The Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois • Page 45

THE PANTAGRAPH Medical myths If pou croHH pour epes, will thep reallg stag that wag? Coming Monday SUNDAY, May 16, 2004 Chuck Blystone, Features editor (309) 829-9000, ext. 248 e-mail: featurespantagraph.com Twin Cities loses radical voice with end of alternative paper Bill Flick FOCUS i (lirmit irim wiwwair vx PO ST Checking girls' thongs could be quite a feat I Fast-break: Seen on Mother's Day afternoon, scurrying around Schnucks, picking out items like a man on a happy mission to appease ISU basketball coach Porter Moser. Life is more than just picking out quality basketball players. There's celery, too. I Butt of jokes: Remember when those flip-flops on your feet were called thongs instead? Some people still call them that.

In fact, the other day at Kingsley Junior High School in Normal, an announcement over the P.A. was that, with warm weather here, girls "are reminded not to wear thongs to school." That's when all the guys started cackling. That's when the girls began to wonder how officials would check to see if girls were wearing thongs? If you didn't know, thongs today are those floss-width garments, too. I Sayonara? Yet another downside to the heightened financial stresses at Mitsubishi Motors? Could be Tachibana restaurant, the classy Japanese cultural experience on Bloomington's southeast side and major community asset (celebrity watch: TV-25's Tom Mclntyre and wife dine there regularly), said now to be pondering its end because of a downturn tied to the Mitsubishi woes. Police beat In Springfield the other day during a "law enforcement memorial procession" to honor officers injured or killed in the line of duty, a Greene County Sheriff's Department squad car failed to notice the parade had stopped and rear-ended a Waverly Police Department squad car, forcing that car into an Illinois State Police squad car, which then rammed into a Oswego Police Department squad car.

Fortunately, no one was injured. I Jewel in the rough: Most interesting facet of Jewel-Osco's little 500-yard move down College Avenue, from its Towanda Avenue site to the old Phar-Mor along Veterans Parkway? In doing so, it coyly crosses from Normal into Bloomington. Tax ramifications, anyone? I Gas tronomic: Wednesdays, long known as hump days, are becoming something else when it comes to the cost of keeping your car's gas tank appeased jump days. We refer and defer at this point to fuel-price aficionado Jim Jacobs, the Normal man who keeps charts and graphs on the price of a gallon of regular here and has discovered something about Wednesday: It's the day when your eyes are most likely to bug out at the price-sign out front. Last Wednesday: Up to $1.98 a gallon.

Prior Wednesday: Jumped to $1.92. High before that: Wed. April 21, when it leaped to $1.89. Lowest cost of a gallon in a year? Sept. 24, 2003.

It was only $1.29. Price jumps, says Jim, almost always occur at mid-week. Biggest spike: a 26-cent leap on Sept. 11. Biggest dip: 13 cents on Sept.

2. Upshot: Apparently you want to buy on Mondays. Until they read this. Don't forget the If looking for a vacation diversion this summer, the Chicago Sun-Times suggests an interesting option watching those plagues of 17-year cicadas invading the state and settling down to have sex so they can swarm again in 2021. Best places in this area to ogle inbound insects readying for the local cicada sex gala? Towns like Paris, Danville and Marshall, suggest entomologists.

So make your plans now. Motels will, no doubt, be filling fast. Ideally not with cicadas. I Another doggone story: Drue Anderson, a B-N native, grad and now investment manager in Glen Ellyn, awakened the other morn to discover his basement was underwater. It was raining from all the ceilings.

Frantically scouring all the upstairs bathrooms and kitchen, he found no source for the problem. Finally, in the laundry room, he did. His 165-pound Great Pyrenees at that moment sitting in 4 inches of water and looking up as if to say, "Uh, I think I did something wrong" had during the night developed a thirst and turned on the water in a sink, causing an overflow that went on for hours. One positive: "My other dog, a little tiny Shih-Tzu, learned how to swim!" reports Anderson. Some poodle.

Contact Flick at flickpantagraph.com ml" 5M 1 111 tm! f. I I By Steve Arney sarneySpantaqraph.com The Post Amerikan newspaper once ran a headline describing its own fate: "The newspaper that wouldn't die." Times change; eras pass. The headline no longer applies. The Post Amerikan newspaper folded with a simple telephone call in March. It was an anticlimax for an underground newspaper with a loud, long tradition.

But by now, two women were keeping the newspaper on a respirator. Without drama, they decided in their conversation that the Post's time had past, recalls Deborah Wilson, one of the women. And so, barring some unexpected outpouring of volunteer effort to revive it, the Post Amerikan ends a 32-year run as Bloomington-Normal's underground newspaper. It ends a streak that, according to the Post, is the longest continuous run of an underground paper in the United States. All that was left for them to do was mail a courtesy letter to subscribers, and Wilson wrote it in April in the expected Post style clever and casual.

Wilson wrote, in part: "There are those who say 'everything comes to an That's a crock. Personally, we think that only good things come to an end. Bad mojo waxes eternal greed, arrogance, corruption, injustice, heartbreak the IMA 1-- Pantaqraph file photos Mark Silverstein protested against drug enforcement with the typewriter and in person, as seen in a 1975 photo of an Illinois State University rally. meager $100 for a full page but ran on heart and energy. The Post didn't die this spring because it was out of money.

It always was out of money. SEE POST NEXT PAGE usual suspects." The Post was irreverent, leftist, pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-minority, anti-war and the antithesis of mainstream press like The Pantagraph. The Pantagraph runs on money. The Post sold ads a The Post Amerikan made an impakt Amerikan say the paper's impact included that it: Past staff members of the Post Gave voice to viewpoints that usually weren't heard in mainstream media. I Disrupted undercover antidrug police operations in the 1970s.

I Forced a business to close in 1978. The business charged people for help finding apartments, but the Post believed it merely read the paper classifieds. The Post wrote about it and picketed. The business in 1978 posted a sign on its window: "Closed due to Post Amerikan radicals financial abuses under ISU President David Burlow, as did other media. I Forced Bloomington and Normal to rewrite vending ordinances to allow Post vending machines, and other machines, on public sidewalks.

picketing and marching." i Emboldened the gay and lesbian community. I Helped, along with other media, to expose abuses at the McLean County Jail in the 1970s. I Worked with media to expose.