Q My roommate is astoundingly hot. Her room is being repaired (the ceiling fell in), and at her request I’m letting her and her boyfriend sleep in my room while I take the couch. I’ve been able to contain my attraction just fine up to now, but the minute she entered my space I had this feeling that all bets are off. I’m considering spying on her with a hidden surveillance cam....

Editor’s note: Chef Jeffrey Hedin left in the fall of 2012. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But while chef Jeffrey Hedin’s concise menu does throw a few curveballs, it also includes primary touchstones of that country’s cuisine: mussels, fries, rabbit (three dishes!), varied applications of mustard, and of course brussels sprouts. Of the two preparations of moules frites—one simmered with leeks and cured pork cheek in spicy California-brewed Devotion Ale and the other in a creamy white wine curry—I prefer the latter for its perfumed subtlety, which puts the focus on the plump, fresh mussels....

In 1989 Tracy Van Duinen graduated from the Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a BFA in advertising design and went right to work in his chosen field. By 1996 he was a senior art director at an international advertising firm in Rolling Meadows, managing accounts for clients like Sega Genesis and Hewlett Packard. He was also miserable. “Expectations were high but creative rewards were few,” he says....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This could be a matter of coincidence–the city may need extra Water Department workers every other odd-yeared winter. Or it could be that it’s handy to have a few more people on the payroll when incumbents are trying to get reelected. The trend was particularly notable in two traditionally clout-driven departments, Aviation and Streets and Sanitation. Together the departments boosted their staffing by more than 400 employees between the end of 2005 and this winter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Sunday night Reader digital content editor Tal Rosenberg and I hit up the Wu-Tang Clan show at the Congress Theater. Having experienced a number of Wu-Tang shows in the past, I’d give this one maybe three Wu-Tang hand signs in the air out of a possible five. There were some high points (Method Man’s floor-length fur coat with matching hat, the group making it onstage before 2 AM, “C....

State Street between 58th and 59th isn’t in the best shape. Empty buildings and empty lots dominate the block, and the cracked, faded asphalt makes it pretty clear that the Department of Transportation doesn’t consider maintaining this particular street a high priority. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Smith’s celebrity is a double-edged sword in this context, though. Incumbent 20th Ward alderman Willie Cochran, a former Chicago cop backed by City Hall insider and key Daley ally Leon Finney Jr....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just in the past couple of years, local retail phenomenon Groupon has grown so fast it’s been hard to keep track. It seems like one minute it was a scrappy little startup and the next it was bullying the state into multimillion-dollar tax breaks like the big kids. Now, according to a press release that went out this morning, it’s throwing in with concert-industry behemoth Live Nation to form GrouponLive....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now that it’s over, let’s keep talking about what a bad idea it was. Tomorrow Harvey Young, a professor of theater, performance studies, and African-American studies at Northwestern, presents the lecture “A Racist Love Note: Stereotypes and Caricatures on Early 20th Century Valentine’s Day Cards,” about which the title gives a pretty good idea of the topic. Young, who wrote the book Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body, discusses greetings cards manufactured for the mainstream—available for purchase, he says, “at the Walgreens and Jewel of their day”—that featured denigrating, racist imagery: “Their caricatures of lazy and dimwitted black people helped to justify segregation....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight there’s Icona Pop at Metro, Dirty Beaches at Empty Bottle, Salt-n-Pepa at Joe’s, Panic! at the Disco at the Vic, Cerebral Ballzy at Beat Kitchen, and a BLVD Records showcase at Burlington. Tomorrow night check out Laura Mvula at Martyrs’, Cafe Tacvuba at Aragon Ballroom, Ryan Cohan Septet at Green Mill, No Age at Schubas, or Charli XCX at Lincoln Hall....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If I had to put a finger on the reasons why reality television shows about the Amish are so popular at the moment (which is what I’m about to do even though I don’t have to), I figure my answer would be threefold: it’s because Amish people are weird (dress weird, speak a cute language, hate fun, etc), because we like watching people behave in a manner that’s unbecoming to their culture’s mores (thematic in the spate of current programs), and, finally, because the Amish are infamously secretive....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » City Winery Chicago, the local outpost of the New York-based wine/food/music space masterminded by Knitting Factory founder Michael Dorf, opens in August at 1200 W. Randolph. Today the venue—booked by Colleen Miller, who programmed most of the shows at the Old Town School of Folk Music for the past 17 years—announced its initial schedule. Comedian Lewis Black inaugurates City Winery Chicago beginning August 15 with a five-night run, but by far the majority of the bookings are music (apart from wine-oriented events)....

If everyone were as skilled as Whitney Gaylord, Ikea might go out of business. Gaylord, who moonlights as a librarian at the University of Chicago, is the talent behind Maker, a custom furniture company offering everything from tables to beds to lighting, all of it built from wood and other materials sourced from the Chicago area. When Gaylord needs a piece of furniture, she imagines what she wants and then creates it....

Turkish journalist Kerim Balci was advised that the reason the Chicago media paid no attention to his visit here is that Wednesday was an unusual news day. “Particularly because of the old lady who passed away,” Balci explained to me, a reference to the funeral of Judy Baar Topinka. Besides, he went on, the audience he was speaking to wasn’t in Chicago anyway; it was back home in Turkey. On December 17, 2013, a Turkish prosecutor launched an investigation of corruption in high places that named names, and among the names were business and government leaders close to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan....

Evanston’s Ethnic Arts Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary in Dawes Park (1700 N. Sheridan) on Sat 7/17 and Sun 7/18 from noon till 7 PM. The organizers’ claim that “every continent is represented in song, dance, spoken word, visual arts and food” seems a tad grandiose (Antarctica, anybody?), but this free fest is nonetheless admirably eclectic. The Central Stage bookings are especially good: Saturday’s highlights are Red Baraat, Los Vicios de Papa, and Tatsu Aoki’s Miyumi Project, and Sunday’s include Grupo Rebolu and Kenge Kenge, who also play Evanston’s SPACE (1245 Chicago) that night at 8 PM....

The 13th European Union Film Festival continues Friday, March 19, through Thursday, April 1, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $10, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening through Thursday, March 25; for a full festival schedule see siskelfilmcenter.com. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dogtooth I’ve seen movies this weird before, but never from Greece....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Barbara Glunz, third-generation owner of the Old Town wine and spirits emporium House of Glunz, and Tribune food editor Carol Haddix give a talk Saturday at 10 AM at the Chicago History Museum called 25 Years of Great Chicago Cooking and Drinking. They’ll also discuss and sign the recently published Chicago Cooks: 25 Years of Chicago Culinary History and Great Recipes from Les Dames d’Escoffier....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It was a glorious sunshiny morning, and many of the leading south-side community organizations were there: the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, Action Now, Centers for New Horizons, the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, and the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council. Facing a horde of reporters and camera crews, they stood on the steps of Michael Reese Hospital, at 2929 S. Ellis, which the city — as busted as it is — is preparing to replace with a 37-acre development that could serve as the Olympic Village....

SMITH WESTERNS The bad news, at least for Team Schadenfreude, is that Dye It Blonde is even better than Smith Westerns. Turns out that by “90s Britpop” the band didn’t mean the lad rock of Blur and Oasis, which really would’ve been a terrible fit for them—they seem to be going for something closer to Pulp, namely a tasteful balance of garage and glam dashed with a bit of new-wave electronics....

The actor Judd Hirsch leans against the display case at S & J Jewelers, on the ground floor of the Monadnock building at Dearborn and Jackson. There’s a tinge of Yiddish to his voice as he accuses an employee of stealing a watch. Vincent Piazza mutters a half-hearted defense of the suspect, hiding his own guilt. It’s a good take, except for some crowd noise in the background. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare wrote, 400 years ago. Now it’s more like all the world’s a screen. As they pretty much have since the first attempts to regulate billboard advertising, during the Lyndon Johnson administration. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What obesity is to Michelle Obama, billboards were to Lady Bird. They had mushroomed around the interstate highways that had begun to be built in the 1950s, blighting bucolic views, and she got LBJ to push for a law that was supposed to clear them away....