And now for all you appendectomy patients out there, here’s Mantovani playing the all-violin version of “Twist and Shout.” “The music helps reduce patients’ anxiety,” says Swedish Covenant Hospital chaplain Ruthanne Werner (in SCH’s Care Letter, Summer) of the hospital’s program offering headsets to patients before and during surgery. “Originally, we created a selection of in-house tapes of easy listening music. But we found that patients preferred to choose their own favorite radio stations.”
Bambi goes to bat for the birds. Hunters didn’t get to shoot doves at downstate Heidecke Lake State Fish and Wildlife Area this month, because the fields of sunflowers, corn, and buckwheat planted to lure the birds to the area had been eaten up by deer.
Who needs local sources when you’re a major national paper? Chicago’s Coalition for New Priorities, on its preprimary contacts last spring with the two dailies on its referendum to slash military spending: “The week before the elections, we called the political editors of the two major dailies….The Sun-Times editor told us that she had been looking for our press release to get our number for the reporter, but we got the impression from the Tribune that if we had not called them, they would have written the story without ever even talking to us. Their story was biased, but would have been much worse without the quotes they used from us” (Handbook for Organizing a Referendum on New Priorities).
Service that metaphor! Chicago Advertising & Media (August 16-31) quotes WLUP vice president and general manager Larry Wert on the advent of a new rock-and-roll station directed at young male teens: “Wert feels the Blaze has filled a ‘gaping hole that needed to be serviced.'”
Vice president for lip service. Dan Quayle to newspaper executives in 1989: “I have often said that too much government information is classified….An educated and informed public is the foundation of a sound democracy.” Peter Montgomery, writing in Common Cause (July/August): “But when Harper’s magazine asked the vice president’s office how many college graduations Quayle had been invited to speak at this spring, his office first said there were too many to count and then withheld the number, claiming security needs.”
“Only 12 to 15 physicians in the nation’s third largest city are publicly willing to treat AIDS patients,” writes Tim Unsworth in U.S. Catholic (September). “They care for 85 percent of the estimated 2000 certified cases in Chicago in one of only five area hospitals that will accept PWAs.”
And if you meet all three criteria, we’ll pay you money to attend college. Among the scholarships Loyola University offers are ones for first-year students who are fluent in Polish, who hail from northern Ohio, and whose last name is Zolp.
“Imagine crack suppliers sponsoring the local ballet or orchestra. The name brand Cocaine plastered over racing cars and the backs of famous athletes. Better yet: heroin suppliers running serious little magazine spots to suggest that the U.S. Bill of Rights really means that advertising of any product, even a lethal one, is legal.” Something tells us you won’t have to imagine very hard (ADBUSTERS Quarterly, quoted in Media & Values, Spring/Summer).
“You’d be amazed at how many sports scores are transmitted across the stage,” Lend Me a Tenor star Gene Weygandt tells Lawrence Bommer in Inside Chicago (September/October). “I got updates on a Bulls game from an actor who punched me in the arm; depending on where he punched me, I knew if the Bulls were ahead or behind.”
I think they’re trying to tell us something. Waterfront World magazine recently observed its tenth anniversary by listing “the top ten waterfront places of all time.” The Chicago Lakefront Plan of 1909 was ranked fourth (after Venice, the Brooklyn Bridge, and San Antonio’s Paseo del Rio). But no actual Chicago waterfront made the list.
“If the environment is viewed as merely another business sector, rather than a critical issue for survival, ‘environmental industries’…with questionable environmental responsibility records [may] be included in an investment strategy,” according to Co-op America’s Socially Responsible Financial Planning Handbook, published in June. “For example, several recent articles discuss garbage incineration companies, nuclear power utilities and producers of low-sulfur coal as ‘environmental investments.'”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.