The inconvenient truth about ticket prices
If there's anything almost as messed up, unfair and chaotic as the pricing of airline tickets, it's the pricing of tickets to hot concerts and sports events. But this is one topic where I'll have to say the Milton Friedman-type "market forces cure all" guys are right.

But the show must go on ...
In the program for the musical The Pirates of Penzance, put on April 11-19 by Larkin High School and its Elgin School District U46 Performing Arts Academy, the cast notes for Dan Berk say only that he is "a senior in the drama focus. He is America!" But that doesn't tell half the story.

Socks in Time, twin futures and church bigots
• Socks in Time: When this endless winter's storms seemed to be chilling the bronze boy and girl leapfrogging each other in South Elgin's Footprints in Time sculpture, dedicated to 12 children and two police officers who died before their time, somebody decided the metal kids looked chilly. So one day a pair of warm, real-life cloth socks showed up on the girl's bare feet.

Hate the war but love the troops
One refreshing difference between the antiwar movement of 1968 and what we see today is how most of today's Americans treat soldiers returning from the war.