Well, here's my first test of using the GigaPan robotic camera mount to take a panoramic image. There isn't much too exciting for you to zoom in on -- but, hey, this is Jefferson Park. You can also view this image on the GigaPan site.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

I've signed up to help beta test the new GigaPan computerized camera system. Ever since I was a kid and became fascinated by widescreen movie formats like Cinerama, CinemaScope and such, I've white-trashed my own half-vast panoramas.

During college, I even experimented with putting anamorphic lenses on my Minolta Autopak-8 D4 camera to give a scope aspect ratio to my Super 8 movies. Of late, I've been snapping two or three horizontal images with my Canon PowerShot SD950 IS to get quick-and-dirty panoramas. The view above is an example of this. I shot this two-panel panorama yesterday from the 22nd floor of the Chicago Tribune Tower. (See a larger version here.)

GigaPan seems a little complicated. I hope I'm up to the task. If all goes as planned, I'll be shooting some panoramas this weekend.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

I was working late one night last week and wandered across the street to Walgreens and bought these treats from Dwight Yoakam's Baskersfield Biscuits line of frozen food.

The one on the left is Chicken Lickin's Buffalo Style Bites. The one on the right is Take 'Ems Macaroni Mouth Poppers -- sort of like macaroni and cheese in a Chicken McNuggets shell.
Despite the box's requisite disclaimer of "serving suggestion," I mistakenly assumed that each product included a small container of dipping sauce. But neither did. And neither tasted very good to me, either.

A co-worker who sampled the stuff suggested that maybe it would have fared better if heated in a conventional oven.

Or maybe not. Check out Flickr photos and discussions of other ways to chow down on Dwight here and here and here and here and here and the group Celebrity Products.

Bloggers who've weighed in on Dwight's cuisine include Damaged 2.0 and Machine Gun Funk.

Check out the main Dwight Yoakam site.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

Pop culture guy Brendan Shultz weighs in with his opinion about "The Rocker," a film that just opened across America.

Brendan also has a few things to say about families and how they behave at the movies. Basically, if your kid is still in diapers, the child doesn't belong at the theater, he says.

I agree completely. If you're going to encounter feces and noise in the cinema, these should be provided by the filmmakers.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

I can't be the only who thinks it's hysterically funny that Sen. John Edwards' dirty sex laundry is being aired by the National Enquirer -- a newspaper whose publisher is named David Pecker.

Speaking of Edwards and peckers, my friend and colleague Doug Page makes some cogent comments about this whole mess on his blog, It's Fourth and Long. Doug's observations, as always, are see-worthy.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

I appreciate the thankless job done by those who work for the Chicago Transit Authority. Our city's public transit system is inadequately funded and they generally do the best they can. And most of the time, that's been good enough. CTA bungling usually only results in frayed nerves, missed connections and raised voices.

This past weekend, however, I saw firsthand how CTA incompetence can put customers at risk of dismemberment and death.

Because of track work, the CTA suspended Blue Line train service Saturday between the Montrose and Jefferson Park stations and passengers boarded free shuttle buses between these stops.

My outbound train arrived at Montrose station about 7:30 p.m. -- and was filled with tourists heading back to Rosemont-area hotels and Cubs fans who boarded the train at the Addison station. All these people swarmed onto the platform and made their way up to street level using either a set of stairs or an escalator.

When people reached the top, they were not moved into a queue by the two CTA personnel on the sidewalk. Rather, they were allowed to bunch up at the top of the stairs and escalator. This wasn't a problem at first, as customers simply jostled each other to make room.

However, by the time I was on the escalator and nearing the top, I saw there was maybe only two feet of room left at the top. Other customers realized this, too, and several of us yelled to the CTA people to turn off the escalator. I believe my words were:

"HEY! TURN OFF THIS ESCALATOR! PEOPLE ARE GOING TO GET HURT!"

The CTA reps certainly heard us, but did nothing. As more passengers continued up the escalator, I pressed myself against the window and allowed people to squeeze past, otherwise I would have been jammed against the mass of flesh ahead.

I continued squeezing past the group of people and repeated the warning to the CTA reps, who again did nothing. Another passenger told me he had warned the CTA staffers down on the Montrose station platform and, "They just laughed."

For some reason, I fail to see the humor in the possibility of people being maimed or killed on an escalator.

I counted at least five CTA employees on duty. I guess they were assigned to jerking off that day, not serving the public.

Fortunately, nobody got trampled or hurt, but this was solely due to luck, not any efforts on the part of CTA employees.

I finally figured, well, I did the best I could, and squeezed past the crowd of people and walked west on Montrose about 25 feet and took the pictures above. I tried to take two shots that could be stitched together to show a wide view. Note that the station lobby is packed and that when the next person arrives at the top of escalator, there will be no room.

By the way, this isn't the first time I've experienced a CTA escalator problem. A couple of years back some lamebrain employee was cleaning the escalator at the Grand Avenue station during morning rush. He kept turning the escalator on and off while people were on it so he could stop and wipe the rubber handgrip.

As for the entire CTA agency itself, I find myself agreeing more and more with my friend __________, who maintains that the train system is like ancient alien technology left by an extinct race of advanced beings and that present-day humans simply have no clue to its origin or purpose.

Within minutes of extricating myself from the Montrose station death trap, I called the CTA customer service number and left a calm, cool message explaining my disappointment with what went on. I'll let you know if they call me back and what they say.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

Normally, I have a pretty low tolerance for street performers and other sidewalk mischief. When you're doing you best to code HTML up on the 14th floor, the amplified sounds of a bunch of kids beating on plastic buckets isn't charmingly rhythmic, it's damn annoying.

But for some reason I really liked this drumming group's sound. Maybe it's because I was on my way home and enjoying the mild late-afternoon weather. So, I dragged out the little digital camera and grabbed some video.

The stuff I find not so pleasant should be well known to anyone who's walked along North Michigan Avenue more than a couple times. Such annoyances include, but are not limited to, slowpoke tourists who walk four abreast and stop in the middle of the sidewalk, young ladies who have themselves photographed beating off the moose sculpture or fondling the Benito Juarez statue, breakdancing kids who seem to be able to block off half the public way next to the Walgreens, the shoeshine hustlers who shake down tourists, and my personal favorite, the guy who accosts pedestrians crossing the North Michigan Avenue bridge and aggressively demands of them, "Can I ask you something?"

Just another story in the naked city.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

I guess I'm just a contrarian. I'm unable to stomach what the rest of the civilized world apparently considers one of the greatest movies of all time.

I'm talking about "Dirty Dancing," a 1987 coming-of-age picture starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. I count "Citizen Kane" and "Amarcord" as among the best films ever made, but I'm sure there are people who can't get through either one without projectile vomiting and that's fine with me. Similarly, I'll be damned if I'm gonna watch "Dirty Dancing" more than once.

My recollection of the film is some dancing, some more dancing, still more dancing, Jerry Orbach determines yep, that's a botched abortion, and then a whole lot more dancing.

Well, color me twinkletoes!

It apparently wasn't enough that this chick-o-rama production spawned a sequel called "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights" -- now every other Chicago Transit Authority bus has requisitely pink-colored ads for the stage version of the original film.

I could have saved the show's producers all the expense of mounting a live production. Look, it's clear that today's female moviegoers are seriously disturbed psychologically -- or simply don't mind grindhouse gore -- or else they wouldn't flock to and evidently enjoy the many movies in which folks are dismembered, tortured and otherwise dispatched in some of the most violent means ever put on film.

In my opinion, "Dirty Dancing" didn't need a stage version. It just needed another film sequel -- but this one directed by Wes Craven. And, in a nod to one of my favorite Coen brothers scenes, I've even got the guaranteed megahit title:

"Dirty Dancing III: Nobody Puts Baby in a Woodchipper"

Coming soon to a theater near you.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

This impressive thunderstorm tore through Chicago's Jefferson Park neighborhood late Monday, August 4, 2008. I recorded this from the relative safety of my apartment building's lobby. That big tree wasn't as fortunate -- it was struck by lightning, but I didn't catch that on camera.

Other neighborhoods got slammed, too. See more storm videos on Flickr. There's also some especially cool video over on Andrew Huff's ME3DIA.

By the way, this is why I'm 100 percent sure that aliens are not visiting Earth in flying saucers. Look at how many folks captured high-quality images of the storm. Many UFO sightings are supposedly witnessed by throngs of believers -- or at least of those who want to believe. So, where are all the high quality UFO and alien abduction videos? Or, rather, where is the footage that doesn't look fake?

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.

Sometimes, I get lucky.

Like a lot of photographers who enjoy documenting America's roadside businesses, there are many targets on my to-do list. Too often, I neglect to photograph those businesses before they are gone forever.

A fast-food place named Guido's comes to mind. For years, I chuckled whenever I drove past this joint on Higgins Avenue here on Chicago's Northwest Side and saw their sign proudly proclaiming for all to see:

NOBODY BEATS OUR MEAT!

I assumed that sooner or later, I'd get around to photographing Guido's. But I never did -- and one day as I drove by, I noticed, sadly, that Guido's was gone.

I had a similar experience years ago in Denver. I had always meant to take photos of the Cooper Cinerama Theater, resplendent in its orange paint job. But I never did that, either. I did manage to shoot some Kodachrome transparencies when it was showing a 70mm revival of "Ben-Hur," but by then new owners United Artists Theaters had repainted the buildings beige. The pain in not snagging photos of the Cooper when it was still orange was offset slightly by the knowledge that the theater was torn down a short time later.

That's why I was glad to have photographed a number of buildings at the intersection of Central and Montrose avenues. About two weeks ago, I had my little digital camera with me during a walk up to Walgreens and I shot some images of venerable -- and closed -- businesses.

When I walked to Walgreens last night, I noticed that all of those buildings had been demolished. The photo above of C Davis Rentals is one of my favorites. You can see more photos on my Flickr pages.

The moral of this story is that if there's something you've been meaning to take a phot of, do it now.

ChicagoScope feedback line: 312-683-5272. Send e-mail to ChicagoScope@gmail.com.