Results tagged “911”

Most of us have been there before: it's a late night of drinking and partying but suddenly your friends bail without telling you and you're left sitting in the corner of a 4 a.m. bar alone except for the bag of Taco Bell you bought two hours before. You need a ride home but the streets are empty and you don't have any cab companies stored in your cell phone. How do you get home? Have the bar call you a cab. Keep waiting for a cab. Walk. Call and wake up your BFF if you have to. Just don't call 911 unless it's an actual emergency. It may seem like common sense, but one man recently learned the hard way this is a no-no.

Two 911 emergency center employees have been suspended without pay for their part in a "dispatch delay" that left an off-duty Chicago cop alone to defend himself against a car full of alleged gang members, the Sun-Times reports.

After working the night shift at Pockets in Lincoln Park, Victorino Valle pulled his minivan in the garage of his Brighton Park home and just before closing the garage door, turned to see his 8-year old son Alexander in a state of shock. Alexander told his father that he heard a baby crying in the alley. His parents discovered a crying newborn lying in a trash can and immediately called 911. According to Chi-Town Daily News, when the police arrived they found a two-week old boy in the trash can which was filling with rain water.

As Mayor Daley announced layoffs after playing hardball with a pair of unions, the Sun-Times takes on a batch of 911 workers who have each earned over $10,000 of overtime pay this year. The city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, however, insists these workers are putting in extra hours thanks to more calls and several position vacancies, making the overtime necessary. Spokeswoman Jennifer Martinez said, "Every ring could mean the difference between life and death."

(Did you like that title? Nobody has ever used it before.) On Sept. 10, 2001, Barbara Koenen shaved her head. The next day brought the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. On Sept. 12, 2001, Koenen heard President Bush respond to the attacks by declaring war on "terror" and encouraging us to go shopping, and knew she needed to respond. In addition to signing petitions, sending email blasts, writing letters to the editor and other standard anti-war activities, she also vowed not to cut her hair "until the 'war on terror' was over."

If you've ever wandered past the ever-under-construction mass of steel and concrete at the corner of State & Kinzie, that's the Museum of Broadcast History, the same group that put out the list of Top 125 American Political Broadcast Moments earlier this week. And, being as that lists are made to be pulled apart, dissected, shredded and argued over, who are we to get in the way of such rich tradition? There are some entries...

Lonely phone calls, dying and dead relatives, a literary classic, and a reexamination of the Middle Eastern conflict took the prizes at the 2007 Third Coast International Audio Festival competition. The jury turned much of their lives over to their headphones, listening to 225 entries in search of the best English-language radio docs. Winners received a trophy/sonic instrument, a national platform for their work, and some cash to help support their future work.

Yeah, people knew how to fly the friendly skies on November 21st, 1965, when the menu above was served on a United Airlines flight from Denver to San Francisco. This and 380 other menus from airlines, ocean liners, and railroad lines are available for perusal online at the Transportation Library archives of Northwestern University. The archives hark back to a time when multiple course meals were de rigueur not only for first class passengers,...

It almost plays like a plot from a trifling summer movie: The Illinois Medical District wants to build a new biotech building on the Near West Side. The kicker is, they want to build it in the same spot as a current Little League baseball field. In a letter dated Sept. 25, Medical District counsel states that the Chicago Park District must remove all improvements from Livingston Park, at Lexington and Leavitt, so that construction...

Issues, shmissues. The real story is that the terrorist madrassa-taught, non-black, freedom-hating Barack Hussein Obama doesn't wear an American-flag lapel pin. We were startled when last night's TV news tag line said, "Why is Obama's patriotism in question? Tonight at 9." Though we have been suckered into watching the news based on these tag lines before, we were again let down when it was all about a pin. Those awe-inspiring pins are a standard among...

People could not get enough Tracy Letts this summer. But lo, we have discovered the ultimate praise of the local playwright: a "99 Problems" spoof from comedy duo Southern Mothers (Russ Armstrong and John Dixon). Lines like "99 problems, high reference ain't one," and "his dick is so hard it survived 9/11" are hilarious, but we're really geeked about the shout-outs to all the Steppenwolf ensemble members....

It was a Tuesday — a beautiful, sunny Tuesday at that. Most likely, most of the United States was getting ready for or just starting an average Tuesday in September. And then, the unthinkable happened. Two planes hit the World Trade Center towers in New York. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and yet another plane was crashed in Pennsylvania. The country was legitmately in "shock and awe." However, there were those of us who...

As part of the old Brach's legacy was being blown up for Batman, intentionally causing a blaze, there have been several other fire related bits in the news as well. The police Bomb and Arson Section and Chicago Fire Department are conducting an ongoing investigation of a warehouse fire that started Thursday night in Bridgeport. Just before 10 p.m., a fire was reported at a building near Halsted and 36th Streets in the 3600 block...

About a month ago, Chicagoist spoke with Kumail Nanjiani about his then-new one-man show. In Unpronounceable, Nanjiani breaks from his usual stand-up routine and talks about his religious Muslim upbringing in Pakistan, his move to Iowa when he was 18, and his subsequent loss of faith and turn toward atheism.

One year after she took refuge inside a Humboldt Park storefront United Methodist church, immigration fugitive, mother, and unlikely activist for immigration reform Elvira Arellano announced that she would risk deportation by leaving the church to head to Washington, DC to lobby Congress for immigration reform. "If this government would separate me from my son, let them do it in front of the men and women who have the responsibility to fix this broken law...

Would Hollywood make a movie about a swingin' 70's housewife, complete with musical numbers? Or a documentary about New York City's Union Square in the days immediately following 9/11? Would Hollywood make a movie about Thax?

- BREAKING: The Tribune and Sun-Times agree to a historic distribution deal where the Bright One contracts the Tribune to handle most of its delivery. More on this tomorrow after we've had time to let this one sink in. - A Dallas real estate investment firm is thisclose to signing off on an $850 million deal for four downtown office buildings, including 440 S. LaSalle, aka One Financial Place. - United Airlines files lawsuits...

Mayor Daley and the rest of his Getalong Gang took their Olympic show on the road yesterday, heading to Rio de Janeiro to the Pan American Games, sort of a regional Olympics. Daley and company are hoping to learn a few lessons from an actual large-scale event, rather than just what they might envision on their drawing board. It won't be a carnival for the boys behind the bid, however, after the USOC issued a...

NPR Host Peter Sagal — Again

Normally, this would be Kevin's territory, and he covered the reasons we're weighing in today at length yesterday. As we sit in front of a computer terminal in Wisconsin fresh from a bike ride to New Glarus, the sights of yellow "support our troops" ribbons, flags and jingoistic bumper stickers every quarter-mile along the route fresh in our mind, we felt the need to write.

We haven’t seen this much talk about an album cover as art since LPs were phased out as the dominant form of music delivery. The artwork for Zeitgeist, the first album in seven years from a retooled Smashing Pumpkins, has been released. Graphic artist / illustrator Shepard Fairey was given the nod to create the cover for the band. Fairey has created album art before with such musicians as Flogging Molly, Less Than Jake, 311,...

Radio Raconteur Mancow Muller

Lake Michigan Structures?

Well, another week has descended upon the city by the lake, and the politicians, like the rest of us, are frolicking in this wonderful spring weather like cowboys at the beach. Let's take all the newsy tidbits that came across our desk this week and rustle them up, like the spring cattle they want to be. Who knows? Maybe one of these stories will fatten up into a vitriol-filled post we can use as a...

There will never be a Netflix for theater. Actors generally aren’t at your disposal to mount a show in your few free hours. You’ve got to juggle your other commitments and, gasp, actually get out of the house. Maybe you’ve caught the actors on an off night, theirs or yours. So any attempt at a “best of” list is unfair and incomplete. With that disclaimer out of the way, here’s our very unscientific Top 6...

Chicagoist is a big fan of Richard Branson. He's the type of tycoon we would want to be if some obscure rich uncle became wormfood and left us a couple of billion dollars. He's been a busy guy, with his fingers in a lot of businesses, including entertainment, retail, and transportation. We're particularly a fan of his Virgin Galactic idea and we can't wait to buy tickets on a suborbital flight. We don't care where we'd go - we'd be there for just for the trip

While many of the lectures and panels for this year's Chicago Humanities Festival are already sold out, there still seem to be plenty of tickets left for the film series. The theme is “Peace and War,” a subject which is (unfortunately) as timely as ever, and Facets program director Charles Coleman has put together a superb lineup. All of the chosen films guarantee plenty of food for thought, some to an uncomfortable degree. We'd like to call attention to just a few.

In case you weren't paying attention earlier, the Chicago Humanities Festival begins tomorrow. Really, we’re not kidding. Judging by the long scroll of sold-out shows in the website’s festival updates section, advance ticket sales have been brisk. And at $5 a pop to see the likes of General Wesley Clark, Garry Trudeau, and Paul Krugman, are you honestly surprised? This year’s theme, Peace and War: Facing Human Conflict, speaks to growing apprehension about America's military...

With the five-year anniversary on Monday, firefighters from Illinois and Wisconsin are riding to New York to honor the victims of the Sept. 11 atacks. On Wednesday at 9:11 a.m., the ride - organized by firefighter Tom Maloney - commenced, CBS reported.

As the Tribeca Film Festival began this week in New York City, it seemed only fitting that the big story dominating the event would be the premiere of United 93, a film that tells one story of September 11th, a day that served as the genesis for the annual festival. RedEye’s cover story discusses whether some feel the film should have been made now, if ever. Though you won’t hear us taking the tenor part...