The owner of the Uptown Theatre hopes the huge Open House crowds will boost redevelopment efforts. buff.ly/IzJYTaJ

The White Sox are bringing a 2-0 ALDS lead home to Chicago!

Did social media ruin Apple Fest? With long lines and large crowds, some believe so. buff.ly/d6F9HDf

The White Sox were ‘blessed’ with a letter from Pope Leo before their first playoff game victory in five years. buff.ly/1ydXU4n

Häagen-Dazs isn't Danish. It isn't a word in Danish or any other language. Two Polish immigrants, Reuben and Rose Mattus, started the company in the Bronx in 1960, and he sat at his kitchen table saying nonsense syllables until one of them sounded European. He added an umlaut, which Danish doesn't use, and put a map of Denmark on the early cartons. Pillsbury bought it in 1983 and in the US it's owned by Nestle's ice cream joint venture now. The part I like is that when a competitor launched Frusen Glädjé with the same fake Scandinavian look, Häagen-Dazs sued them for copying its Scandinavian marketing theme. The court said you can't trademark pretending to be from Scandinavia. Both companies were from New York.

After 17 NBA seasons, Taj Gibson is retiring and returning to the Chicago Bulls as an assistant coach under Tiago Splitter to begin his coaching career.

still my favorite video on the entire internet

Chicago’s "concrete beach" is going viral on social media. Here’s why locals love it: blockclubchi.co/3T6CAxi

Will Ferrell says his favorite review of Step Brothers came from Roger Ebert who called it “the end of Western civilization.” Ebert went further and urged readers not to buy it on DVD. Not to support movies like it. Will Ferrell: …”It’s like, the our most favorite review of Step Brothers was Roger Ebert… …who said, “This is the end of Western civilization.” Will Ferrell: And he went as far as to say, “Do not buy this on DVD when it comes out. Do not support movies like this, because it will, it will make other people think they should make movies similar to this.” “So, please…” It was a it was like a call to action. (Mimics Ebert) “McAdams… McKay and Ferrell… Ahhh… That is so delicious.” Only because we had gotten enough filled up on the love side, that we could handle it.”

The U.S. soccer federation is a poor return on invested capital. I played soccer for 20+ years. Grassroots. Academy. D1 college. Pursued professionally after. And I’ll say the quiet part out loud: The US soccer infrastructure is broken. In America, we treat playing D1 soccer like it is the peak achievement. For most families, clubs, coaches, and players, the entire youth soccer machine is built around one goal: Get recruited. Get a scholarship. Play college soccer. But if the objective is to produce world-class players, D1 soccer is a terrible development path. From 18-22, some of the most important technical development years of your career, you are preparing for a 3-4 month season built largely around athleticism, direct play, set pieces, fitness, and survival. Now compare that to an 18-year-old in Spain, Argentina, Morocco, Italy, England, or France. That player has likely been in a professional environment for years. Training daily. Playing meaningful matches year-round. Competing against grown professionals. Getting thousands more touches. Learning how to solve the game under pressure. The gap is massive. And it shows. American players are usually athletic. They are usually fit. They usually compete hard. But at the highest levels, that is not enough. The biggest difference is technical comfort. We do not move the ball like Spain. We do not combine like Argentina. We do not play with the same fluidity, rhythm, and confidence you see from countries where the game is embedded into the culture from childhood. That comes down to volume. Volume of touches. Volume of street soccer. Volume of futsal. Volume of unstructured play. Volume of high-level training environments. Volume of meaningful games. In the US, youth soccer is expensive, overly organized, overly coached, tournament-driven, and too often built around winning games at 13 instead of developing players for 23. Parents spend thousands. Clubs charge thousands. Travel teams fly all over the country. Showcases become the product. Recruiting becomes the scoreboard. But the return on invested capital is poor. We probably spend more money on youth soccer than almost any country in the world, yet the technical output does not match the investment. That is a broken operating model. And like any business, if the output is weak, you do not blame the customer. You inspect the system. The US has talent. The US has athletes. The US has money. The US has facilities. But the foundation is wrong. We built a pay-to-play, college-recruiting machine and confused it for a world-class player development system. Those are not the same thing. Until we fix the grassroots layer, increase meaningful touches, make development less dependent on family income, and stop treating college soccer as the top of the mountain, the US will keep underperforming relative to its resources. I’m not saying this to trash US Soccer. I’m saying it because I lived it. And if we actually want to become a powerhouse, we have to be honest about the infrastructure first.