A Sox fan would never stoop to this level... Cubs "fan" Scot Moore has decided that he's had enough with the North Siders and their continued futility, so he placed his baseball loyalties up for bid on ebay. The auction (#120313290200) no longer appears on ebay's site, but bidding reached $455 on Tuesday. The 30-year old Wheaton native, who currently lives in Minneapolis, says "I can't take it anymore. I get too invested." So he......

Today, as it's been noted, is my last day as editor of this fine site, and one of my last in Chicago. This gives me license for some seriously corny self-indulgence. This past Saturday was my eight-year Chicagoversary, and if I could tell my eight-year-ago self what fantastic times lay in front of her...I probably wouldn't, because advice from the future might scare her. But! The past eight years in Chicago, and the four-and-a-half since......

Who owns Chicago2016.com? Currently, MBA student Stephen Frayne Jr., who bought the domain back in 2004. But now the Chicago Olympic bid folk, whose website is currently Chicago2016.org, and the USOC are suing him, claiming the site belongs to them. "We certainly see Chicago2016.com as the logical default domain for our site, and we believe having someone else control it is misleading for people seeking information about Chicago's bid," said Patrick Sandusky, a spokesman for......

Margaret: Marcus, I'm having sort of an off day. Let us turn to the internet in search of wonder. Marcus: Margaret, I have a bad case of Vacation Tummy and a dwindling IRA fund, so I accept your challenge. Margaret: I am leading off with bear video: I love you, bear video Marcus: Wow, that's great. I wish there had been more "dudes wearing bear costumes walking around town" during the media's Katrina coverage.......

Millions of football fans have either drafted or will soon be drafting their Fantasy Football teams. As a way to connect with friends, possibly win some money, and as a definite way to kill time at work, it's no wonder that Fantasy Football has grown in popularity. And the web makes drafting and maintaining teams so damn easy! 9:30am: We're about 30 minutes away from our own Fantasy Football draft, which includes seven other sports......

Well, is it?......

Five people were injured, three seriously, when a car plowed into a crowd in a West Side alley last night. "The incident was sparked when someone in the crowd sprayed mace at the motorist, who then drove through the crowd, possibly twice." [S-T] Oh, no. Now that we know the New York Times has the game Set online we may be capable of waisting Chain Factor-levels of time in all new ways. Speaking of oh,......

Wordle is a sweet little applet that takes text and turns it into a word cloud. You can customize the layout, font and color scheme, too. We made this one with some of today's posts.......

If you haven't checked out the official blog of the Chicago Pizza Club, you're doing yourself a major disservice. Using the "where is the best pizza in Chicago" argument that has taken lives and broken families and marriages, the members of the club scour the city's far reaches with one simple goal in mind. Looking for some good pie. They've listed their favorites, not-so-favorites, ranked chain pizzerias and even have some out-of-town reviews, because the......

Wired's blog Threat Level has an interview with "Defiant" and "EBK," the hackers who took down Comcast yesterday. They say they did it because they hate Comcast. However they got in, the intrusion gave the pair control of over 200 domain names owned by Comcast. They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant's e-mail address; for the street address, they used the "Dildo Room" at "69 Dick Tard Lane." Baaaahahaaha. Feel......

Comcast.net was hacked last night (screenshot) to read "KRYOGENICS Defiant and EBK RoXed Comcast sHouTz to VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven." Comcast e-mail was down while the site was out of commission, but a company spokeswoman says no private info was compromised. [AP]......

Muckety, a relationship visualization tool, released its map of Chicago's 100 most connected people today. Fun! muckMapWidth="640"; muckMapHeight="502"; muckMapCtx="http://www.muckety.com/Java"; muckMapProps={restore:"E960D82A4AA91CF23562B2912296B3DC.map",autoGroup:"7,14"};......

Ayee. It's always something. Looks like Looptopia.com isn't working at the moment, which is great because probably no one wants to check it before they leave work or anything. (We're getting "please check back." Katie Scully got "this account has been suspended.") If you're trying to figure out which events to head to, these are our picks.......

Eighth grade students from Franklin Middle School in Champaign have written, produced, and acted in a short film about the effects of bullying. Part of an anti-bullying curriculum that will be instated by Franklin and other schools throughout the U.S. next year, the film shows some situational examples of bullying and its consequences, and hopes to make an impact on bullying by provoking classroom discussion on the topic. Bullying has gone high tech since the......

An Aurora teen was sentenced to 27 days in jail for posting what prosecutors called threats on his MySpace page. The 15-year-old East Aurora High School student agreed to a plea bargain today, having already served that time. He was also sentenced to 21 days of electronic home monitoring and a year of probation, during which he's only allowed to use the internet for homework. The teen's Feb. 17 post lists particular students he felt......

Have you been getting internal server error messages when you leave a comment? We have, too. But don't worry--your comment still goes through even if you get that message, so you don't need to send it again. Our crack team of internet ninjas are working on it. Pretty picture by Coma Toast......

Sumei Hu, the woman who disappeared from O'Hare on Feb 26, still hasn't been seen or heard from, but her husband Steven Frash went on Greta Van Susteren's show last night to explain--or, not really explain--what happened. Van Susteren: Prior to the 26th, when had you last spoken to her? Frash: It was like five days before that. She was going to her daughter to visit her daughter's house. And what she was going to......

Google unveiled a new chat status the other day: invisible. If you sign in as such, you can see your regular contact list of who's online, but they can't see you.......

When it's this cold and icy, the last thing we can imagine doing is sitting outside at a ball game. But spring will one day arrive, and we're sure some of you will want to spend time enjoying the nicer weather at Wrigley Field. Cubs individual game tickets go on sale on Friday at 10:00 a.m. CST, which means it's almost time for the annual tradition of calling in sick or hijacking unused computers throughout......

They say Shakespeare wrote over 30,000 unique words in his complete works and his vocabulary is estimated to be about twice that. The average person today knows roughly 12,000 to 20,000 and only uses a tenth of that. Thanks in part to the Internet, those numbers are fast becoming outdated. English has always been composed of a mish-mash of different languages and other words, and now Paul Payack, who runs Global Language Monitor (GLM), estimates......

Barack Obama swept the Potomac Primary last night, bringing his winning streak to eight, and eclipsing Hillary Clinton in the delegate count, 1,059 to 956 among pledged delegates. John McCain continued his march to the nomination, winning all three states and adding to his already substantial delegate lead. Mike Huckabee came close in Virginia, doing well in rural areas and losing the state by less than 50,000 votes. He vowed last night to stay in......

So's everyone else's, sucka. Research in Motion, the company that makes the way of life device, says a "component of the Americas network infrastructure" is broken, and they don't know when it'll be fixed. It's affecting all wireless carriers, so as much as we all love to curse a our various providers, this problem originates with RIM. Looks like you're going to have to send e-mails the old-fashioned way for the time being. [Bloomberg, AP]......

In our ongoing quest to bring you all things animal and Obama, we present Yes We Can Has, the perhaps inevitable hybrid of the Internet's favorite topics, hasing cheezburgers and Barack Obama. You're welcome.......

Here are some things going around town to make you consider giving the weather a big ol' raspberry. Internet: Still sad that Chciagocrime.org shut down? Interested in how do do your own Google maps mashup? Or do you just want to understand how hyperlocal mapping works? Then head to the Garland Room of the Chicago Cultural Center this evening at 6 p.m. where chicagocrime.org's Adrian Holovaty himself discusses how they work. Film: If John Sayles......

Photo by Lauri Apple "Internet," you say, "cure my case of the grumpies." Seek and ye shall receive, Chicagoist reader. Maybe that pooch above, whom photographer Lauri (aka Insomnia Jones) says is named "Fuggles," will do the trick. Or maybe the saga of a toast bandit who puts bread under the hood of people's cars will bring a smile to your face. We don't care if it's real--we're assuming it's not, actually--but what a......

"Simone de Beauvoir in Chicago, 1952" by Art Shay Last week's "Flashback" installment on Art Shay proved to be pretty popular with fans of the famed photographer. We made mention of one of our favorite Shay photos, snapping French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir au natural in "Nelson Algren's bathroom" from 1952. An Art Shay fan page linked to the post, which drew a response from Shay himself, clarifying some misconceptions of his......

Local internet guru Adrian Holovaty is pulling the plug on the much-beloved, much-used Chicagocrime.org. After February 15, the info trove will be no more; instead, it'll redirect to the appropriate parts of EveryBlock, Holovaty's latest venture. He writes on his blog, As we developed EveryBlock, we kept chicagocrime.org firmly in our minds — this new thing we were making had to be a superset, an expansion, a significant step forward. So there's almost nothing you......

When we found out about Make3D, we couldn't wait to give it a whirl. We tried it out with Pantagrapher's lovely bathtub planter shot, above, but Make3D doesn't work quite right on Macs (which is what I use). In any case, we still wound up with this pretty cool little movie:......

Photo by Ankylosaur Send good thoughts Roger Ebert's way tomorrow. He's having surgery again. [S-T] Mary Schmich is so desperate to write something poignant about the woman whose body was found in Lake Michigan she quotes the tagline from Shawkshank Redemption. [Trib] Internet genius Adrian Holovaty and co. have launched Everyblock, a magical local news aggregator for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. [Everyblock] Want to work for the state? Now they have a......

From the Trib's website a few minutes ago.........