck spasm emerged from the dugout to bewildered but deafening applause, whiffed once, sat on three, and then smacked one into the bleachers. Oh, also the bases were loaded. (A pinch hit grand salami, for goodness sake. Can anyone tell me the last time that happened with the Cubs?) Good times.

But what I really want to talk about here is drinking beer at Wrigley. Admittedly I’ve only been to a few other parks in my life, but I have to think the culture of beer is stronger in The Friendly Confines. Hell, it is the only park to have baseball cards for every single beer vendor.

So there’s a whole set of unwritten rules regarding buying from beer vendors at Wrigley. Here is the obligatory How To (Digg front page, here I come!):

1. Yell “Hey Old Style!” like you’re picking a fight or sheepishly flag down the Bud guy.
2. As he works his way up or down the rows serving other fans remind him of your order periodically by throwing peanuts his way and waving the number of beers you want his direction. Actually, don’t throw peanuts.
3. When he gets to your row he’ll normally hold his index finger and thumb like he’s holding your ID. This means send it down the row.
4. Do the math. $6 times the number of beers requested. Pass this and a little more plus your ID to the person next to you for delivery down the row.
5. Watch as every person handles your ID, looks at your photo, and basically learns who you are.*
6. Wait for the beers to be passed down to you while enduring the obligatory “sip charge!” heckling from those having to pass them.
7. Flash the number of dollars you want back, implying the tip, to the vendor. Remember, he has your ID and he hasn’t spit in your beer (yet).
8. Enjoy beer.

[*] Does anyone find it odd that the park is now carding people this way? I’m not opposed to enforcing the age limit, but in what other circumstance would I be forced to put one of my most important identification documents in the hands of a row full of total strangers? Privacy nuts are obviously not ballpark beer drinkers.

To make matters worse, my ID is actually cracked at the top from where the top of it pokes out of the sleeve in my wallet. Apparently consistent ass-pressure over the years has made it so. The vendor in the stands told me that he couldn’t sell me another one with an ID like that and, sure enough, when I went to get more after a potty break under the stands I was rejected. (Luckily, a nearby seatmate stranger — part of an earlier pass-the-money pass-the-beer bucket brigade — was in line right next to me. So he bought my beer.) But still, the policy is no altered, broken, or frayed ID’s will be accepted. Altered, ok. But broken or frayed? Do they think we keep our ID’s in some kind of Centers for Disease Control white room? It is under our ass 70% of the day, for god’s sake!

I’ll leave you with the completely unrelated but absolutely hilarious rant by the Sox head coach, Ozzie Guillen, the day the series started. Idiot.

When it comes to Wrigley Field lots of people talk about how great it is to see a ballgame smack in the middle of a vibrant neighborhood. Not as many talk about what this means for the neighbors. It is of course a boon to the merchants and businesses in very close proximity to the field, but the neighborhood also serves as the stadium’s parking lot (the only one, really) and as a mile-square urinal for the ocean of over-served fans who spill out at game’s end.

The Cubs have in recent years made a special effort to win the good will of the people who live in the community, specifically the area known as Lakeview. This includes spiffing up local parks, appearances of hall of fame players in the area, and free bike lock-up for games. But the coolest perk has to be Wrigleyville Neighbors Day. Each year the Cubs hold a lottery for residents in Lakeview to come to the park for 90 minutes of free food and drinks (alcohol too) and to play catch, picnic, or just lounge on the field. We’ve lost out the last two years but got it this year. One person per address plus guest. I took my son.

We were close to the front of the line of about 100 people so when we entered the field from the service door in the outfield it was like the park was ours alone. We ran out onto the grass with our mitts, one five-year-old boy and his five-year-old father. At first we just ran around because we could. We played catch. We ran the bases (four times) and just lounged in the outfield. It was extraordinary. A wonderful, memorable way to spend an afternoon. Thanks, Cubs. Well done.

This is classic.

From ChicagoSports.com:

The Lilly-Piniella incident was one for the books. Lilly [the pitcher] had slipped on a bunt attempt for the second time when Piniella [the coach] gave him some unsolicited advice.

[Lilly recalls the walk to the mound.] “I suggested to him, almost like football, ‘You better change your spikes,’ ” Piniella said. “Then I went out there and he said, ‘Skip, your zipper is down.’ ”

A quick check by Piniella revealed Lilly was correct.

If you’re gonna get yanked from the game for sucking you might as well needle the man in charge, no?

And if you’re wondering where all the posts have gone of late, fear not. The Italy adventure is consuming much of my time … and soon will yours.

Remember the Urban scar tissue post? No, of course you don’t.

Well, it was about the way cities have of slowly assimilating unused infrastructure and how this becomes visible when you scale out, looking at the city macroscopically. The earlier post showed the way the buildings have been shaped by the tracks that are no longer there, a ghost-limb of transportation past.

But the very southern edge of the line is still in use. Twice weekly. It is called the Sugar Train and it delivers sugar to a confectionary. The tracks, embedded nearly flush with the pavement sans sleepers, slice through private backyards and parking lots. My gym prohibits parking on the tracks tuesdays and thursdays because of the delivery. Up until last week I had never seen this mythical train.

Turns out this delivery route is a fantastic pain in the ass for everyone involved. There’s a small army of engineers that walks with the engine and single car as it creeps through the north side. Gates have to be unlocked, backyard equipment pushed aside, and — in the case of my gym — owners of cars have to be found. Seems that twice a week the train comes to a stop at the club while the management goes elliptical-to-elliptical asking people if they parked on the tracks.

I stood outside with clearly-irritated trainmen as the massive engine belched and growled, mere inches from a car parked directly across its path. I struck up a conversation and urged them to exercise right-of-way, crushing the pathetic vehicles like matchbox cars. They declined. In fact, they eventually gave up and backed the train down the tracks to who-knows-where.

I love that this throwback train exists, but you have to wonder: wouldn’t it be easier to deliver the sugar by truck at this point? The train basically spends a full day inching through roadblocks that the city inadvertently lays across its way. I’d love to know what the actual story is. Why the train is still a better option for the candy factory.