Results tagged “foreignlands”

Two weeks ago, in what was considered a rare act of humility, Japanese Emperor Akihito apologized to his countrymen, taking responsibility for a bluegill infestation that's wreaked havoc on Japan's ecosystem by bringing home a pair of the fish from a trip to the States nearly fifty years ago. "Bluegills are the ones I brought back from the U.S. some 50 years ago and donated to a Fisheries Agency research institute", Akihito said. "In those...

In his new memoir/cookbook Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile's Hunger for Home, author and playwright Eduardo Machado spins a nostalgic account of the Cuban exile experience, framed by meals he remembered as a child in Cuba, as an exile entering the States during the Peter Pan airlifts, as a young actor and writer and, later, on return visits to Cuba as an adult. "All my life I've been trying to get food to taste like I remembered it as a kid", Machado told Chicagoist in an interview last week. "To me, the smell of food like roast pork and tamales is my childhood."

It was a Tuesday — a beautiful, sunny Tuesday at that. Most likely, most of the United States was getting ready for or just starting an average Tuesday in September. And then, the unthinkable happened. Two planes hit the World Trade Center towers in New York. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and yet another plane was crashed in Pennsylvania. The country was legitmately in "shock and awe." However, there were those of us who...

Obama has done it. Durbin has done it. Now Daley’s gonna do it. The “it” in question? Lobbying for alleged murderer Hans Peterson’s extradition to the United States. The story’s old hat by this point: Peterson supposedly confessed to killing dermatologist Dr. David Cornbleet last October in his office on Michigan Avenue. Unfortunately his confession fell on French ears, as Peterson had fled to the isle of St. Martin, where he invoked his Gallic heritage...

Fermilab — home to a herd of American Bison; strange, little, colored homes*; and the Tevatron. Fermilab currently is the world's foremost authority on all things atomic. The Tevatron is currently the world's highest energy collider, and it's being used in the race to find the Higgs boson, considered by some to be the "god particle." It's a piece of the Unified Theory puzzle that continues to elude scientists and whose verfiied existence, according to...

The French have spoken. Overseas officials have denied U.S. requests to extradite Hans Peterson back to the States to stand trial for the murder of Dr. David Cornbleet. The 29-year-old Peterson allegedly confessed to killing Cornbleet, his former dermatologist, due to a prescription drug that left him impotent. Despite pleas from U.S. senators Durbin and Obama, the French embassy returned a rejected verdict, with the explanation that they won’t sell out a French national. After...

Here are some other newsworthy items to ponder while we slap some Tiger Balm on our knees. Serves us right for riding our bikes to Morgan Park and back. Even when being deported, Elvira Arellano can't stop talking. She also got to see her 8-year-old son, Saul, before leaving. He's staying with his grandmother godmother. The "cell-phone bandit?" Now that's a robber with a gimmick. Bond for two men accused of robbing former Bull...

Before we teleported up into the great nightclub in outer space, Chicagoist took a few hours to walk around Grant Park this weekend and have a friendly chit-chat with some of the many fine folks who came to Lolla this weekend. Some of them came from nearby - North Side, South Side and the suburbs. Others came from farther away, places like New Jersey. Still others came to visit us from other countries, like Ireland....

We were reading Deadspin yesterday and came across the map you see above, via flickr user "littlebudapest" and the website Strange Maps. As you can see, the map breaks down the continental United States by baseball allegiances. Notice the little fiefdom the White Sox hold within Cubs Country, like West Berlin surrounded by East Germany during the Cold War. One would think that, with one World Series win in the past ninety years, the...

We're sweltering in the heat here, the CTA sometimes seems to barely function and both of our baseball teams suck. All annoyances no doubt. But let's not forget that in the midst of all this a little thing called the Iraq War just keeps marching on: $442 billion and several thousand lives later. We can protest against it and agitate for change but most of the time it's much easier for us to put it...

"Exotica was a round-trip ticket departing everyday for something more fabulous. It had the feel of distant places, but it took you to spots never before trekked by man ... All this cultural production promised a world more primitive and less mediated than life in the burgeoning white collar states. Exotica was more than a sound, it was design movement, and a pop art reaction to a Cold War paradigm that said all that was...

Chicagoist is insanely jealous. We’re approaching our late 20s, and we’ve only left the country once. England hardly counts, either; for Americans, it’s the most vanilla, non-challenging place to visit, outside of Canada. (No offense meant.) So we read through green eyes about two lucky teens who get to go to Africa (freakin’ Africa!) through an opportunity with the Field Museum.

Illinois legislators are saying “neigh” to the idea of grubbing down on horse meat; the Senate yesterday approved a measure that would ban the slaughter of horses for human consumption, and Blago is expected to sign it into law, according to an aide. Illinois only has one remaining horse slaughterhouse, a plant owned by Cavel International in DeKalb. A federal judge’s ruling shut the plant down at the end of March due to issues with...

"I have one criteria, this is my one litmus test for guys and I could not marry someone if they didn’t pass this test. They can’t like Dave Matthews Band."

There are so many cultural institutions in Chicago that it'd be easy to overlook the Alliance Française de Chicago. In addition to being located inside a really cool building, this non-profit cultural exchange organization sponsors everything from language classes to lectures and gourmet food tastings. And movie screenings too. Tomorrow as part of their Ciné-club they'll be showing Playtime, Jacques Tati's 1967 classic.

We at Chicagoist are intrigued by the Field Museum. So much stuff representing the whole of the planet. Do you ever go there and wonder, "Where do they get these exhibits? How did it end up here instead of London or New York? And what do the native countrymen feel about us having their antiquities here?" We found that answer concerning a small slice of Pacific heritage. The Field Museum has in its collection 14 Māori heads that were purchased from a New York scientific supply sometime in the past. But now the heads are going back to their native New Zealand, after three years of talks with museum curators and foreign nationals.

It might seem like we've been posting a lot lately about women-oriented events in the world of film. It might lead you to believe that perhaps the playing field has begun to level off a little. But consider this: only 1.8% of the top-1000 domestic box office grossers in 2006 were directed by women. Unfortunately, filmmaking by women is still the exception to the rule in an industry still dominated by white men.

We hope you're reading this weekend's blotter on a laptop outside somewhere. A homeless woman is being questioned concerning a fatal fire in Wrigleyville Saturday morning. Around 7 a.m. a fire broke out in a three-story apartment building at 3553 N. Fremont in a stairwell, quickly spreading throughout the structure. Three unidentified men and one woman, 24-year-old Jennifer Carlson, were found dead. Witnesses saw an unkempt woman hovering around three smaller fires the previous night...

There isn't much more we can say about the South Side Irish parade, which rolls out en masse along South Western this Sunday. We know that for some of you it'll be your first — and possibly only — time heading out south to Beverly. We just want to assure you that you needn't be afraid. A dollar is still a dollar, Miller Lite dyed green is still Miller Lite, and there will be more...

Mainstream media journalism can be a fickle mistress. Company turnovers, budget crises, and lessening readership has thrown newspapers into a panic recently. It's no surprise to lay off a few reporters here and there. But when you're a foreign correspondent and your adopted country tells you to get out ... that hurts.

Chicago has been recently been celebrated for its achievements in haute cuisine. And while we love discussing the merits of molecular gastronomy vs. locally and organically grown, we know that eating out night after night isn't realistic for most Chicagoans. It certainly isn't realistic for us.

Dear LAist, When we read your mash note this morning, we were all set to go all Superboy-Prime on you. Such is the way we get when we read things that are critical of the City of Big Shoulders. Except that it wasn't really critical. Maybe it was the full night's rest we got last night, or the really strong latte. Or the cold pizza we had for breakfast. Or maybe it was the...

Several months ago, you surely heard the story of Elvira Arellano, the illegal Mexican immigrant hunkered down in a West Side church in an attempt to avoid deportation. As hers is no longer a top story on the major news networks, maybe you thought this problem had been resolved. Perhaps Arellano had unexpectedly decided to comply, or maybe the feds had decided this was one battle not worth fighting. In fact, Arellano is still holed...

While it hasn’t exactly been occupying our every thought, we have occasionally wondered what Thax Douglas is up to out in New York. Last week, before Riviera took the stage at Martyr’s, we even caught ourselves mumbling things like “the earth wraps itself in a sheet of pale indigo cockle shells and absorbs its balmy reputation over the rice paddies of insolence.”

While it hasn’t exactly been occupying our every thought, we have occasionally wondered what Thax Douglas is up to out in New York. Last week, before Riviera took the stage at Martyr’s, we even caught ourselves mumbling things like “the earth wraps itself in a sheet of pale indigo cockle shells and absorbs its balmy reputation over the rice paddies of insolence.”

Chicagoist loves when our fair city makes a mark on the international scene, but maybe not for reasons such as these: on Friday a Glenview man was arrested for allegedly putting a hit out on Poland's former national police chief back in 1998.

It’s a well-known fact that Chicago has the largest Polish population of any city outside of Warsaw. But Gridskipper reminds us that it’s also the city with the largest Bulgarian population outside of Bulgaria. The Encyclopedia of Chicago says that Bulgarian writer Aleko Konstantinov’s book Do Chikago i nazad (or To Chicago and Back) was instrumental in the wave of Bulgarian immigration in the 1870s. Currently, the unofficial estimates of the Bulgarian community put the...

We knew that Chicago loved its zombies, but even we are surprised about how hot Chicagoans are for mummies.

An Alderwoman from Illinois' second largest city has been sending letters to lazy citizens asking them to take their Christmas decorations down. Second Ward Alderwoman Juany Garza's beef is simple, "They didn't do that in Mexico," she said. "I don't remember my mom leaving the Christmas ornaments up the whole year." Aurora is almost one-third Mexican, so south-of-the border traditions matter there, we guess.

We have no idea where this thing came from, and we have no idea what the lady in the video is saying, but she has a kick-ass way of folding t-shirts, and Chicagoist thought the world should know more about this rockin' laundry folding method.