Need a three layer cake in the shape of a tea kettle (complete with cotton candy steam) for your grandmother’s 80th birthday and your baking skills began and ended with the penis shaped cake you made for your college roommate’s bachelorette party? Never fear; Chicago bakeries have you covered for your non-penis shaped, special event cake needs. Contact any of these great bakeries well ahead of your next event to describe your cake needs and......

John Kass doesn't want us to think about his "Mediterranean back hair," which pretty much guarentees that's ALL we're going to be able to think about for, oh, ever, but he's really writing about what's he's dubbed "Showergate": City Budget Director Bennett Johnson III has installed a shower in his City Hall office. It's at his own expense, and City Hall spokesfolk say he wants it because he bikes to work sometimes and wants to......

For those of you who are checking in today, we thought we'd also take some time to pay our respects to two giants who passed away on Christmas Day. It was one year ago that James Brown passed away. If you don't have a copy of "James Brown's Funky Christmas", buy it or download it now. It is a necessity of Christmas listening. We managed to find a clip of "Soulful Christmas" dubbed into some......

We've been playing with Hulu, FOX and News Corporation's (FOX, MySpace, etc.) online video-on-demand service, for a few days now and admit we're pretty impressed. We've been missing eps of The Office, Heroes, and The Simpsons, and since that feud with Apple blew up, our only chance of seeing them was crappy streaming video on network sites. That stuff always stalls and crashes our computer. So imagine our pleasure when we started watching Hulu's high......

Working Mother magazine's annual Top 100 companies for, yes, working mothers includes eight Illinois businesses. Speaking of working mothers, congratulations to Lisa Madigan and her husband Pat, who are expecting their second child. The Pacific Garden Mission is leaving its spot on S. State and moving to 1458 S. Canal. Archdiocese of Chicago has to pay $19 million to a family whose son sustained permanent cognitive injuries after a TV set fell on his......

To paraphrase an old Simpsons quote: In a way, all the Impress These Apes contestants were winners. But more accurately, Kristen Studard (pictured) was the champ, earning the accolades of primates and peers along with $250 in cold hard cash. The competition was fierce and the "anything goes" format yielded some of the contestants’ best work. But “Desperate Houseflower,” Kristen’s penetrating multi-media exploration of the secret lives of houseplants, brought the audience to its feet......

This clip from The Simpsons is as good a place to jump off this week, as we're leaving to see the film after we file this, and the beginning setting is at a fair. Which makes a nice segue for us. Last week, we went to the South Side Arts & Music Fest we profiled in last week's installment and were confronted with the sticker shock of seeing a funnel cake sell for nine......

Seriously? Apparently, Springfield, IL has lost out to Springfield, VT as the city chosen to be the "real-life" Springfield in conjunction with the Simpsons movie. D'oh! They found Antoine Walker's Mercedes. People who perused the Pars Cove Persian Cuisine booth at the Taste of Chicago got sick. As per usual, it's most dangerous to be "very young, the very old and people with weakened immune systems.” In other fictional character news, Batman is still......

Now that Spidey 3 and Transformers have opened and iPhone mania is starting to subside, it’s time to find a new place to direct all that geek-out energy. Enter Chicago Tap Theatre’s latest storybook show, The Hourglass in the Stop-Time Chronicles, a CTT collaboration with comic-book artist Andrew Pepoy. Fans of the genre don’t need to be reminded that local boy and Loyola grad Pepoy has inked Spiderman, Superman, Batman, and The Simpsons comix, among......

As part of the promotion for the upcoming "Simpsons" movie (so there!), 20th Century Fox, Gracie Films, and 7-Eleven have joined together to turn a dozen stores across the country into Kwik-E-Marts. We have a sneaking suspicion that the 7-Eleven location at 6754 W. 63rd Street (Ha HA! The North Side is Shelbyville.) will be mighty popular the next four weeks. 7-Eleven will also be selling "Simpsons"-inspired products including squishies, "Buzz" cola, Krusty-O's, official "Simpsons......

You know what Chicago needs? More news programs. We just can’t get enough of morning news, along with news at 4, 4:30, 5, 5:30, 6, 9 and 10 p.m. And that’s just the networks. You cable and satellite-lovers must be in headline heaven! To rectify this absolute dearth of news progs, Fox Chicago, WFLD-32, is throwing their hat into the ring. Starting April 9, “Fox Chicago News at Ten” will debut right after their “Fox......

This isn't a local story, but nothing, and we mean nothing, can top the strange case of astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak. She was arrested Monday at Orlando International Airport after attacking Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, who she thought was trying to steal her would-be boyfriend and fellow astronaut, Cmdr. William Oefelein. Aren't astronauts supposed to be our best and brightest? This makes that episode of the Simpsons where Barney lays off the sauce and......

Admit it. You’ve got a secret (or not-so-secret) nerdy streak. You long for your old Atari or Genesis that your parents heartlessly ditched at in the process of cleaning out their basement. You’re familiar with segfaults and/or gelatinous cubes. You have wet dreams about the Cthulhu mythos. You’ve memorized 90% of the entire Simpsons catalog (the other 10% being the new epis and therefore don’t count), and you can’t wait for Kraftwerk to come back......

Chicagoist has an affinity for Charlie Trotter. The first meal where we really tried to impress a girl was made with recipes from Chef Trotter's arsenal. (We're married to her now) Love him or hate him, the guy is a badass in the kitchen and sets the bar for excellence in his art, and that’s why we’re so happy that he’s our haute cuisine hometown hero. We’re also food geek enough to admit that we......

We tipped you off a little while ago to the goings-on at Navy Pier. We now have more details on the revamp, and more on the inevitable and totally valid crankiness of local residents. First, we can now confirm that the proposal includes a larger Ferris wheel “closer to the size of the original built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition[.]” Yikes. Wikipedia’s telling us that that Ferris wheel could carry 2,160 people at a......

Note: Part 1 of this series is here. The Chicago Sketchfest brings some of the country’s finest comic troupes to town this weekend and next. Fitting really, since a mid-January Chicago vacation requires a hearty sense of humor. Yesterday, Chicagoist profiled a few up-and-comers but we didn’t want to leave out the veteran performers, the very backbone of the festival itself, and the uniquely wacky groups, the pickled liver of the festival itself. Many of......

We’re revising our opinion of the Sun-Times. It doesn’t hurt that Roeper gave us a nice shoutout in Today’s Chicago Woman, but that’s not the reason. Despite our having issues with other aspects of the Sun-Times, it seems to us that they can bust out the investigative reporting hats now and again. Although it didn’t help us get our booted car out of the realm of the cubed, it was the Sun-Times that did the......

Once in a while an event comes along that makes you question your preconceptions and reexamine the meaning of life, the universe, and the forbidden donut. That would be tonight's discussion, entitled “The Simpsons: Cultural Criticism and America’s Favorite TV Family,” at the Chicago Cultural Center. Faculty from Columbia College, The Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University will hold court on why the megahit show has made such an impact on our collective consciousness.......

There are certain things in life that, in Chicagoist's opinion, are responsible for keeping the world turning. These are things that one can count on: Sunday comes before Monday, the sky is blue, Ben Folds and William Shatner's work together for Shatner's "Has Been" was a collaboration that produced underrated genius. Another is that carnivals are going to have more than one criminal working for them. We're not saying all, but you people have been......

If you can think of a product, then there's an apparent untapped market for the it. Places like Cereality popping up and doing balls-out business prove the theory of supply-and-demand. But cupcakes made with mostly organic ingredients? Can a "Homer Simpson's Dumpster Buns and Giant Donuts" be far behind? An article in the Sun-Times training paper this morning tells the story of Cupcakes, a new boutique bakery in Lakeview at 613 W. Briar. Their......

Independent film festivals are often a hit-and-miss affair. For every film that combines humor, insight, or drama with the visual excitement that is the medium of film, there are usually two or three works that sap your will to live just by watching them. Moreover, August is usually the month when major film studios start dumping the lesser lights in their summer release schedule. Oh save us, Chicago Underground Film Festival! This is CUFF’s 12th......

It might be too much to ask you to switch away from The Simpsons or The Daily Show at 10pm, but DO IT ANYWAY. Chicagoist is going to be featured in a segment called "Entering the Blogosphere" on ABC7 tonight. The interviews were done a few weeks ago in the Loop and feature about 7 of us. The crew even visited a couple of our "real job" offices. It will be interesting to see how......

First, a correction: Earlier this month, Chicagoist suggested that some of the bands scheduled to play Taste of Chicago were one or two years away from playing a state fair. In Lynyrd Skynyrd’s case, we were incorrect. Lynyrd Skynyrd will be playing the Illinois State Fair this year. So sayeth the Associated Press who reported the lineup yesterday. The headliners will be REO Speedwagon, Skynyrd, and two country bands called Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley.......

Usually Chicagoist is smart enough that at 10 p.m. it's time to focus attention to WFLD and spend our last waking minutes engrossed in The Simpsons. Chicagoist is especially vigilant of this practice during Sweeps months when local television news programs are using every sensationalist trick in the book to get us to watch their newscast. And we nearly made it out of February unscathed but, alas, we were sucked in by that wily......