A Coyote Among Men

If you are into urban fantasy and you haven't picked up the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, you're missing a treat.  Mercy is a werecoyote, or a "walker" as she would have it, one of the last of her kind. She grew up with werewolves, and doesn't have the fear of them that perhaps prudence…
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Radical Robots

Anyone who has children or works with kids knows the popularity of robots. Take Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot and Robot Riot!, add WALL-E, R2D2 and everything in between, and you've got a full-blown case of robot-mania on your hands; but what is the cure? Try the Radical Robots program, presented by Mad Science of Chicago, which…
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Some Chilling Euro-Horror Movies

   After World War II, the horror film genre was nearly dead.  Hollywood was producing comedic satires of movie monsters like “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and dozens of nuclear-fused, giant bug and outer space films. Beginning in the late 1950s, British, Italian and French movie makers delved into fresh re-workings and re-imaginings of the gothic…
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Is It Art? Is It Fake?

Did you know that the root of the word artifice is art?  Does that mean that all art is artificial?  Perhaps the great 20th century surrealist Rene Magritte illustrated it best with his painting, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” which translates as “This is not a pipe.”  In one simple statement, he shows that both…
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Fall Into Books…and TV

I love books...just as much as I love television. Sure, there is nothing better than curling up with a good book, but its also just as comforting to flop on my couch and watch a rerun of The Cosby Show. Just my luck fall TV programming is in full swing, and many of today's actors…
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A Tale of Two Mayors: Thomas Hoyne and Harvey Doolittle Colvin, 1876

Thousands of Chicagoans live on Hoyne Avenue, yet few know much about the man it was named after. Thomas Hoyne was a schoolteacher, a lawyer, Chicago’s third City Clerk, the first president of the Chicago Public Library’s Board of Directors, a U.S. Marshall and holder of numerous other public offices. He is perhaps most famous…
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