I picked up a People Magazine for the first time in my life today to read the cover story about Tim Russert.

I didn’t tell many people it, but Tim Russert had to be one of my heros. I mean, there are great political activists and people in history to idolize, but Tim Russert was willing to go each week toe-to-toe with anybody and actually increase the ‘public diaglog’ without sounding like an ass.

He never sounded like an ass. He NEVER sounded like a pundit. His friends at NBC never knew who he voted for and he never seemed to inject opinion into his newscast.

Well, he did, rarely. But that was only if someone was evading a question or pulling a fast one on him. He was a true moderator, a true political wiz kid, and a man who was taken from us way to early.

I picked up this People Magazine article this evening and started reading. It is a great article about his life and how he succeeded to celebrate it like a ‘normal’ American (he would go with his son and have a few beers in the backyard then go to some A-list ceremony right after)

That’s cool. Very cool. Sad.

My grandmother is 88. She had an aortic aneurysm a few days ago. It was bad.

Except she is at an amazing recovery at 24 hours than many 40 year olds take a week to reach.

Her mother (my great-grandmother) died the earliest in her family at 85. Her father (great-grandfather) died at about 100. This is back when people didn’t normally live to 100.

Of course, there is a history of heart problems for the other 75% of my genetic line.

I am on my way back to Milwaukee again. To get home I have 2 choices (if I decide to go last minute.) There is the $12 (plus $0.50 processing fee) ‘MegaBus’ or the $21 Amtrak ‘Hiawatha’ train service. Both run about the same number of round trips daily. I know the Hiawatha runs 7 round-trips daily, with the early morning one (one leaves Chicago at 6:00 AM and the other one leaves Milwaukee at 6:15) not running on Sundays. That means that at any one time there is one train going to Chicago and one going to Milwaukee. The nice thing about the Hiawatha cars is the wide seats, ample legroom and power plugs at every seat. The nice thing about the MegaBus is that it costs $8.50 less per one way.

Today I took the Hiawatha.

I always wondered why the Hiawatha takes about the same time to get to Milwaukee as the MegaBus does. The Hiawatha runs a good chunk of its trip at 80 miles per hour, and rarely is there traffic on the rails (I believe that they have to yield to freight trains, but I’m not 100% sure.) So I opened up my cell phone and launched Google Maps. It turns out that the train goes out west before it goes east. Sort of like a < shape. It stops in Glenview, Illinois, which is significantly west of the lake.

It isn’t that there is a lack of track from the Amtrak station directly north. Union Pacific owns a line that goes right along the lake that they lease to Metra heavy-rail city-suburb service. And it isn’t that the Hiawatha cannot share Metra track, because for a good amount of the current Illinois Amtrak route already shares track with the Metra. In fact, the Glenview station is also a Metra station. To get to the Sturtevant, WI/Racine stop the train has to turn east again, towards the lake, to continue its route to Milwaukee. Who designed this damn thing?

I know that the line is paid for by funds from both the State of Wisconsin and the State of Illinois, but there are a ton of great stops near the lake in Illinois.

I am a little biased here as the near-lake track is somewhat close to Loyola, but putting that aside… what the hell happened here? You would reduce transit time and saves expensive fuel.

Add to that the fact that it takes freaking forever to get from Loyola to Union Station to pick up this train. Depending on the time of day it can take from an hour to two hours to get to and from Union Station to my apartment via public transit whereas it only takes 2 hours 30 minutes to get from Union Station to Milwaukee. 1/3rd of my entire transit time is getting from downtown to my apartment. Now I can take a cab it costs me $25, which takes a half hour to get to and from Union Station. Not to mention the cost for a cab from Loyola to Union Station is $25 with tip.

I solved this problem today… I think. I took one of the buses that runs ‘express’ down lakeshore drive. I take this bus from time-to-time to get down to Loyola’s water-tower campus as it takes less time to get downtown (even with stops) as it does to wait for a seat on a shuttle that runs every 15 minutes (and has to deal with the same traffic.) With my new solution I get to the water-tower campus (on the magnificent mile right in front of the John Hancock building,) I get off the bus, and flag a taxi. There are taxis all over where the first bus stop is, so flagging one down is super-easy. All of a sudden my transit time goes from an hour with one transfer to 40 minutes with a transfer from a bus to a cab. And costs about $12 less after you take into account the cost of the pass.

I have come to a conclusion recently:

Black men can pull off a shaved head without glasses. In fact, with glasses it seems… not as appealing as without them
White men cannot pull off the bald head look without glasses. With glasses it looks good, no glasses just doesn’t work

That is one thing you can’t get away from when it comes to race: What a man looks good in. I mean, you have so many things to take into account. Especially with suits and tuxes.

If I was going bald I would totally do the ’shaved head with glasses’ look instead of trying for a comb over. Although if genetics serves me right I will go gray instead of bald. Not sure if I would dye my hair or not… I guess if it was single strands of gray mixed in with brown i would look i would dye it… Kinda depends on how ‘respectable’ I look with the gray.

I should go work at Macy’s in the suit department. Some of the guys there have to be the most amazing people I have ever met when it comes to menswear. I was picking out a tie a few months ago and was unsure about what color to get. I had the best customer service experience of my life and I came home with a kickass tie at just the right price. It even works with both a blue collared shirt and a white one with the same suitcoat. The same tie with two colors. I sent Macy’s an email saying how awesome my tie is. Hopefully that guy got a raise.

Try getting that kind of service at Target.

Now that I have a bunch of time on my hands I am going to do something I should have done years ago: Actually design a theme for this site.

Right now I am using a modified form of the default theme for WordPress called Kubrick (after Stanley Kubrick, in my opinion one of the best directors of all time.) All I did was take the default theme and make my own header images. The top of the design is fun to mess with and I have about 15 different versions I have played around with.

Some of the headers were topical to posts or pages (this one was about movie posts and this one was about the music page) and some where just stupid (this one had a picture of JFK and this one was cut out of an image I found online)

But none of these things were truly ‘original.’ They made this blog look like every other blog out there, and while this is pretty much like every other blog in the world (run by a single narcissistic person with wayyy too much time on their hands… wait… nevermind) it is also something of a journal that I decided to post to the internet. Some people document their entire lives, I try to document what I think I should document so perhaps someone would learn something from it. Perhaps myself…

Or the entire Loyola mock trial team, family members, a few random people who seem to enjoy reading it, a spattering of colleagues, people who find stuff on Google/AOL/MSN, people who read it on Facebook, people who forward posts and just about everyone who searches for “ghetto prom pictures” for some reason. And some of it has become REALLY useful. Like a post I did about Vector Marketing and their misleading mail. Which has a bunch of comments from people who needed to search for information about this sham company. You never know when something is going to be useful to somebody…

But such a personal thing can not be put on just any old theme. There needs to be a theme that is kickass and really expresses my intent with this thing. It has been around for 3 years, so I am going to scrub through old posts and go through some statistics software to see where people are visiting and from where and start work on a new theme.

Update: Here are all the headers