The Hideout's excellent seasonal Soup and Bread benefit is returning for a special, all summer soup (read: cold) edition tonight to benefit the Garfield Park Conservatory. The Chicago landmark sustained heavy damage after last week's hail storm, with roughly half of its glass-paned roof shattered, and damage to some of the rare plants housed below. more ›

This is not a lie – we rock at Scrabble. We even played Scrabble using French words once; kind of a pretentious pursuit, but fun nonetheless. Here in Chicago, you can still get your Scrabble on even if you don’t own the game; lots of bars and coffee shops have Scrabble and other board games on their shelves, available for play. And in our opinion, there is no better way to impress a girl on a date than whipping her ass in Scrabble (or Connect Four, or Battleship). more ›