What we're reading while we await the inevitable Cubs comeback that starts tonight.
And it's going to start tonight because if it doesn't start tonight, it's not going to start on any night because the Cubs will be eliminated.
But we digress.
Aren't you that guy? A University of Illinois-Champaign student is turning heads because of his resemblance to North Korean "supreme leader" Kim Jong-un. And the student, Minyong Kim, is loving it, clowning around for fellow Illini around campus and getting a "trapezoid-shaped" haircut so he looks closer to the despot, USA Today College reports. "The college life is very hard and stressful. If people can laugh for a while for 10 seconds, I'll be happy with it," says the South Korean native. Not everyone's laughing though: "He's densitizing an issue that's touching over 20 million people," says a co-president of the U of I chapter of the Liberty in North Korea group. Still, senior editor Andrew Herrmann is having a hard time not chuckling over a YouTube video of the ersatz Kim Jong-un singing "All By Myself."
Toddler Shot Once A Week So Far This Year: On the day a 6-year-old West Town boy shot his 3-year-old brother in the head while playing "cops and robbers" last week, The Washington Post published a story calling out a disturbing trend: toddlers have been involved in gun incidents at least once a week so far in 2015. According to their findings, at least 13 toddlers have inadvertently killed themselves with guns, 18 injured themselves, 10 injured others and two killed others. The Chicago shooting was not included in the round-up, and the cases don't include toddlers killed in acts of homicide. Though the story focuses on "accidental" shootings, the article cites gun control advocacy groups who say the shootings were generally preventable. In the Chicago case, the 6-year-old boy found his father's loaded gun from atop the refrigerator.
Is Snoopy The Most Evolved Peanuts Character?: Over the years, some critics have said that Snoopy ruined Peanuts. Cartoonist and writer Sarah Bocker defends the free-spirited, fictitious beagle in her thought-provoking essay, "The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy," in this month's issue of The Atlantic. Those critics, she writes, believe "his confidence, his breezy sense that the world may be falling apart but one can still dance on, was worse than irritating. It was morally bankrupt." But Snoopy wasn't just deep, he was also always careful not to get too far away from his supper dish when on adventures. Like Bocker, reporter Mina Bloom acknowledges that Snoopy wasn't the most grounded character of the gang, but also believes there's value in the complexity of his character.
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