CHICAGO IN AUTUMN = FUN (probably)

Three blog entries for the price of two. 3 for 1 seemed a little generous, don’t you think? As always, we honor all competitor’s coupons, unless their blog is better than ours. Anyway, here’s what has been going on in Chicago since nature ticked its calendar over to Fall.

DA BULLS

We here at MojoFiction love basketball and we know everything there is to know about the current incarnation of the NBA. So we actually posted today to brag about the seating arrangement we had for last Friday night’s game at the United Center, which featured the Chicago Thingys (we forget) versus the Utah Knicks. The poor Utah team didn’t look very good against a sloppy Chicago team: receivers were wide open but they kept getting called for off-sides by the line judge, who kept awarding the other team free kicks. At least we think that’s how basketball is played. But it hardly matters because we love the NBA! And we thank Scotland for sending it “across the pond” on the Titanic. Obviously, it didn’t make it that time, but the Hindenburg was able to drop it off shortly before heading to New York.

So anyway, the sweet tickets wasted on MojoFiction instead of going to real fans were in the second row behind the visitor’s bench, which means we couldn’t see anything because all the visitors are 9’2”. Here’s a picture of the game from our point of view:

But at least we got to enjoy the half-time show, which featured these freaky dudes who can hover twenty feet above the ground without any wires that we could see.

The only thing we could figure is, their abilities might have had something to do with the large trampolines directly below them, but we don’t want to guess.

DA CLOUD GATE

Chicago is a beautiful city in the fall, unless you have to sit in an office all day working, which MojoFiction does. So, when no one was looking (except the secretary, she’s ALWAYS looking), we stepped outside and walked over to Millennium Park to see one of Chicago’s cultural attractions, the “Cloud Gate.”

For those of you who don’t know, the Cloud Gate fell from the heavens in 2006 with a loud THWONK!, narrowly missing three city workers who were immediately awarded three years of disability and positions as Aldermen (and also Police Superintendent), along with generous pensions that Illinois demanded from Indiana because everyone from Indiana works here anyway.

The locals call the Cloud Gate “The Bean” because, per NBA rules, it’s shaped like a basketball. But what’s really confusing is which Legend of Zelda game the sculptor raided to come up with the name Cloud Gate. Right? It’s not actually a gate to anything unless you stare at it on an overcast afternoon for fifteen minutes without blinking. Then $#&! gets weird.

HALLOWEEN

In our opinion, Halloween ushers in the fall season, not those thoughtless trees littering their leaves all over our yard and clogging up our gutters without so much as a “my bad.” Stupid trees. How do you like this new chainsaw we bought? Yeah, you just stand there and say nothing…

We love handing out candy to our nation’s youth, because it keeps dentists in business, but also because the really little kids are funny and so excited to get treats.  …And extra also: we feel bad for all the candy our own kid has taken from the neighborhood over the years, so we have to give something back.  So this year we here at MojoFiction bought three bags of candy to hand out, which ended up being almost $30.00. We didn’t realize we were spending so much until we got to the register, where the cashier quickly called “No take-backs” and we had to buy it all.

Unfortunately, Halloween virtually rained out in our neck of the woods. Trick-or-Treating was from 4-8pm, but by 7pm we only had two visitors, so we packed it in early. But then, just before 8pm the doorbell rang.  We opened the door to find two young boys, escorted by their parents (standing out in the rain), who were obviously off to a late start, given their low candy levels. Our guess, they tried to wait out the rain. Well, they were in luck.

We grabbed our bowl full of candy and dumped a huge handful into each bag. Looking back on it, we should have given them even more. As we closed the door, we heard one of the kids say to his parents, “Mom, look how much I got!”

To explain the warm, fuzzy feeling we experienced upon hearing that, let’s use this mathematical equation:

$30.00 worth of candy + 2 happy kids who almost missed out = totally worth it.