Tornado touches down in Richton Park

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Casey
on June 9, 2008
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Richton Park Tornado
For a few minutes, 79-year-old Pearlie Anderson prayed in the dark, asking God to save her family as her 4-year-old grandson screamed in terror.

“He was crying and saying, ‘I’m scared, I’m scared,’ ” Anderson said Sunday, recalling how she hunkered down in the bathroom with her four grandchildren Saturday night while the wind peeled the roof off her University Park apartment complex in the 4700 block of Hickory Creek Drive.

“I just talked to him and told him he was gonna be all right. I said, ‘God’s gonna take care of you. Ain’t nothing gonna to happen to you.’ He looked at me and said, ‘He is?’ ”

Anderson and her grandchildren were among the 75 families who found shelter at Rich South High School in Richton Park after five tornadoes tore through the Southland, inflicting the heaviest damage on Richton Park.

“I wish I could get home so I could get in bed,” Anderson said about 1 a.m. Sunday. “We have nowhere to go.”

Eventually, Anderson hoped to check into the Homewood Hotel, one of the few lodgings with available vacancies.

The Red Cross opened the relief center in the Rich South High cafeteria around midnight. Red Cross officials brought coffee and doughnuts, and people slept overnight in cots and bedding provided by the relief agency. Additionally, the emergency aid group deployed health, mental health and canteen teams to the site, according to Red Cross spokeswoman Leah Jakubowski.

Richton Park resident Sherrie Shannon, who also was at the high school in the wee hours of the morning, said she planned to stay the night at her boyfriend’s residence. Her apartment complex, Canterbury Courts, was cordoned off because of heavy damage.

“The roof is completely gone,” Shannon said, adding she found a piece of it lodged in her car’s fog light. “You could even see into a woman’s bedroom. You could see her bed from the street. They basically told us we couldn’t go back in the building, and so I’m outside with nothing.”

Shannon said that during the storm, she saw patio furniture, siding, bricks, and pieces of the building swirling together. The violent scene spurred her to take shelter inside her bathtub.

“It was just loud and thunderous,” Shannon said. “You could hear thunder and lightning within it, and we were in the center of it.”

Nina Jefferson, 22, also at the Red Cross shelter, described a similar scene. When Jefferson, also a resident of the Arbors on Hickory Creek Drive in University Park, heard tornadoes were touching down, she huddled inside her bathroom with her wheelchair-stricken, 42-year-old brother and her 61-year-old mom.

“The sky was black, it was pitch black,” Jefferson said. “It got real, real dark. My heart was beating real fast when we heard the noise, and we just prayed. I was calling ‘Jesus, Jesus.’ My mother was asking the Lord to wash us in his blood.”

After the storm, Jefferson and her family were told to leave home because of a related gas leak - a small price to pay for safety and their lives.

“I think I’m blessed because nothing happened to me,” she said.

By mid-Sunday morning, about five people were left at the shelter, Mayor Rick Reinbold said. He said the shelter would stay open as needed.

Knocked Up review

Published
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Casey
on May 31, 2008
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Midway through “Knocked Up,” a woman follows her husband’s car to a house where she expects to find him in bed with another woman.
Instead, she walks in on him drinking beer and talking sports with a roomful of middle-aged dads in professional baseball jerseys.
While she’s relieved he wasn’t sleeping with another woman, she’s absolutely crushed that he cheated on her with, of all things, a fantasy baseball draft.
It’s a joke that sticks in your throat and a typical example of the should-I-laugh-or-cry humor embedded throughout “Knocked Up,” an engaging, Woody-Allen-meets-Harold-Ramis sex comedy with a heart as deep as its mean streak.
Continuing in the steps of the wildly funny “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” writer/director Judd Apatow pieces together this summer’s smartest, funniest film guised as dumb stoner comedy.
Bong-in-hand and 30 pounds overweight, Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) seems destined for a life of Cheeto crumbs, skin flicks and pot smoke. He is, after all, still living off the lawsuit money awarded to him
by the British Columbia government after a postal truck ran over his foot.
Playing ensemble to Ben are pals Jayson, Jay, Jonah, Martin and Jodi (all hilarious), Ben’s roommates and fellow “fleshofthestars.com,” business partners, a still-under-construction Web site devoted to the naked flesh of Hollywood starlets.
Circumstance intervenes after an, um, prolific, one night stand with blond babe and “E!” television station anchor Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl).
Their baby soon starts baking in the oven as Alison Scott nearly barfs morning sickness all over her interviewee.
Many a disposable pregnancy test later, Ben and Alison agree to bring the child into the world. Playing foils to the newly parents-to-be are Pete (Paul Rudd) and Alison’s sister Sadie (Lesile Mann), a tortured couple trapped in an exploding relationship tied together haphazardly for the sake of the kids.
What makes it new instead of cliché is that “Knocked Up” treats its subjects with bare knuckles: feelings get obliterated and the characters do things they wouldn’t in lesser films.
Oh, and it’s filthy. Writer Judd Apatow has an ear for the way people, mid-20s-men especially, really talk, the f-bombs flying as fast as references to Back to the Future’s Doc Brown.
Sure, some might be turned off by Apatow’s realism and their heads will probably explode in the climax of the final act. Suffice it to say, “Knocked Up,” features the most subversive sight gag you’ll ever see.
The heart of the film isn’t about filth or fury, though; it’s about love and suffering. Ben and Alison are two flesh and bone human beings who don’t want to grow old just yet.
Ben (an astonishing turn by Seth Rogen) has his bongs and buddies; Alison has her looks and TV career. When a child threatens it all, they bite down and bear it, fearfully.
Apatow first staked out a name for himself in the late 1990s with his television drama “Freaks and Geeks,” an unflinching and funny look at marginalized high schoolers in a Michigan suburb.
“Knocked Up,” is proof that Apatow’s beloved freaks and geeks, lovable, quirky characters we all know — are, with regret, finally growing up.

Earth Defense Force 2017 Review

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Casey
on May 31, 2008
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“Earth Defense Force 2017″ is a dumb game featuring a bevy of scrappy graphics, repetitive sound and a ceaseless river of programming errors.
This mindless action romp would be par with the $5 Burger King games, if it were not inexplicably amazing.
Maybe it’s the return of the 17-year cicadas to Chicago, or the
armies of summer mosquitoes constantly sipping our blood, but thrashing the insects in “Earth Defense …” feels like the purest fun since the dudes from the game “Contra” started cracking alien skulls.

This ultra low budget, third person shoot’em up pits you and your
Earth Defense Force against an alien invasion dispatched from a UFO perched high above the city.
But a simple death from above does not come easy for our Earth defender, who is armed with a bevy of cannons, explosives, rifles and shotguns that can be picked up and replenished on-scene after any thorough alien massacre.
Predictably, the aliens get gnarlier and gnarlier with each impending stage. The first mission, for example, has you fighting off a swarm of monstrous ants. In successive levels, the ants can climb buildings and squirt bubbling puffs of acid from their abdomens.
Throughout the 50 stages, the ants are replaced with flying saucers and spiders and robots, each bearing fangs, guns and other villainy.
Your weapons get sweeter and sweeter as you acquire them in-game until you’re cradling the government’s most deadly homing missiles and grenade launchers on your shoulder. Fun toys like tanks, mechanical robots and combat helicopters also make themselves available throughout the game.
Some of the more devastating weapons and protective armor can only be picked up through the “inferno” difficulty level game, which is about as difficult as it sounds. However, the “normal” setting is an easy enough jaunt for video game neophytes.
It’s obvious “… Earth Defense” has some serious flaws. Developed on a spare budget, the graphics harness little of the XBox 360’s graphical power.There’s only one city to explore in all 50 missions, the voice acting is abominable and the play is seriously marred by frame rate slow-down once the alien critters start flooding the screen.
However, once they do, it’s a glorious happening. Be sure to employ
some firepower and blast those alien insects into pulpy bags of green goo.
In the year of the cicada, it’s always bug-smashing time.

40th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Assasination

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Casey
on April 13, 2008
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“I remember when it came over the news and everyone was sitting in the living room crying,” Usher Sawyer III said.

“I can remember hearing a lot of gunshots and people screaming.”

Sawyer, now a Matteson village trustee, was 12 the day the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, April 4, 1968.

He was living with his family on the 11th floor of a Henry Horner Homes building on Chicago’s West Side, home to some of the fiercest racial riots in the city.

“When you looked out the window, you could see fires that were burning on Madison Street, and people were running back to the projects with furniture and clothing and all kinds of stuff. It was just like a marathon.”

“When we got up there on Madison Street, people were looting,” Sawyer said. “They were tearing the place to pieces. At the end of that, it was like living in hell. It looked like the whole city, the whole world was on fire.”

Sawyer described a scene of violence: Chicago police clubbed men and women over the head with blackjacks and batons, locals attacked police officers, and innocent people were dragged from their cars and beaten on the streets.

The anarchic mood, Sawyer, said, reflected a feeling of hopelessness among the black community, their leader now slain.

” That’s how people looked at Martin Luther King Jr., as a modern day John the Baptist. He was the one to prepare the way, the way paver,” Sawyer said.

“For him to be assassinated - he was like the hope for the black race - it was like we were pretty much left at the perils of the world.”

“It was a sad time in the history of all of us,” Sawyer said Wednesday. “Whatever peace or understanding we assumed we were headed to as a people, it was lost or taken away that day.”

The Rev. Ollie Carter Jr., a pastor at New Faith and Hope Outreach Ministry in Dolton, was 24 when King was killed.

He was living in Chicago’s Grand Boulevard community, a neighborhood torn up in the the post-assassination riots.

“The streets, at first, had a serenity to them,” Carter said. “It was the black quiet before the storm. Everybody in the black community was extremely friendly and affectionate toward each other.

“Then all hell broke loose. Folks were out burning and rioting and looting - it went on and on and on.”

South suburban residents, many of whom watched the riots unfold on television, were left to sort out the intense racial tensions for themselves.

Park Forest resident Douglas Price said he was mugged outside St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights sometime after King’s death.

“I just had a knife held to my crotch as they took my wallet and watch and made reference to the fact my father had killed Martin Luther King Jr.” Price said.

“I was sick to my stomach, and I felt like a punk, a wimp, and then I had to listen to a police officer for an hour and half tell me that we were going to whip some N-butt. It was like a double assault.”

Dorothy Furnace, then a teacher at Gavin School in Chicago Heights, said her sixth-graders were heartbroken over the loss.

“The sixth-graders were up in arms about the whole thing,” Furnace said. “They didn’t understand how people could be so mistreated.”

King already was established in Chicago Heights, Furnance said, having marched through the city in the fight for fair housing.

“The church in the African-American community acts as a sounding board, and the churches kept things calm in Chicago Heights,” Furnance said.

The scene in Park Forest, then a mostly white community, was more quiet.

“You said you feel sorry and it was wrong and it was terrible, but I don’t really know if the people in Park Forest may have understood the rage going on in other parts of the country,” Park Forest resident Jerry Shnay said.

“One of our sons’ closest friends was a young black man that lived down the street from us. They were African-American, and it devastated them to a great extent, but I have no idea. I never wanted to or was able to ask them, how did it affect you? Just like a death in a family, you work through it all you can.”

David Sedaris Review

Published
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Casey
on April 13, 2008
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He talked pretty, and then some.

The National Public Radio personality and renowned essayist performed before a packed house Friday night at Governor State University’s Center Stage Theater.

Sedaris read NPR segments, diary entries and samples of new nonfiction, scheduled to run in an upcoming issue of the New Yorker.

The wry speaker, timid in stature and soothing yet adenoidal in voice, spoke alone underneath a sole white light, and gesticulated behind a wooden podium.

Sedaris tempered the gig with typical Sedaris material: his crazy Greek family, cantankerous landlords,  language barriers, and personality quirks.

Boring out deep belly laughs from the crowd, Sedaris welcomed us into the wonderful world of first class flying, where the in-flight movies are always funny and just one almond crusted hot fudge Sundays is never enough.

His riffs hopped, skipped and jumped aimlessly from topic to topic as they do in his best essays, from the obscene to the sad and back again, but always easy on the brain, soft on the heart.

He veered from a crying Polish man beaten up over the death of his mother, to his own mother’s funeral, before pivoting back to a well-planted sex joke.

A bit about his professor’s Latino pronunciation of the word “Nicaragua,” and other language foibles had a crowd rolling, the story echoing the honed rhythms of Sedaris‘ fabulous nonfiction collection “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”

Sedaris took questions from the audience afterwards, addressing concerns about his oft-publicized boyfriend, Hugh, and a story he wrote about quadriplegics and toothless chimpanzees, trained as human eye dogs for the disabled — all hilarious.

While some of the Q & A shtick sounded a tad rehearsed, it was cool he was willing to meet us halfway. It was even cooler he stuck around to autograph books after the show.

I was reminded, a little bit of what Woody Allen would be like if the famous Jew comedian did book tours.

David Sedaris: a tiny man with a big soul. Behind his smile, fangs.

A peculiar kind of talent, giant of course, but approachable, strange. A smirking southern pixie, neurotic as all hell, hardwired and ready for the post-Seinfeld brain.