downtown

I went downtown today for a business meeting. I was in an office overlooking the northern portion of Grant Park. Lil Hizzoner has loaded that park with crap.
Maybe it looks better from ground level, but what part of "park" doesn't he understand.

All this talk about a mass transit funding crisis - hey, I paid $2 bucks for my six block ride from the train station. Seems a fair price. They ought to be able to scrape by on $2 fares. How come they're broke? Running buses at two o'clock in the morning with nobody on them? Sending specially equipped vans to handicapped peoples homes to take them where they need to go? Overpaying for supplies to politically connected suppliers? I don't know. But it did make me think of the street cars that used to run around town when I was a kid. They had tires and didn't run on tracks but they had poles on top reaching up to electrical wires overhead. Getting rid of them was Big Hizzoner's idea. I wonder how much they'd be saving on fuel and how much less they'd be polluting if they'd kept those things.

A comment on the financial markets: taking the same route forty years ago I would have passed a half dozen ground floor brokerages with electronic stock tickers in the window. Today I looked out the bus window for a brokerage with a market ticker in the window, just to see what the Dow or S&P were doing. Nada, not a one. Which tells me the retail trade is dead. People invest in mutual funds through their 401K at work, or an IRA through their bank. They're at least two steps removed from the action. Those old brokerage houses used to have a couple of benches where guests could sit and watch the action on big electronic tickers. Gave the old geezers sometning to do. Maybe it's a security thing, a ground floor retail office would make it too easy for an investor who just lost his job, his house, his kid's college fund and his retirement money to walk in and start shooting account executives.

I guess I'll have to learn how to get that kind of info off a cell phone, if I start carrying one.