On Friday presidential contender Mitt Romney visited Gino's East and afterward sent his deep-dish leftovers to Obama's Chicago election headquarters as a prank. We're confused. How is that funny? Hey Mitt, is your refrigerator running? Do you have Prince Albert in a can? more ›

Last month I was given the proverbial offer I couldn't refuse: the chance to work on something with the legendary radio personality, Steve Dahl. For a generation of radio listeners, Dahl's partnership with Garry Meier was appointment radio worth all the detention hours I racked up at Lane Tech listening to them in class, and the overnight rebroadcasts of Steve and Garry on WLUP-AM 1000 made the homesickness of my first couple of years of my Navy hitch bearable. I even followed the Stever through the post-Meier solo years with Buzz Kilman, Wendy Snyder and eventually the final show on Jack-FM and into his current run as a podcast pioneer. Seriously, check out the Dahl Twitter feed and Facebook pages. He and his team have adapted to social media like a duck to water. more ›

Travel Channel's "Food Wars" airs a special episode Wednesday pitting the two most popular pizza casserole deep dish pizza names in town — Lou Malnati's and Pizzeria Uno — against each other for ultimate bragging rights. The term "grudge match" is often overused, but fitting in this case, given the intertwining histories of the two chains. Lou Malnati's father, Rudy, has long been noted as the creator of the deep dish style while he worked for Ike Sewell at Pizzeria Uno. more ›

We interviewed local filmmaker Joe Swanberg recently and so we figured that was a pretty good excuse to talk to his sometime-partner-in-crime Andrew Bujalski. The two have been fountainheads of enthusiasm for the recent explosion in microbudget filmmaking. Bujalski has two features under his belt, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. Both are painfully hilarious (or hilariously painful) and startlingly lifelike: it's impossible to tell where the screenplays ends and improv begins. Pretentious comparisons to John Cassavetes and Richard Linklatter are hard to avoid, and like the latter, his honest handling of the foibles of youth are a billion miles away from Hollywood. more ›