What if during the World Cup finals, a unicorn pranced out onto the field. Or a woman on stilts appeared. Or, say, Wilford Brimley. You'd probably notice, right? Not necessarily, as psychologist Daniel Simons has shown.
In the late 1990s, Simons produced a video in which players dressed in either black or white are passing around a basketball.
Editor's note: Robert Feder is off until July 13. While he's away, we're running "The Best of Feder." The following post originally appeared on Feb. 10, 2010:
"This Channel 2 experiment serves as a referendum on straightforward, no-nonsense news, a genre that fell out of favor with the ad salesmen who run most TV stations, the consultants who advise them and the ratings-hungry news directors who do their bidding. If it works, as in all TV, it will be imitated. If it fails, our last, best hope for a return to real news will have been squandered, maybe forever."
“Who are you rooting for in the final four?” one of Grace’s pals asked.
“Netherlands!” Grace responded emphatically. The surprise was double: Grace had been in slo-mo most of the evening, jet-lagged from her first trip to Vietnam, her family’s ancestral home, and now that she’d had a jolt of energy it was for the Netherlands?
“Noooo!” said the friend.
“Spain?”
“Well, the Dutch were the colonial power in South Africa, after all.”
“Oh right,” said Grace. “I hadn’t even considered the post-colonial implications.”
“We were hoping for Uruguay but in the face of a contest between colonizers, we must err on the side of Achy’s very own.”
The heartbreak over Uruguay hadn’t been simply that they’d played such a fierce game against the Netherlands before falling 3-2. It was also that, as a relatively inoffensive little country, rooting for them doesn’t require a whole lot of compromise.
“That’s really what the World Cup is all about, isn’t it?” Grace sighed. “You know what team I was really curious about? North Korea.”
“Oh, man, they got smashed.”
“Yeah, I watched the game in Vietnam and it was really somber. Everyone was really worried about the aftermath for the North Korean players.
Brasserie Jo
RJ and Jerrod Melman have already proven they can run a restaurant (HUB 51) as well as their dad - Lettuce Entertain You Founder Richard Melman. Now the sons are poised to open their second restaurant in Chicago, right next door.
Thank you to everyone who baked "World Cup...cakes" and sent in photos.
I'm sorry this took me a while to assemble. But in the end, I suppose the timing is pretty good as we are just about to go into the World Cup Finals this weekend.
I hope this video eventually makes its way into the hands/hearts of the U.S. Team. If anyone has an in there, be sure to pass along!
Tom Shepherd, local historian and go-getter, has been fighting Wal-Mart’s intended move into his historic Pullman neighborhood. To Shepherd, the runs counter to the area’s connection to the early days of the American labor movement, but the big box store has a in common with Pullman’s idea of a company town.
This neighborhood of course was built by George Pullman. He came out here with a grand vision in 1882. Most of the homes around here were remarkably built up within a year or two. At that time it was quite an achievement, and was heralded throughout the country, indeed throughout the world, as a real accomplishment that an industrialist was building a model town for his employees.
