Broken Nose

The late Chicago journalist and author Mike Royko (BOSS) said that loving Chicago was like loving a beautiful woman with a broken nose: once you're used to her, other merely beautiful women don't quite look right.

Some of the "broken noses" of Chicago:

1. North Side pro baseball team, the Cubs, who perpetuate an execrable win/losss record but are nonetheless idolized as the "cubbies";

2. Weather: coldest major American city other than Minneapolis, snowiest outside Buffalo, steamiest summers outside the Mississippi River Valley or Deep South. Winter days are so short that evening rush occurs in the dark. Even on the best spring days, "San Francisco sweater weather" is practically nonexistent.

3. Political corruption, which is awesome due to its extent, its reach, its resourcesfulness and the apathy with which it is greated by most Chicagoans.

more pleasant phenomena of Chicago that still have a slight eccentric or "broken nose" quality:

1. Italian beef, which is roast been marinated in gravy, garlic and giardinera, served on Italian-crust sandwich bread, and almost unobtainable outside Chicago.

2. the conviction (and it still actually works) that if you place old dinette chairs in the spot from which you just extricated your hitherto snowbound car, that spot will be waiting for you when you get back.

3. Refusal to call the 'Willis Tower' anything other than its original name, the 'Sears Tower.'

"Is this a great city or what"?

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