So, where do you think I spent the finest week of the summer…beginning on the 19th of August? In sunny Arlington Heights, that’s where, at scenic, voluptuous, scandalously decadent Northwest Community Hospital.

8/18 I posted my last entry in this place on my radio guest earlier that night- one James Merriner, author of a yet to be published book of a man James R. Thompson hopes to be beatified for emptying death row. If not beatified at least PARDONED by a soon-to-depart George W. Bush. The subject of Merriner’s book is, memorably, “The Man Who Emptied Death Row,” …who else but the infamous former Governor George Ryan whose corrupt secretary of state’s office took money to conferring commercial drivers’ licenses on anyone who would pay for them-this resulting in an illegal alien driving a truck in Milwaukee and, unable to understand English, failing to understand a warning shouted by a bypasser that a piece of iron was falling from the rear-end of his truck…the piece striking the car immediately behind, triggering an explosion that burned six children alive, a cataclysm for which it didn’t move the insensate Ryan to apologize to the children’s surviving parents. There, said I, that will take care of Mr. Merriner and his thinly veiled George Ryan backers, Big Jim foremost, trying to spring him early.