Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A new crop of spring food books is piling up around here, and for partly egotistical reasons I was particularly excited about Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods, a coffee-table menagerie of heritage animal breeds and heirloom plant varieties that features a short chapter on our favorite critter, the American mulefoot hog. A few months ago the book designer asked permission to use a couple photos I shot for the Whole Hog Project–one a closeup of a fused hoof, and another of a very pregnant Crystal during her days at Hillspring Farm....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike Sula reviews GT Fish & Oyster, the River North restaurant from the Boka group that highlights the cooking of Giuseppe Tentori (who remains executive chef at Boka as well), from the simple and classic—a lobster roll, clam chowder, crab cakes—to the distinctive and challenging—taro chips served with haddock dip, chorizo-stuffed squid on a bed of saffron rice, a primordial-looking dish of squid-ink gnocchi and fiddlehead....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I moved to the Chicago area because there was a large population of deaf people here. I had deaf roommates for about five years. We had wooden floors, so they’d stomp on the floor to get someone’s attention, and the vibration would carry. The biggest thing for me culturally—and I’m making a generalization; not all deaf people are like this—is that they were very blunt....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’ve decided to start doing more tours of large areas of the grid, and filing multimedia reports about what I found. … For today’s trip, then, I decided to make a boat ride down the entire length of the main “winter river” in SL; that is, the river that runs through the section of the grid that’s perpetually covered in snow and ice…....

The news last week that there’d been a change in contractors for the Zaha Hadid-designed Burnham Centennial pavilion in Millennium Park wasn’t surprising. Weeks after its projected June 19 opening, the Hadid structure—one of a pair intended to symbolize “Chicago’s bold thinking about the future”—was still encased in a construction tent, like a giant insect stuck in its cocoon. Late is fate at Millennium Park, which opened four years after the millennium turned....

Marianne Sundquist’s “Ants on a Log, Cocktail Hour” When Julia Thiel and Michael Gebert head out to do the shoots for our chef-to-chef challenge, Key Ingredient, they never know what to expect. Michael Carlson started his demo with a stiff shot of Malort. Brandon Baltzley found that a tray of cocoa-nib chicharron he’d set out to cool had blown off of the 25th-floor balcony of the apartment where he was cooking....

Jack Flash, 30, is the singer and lead guitarist of the local new-wave band Bang! Bang! About three weeks ago he started selling lightning-bolt shaped ties like the ones he wears onstage. They’re available in three colors at the band’s shows, through a MySpace page (myspace.com/bangbangties), at Strange Cargo, and at the John Fluevog store, where Flash works. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I started wearing it in late 2002....

Of the wave of new-breed fadistas to emerge from Portugal in recent years, Ana Moura may be the one who puts the greatest emphasis on fado itself. While Mariza has allowed her dramatic persona to overshadow her impressive singing and Cristina Branco has veered away from fado proper, Moura maintains her devotion to the classic form without sounding like she’s playing dress-up. Her second album, Aconteceu (World Village)–produced, like her first, by Jorge Fernando, former accompanist to fado grande dame Amalia Rodrigues–is a collection of 20 old-school tunes....

1904 World’s Fair Reading the comments that follow my first Bleader post on Rachel Shteir’s notorious book review, I spotted this intriguing observation. It’s not unusual for people to look for rivals (real or imagined) to measure themselves against or to strive to outdo. Many Chicagoans look at the bigger, more prominent NYC this way; when it comes off as needy and defensive, it’s not attractive. But Chicago is hardly alone in this dynamic....

Coco Rouge Brutzkus and his partner, Erika Panther, may still be adapting to the quirks of their three-month-old retail space on Division near Damen. But after culinary school and almost seven years selling artisanal candies out of a friend’s catering kitchen, they’re experts on chocolate. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two met and coupled up as students at Le Cordon Bleu in London....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’re deeply saddened to report that Andy Palacio has experienced what was apparently a severe heart attack and is in grave condition. He is currently on life support and the prognosis is not good. We are all hoping for a miracle and that Andy will regain consciousness, but at this point this does not seem likely. Yesterday, Andy’s condition worsened and he began experiencing more seizures....

Temo Rivera, a teacher in Morelia, Mexico, was shopping in the men’s section of his local Sears recently when he picked up an awfully familiar looking T-shirt. The image on the front showed E.T. in silhouette making a call from a phone booth. The same graphic was on a shirt he’d ordered from Threadless, the online T-shirt company run out of a warehouse on Ravenswood near Irving Park. He checked the label: the mark under the collar said “JNS Jeanious,” which he says is a Sears house brand....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Reagan was a dunce and a fabricator. One of his most famous assertions was, ‘Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,’ and he maintained, wrongly, that sulfur dioxide emitted from Mount St. Helens was greater than that emitted by cars over a 10-year period. (In one day, cars emit 40 times what Mount St. Helens released in a day even at its peak activity....

The first scene of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker With the Hat is fast, flashy, and tremendously assured. A tough-cookie Nuyorican named Veronica is straightening up her crummy residential-hotel studio and taking occasional snorts of a white powder as she talks to her hard-drinking mother by phone. She wants mom to drop her current boyfriend, a “fuckin’ big-time loser with a head like a actual fuckin’ fish!” “Ma, when you see him tonight: Take a moment....

Gossip Wolf is “on fire” with the news that local garage label HoZac is doubling down on its love for Dwight Twilley. Not only is the Oklahoma-born power-pop genius headlining the closing night of HoZac’s annual Blackout fest at the Empty Bottle (that’d be Sun 5/19), but the label’s Archival imprint will soon release a seven-­inch of his massive jam “Shark (in the Dark).” Originally intended to follow up Twilley’s 1975 Billboard top-20 smash “I’m on Fire,” the single was shelved after his label, Shelter, decided it might look like a novelty-band cash-in because Jaws was blowing up movie screens that summer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This morning 18th Ward alderman Lona Lane–architect of the failed chicken ban–will be introducing an ordinance to the City Council’s Committee on License and Consumer Protection “prohibiting the sale of any ice cream, frozen confection, or frozen dessert from a vehicle operating on the public way within areas of the 18th Ward.” UPDATE: Lane’s explanation? Suspected ne’er-do-wells. She related a story of one dodgy truck....

“It has to be amazing,” Theron Denson says, “to walk around the earth and be Neil Diamond. He’s just very loved and has legions of fans. Girls must be approaching him all the time.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The bar upstairs has been transformed into a spa. Some women are flopped on massage tables; others are having their nails lacquered. As Denson makes his way across the floor, the house manager grabs the microphone....

This collaboration between Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Milan’s venerable Compagnia Marionettistica Carlo Colla e Figli is a disappointing bore. Seven actors under the guidance of local director Kate Buckley voice the text of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy while beautiful handcrafted marionettes strut and fret their two hours (with intermission) upon the stage. The stiff gestures, stodgy stage pictures, and declamatory line readings suggest an antiquated Shakespearean style that’s mostly tedious though sometimes unintentionally comical–when Lady Macbeth “jumped” to her death on opening night, the audience barely stifled snickers....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Did Logan Square just have a collective brain-meld that Hyde Park was the next thing? Hardly; both sets of restaurateurs were wooed by the University of Chicago, which is heavily involved in developing retail on 53rd Street near the university and trying to improve the area’s restaurant scene, with its sometimes likable, but decidedly trapped-in-a-70s-college-town vibe. Even if it means, basically, transplanting Logan Square to Hyde Park like they’re picking up a colony from Earth and dropping it on the moon....

In an interview in January’s issue of the Wire, Matt Valentine posited a personal variation on Duke Ellington’s famous pronouncement that music is either good or bad: “It’s either sound with a fuckin’ message or it’s wimpy.” Valentine and his fellow singer, multi-instrumentalist, and messenger Erika Elder have amassed an impressive discography that includes stacks of CD-Rs on their private Child of Microtones imprint, deluxe-edition LPs on an assortment of tiny labels, and a new album called Green Blues on Ecstatic Peace that’s been sucked into Universal’s distribution pipeline....