Ommm, I’m tellin’ GI…
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chicago
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Chicago Alderman Pat Dowell has proposed a plan that bicyclists in the city should pay a $25 annual bike registration fee as a way to raise revenue for the city. Ms. Dowell is hoping this would be an alternative to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposed cable television tax hike. She also thinks that all cyclists should be required to take a “rules of the road” safety class. The safety part I can get behind, the tax? Not so much.
As the fee is proposed as just a way of increasing revenue for the city of Chicago and does not directly benefit transportation let alone cycling, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Even Emanuel doesn’t think so. Continue reading
One of the very first bars I got drunk at in Chicago is called Twisted Spoke – the one on Clark Street, not the one on Ogden in the West Loop. My friend Christine and I got drunk on $2.75 pints of Woodchuck Cider.
Since then, the owners of Twisted Spoke sold the Clark Street location, leaving only the location in Chicago’s West Loop. In the past couple years, this has become the site of what my friends call “Brunching Hard,” which means we sit at the bar with some fancy drinks, get drunk, and maybe eat some food. Continue reading
Not for the cloisterphobic. Continue reading
Hey dude, you better step off. Continue reading
On Monday, the New York Times reported on the dramatic increase in Chicago’s homicide rate. The city’s murder rate from January to June has increased 38% compared to the same period in 2011. That’s 240 murders so far– putting the city on track for more than 500 murders this year. So why is the city suddenly much more violent? Continue reading
Writing a book is probably not something you think about doing 140 characters at a time. But that’s exactly what Dan Sinker did with “The F*cking Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel.” He might not intended for his parody of Rahm Emanuel’s 5 month long mayoral campaign to become a book, but that’s what happened.
I originally read the @MayorEmanuel twitter feed in real time. It was one of the reasons I finally ended my boycott of twitter. The feed was hilarious then and it translated well as a book. The annotations in the book provided additional background of the characters featured in the twitter feed – both fictional and non fictional. Most tweets on their own are comedic gold, but read again in book form you can see the whole story come together. Continue reading
Oh hey, Chicagoans. How’s it going? Did you know that your sexy mayor plans to slash your public library’s budget, with plans to lay off about a third of your city’s librarians and paraprofessional library staff and reduce hours at most of the library’s 78 locations by eight hours a week? Yeah, that’s part of his plan to close Chicago’s $646 million budget deficit.
I’m not usually one to jump on a restaurant bandwagon, but when one of my regular baristas told me that her boyfriend took her to West Loop Chicago restaurant Girl and the Goat for her birthday and gave it a rave review, I decided that I needed to try it for myself. I made my reservations for this past Sunday in July. I could have made a reservation sooner, but that would have meant eating dinner at 10:30 on a Tuesday. Our reservations were for 8:00, but once we got there we had to wait a few minutes for the party at our table to finish. I was a little annoyed, but I after my meal understand why they took their time. Girl and the Goat is shared plates, served family style. I think I preferred it this way. Too many times you go to a good restaurant and end up wanting to taste everyone else’s food anyway. Continue reading
British band Bush played the Congress Theater in Chicago on August 18 as part of a series of warm-up dates for the world tour they will start in October. It was a free show that had two lines (priority ticket holders and “regular” ticket holders) spanning nearly a mile on Chicago city blocks. This was a free concert sponsored by Samsung and AT&T as part of their Summer Krush series. The priority ticket holders were told to arrive at the venue a half hour before the doors opened to guarantee entry. Not only did they get guaranteed admission, but they were also treated to an hour of a hype man selling the crowd on AT&T and Samsung products. Someone won a phone and someone else won a guitar. Not sure what the guitar winner was supposed to do with a guitar at the beginning of a concert, but that was his problem. Continue reading