@Randem

Crowd on Lakeshore watches the show.

In spite of stop-and-start rain that tried to interrupt the show, Chicagoans came out en masse to watch.

The morning was cloudy but dry, and people were gathered along Lakeshore Dr. for miles, watching in awe. But when the rain came down, I was surprised to see that very few people gave up.

Most people, apparently accustomed to being in the city, had umbrellas in their backpacks, and they weren’t about to let a little rain stop them from seeing the show. What a feeling, standing tall with my fellow Chicagoans in defiance of Mother Nature.

For me, the bi-planes and single-props make for nice filler, the bombers are okay, and I didn’t even manage to see the water show, but the real meat and potatoes is the combat jets streaking through the city. The sound of an afterburner crashing down over your head at Mach 2 is incredible.

The best part of the whole show, however, isn’t the planes. When you watch a jet flying at hundreds of miles per hour suddenly pull up and climb out of the atmosphere, yeah that’s cool. But ten seconds later, a giant ripping noise hits you in the wake of the jet tearing open the sky.

When that sound goes through you your jaw drops in awe. As you turn and look around, you find you are surrounded by hundreds of similarly dropped jaws, all smiling in awe. THAT is the best part of the show.

I saw this in the street directly across from my cousin’s house. The neighborhood kids had constructed a basketball hoop by removing the bottom from a milk crate and then attaching it to a piece of plywood.

They played on it for a week, until one over-zealous participant slam dunked the ball, ripping the crate down from the plywood backboard.

Holy cow. Why do they still allow these people to breed?

Okay, the author of this piece is out there, right now, polluting our gene pool… as are the idiots who were responsible for this person’s education. This is your anti-abortion crowd: people who’s family tree needs to be fed into a wood chipper!

I don’t even have to get into any discussion over religion or atheism. This goes beyond that. This is about education. This is about breeding. This is about letting the weaker members of the species die off in order to make the species stronger as a whole. Someone get this wack-job some cyanide. Please.

As much as Barry Bonds sickens me, I’m glad he finally broke the record. Not because I’m happy for him, but because I finally don’t have to hear about him any more. To quote Phil Rogers at ESPN.com,

After a 30-day stretch in which a .279 hitter on a last-place team has dominated the headlines in baseball — that is, from the time that Barry Bonds spent an hour in front of reporters on the eve of the All-Star Game until Tuesday night, after a home run that set out the jubilant celebration that extended from AT&T Park almost all the way to Alcatraz — the focus shifts back to simpler pursuits.

So it’s official. Every facet of the great American pass time has been tainted. There is no sacred ground left. Now I just feel bad for the handful of decent men who tried to preserve the integrity of the sport — guys like Ken Griffey Jr., who is only 11 homers away from 600. His mark — heroic in my mind — will never hit the radar in a world dominated by the juice, the cream, and the clear.

If this seems like a shameless attempt to get someone else to buy this for me, well, it is. I really want one of these clocks.

The Barenaked Lads, enjoying their third year of success in Chicago, are going to hold a “Naked Night” in which the audience as well as the cast will be completely nude. Holy audience participation, Batman!

Yeah, I know it sounds cool at first but let me remind you, dear reader, that this is the theater crowd we’re talking about. I’m sure you can count on being surrounded by hundreds of old, fat, wrinkly bodies with way too much hair growing out of way too many places — just like any nude beach.