Tomorrow night at the Fulton Lounge, local Field Testers will be sharing their books-in-place reviews from Coudal Partners' annual litstravaganza. Lori Andrews, James Finn Garner, Kevin Guilfoile, Andrew Huff, Wendy McClure, Jonathan Messinger, Nathan Rabin, and Claire Zulkey will all be sharing their contributions. Sadly, I can't make it, but my field test is here. The fun starts at 7pm and is free. And if you like bitter drinks, Fulton Lounge's negroni is amazing.......

We're leading off today's awesome round-up by reminding everyone that, as Roosevelt "Rosey" Grier says, it's alright to cry. People seem very stressed out today — Holiday stuff? Lack of daylight? Weird diet? — but don't keep it bottled up. Let it out, and recover with some things that should cheer you up and quick: Ah, real-time graphs, how we love you. Like this one, which displays the real-time gage height of the Chicago......

Okay, we had so much fun with yesterday's things that were awesome, we figured we'd bust out another list for today. Plus there's a boatload of terrific stuff. Today in awesome: We were going to save this for our annual gift guide, but we couldn't wait. That ridiculously cool maps on the left is from Chicago's own Jenny Beorkrem. Typographic illustration + Chicago maps = time for new pants. We can't stop listening to local......

Our pals at Coudal Partners work fast: They put together four Blackhawks spots in a week and change. Above is our favorite, but you can see all of them right here.......

Coudal Partners, the Chicago based ad/design firm is extending their deadline for the amazing Swap Meat. While the focus of Coudal is design, they frequently take on projects that they simply find intriguing. They are the folks that have the "what if" conversations, but actually follow through. The latest Coudal project, the Swap Meat, has been extended and by the looks of what you might receive in the mail, we suggest you take advantage.......

It may seem like Chicagoist is cool, but really we're big time nerds. We get off on geeky new gadgets and websites and blogs. And we're not ashamed of it either. Let's look back at the nerdiest Chicago-area things that caught our attention in 2005. Our Biggest Nerd Crush went to Adrian Holovaty, internet wizard and co-creator of chicagocrime.org. We met him at an event and all of us were clearly drooling at how nerdy......

So Chicagoist was enjoying this peaceful Saturday afternoon reading the paper and eating Chinese food when this absolute scrub of a kid struts into the restaurant like he owns the joint yapping into his cell phone with a total disregard for the people around him. After a few too many "damn, bro's" we walked to him and politely mentioned that we weren't really interested in the killer game of pickup ball he played, the......