Can you feel the excitement in the air? The electricity? The sensation down your spine that something HUGE is happening? That could be the early stages of crack-induced spinal cord failure but more likely it's the Conrad Black trial. Set to begin this morning in downtown Chicago (got a great Cubs story for you, btw, ask me about it later), Mr. Black (and some lawyer-types) will be defending himself against accusations of plundering a sizeable chunk of change from his newspaper empire. Of course, the question that’s weighing on all of our minds isn’t ‘guilty or not guilty?’, since, by rule, we assume that all Canooks are Crooks (see our .blogspot.com site devoted entirely to this assertion), but where the heck is CB shacking up during this whole thing? The Post is guessing the Ritz, though one of their (less classy) sources believes it to be the Four Seasons (and Ritz doormen “claimed yesterday they’d never heard of Black,” which puts him in the same category as Muqtada al-Sadr, but doesn’t necessarily refute that Black’s staying there). We’re actually more inclined to believe he’s turning in at the Courtyard Marriot, for reasons we cannot disclose at this time. But what about you? The Venn diagram overlap of your expertise in the areas of Conrad Black and hotels is quite sizeable, is it not? How about you take your best guesses and we’ll do whatever it takes to determine the truth and whoever it turns out guessed correctly (we’ll be going by the honor system here) will get a free copy of Jack Welch’s Winning and a drink with John Carney? Sound good? Great. Remember that at the Ritz they put chocolate on your pillow but at Super 8 there are lots of fun things to examine on your sheets with a UV light. Toss up indeed.

BLACK IS GOING TO HIS TRIAL IN STYLE [NYP]