WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

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Weekday mornings and evenings I’m usually somewhere along the near north stretch of Lake Shore Drive, express-bus bound for either work or home. Traffic can be horrific, the bumpy ride can be jarring. But I never tire of this commute: the sometimes scary S-curve, the rosy red neon sign atop the Drake Hotel, the straight shot by the trees, monuments and joggers of Lincoln Park. You can walk or bike by the lake, you can stroll its sandy beaches. But until you’ve driven along Lake Michigan, forget about it! This is Chicago’s first freeway, its vital artery, the Midwestern version of the Pacific Coast Highway. The drive’s been re-named and re-engineered, it’s provided a route for political protesters, and 40 years ago it served as cultural muse. In 1971 the country-rock-folk trio Aliotta-Haynes-Jeremiah had a hit with their ode to LSD (whether or not the song is also an ode to a different kind of trip isn’t clear).

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By Pete Bigelow, Changing Gears

In a fight over mittens, the gloves have come off.

Michigan and Wisconsin are tussling over which state can rightly lay claim to using mittens in their public-relations and tourism campaigns.

Michiganders, who have long nicknamed the state’s lower peninsula “The Mitten,” for its similar shape to a hand, have taken good-natured umbrage to a new campaign launched by Wisconsin’s Department of Tourism, which uses a knit-brown mitten to represent the shape of the state.

Wisconsin began using the new image in tourism campaigns on Dec. 1, and tells the Detroit Free Press it follows up on an earlier seasonal campaign that used an image of a leaf shaped like the state in the fall.

A Wisconsin Department of Tourism spokesperson tells the newspaper that people in Wisconsin consider their state mitten-shaped as well.

Dave Lorenz, who manages public relations for the state of Michigan, tells the Free Press that, “We understand their mitten envy.

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As former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich counts down the days until he begins serving his 14-year prison sentence, the Chicago media is left looking for new story leads. I think we're unlikely to come up with anything as compelling and unpredictable as this story has been in the three years since Blagojevich was first arrested.

Yesterday WBEZ reporter Alex Keefe and I spent two hours staking out the Blagojevich residence in the Ravenswood Manor neighorhood of Chicago. It felt like a long time, but paled in comparison to the 12 hours some of the television news crews spent there by the time it was all done.

I've been in the thick of it on many of the craziest days in the saga. Yesterday Justin Kaufmann posted every video we've made over the past three years that relate to Blagojevich.

The residential stake-out is a lot different than the scene at the courthouse during the verdicts.

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