I’ve been attending the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival for a few years now and can honestly say it’s a fantastic couple of weeks of movies for kids and adults.

The movies are made up of both shorts and full-length and target age groups from two to sixteen. I bought some very reasonable tickets for shows this Saturday and Sunday priced at $6 for kids and $8 for adults.

Check the schedule for a theatre near you. They’re even showing movies at the Wilmette Theatre this year. So if you don’t own a kid, make sure you borrow one!

Photo of “Martian Child” from the CICFF website.

I just about fell off my chair when I saw the Sun-Times headline 20,000 disappear in Chicago each year. Sure you know it happens, but 20,000?

To clarify the article, most of these people leave for their own reasons and 98% are found alive and well. Check back with the paper as they further detail the stories of missing people and their families all this week.

I’m sure the Rosehill Cemetery walking tour is on plenty of “things to do for Halloween” lists but it really wasn’t creepy at all. In fact, it was a nice walk on a crisp fall morning, with a bit of Chicago history thrown in.

The second and fourth Saturdays of the month you can take a free two-hour walking tour around Chicago’s largest cemetery, starting at 10 am from the gates at 5800 N Ravenswood Ave. On October 27 it will be a little different as they’ll be having an open house from 10 am to 4 pm at their newly renovated Community Mausoleum. Built in 1914, it’s the resting place of many famous Chicagoans — like both Richard Warren Sears and A. Montgomery Ward.

Every time I try to explain Layer Tennis to someone in person, they look at me like I’m crazy, so let’s see if this makes sense: Chicago design house Coudal Partners is hosting this online sport where two designers trade Photoshop files back and forth in 15 minute “volleys” with commentary by a blogger. It all unfolds in real time on Friday afternoons in front of a live audience chattering away in forums. This afternoon’s match features Chicago’s own Chuck Anderson vs Steven Harrington and next week has Gapers Block (etc.)’s Naz Hamid vs Chris Glass.

We all wondered what those Parking Zone stickers meant that appeared on parking meters over the summer. It turns out they’re for an in-car/cell-phone parking meter system. You buy a $15 “ParkMagic” device, stick it in the window of your car, and then activate it by cell phone when you’re parked in a spot. The city is trying out the system for six months and there are 1000 devices available for the trial.

(via Gapers Block)

Check out this hot new Halloween decoration, straight from a “fashion” store on Bryn Mawr Avenue in our Edgewater neighborhood:

That’s right- a plastic glove full of water. Hanging. There were a couple more several feet apart.

Booooooo!

The Party Cab is no more. The Department of Consumer Services said the cab was “a safety hazard” and won’t let it on the streets until it complies with code.

Safety hazard? Apparently, the Department of Consumer Services are unfamiliar with the driving of the other ten-thousand cabs out there… how about doing something about that safety, instead of picking on a guy who puts stickers and kitsch in his cab.

What’s this exciting picture? It’s a Chicago Marathon water station being packed up at 9:40 9:20** am, because they were out of water.

With the record heat yesterday, the Marathon was canceled around noon (about 2 and a half hours early). The word on the course was “they’ve run out of water and ambulances”. I was running near the back of the race* and water was hard to come by — at one water station we handed cups and told to go two more blocks where there were “hoses”, which turned out to be a fireman with a firehose attached to a hydrant. Yes, water, but not very organized. Really amazing was the generosity of bystanders who were handing out bottles of water or handfuls of ice. One restaurant near Broadway and Diversey (I’m sorry that I don’t remember which one) was giving out water in the only containers they had — styrofoam soup bowls.

I understand that the Marathon is a huge, and vastly distributed, event, staffed largely by volunteers. But it still seemed very disorganzied when they did cancel the marathon. Grant Park was something of a madhouse, as thousands of runners returned from the ‘wrong’ direction.

But, hey, I’m alive (eek) and I got to run 18 miles through our fine city and see a running set of testicles. And how about that photo finish and the drama at the women’s finish?

* I was totally on track to finish in 6 hours. Which is, if you’re not familiar with marathon times, very, very, slow.
** A commenter’s comments made me check my math (see below) and it turns out my camera was 20 minutes fast.

Instead of the regularly-scheduled Photo of the Week, I’d like to post pictures of the marathon. It was so inspirational, amazing, heartbreaking, and hot yesterday. I think it would be cool to see multiple perspectives on it.

If you have Chicago Marathon pictures (in it, spectator, pic of news), please post them to our Flickr Pool and I’ll start launching them up here.

Tomorrow morning is the Chicago Marathon and as I threatened in April, I’ll be one of the 45,000 odd* runners. (If you’d like to track my progress from afar, my bib number is 48874.) I actually went out a month ago and bought some new long sleeve running shirts for the event** since it’s being run in, you know, chilly October. Looks like that was a waste.

Feel free to come out and cheer for some folks — the route covers quite a bit of the city, so you might not have to go far to encourage a stranger. I was surprised to discover when I ran a half-marathon just how helpful it was to have random people yelling out my name (which they read off my bib) and I can only imagine it will be twice as helpful in this twice-as-long course. And if you do come out on the Northside, well, at least it won’t be quite as crowded in Wrigleyville as was feared.

Wish us all luck.

* To say the least.
** For myself, I hesitate to call it a ‘race’, since I’m going to be running so slow.