To contact the Public School system directly to let them know that you value Sports you can write them through this link.

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I have not done a lot of new years resolutions in my life because I am pretty ok with where I am and generally don’t like throwing down the gauntlet before a year is even started.

But, there is so much that I want to get done. I think if I write down some goals and orient myself toward that list it may be easier for me to do the things I want in the year that’s coming (already here).  Also, with a blog I have a few more witnesses to hold me to it.

Finance

• Be less broke (in terms of liquid assets) at the end of the year than at the beginning

Fitness

• Bench my weight
• Do 12 clean pull-ups
• Bike a century (100 miles)

Blog

• 120 posts
• 40 interviews

Music

• New Set (12 – 14 new original songs)
• Play 4+ gigs
• Learn basic piano composition

If you live in Illinois and want to vote but don’t want to go to some horrible bureaucratic hellhole simply print of the form you can get here and send it in today.

Voting in primaries is especially important in states like Illinois and Texas where one party dominates, so if you share my interest in complaining about local politics please register.

That goes for: liberals and conservatives, democrats and republicans, ninjas and pirates.

Also: socialists, libertarians, Unitarians, librarians and septuagenarians.

Coinstar and the CTA Card

Coinstar is a great partner to grocery stores.  They have machines that take change and (for a small percentage) return paper bills.  It’s a device with low upkeep costs and a simple purpose that generates them income at all hours of the day.  It’s a logical partner for the CTA.

The CTA card creates a system where money is taken out of the general economy and turned into a resource that can only be redeemed at one place.  Any time the CTA can get someone to put money on a CTA card they have done a good thing.  If a customer puts money for fares on a card and doesn’t use the service they have already collected the payment, if through some enticement the customer puts money on a card uses the service when they might not have otherwise this is also good because taking on extra passengers doesn’t generally increase cost.  The CTA could modify the machines they already have or partner with Coinstar to make the machines for them.

Unlike a gas station or a car dealer there is no added cost for usage of the CTA’s service.  If people use the CTA more there is more profit.  Why not make it easier for riders to give the CTA their money?

Smart Phones and Bus Tracker

The CTA’s bus tracker is so useful and it’s one of the greatest things a smart phone does. But, I think this is just one of a couple ways the CTA can be using emerging technologies to improve its service and make more money.

One concern when riding the CTA is having correct change.  Especially now that the fair is 2.25 it is a particularly unlikely amount of money for a person to have.  There are a couple ways to get around this: a person can always have a well stocked CTA card or always have a pocket full of quarters.  Neither of these solutions appeals to me. I don’t want to take my money and put it in a position where it can only purchase one thing or get holes in my pants pockets from carrying around quarters.

What if you could with a credit card instantly purchase a bus fair over your phone? People already use their phones to make purchases online, why couldn’t those purchases be bus and train rides? If people are already on the CTA’s website checking on their bus it would only be logical for them to buy their tickets there.

I think Bus Tracker could also be made better, both in its utility to the customer and in its profitability for the CTA.  Anything that can improve Bus Tracker has the potential to make more people ride the CTA.  Bus Tracker could send a text message every time your bus passed your stop.  It would be easy enough to write an iphone app that would notify a person through text message every time a bus was passing (or even better when there was one in five minutes) so that if you were at a lunch you could wrap up early to get on the right bus or if it was cold outside you would not have to spend a minute extra waiting in the cold.  Unlike Bus Tracker where you would have to actively watch you could just relax and wait for your phone to ring.

Vending Machines

The Dunkin Donuts at the Davis street station does a brisk business.  While it is great that the franchises of that store pay rent to the CTA it would be better if all the money spent on coffee went directly to the Transit authority.  I am not suggesting that the CTA try to administer coffee shops or bake donuts, but I think that there is plenty of money to be made by taking advantage of vending machines.  It would be easy to sell coffee and snacks at CTA stations.  If they wanted to take the system one step further they could adopt something from the technology used at gaming places like Dave and Busters where by anyone who plays video games first puts money on a card. The CTA already has tens of thousands of cards in circulation why not create machines that could take those cards and provide coffee, snacks or newspapers.

Advertising

There is plenty of advertising in CTA buses and trains, but they could be monitized more effectively

The value of the advertising space the CTA already has was illustrated when a private company put up a number of bus shelters around the city for the sold the ad space on them.  There is enough money from potential advertisers that this company put up the money to build and maintain these shelters.  Meanwhile, I know from being at the Francisco stop last night that there are a number of shelters that the city has already built that don’t even facilitate advertising.

It’s difficult for any agency with ties to the government to be as dynamic and innovative as other companies in the private sector.  The post office has long had trouble competing with federal express and the CTA has survived for generations.  But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, and its too important that it keeps surviving for our generation to ignore it or take it for granted.

As I griped about here (link) the increase in fares out paces rises in transportation costs and inflation. While fares seem to be stable for the moment and rumors about the jump to three-dollar were overheated, I think that fare hikes are inevitable. The problem is if the CTA gets too expensive it will lose its utility as public transport. Hikes need to be avoided however possible. There are two ways for a company to slow down its thirst for cash flow it can address costs or revenue.  Because it is hard for me to speculate about the CTA’s costs I would like to focus on ways for the CTA generate new revenue without raising fares.

The CTA gets money from several sources the two principle ones are fares and government funding.  But, those are not the only sources of income the CTA also gets secondary income from advertisers retail tenants.  Any money coming from secondary sources is keeping the fares down or keeping money in tax payers pockets (if it can get through the bureaucracy in tact).

Examples of sources of ad revenue can be found in the advertisements on every bus and train most of them have ads both inside and outside of the vehicles.  In the stations themselves there are ads on walls.  Some stations such as the Davis stop on the Purple Line even have television screens showing ads.  There are also train stops that have businesses operating inside of train stations like the Dunkin Donuts in the Davis station.

Starting with the premise that any way of supporting the trains without increasing the tax or raising the fares is a good thing, I tried to think of ways the train system could improve and expand its secondary revenue generators. Tomorrow I am going to look at a few ways to do this by taking more coins, working more closely with smart phones, vending machines, and improving advertising.

My ranking for teams in the world cup:

1)    Brazil
2)    Germany
3)    Italy
4)    Spain
5)    Portugal
6)    Argentina
7)    England
8)    France
9)    Netherlands
10)  Greece
11)  USA
12)  Mexico
13)  Algeria
14)  Serbia
15)  Cote d’ivoire
16)  Switzerland
17)  Denmark
18)  Slovakia
19)  Slovenia
20)  Chile
21)  Australia
22)  Cameroon
23)  Paraguay
24)  Nigeria
25)  Ghana
26)  Japan
27)  Uruguay
28)  South Africa
29)  New Zealand
30)  Honduras
31)  Korea Republic
32)  Korea DPR

Update

Groups have been selected.  It looks like the USA has been reasonably fortunate with in group C with:

• USA
• England
• Algeria
• Slovenia

Meanwhile the Group of Death looks to be Group G with:

• Brazil
• North Korea
• Portugal
• Cote d’Ivoire

For full ranks you can follow yahoo’s coverage here

The Movie: Eleven years ago, as a freshman in high school, I undertook a project that would become known as “The Kung Fu Movie.” This project was never finished, no part of it was particularly coherent and what little of the movie remains today is more a yearbook of a few misspent summers than a film (read video) that anyone would want to spend seven minutes and twenty three seconds watching.

The Device: My Brother Brian had told me at one point that if I could encase a ball of steel wool in a cage of chicken wire, tie that encased ball to a rope, light that ball on fire and swing that ball around my head I could have something that looked pretty cool.

Materials:

• Rope
• Steel Wool
• Chicken Wire
• Fire
• Fire Extinguisher

Moral: If you get steel wool hot enough that little bits of molten steel flame globules start dripping off it, it’s gonna be real hot.

The Story:

I spent about two months waiting to film this flaming ball of steel wool flying around my head, but there wasn’t any place for me to do it.  I was in the middle of Chicago.  I knew public places would be tough. There are always cops at the beach in the summer time and it is illegal to be in most Chicago parks after 10 (probably also illegal to have big flame balls of steel wool, but that is another matter.)

It developed that there was a girl who had a side yard (the size of a single lot) which was huge by city standards and, in my view, perfect for flaming experiments. She thought the scene might make more sense somewhere else, but I knew there was nobody else who I could sucker into letting me use their yard for Kung Fu pyrotechnics.  So my father and I, my father came to save me if need be, took a train to the north side with our steel wool, and fire extinguisher in tow.

Well, when we finally got there we were anxious to get the experiment under way when we found that steal wool does not catch fire easily.  We held it to the grill lighter and even put some paper in the cage, but it just didn’t seem to want to catch.  We were about to try putting kerosene on this ball of metal when the idea struck me that I might just start swinging this hot ball around my head and see what happened.

What happened?

Molten Steel.  A red-hot ball of molten steel whistled around my head.  It looked like a meteor with a tail of hot steel dripping off onto the ground. It was hot and heavy and beautiful and it was swinging around my head in Betsy Tangora’s yard.  I felt proud and powerful and, after a while, I felt concerned that this ball of fire had been flaming a long time.

In this yard there are 4 sides: a street, an alley, a great old wooden house, and a neighboring apartment building.  There were two things behind me: my father, and a tree.  When the fireball exploded out of the chicken wire it did not hit the wooden house, and it did not hit my father.  If it had broken even a fraction of a second earlier or later it could have hit either.  What it hit was the tree.

The tree was only a little on fire.

What the tree did to the steel wool (and we were probably lucky that it happened this way) was break it up in to a hundred pieces and spray those pieces all around the lot.  So now there is a slightly flaming tree and a lot of pieces of pretty flaming ground.  There was a lot of yelling about hoses and fire extinguishers but most of what we did was stomp on little flaming bits and hope that the tree would put out itself.  It did.

Dad and I got on the train to head home relieved.  We were on the other side of a big adrenaline rush and it made me kind of giddy to have escaped disaster.  It was in this mood that I turned to my father and said, “When we do this again we should…”

That was as far as that sentence ever got.

James Farrell

What’s been said about James: “In his songs about love, loss, regret, sin and repentance, James expresses what we all think about in the shower but are too afraid to talk about once we’ve toweled off. He sings a simple message, in simple language, for a simple purpose: to get it off of his chest, and allow his listeners to do the same.”

His Site

Tom Fort

What’s been said about Tom (and his band Cobalt and Hired Guns):

“…Incredibly charming, poppy, youthful music…” –Roctober Magazine

“They remind me of a band that would be playing at a party in a movie that is more fun than a party that would happen in real life” -Mike Raspatello of Kingtello Productions
“If you’re looking for a cool twist to Americana music, SouthSide recommends checking out Cobalt & the Hired Guns at their next show.” -SouthSide of the Town, Fearless Radio Blog

His Site

He’s also been here on North and Clark

Emily Claire Palmer

What I am Saying about Emily Right Now: “Emily Palmer is a Chicago-based folky/indie singer/songwriter musician extraordinaire.” –Me, Right Now, Paraphrasing her website.

Her Site

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Like I said at the top of the blog I am going to try and bring this to you in a different way than we I have been bringing you content here in the past.  I am still waiting on a couple of details, but if you are in Chicago and you are intrigued by any of these musician’s or like North and Clark you might want to consider leaving December the 3^rd open.

I wish I could give you all the details right now but this is a collaboration with a bunch of different people and I need to make sure all the ducks are in a row before I make too many announcements.  If the suspense is killing you and you really want more details you can write me at northandclark@gmail.com.  Otherwise keep checking this space for more info.

When I’m Gone

This is a bluesy duet we put together for Amanda and me.  Its got a “Hit the Road Jack” vibe and it got a great response from the completely awesome audience we had at the Elbo Room that night.  I love songs that involve bragging and competition and think Amanda was more than game to be my foil on this one.

Went Back

We always have to be careful where we put this song in the set because I am worried that I am going to shout myself horse. The other thing on this song is that the horns completely deepen and change the sound.  If you listen you can hear that ae added an instrumental verse late in the song just to feature that alto and tenor sax

Lord Deliver Me

This is what Amanda and I are playing in the picture at the top of this post.  Its one of the first songs I ever wrote and brought to the band and we could rip through this song in our sleep.

If you want to download the MP3s of any of the songs you hear here just write me a comment below and I will give you a link and a password.

Photo Credit: Fabi Lima

This is my second interview with a lawyer working at Guantanamo, the first was with Candace Gorman.

Because of the seriousness of the subject matter covered here this interview is only lightly edited and the conversation is presented almost in its entirety.  The first part of this interview is available here.