Thank goodness I’m neither a woman nor single, because Chicago is, according to Men’s Health magazine, only the 34th best place in the country for a woman over 35 to find a man. (But, hey, at least we’re not Buffalo, NY — cruising in at #101.) And check out those stats — we’re dumb and don’t give any money to charity, but we stay married and are reasonable thrilling. Whee!

It’s interesting the lengthly description of the methodology the authors used to compile the list — so scientific. It’d be nice to see one of these articles where the authors were honest and just stated “we pulled this all out of our asses — enjoy!”

(via Violet Blue)

So yesterday my friends and I jumped on a Brown Line train at Belmont heading north and walked into a screaming fest between two women talking about how “I told him to give me my $40!” and “I seen those same guys doing that last week!” and “Aint no way I aint gettin’ my $40!!” They got off at the next stop and we noticed that a slightly calmer bench of people were in the process of calling 911 which definitely sparked our interest, what had we just missed? Turns out we’d missed a classic Three Card Monte scam and the guys doing it had just walked off the train, after taking quite a bit of cash from people they were able to talk into playing with them. We talked shortly with the other train raiders about how bad that was and illegal and all that but as we were walking off the train we started talking to ourselves – sure con game are illegal, no question about it, but in 2007 is there anyone who doesn’t know Three Card Monte is a scam and completely unwinnable? I guess there are but who thinks it’s a good idea to gamble on a train for crying out loud? These folks didn’t deserve to be scammed, no one does, but I can’t quite shake the “wow, that is the oldest most cliched trick in the book and these guys found someone to fall for it – social darwinism at work” feeling.

Pronounced Puh-lah-nuk (at least that’s how it sounded when his agent said it at the last signing I went to) will be in Chicago to sign copies of his latest book Rant on Wednesday, May 16th at the Borders downtown.Click here for details.

May 11th at 5:00 pm marks the start of Chicago city event Looptopia, a dusk-til-dawn evening of theatre, music, spectacle, visual art, late night shopping and so much more, all in downtown Chicago’s Loop District. Hosted by the Chicago Loop Alliance, Looptopia boasts an extensive schedule of events, with programming to appeal to people from all walks of life.Some scheduled events include:

• Live concerts, comedy improv and dance performances throughout the Loop
• Art and design exhibitions that include do-it-yourself mural projects
• “Opera Idol,” hosted by the Chicago Opera Theatre
• An outdoor silent dance party that uses individuals headphones and live-feed video projections
• Shadow games with large scale projections and puppetry performances
• Special restaurant and hotel offers
• Miss Looptopia pageant, featuring local drag celebrities
• Yoga classes
• Knitting circles
• Late night retail shopping
• Docent-led architectural tours from dedicated elevated trains conducted by the Chicago Architecture Foundation

And if you are in need of a baby-sitter, the Harold Washington Library will be hosting a sleep-over with storytelling, animated games and projected movies on the adjacent building for all the kiddies out there and their families.I, for one, am excited about the light shows and art projections promised, and am looking forward to enjoying a celebration of Chicago’s breathtaking downtown skyline.Let’s hope that more of these celebrations of art and architecture continue in the future!For more details, and a complete list of events, visit www.looptopia.com.

For days now I’ve been hearing that the single greatest bowl of lentil soup awaits mere blocks from where I’ve been sleeping at Taste of Lebanon (1509 W. Foster) and today I decided I’d heard enough and had to try this for myself. I’ve had my fair share of lentil soup in the past and am pretty sure I have a good idea what’s good and what isn’t. So I got a bowl of it. A bowl that costs $1.79. Holy. Fucking. Crap. It seriously was the best lentil soup in the history of lentil soup, and maybe even soup in general. Their other stuff, falafel, grape leaves, hummus, etc were all fantastic too but the soup… whoah. I’m really not going to be happy about leaving that when I go back to LA next week.

I’m pretty paranoid about shredding anything that might be used for identity theft or credit card fraud. Credit card offers are pretty easy because I take care of them as they come in, but it does take a couple hours each year to get rid of three-years-ago’s utility and credit card bills (that’s the archive cycle I’m on, your mileage may vary). If you’ve got a back log of sensitive information that you want to get rid of but know you shouldn’t just throw out, then National USA Community Shred Event is for you.

Commercial shredding company Shred-it will have their shredder trucks at the Office Depots at 6431 W Fullerton and 352 W Grand from 10 am to 2 pm tomorrow (Sat, April 28).

Credit card bills and receipts, utility bills, old tax returns, and may I suggest those high school poetry notebooks? That’s something you really don’t want falling into the wrong hands.

(Photo by willsfca)

The Lincoln Park Zoo may offer beer and wine this summer to help the zoo to remain free. I’m all for things that are free, animals, beer and wine. So this is sounding pretty good.

On my trips to the zoo I would never think of getting drunk, but having a couple of beers might be nice. What’ya think?

National Geographic and LiveScience have the story of a complete 300-million-year-old rain forest found fossilized intact, thanks to an ancient earthquake, in an Illinois coal mine.

Miners in Illinois are used to seeing a few plant fossils strewn along a mine’s ceiling, but as they burrowed farther into this one, the sheer density and area covered by such fossils struck them as phenomenal, Elrick said.

That’s when they called paleobotanist Howard Falcon-Lang from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and William DiMichele, a curator of fossil plants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

“It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armored vehicle, until we were a hundred meters below the surface,” Falcon-Lang said. “The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine.”

Photo by Howard Falcon-Lang
(via BoingBoing)