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It appears that author and cyber stud John Green is a sucker for Positive Pranking.

Just look what he did with the Tootsie Pop idea! It's so awesome!  He's so awesome! Enough already with the exclamation marks!

And btw, here's what John's sweet note said:

My note: Hello! Your home has been TP'ed, which--for today, at least--means that it has been Tootsie Popped. These Tootsie Pops are your for the licking (and/or biting) not as a part of some marketing campaign but because of an initiative called Positive Pranking started by the author Amy Krouse Rosenthal with the help of the nerdfighters, an Internet-based community of people who seek to decrease the overall worldwide level of suck. Please enjoy, and if you're so inclined, start your own positive pranking adventure.

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Now, this is kind of cool:  Here is Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1956–a year in his first term–appearing on the nationally-televised game show “What’s My Line.”

On the show, a blind-folded celebrity panel asks questions in a bid to learn the occupation of the mystery guest. Brisk, confident and smiling, Daley is 54 years old here.Dorothy Kilgallen uses a question about a political convention to hone in and guesses Boss’ identity at the 2:51 mark. (Kilgallen was born in Chicago.

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You like Lula's roasted beets too? Cool! (photo: Joseph Storch)

Talk about pressure. If you have to choose the restaurant for a first date, you probably want to, a) go somewhere on a weeknight, so you don't waste an entire Saturday, and b) choose somewhere casual, so you don't go broke in the process. My criteria is even simpler: just focus on the food, and the atmosphere will usually take care of itself. After all, you'll know pretty quickly if the date is going well.

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In addition to Kanye West's performance of the new song "Runaway," one more morsel from Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards seems worthy of comment: button-pushing dance-pop diva Lady Gaga and her instantly infamous "meat dress."

Yes, I was deeply offended by Gaga's outfit: As a committed meatatarian, it truly hurts me that she wasted all of that tasty beef when there are so many Webers worldwide that have no meat to grill.

My pain was only somewhat mitigated by this article in the Daily News, which dispatched two reporters to interview New York butchers, discovering that the meat was not of the highest quality, a la what you'd find at my idea of heaven on earth, Chicago's Paulina Meat Market.

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^{Don & Roma}

^{Roe & Roeper} 

• When WMAQ-Channel 5 launches its new 24-hour digital channel next month, look for some familiar radio faces to be front and center. Plans call for the NBC-owned station's lineup on "Chicago Nonstop" to include simulcasts of Don Wade & Roma's morning show and Roe Conn & Richard Roeper's afternoon show from the studios of Citadel Broadcasting news/talk WLS-AM (890). (Conn telegraphed "some very exciting things on the horizon" in an interview here Tuesday.)

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The ol' memory banks tend to slip a little as we get older. No surprise there. It's so common that scientists have long believed some memory loss is just a normal part of aging -- perhaps even pre-programmed into our brains' lifecycle. 

But new research from Rush University Medical Center suggests something different -- that even mild cognitive decline seems to be connected to full-blown dementia. Rush's Robert Wilson led a project as part of the Religious Orders Study examining 354 brains that came from Catholic nuns, monks and priests. They found that gradual memory loss was closely associated with so-called tau tangles in the brain -- one of the pathologies that characterize Alzheimer's disease. Here's our news story on the finding, and above is an extended interview with Wilson.

How you take the findings depends a lot on how you think about these issues connected with decline, dementia and death.

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(photo by Corey Nuffer)

Last night Mark and I went out with our bag of Tootsie Pops. We eyed an innocent tree on a busy intersection in Oak Park and set to work.

At dawn, we returned to the scene. Over half of the Tootsie Pops were gone!

If you’ve positive pranked this week, tell us here!

Your Partners in Pranking,

Corey and Mark

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