The week's best columns, reports, tips, referrals and tirades from columnist Eric Zorn.
I am really fond of "Do you like nectarines but wish they tasted more like little cymbals in a wooden hoop with rawhide stretched over it? Then you'll love tambourines!" by @BeTheCookie, by far the looniest entry in the latest Tweet of the Week poll. The fact that it makes no sense is a virtue, but if I know my click voters, they'll have it in last place.
Last week's winner was "I get most of my exercise these days from shaking my head in disbelief" by @RogerQuimbly.
I went back to local issues in this week's column offerings —  Deal's off! Time for Emanuel to name and shame Daley was my effort to be sure that the rosy glow of history doesn't disguise what a mess Daley the Son left Chicago in when he retired in 2011. It's not often you see the expression "flaming pile of excrement" in the newspaper, but it certainly applies here.
If it's time for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to "put the big-boy pants on" regarding city budget woes, then it's also time for his predecessor, Richard M. Daley to put the hair shirt on for leaving the city in a financial mess when he left office seven years ago this month. Some blunders take a lot longer than that to undo, like the constellations of blunders that marked Daley's dismal fiscal stewardship .
 I wrote two columns about the killing of Laquan McDonald, the young man gunned down by Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014. The first was Coming soon: A Laquan McDonald documentary that makes the story even worse, about a film I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at last month but could not write about until it was shown May 1 to a festival audience in Toronto. What's new in "The Blue Wall," a just-released feature-length documentary about the shooting death of Laquan McDonald? It's a fair question. I assumed, going into an advance screening last month, that the film would be little more than a handy digest of this familiar story aimed mostly at a national audience with little knowledge of the details of the story that put Chicago's police practices under a microscope.
In fact, director Richard Rowley and producers Jacqueline Soohen and Jamie Kalven have fleshed out the story with fresh interviews and rare archival material that are going to make "The Blue Wall" the must-see film of 2018 in Chicago.
The second was Laquan McDonald's past has no place in Jason Van Dyke's trial — a look at how a key Illinois Supreme Court decision should not figure in to what happens next. Should evidence of McDonald's turbulent prior behavior be admitted in Van Dyke's still unscheduled murder trial in an effort to show that Van Dyke was justified when he emptied his service weapon into McDonald, a moment captured in a graphic dash-cam video? No. McDonald's troubled and troubling past is irrelevant to the question of whether Van Dyke was justified in shooting him down like a dog.
If you subscribe right now to the Mincing Rascals podcast you can say you were into us before we were cool — before we won a Peter Lisagor award for best local podcast, which ought to be this Friday evening at a ceremony in Chicago. If somehow we lose, we'll be an intriguing niche product recognized only by the select few, so you will have that going for you.
Finally, a fond farewell to my colleague Jessica Reynolds whose many duties included backreading this newsletter. She's leaving us this week for a cool new job, and she has my gratitude for all her digital guidance over the years.
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