5 posts tagged “chicago”

So, NewCity, one of the alt.weeklies in Chicago, has a feature this week on the "Fame 150," the most famous people in the city. Their methodology? Google hits.

A sampling of results:

1 Oprah: 34,400,000
2 Kanye West: 5,300,000
3 R. Kelly: 4,390,000
4 Michael Jordan: 4,370,000
...
27 Jeremy Piven: 1,020,000
28 Jeff Tweedy:    997,000
...
43 Brian Urlacher: 535,000
44 Studs Terkel: 526,000
...
71 Richard M. Daley: 279,000
72 Charlie Trotter: 275,000
...
113 Christie Hefner: 103,000
114 Al Jourgensen: 101,000

So clearly, I'm one of the 150 most famous people in Chicago too! Bow down before my relative importance!

*Of course, not every one of those results is for me, but how many of #134 Liz Ryan's 134,000 results are actually for the founder of WorldWIT and not the no-doubt dozens of other Liz Ryans in Chicago? Do you think NewCity actually counted? For what it's worth, if you add "+ Chicago" to a search of my name (their method for narrowing results for common names like Liz's) you get 10,500 results, which would take me out of the running, but would also eliminate a lot of valid references, too. So whatever.

What's your favorite restaurant?

Sushi Mike strikes again

I of course have two.

One is Tanoshii, home of the amazing Sushi Mike, whose handiwork you see to the right. Some of the best sushi I've ever had, and I've had a good amount of sushi. He's very creative and experimental, and most of his rolls require  (and in fact he specifically requests) no soy sauce.

Sushi Mike is the kind of chef who inspires a cult following. He's had some disagreements with his silent partner (the guy with the money) and has talked about closing Tanoshii and opening his own place; if he does, you can bet a huge portion of his dining audience will follow him.

onion paratha at Bhabi's Kitchen

The other is Bhabi's Kitchen, a block over and a block up from our house. When we had no kitchen for six months last year (due to a kitchen renovation gone terribly over deadline), Bhabi's was our surrogate kitchen -- we ate there at least three times a week. Mr. Syed and his wife know us by name now, and we've grown accustomed to his stories of his many jobs prior to the restaurant, each more surprising than the next (gold trader and beauty pageant dress designer among them). The food is delicious, made fresh when you order it.

Their specialty is breads: they make more than a dozen types of naan, paratha and chapati, some with fillings like potato or beef, others made out of grains such as millet. I usually order an aloo (potato) paratha with my meal. Among my favorite dishes -- I've yet to have a bad one -- is the butter chicken, chunks of chicken simmered in a tomato-based sauce with just a hint of spiciness. Other faves include the haleem, the chicken briyani and the fish pakoda. Bhabi's will be featured on the new season of "Check Please!" so hurry in before the crowds get awful.

El Boton in Time Out Chicago

A little press for Naz and my side project. Woohoo!

(Photo by Naz.)

In case of dinosaur, hide in museum.

run from the dinosaur!

Cinnamon and I went to the preview party/presentation for Vox here in Chicago. It was at the MCA, and a serious storm followed our train downtown from the north, so we ended up soaked as we walked inside.

Mena Trott explaining Vox to the crowd at the Chicago preview party.

It was quite the meet and greet: folks from Feedburner (who helped organize the event), Time Out Chicago, Chicagoist, Gapers Block (of course), the Tribune, Ron May...

After a couple of rather strong drinks (blue martinis, all booze) we listened as Mena gave a brief overview of the service and answered some questions from the crowd. I'm excited to see the planned integration tools 6A has in the works, and was intrigued by Vox's ability to set permissions on each portion of a post -- I could make these photos only viewable to friends if I wanted. It'd be great if you could also set permissions on blocks of text within a post, so I could make asides to friends inline.

(I was also excited to hear they're adding a Chicago skyline blog template.)

Talked a bit with Scott and Mena afterward. We're reaching the limit of what we can do with MT for Gapers Block -- it groans at every rebuild and regularly throws up server errors when we post to Merge, which contains several thousand posts. We've been talking casually about building a custom CMS in Django to fix some of those issues. Mena mentioned that they released an MT update last week that may address some of those issues, and I asked her and Scott to keep us in mind for any beta testing of future versions. We'll see.

Mena explains Vox to the crowd.

The great thing is I haven't spoken with Mena since SXSW three years ago, and before that only when she and Ben came here for a presentation at Seabury before they even had funding, yet she still remembered who I was and what I did. She remembered Cinnamon on sight, and told her she still loved the bag she made for her (and chastized her for not saying hi at southby this year). It takes an incredible mind to remember details about people years later, and it seems to be a talent that politicians and CEOs share. It's part of their job, I guess. Still, I wish I had it: I can remember people I met once years prior -- I recognized Mimi Smartypants from the train despite having never actually met her -- but I sometimes can't remember the names of close friends.