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Halstead Avenue, just south of Wrigley Field, is the heart of what is known as Boystown, one of Chicago’s openly gay neighborhoods. Rainbow flags, rainbow art deco pillars and lots of leather, Boystown makes Dupont Circle look like rural Texas. I was in Chicago for a wedding over Memorial Day weekend, staying with my friend Andrea who lives just off of the Boystown strip.

Andrea and I skated along Lakeshore, all the way down to the Field Museum (for those unfamiliar with the Windy City, that’s a gorgeous path running north/south between the city and Lake Michigan). We met one of her friends for hot dogs and $3 mimosas. On our way back to her apartment, I offered to carry the backpack with our shoes and water. She’d been lugging the thing around all morning so it was only fair. She flat-out refused. It wouldn’t bother me to carry a knit, girly bag, but as she said, “not in this neighborhood.”

Andrea’s boyfriend is from Charlottesville. She doesn’t have television. When he comes to visit, he goes by himself to a neighborhood bar to watch sports. It sounds like the set up for a bad joke — naïve southern gentleman walks into a gay bar. He wound up giving out his phone number, not wanting to offend the guy. Read the rest of this entry �

Like any decent idea I have, someone else thought of it first. In this case, when an obnoxious cell phone ring went off in the Potomac News newsroom, it occurred to me that ring tones are the new ghetto blaster. A blogger named Martin Dittus thought of it first (at least, that’s what my google search told me). He posted about this fad in 2005, when he noticed a guy riding his bike, using a cell phone to blast hip-hop, glancing around to see if anyone was noticing.

“It seems odd at first to use the cheap and weak speakers of a phone in this way, but when you think about it it’s not that strange,” Dittus writes. “Ghetto blasters were never about high fidelity sound. They were a method of communication, they were about group-building, and about attention.” Read the rest of this entry �

I want Clint Eastwood to play Batman.

I know, I know… he’s “too old.” That’s exactly the same thing everyone is saying about Harrison Ford, 65, on the eve of the new “Indiana Jones.”

Eastwood, who turns 78 this month, would be the perfect Batman for “The Dark Knight Returns” — considered among the best comic books ever created and not to be confused with director Christopher Nolan’s new movie “The Dark Knight.” Adapting a movie version is a no-brainer. Read the rest of this entry �

“Is this the end of the trilogy?”

It’s a good question, posed by my friend Ben after “Iron Man” on Saturday. He wasn’t referring to “Iron Man” it-self (the first movie in a franchise, not the third), but the idea that studios release pictures in threes — or an initial movie, followed by an order of two sequels. Read the rest of this entry �

Let’s revisit the American Male, Age 10 (with apologies to Susan Orlean). He loves violent movies like “300″ and “I am Legend.” Unsurprisingly, he knows all of the major swear words, but his insult of choice is “emo,” to mean a combination of “gay,” “freak” and “goth.” He’ll play Madden video games for hours. His primary source of news and information is SportsCenter. As he gets older, he’ll have even less use for a newspaper than those that came before him.

No one knows when (or if) newspapers will go the way of the Beta Max, but if it happens, our 10-year-old won’t care. Read the rest of this entry �