With how nasty the race for Dennis Hastert's vacant seat has gotten recently, you'd think a couple of high school girls were running the campaigns leading up to tomorrow's special election for Dennis Hastert's seat in Illinois 14th Congressional District. Both Republican Jim Oberweis and Democrat Bill Foster have campaigned hard for the vacancy, and this week each accused the other of misleading voters. Bill Foster hit the dairy man on his use of actors......

Sumei Hu, the woman who disappeared from O'Hare on Feb 26, still hasn't been seen or heard from, but her husband Steven Frash went on Greta Van Susteren's show last night to explain--or, not really explain--what happened. Van Susteren: Prior to the 26th, when had you last spoken to her? Frash: It was like five days before that. She was going to her daughter to visit her daughter's house. And what she was going to......

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......

It was pretty much inevitable that discussions about the NIU shooting would turn to gun control. And turn they have. A group of NIU parents are calling for tighter gun control laws, as is Rep Edward Acevedo (D-Chicago). Mayor Daley asked "Why do we love guns in America?," and Neil Steinberg complains that "the prospect of any kind of meaningful gun control in this country is as impossible a dream as perpetual motion." There's a......

Last week the English Premier League announced its intention to play some regular season matches abroad. In previous years, international club teams have found financial success by coming to the United States to play some pre- and post-season friendlies with other international powerhouse clubs or local Major League Soccer clubs. The EPL has obviously realized the potential of taking the league to a new level by playing a select few league games in North America......

Screw Valentine's Day...let's think of tomorrow as Palentine's Day instead. High fives and paper airplanes for everyone! Daley's plans to privatize Midway is forging ahead, with five of the seven carriers who fly into Midway agreeing to the proposal. [Crain's] Anthony Abbate may plead guilty to aggravated battery. [S-T] Illinois lawmakers have accepted $83,000 from tobacco companies in the four weeks before the primaries. Is there such a thing as "small" tobacco, or is it......

Our winter just became more tolerable with the news that chocolate maker Barry Callebaut A.G. is opening a chocolate academy in Chicago. The academy, slated to open in June, will be in Callebaut's local headquarters in the Montgomery Ward building on West Chicago in River West and fulfills the company's desire to have an academy in the United States. Barry Callebaut does about $3.6 billion in sales worldwide (some readers might remember them from our......

The United States isn't the only country that is having federal elections this year. In March a by-election will be held in Toronto's Toronto Centre Riding. And our sister site, Torontoist has been posting a semi-regular column by their Environment Editor, Chris Tindal, who is running for parliament as the Green Party candidate. With Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama racing headlong into Super Tuesday, it seems that Canadians have already made up their mind. On......

Joseph Pannell was 19 years old when he shot a Chicago police officer in 1969. And then he skipped bail. And skipped bail again in 1974, this time fleeing to Canada, where he changed his name to Douglas Gary Freeman and lived under that identity for almost 40 years. But in 2004, Chicago's cold case squad tracked him down and started extradition proceedings, which Parnell fought....until this week. Now, Pannell says he's ready to come......

Remember in Moulin Rouge when Ewan McGregor's character drinks some green liquid, the camera tilts to a canted angle, the crazy music starts playing, and you felt like maybe someone had slipped a hallucinogen into your popcorn? The green liquid, of course, was absinthe, and its purported psychoactive properties have been well extolled by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Outkast, and Johnny Depp. Known as the Green Fairy, absinthe is an anise-flavored (read: licorice) alcohol......

Agence France-Presse has interviewed an unnamed member of the IOC committee who is saying Chicago is all but locked up to be named host for the 2016 Olympics, and that "it is [ours] to lose." According to him, Chicago has been in the lead from the beginning and is "streets ahead" of the competition due to Chicago's "professionalism and power." No, really. Stop laughing! Before you get too excited, Rio is still in the running......

Chicago has been selected as the host city for the 2008 Barclays Churchill Cup finals, the biggest international rugby tournament in North America. The Tournament will kick off in Ottawa, Canada on June 7th with several dates across Canada before converging on Chicago for the final day of matches. Teams from the United States, Canada, England, Scotland and Ireland will compete in the event on June 21 at Toyota Park. Last year, Toyota Park played......

Yes, that's a CPD horse in a Santa hat. If Chicagoist staffers put together a list of the Sexiest Men Alive, Anthony Bourdain would be waaaaay high on the list. Like, Ron Huberman high. Bourdain is reading at the Borders at 830 N. Michigan tonight at 7 p.m. Is it gross if we say "delicious"? Maybe? OK. Everybody's got a hobby ... but whittling instruments out of vegetables and playing them in an orchestra?......

In the mood for a beer and debate about the war tonight? Considering some of our comment threads on politics, we thought so. Globally Occupied Attention (GOAt) presents a discussion titled Could a Draft Cool Talk of the War? at Schubas tonight. The army is running thin on volunteers, even with clever ad campaigns and more recruitment incentives. Is it time for a draft? And if the draft is reinstated and politicians' children are at......

It was twenty years ago today that Mayor Harold Washington collapsed at his desk in City Hall. He died of a massive heart attack. In 1983, Washington surprised Chicago by winning the Democratic Primary for Mayor. He won with 36% of the vote, beating out incumbent Mayor Jane M. Byrne and Richard M. Daley. In the April 1983 general election, Washington received 52% of the vote to become Chicago’s first black mayor, trumping Bernard Epton......

Made in Chicago's taken a short hiatus, but now we're back, full of turkey and thankful for the artists and artisans in our town. Dolan Geiman grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia on his family's Christmas tree farm. Dolan started making things from an early age and exploring the Blue Ridge Mountains near his home. His work reminds us of traipsing around old barns and making tree forts back in Tennessee. Dolan and......

U.S. Soccer announced the selections for the 2007 Best of U.S. Soccer Awards and Chicago has several representatives in the competition. For Best Fan Atmosphere Chicago's Soldier Field gets two nods: one for this sSummer's Gold Cup Final in which the United States defeated Mexico and the other for the U.S. game versus Brazil in September. Chicagoist is voting for the Gold Cup game--it wasn't the most pro-U.S. crowd, but the fans filling Soldier field......

Metra officials voted today to raise fares 10 percent in January, and again in Jan 2009 and '10. But Sunday service is safe. Osyp "Joe" Firishchak, an 87-year-old Chicago resident, is being deported to the Ukraine for aiding the Nazis during World War II. Firishchak, who has lived in the United States since 1949, has until December 10 to appeal. Holy crap, that's a lot of people: 47 people were arrested for a high school......

Oh, look, it's time for another sensationalist story about the internet. Let's see... sexual predators on the web? Nah, that's too played out. We know: Hate speech! Let's get to it. Trib says: "It might come as a surprise to the soldiers who defeated fascism in World War II, but the United States has become a refuge for Nazism and other brands of extremism over the last decade. On the Internet, that is." We say:......

Obviously still angry about being featured on the cover of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Marina Towers Condominium Association (which only owns the top 40 floors of the two 60 floor towers) is now claiming a copyright in the name and image of Chicago's famous corn cobs. The entire document can be found here (pdf), and seems primarily to be a response to Marina City Online, a website run by Steve Dahlman, a resident with no......

The United States Olympic Committee awarded an Olympic Opportunity Grant earlier this month to World Sport Chicago. The Gloves not Guns program, run in cooperation with USA Boxing, the Police Athletic League, and the Chicago Park District, promotes the sport of boxing to Chicago's urban youth as a way to stay in shape--and out of trouble. World Sport Chicago President William Scherr said in a press release, "By motivating young people to spend their spare......

Where Do Cows Go to Retire?...

Is Barack Obama a hypocrite? Bloggers want to know. Obama's looking for votes in South Carolina--that primary is only 97 days away--by hosting three gospel concerts. (We've seen Obama use gospel music to inspire people before.) Included in the line-up is minister and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Donnie McClurkin, who says "homosexuality is abominable" and can be "cured" with prayer. (FWIW, he also says prayer cured his leukemia.) Obama released a statement on the LGBT section of......

The Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force announced yesterday that the mortality rate for black women diagnosed with breast cancer is 68 percent higher than for white women. And that gap has widened: In 1980, white women and black women had similar cancer mortality rates, but over the last 30 years, while white women's survival rate has improved, black women's has not. According to the report, these disparities can't be chalked up to "biological......

You know what today is, don’t you? It’s golden beer’s 165th birthday! Yes, 165 years ago today, on Oct. 5, 1842, Joseph Groll, a young brewmaster in Plzen, Czech Republic, discovered a technique for brewing golden beer, otherwise known as the pilsner, or Pilsner Urquell, which is the brand name now. Prior to 1842, most beers had a darker, murkier consistency and a sweeter taste. Lore has it that the citizens of Pilsen were fed......

New York Times reporter Monica Davey took an "unscientific survey" of people at the Cultural Center yesterday, asking them questions from the new citizenship test. People didn't do too well. We decided to do our own "unscientific survey" of Chicagoist staffers and friends, and ... wow. Somewhere, our history teachers are in a corner gently weeping. Highlights of our wrongness: 42. Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of......

Violent crime is up 1.9 percent nationally, but locally, it's down 3 percent. The city owes all of us noncriminals a pizza party. Crime dropped statewide as well. Uh, do we smell two pizza parties? The FBI released its yearly roundup of crime in the United States, and it's a real gold mine for info nerds like us. But the first thing we noticed was most of the tables say Illinois has "limited data......

"Tea is a fashion, coffee is a passion," wrote commentor Tim, the last time we wrote about the trendiness of tea. Tim, we hate to break it to you, but at this point, tea seems to have moved beyond trendy and into a full-fledged lifestyle choice. Says who? $5 million in sales this year at Argo Tea, for starters. Today's New York Times has a flattering profile of IT-cum-tea entrepreneurs Arsen Avakian and Simon Simonian,......

Asking for salt and lime with a premium tequila has long been a pet peeve of ours, but since we regularly found ourselves behind a bar, we bit our tongue. Not anymore — we're demanding you shed the "training wheels." It isn't as though we're talking about mixtos here, where nearly half of what's in the bottle is cane sugar. These days every major tequila brand seems to be launching a 100-percent, pure agave line.......

"The United States of America v. the State of Illinois" has a real dramatic ring to it, no? The Department of Homeland Security is suing Illinois in an attempt to invalidate a state law that bans employers from using E-Verify, a website that allows employers to check if a Social Security number is valid. Blago signed the law, which passed with bipartisan "veto-proof majorities," in August, and it's supposed to go into effect in January.......