Oh my: "Perpetually beleaguered Cook County Board President Todd Stroger is scheduled to address the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws this morning at the welcome breakfast of the group's 30th annual conference, which is being held in Chicago."

Via the Beachwood Reporter, where Steve Rhodes also notes:

"By the way, I'm not linking to the S-T story because the paper's website has frozen my browser nearly every time I've gone to it for the last week. Is anyone else having this problem? I use Firefox on an iBookG4."

Yup (Firefox 3, Windows XP). The S-T Web site has been running some spectacularly difficult Flash-based ads recently--the Sprint roadblocks (when an advertiser buys up all the slots on a page) are especially guilty, as far as I can tell.

I have no evidence to back me up, but it seems that Flash ads have bloated up in the past few months. It feels like five years ago when I'm browsing the Web these days. If you're having this problem, you may do better with Opera or Chrome as a browser. I still use Firefox, because I like the plugins enough that I'm willing to deal with its memory usage occasionally spiraling out of control.