By J.J. Tindall
Red Wing, Yellow Sin
A red-winged blackbird
landed at my picnic table
at Navy Pier
opening a great lake
in my turbulent mind.
Yes: my mind landed
on this picnic table at Navy Pier
for a cig break
Posted on July 18, 2012
The Grunsfeld Children’s Growing Garden
The New And Unimproved Taste Of Chicago
City Hopes To Make More Money By Offering Less Food Over Fewer Days
With a slimmed down Taste of Chicago winding up almost as fast as it got going, we sent our intrepid team downtown to see what Taste of Rahm’s Chicago had to offer. Here’s what they found.
* More realistic Chicago experience includes the Booth of Bile and the Eat Your Meal Before Your Meter Runs Out Booth.
* The Next booth serves food from the Taste of Chicago July 15, 1837. The turkey legs are served tartare.
* Bandshell headlined by the bucket boys. Buckets returned to KFC after performance.
* Eat Lead Booth sponsored by members of Chicago’s gang community.
* Turkey legs replaced by (gluten-free) vegan leggings.
Posted on July 13, 2012
The Chicago International Teleport
Uploaded to YouTube by Dr. A Mo
“United Video Satellite Group’s subsidiary, SpaceCom Systems, Inc. had a satellite teleport outside of Chicago. It was built starting in 1982. Today (2012) it is owned and operated by DirecTV.”
Posted on July 10, 2012
Dirty Girl Mud Run
By Nikki Golden
Men came for the free mud wrestling. Women came for the empowerment of completing a non-threatening 5K obstacle course. Both groups got their wish this weekend as the Dirty Girl Mud Run came to town.
This past weekend, the Lake County Fairgrounds were transformed into a 5K track with obstacles such as One Ugly Mudder (a mud hill you had to both scale and descend), Get a Grip (a 12-foot-plus cargo net you had to climb up and down), H2OMG (a water pit you had to crawl through) and the final obstacle, PMS, which stood for pretty muddy stuff, a mud pit you had to crawl through like a snake.
Posted on July 2, 2012
The Beer Thinker: Collaboration Brewing
By Dan O’Shea
After the heady beer-drinking days of May, when Chicago Craft Beer Week had us forcing an unbelievable variety of brews on our palates and livers, I tried to slow down a bit – you know, drinking only two beers a night instead of four.
I used the small increase in clarity this afforded me to think about some of the ongoing trends in the craft beer world. One of those trends is collaboration brewing, a not entirely new concept by any means, but one that seems to have taken off in new directions in recent months.
Some of the first collaboration beers I remember seeing were three or four years ago, and most often the product of partnership between two or three breweries. San Diego’s Stone Brewing Co. has been an especially prolific collaborator, working with Dogfish Head and many others.
In Chicago, several new craft breweries have done some collaboration brewing with other brewers. For example, Half Acre Beer Co. has worked with Three Floyds Brewing, Pipeworks Brewing Co. and Short’s Brewing Company from Michigan, among others.
Posted on June 27, 2012
Chicagoetry: Zoo Of Shadows
By J.J. Tindall
Zoo of Shadows
This is a memorial garden,
an Eden of dreams,
free to the public,
a regeneration of a 19th century
graveyard.
Little black holes linger
amidst the sculpted landscapes,
shade for scorpions.
They lengthen as the sun wanes.
Posted on June 24, 2012
Illuminati Not After Chicago Dude After All
I Am A Pizza Delivery Guy
By Guy Essenfahr
I don’t care what our government’s bean counters have been saying about the economy “recovering.” It isn’t, and it’s not getting any better. But this really isn’t news to people like me who have spent the past several months (or in my case, the past three years) trying to land a decent job we’re qualified for – or hell, even minimum-wage jobs we’re overqualified for.
If nothing else, the whole rotten experience has given me a vast new appreciation for our ancestors who somehow managed to make it through The Great Depression or The Dust Bowl without blowing their brains out.
But being hopeless isn’t the same as being helpless, because there is one basic-survival job that has always been available even in times of dread like this; a job that has over the past few generations provided sustenance to high school and college kids, married guys with second mortgages, and divorced guys with too much alimony and too little paycheck left over from their daytime jobs.
This is why I am Pizza Delivery Guy.
Posted on June 15, 2012
Chicago Dude Does Bath Salts, Destroys Grocery Store Produce
Attacked Killer Tomatoes, Ate Hairy Coconuts
“I went absolutely fucking nuts.”
Posted on June 13, 2012