Results tagged “twitter”

With the way technology is growing, it's no surprise there are so many ways to keep track of things and we're no different. Here's a list of places you can follow us.

Just five games into his tenure, Bears GM Jerry Angelo rewarded quarterback Jay Cutler with a two-year, $30 million contract extension. The deal includes about $20 million in guaranteed money. Already under contact through 2011, the team now holds Cutler's rights through 2013. The Bears stopped short, however, of ensuring Cutler will retire a Bear -- he'll still be just 30 years old when his new deal expires. While his deal is nowhere near the six-year deals pushing $100 million that other young franchise QBs have received, if Cutler continues to put up numbers like he has so far, we have a feeling Angelo and Cutler will be making more deals in the future.

Last night, Kanye was scheduled to appear alongside Jay-Z and Rihanna on the premiere of Jay Leno's new show, but the host took the opportunity to bring Kanye out and talk to him about Sunday night's Taylor Swift Thunder Theft. Kanye's apology seemed as genuine as you can expect from him. And for the conspiracy theorists who still think it was staged, well...we can't blame you. We're suckers for conspiracy theories. The whole thing stinks to high heaven, but, as we pointed out yesterday, to pull off such a stunt would require a level of self-awareness on Kanye's part. So let's just blame Leno for slipping something into Kanye's drink on Sunday night.

The countdown to Homaro Cantu's big reveal of his "Disruptive Food" project currently stands at 62 days. Today, however, we're gonna give you another reason to follow Cantu on Twitter. More accurately, to sign up for the messaging service yourselves.

Rick Bayless has consistently been in the news in recent weeks. First, there was his winning Top Chef Masters and earning a $100,000 check to his Frontera Farmer Foundation. After two years of planning, today Bayless opens XOCO (449 N. Clark St.). Inspired by the legendary Churreria El Moro in Mexico City, XOCO is Bayless's tribute to Mexican street food: tortas, hearty soups, churros and chocolate. Anticipation among food media and foodies, not to mention the pared down, simple menu, has primed XOCO to be the Publican of 2009.

The Steppenwolf is on it. The Broadway musical Next to Normal took it to the next level. And now, The Playground Theater is bringing it to the stage. (We're talking about Twitter in case you were wondering.) The Tweet Life is an improv show that uses one guest's tweets as scene suggestions for the performance. Each week, a different twitter follower of @the_playground will be chosen as the subject of an original show. If you want to participate, follow @the_playground and @reply "I want in on #thetweetlife." The selected follower will receive two complimentary tickets to that week's show. If you're not on Twitter, we can't help you. Or just sign up.

God Bless The Onion. Especially for giving us this pretty brilliant take on parents and social media, which, now that parents are having to pay for kids to study Twitter, is only going to get worse.

We suppose if you can get sued for something you say on Twitter, you can pay thousands of dollars to study it in the classroom. DePaul is joining the social media fray by offering a class on Twitter this fall. Taught by the Trib's digital intern Craig Kanalley, is called, "Digital Editing: From Breaking News to Tweets." According to one report, the class description is:

Rick Bayless, who's probably the most Twitter-savvy chef out there, announced an opening date of September 8 for XOCO, his highly anticipated street-food centric restaurant at 449 N. Clark.

Ben Stiller tries to explain Twitter to Mickey Rooney. Hilarity ensues.

Today is a bummer of a day for 90,000 students across Chicago: the school year has begun. 132 schools across the Chicago Public School System are on the system's Track E schedule which is a year-round calendar. The students on Track E still have the same number of school days of other students but instead of the typical 10-week summer vacation, they'll have shorter breaks several times throughout the year. Chi-Town Daily News has more on the evolution to the year-round schedule.

It seems as though everything Stephanie Izard does these days is becoming one long advertisement to the impending opening of the Drunken Goat. And they're all cool endeavors. But this Le Cordon Bleu online cooking demonstration with Izard sounds really cool, even if it's also being tied in to promote the release of Julie & Julia. Izard, a Le Cordon Bleu program graduate from the Scottsdale Culinary Institute, will be making Beef Bourguignon and Chocolate Chiffon Pie, inspired by the film. The demo can be streamed via uStream and discussion of the demo will be live via Twitter at twitter.com/LCBSchools (hashtag your tweets #LCBJulia to join in on the discussion). the demonstration starts at 1 p.m. tomorrow. (h/t Colonel Tribune)

Our pals over at Gapers Block uncovered a site called Wooxie (and also win for "best headline"), a locally-based Twitter competitor that takes the concept a few characters longer. It looks...exactly like Twitter. While we're all for local businesses making good, we're guessing the striking similarities between the two interfaces could eventually lead to a cease & desist order.

Since the last football season ended, Twitter has become the next hot thing on the internet. NBA players made news during their season for tweeting during games, and Shaquille O'Neal is perhaps the most engaging athlete on Twitter. Now that the NFL teams have hit camps, who tweets in the NFL is now news. The Sun-Times' Mike Mulligan fills us in on which Bears are on Twitter, including Tommie Harris, Greg Olsen, Matt Forte and Devin Hester.

Twitter no-no's have been all the rage this week. First, there was the local woman who was sued for defamation by her property company and now it appears as if U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, who recently announced his campaign for U.S. Senate, may have violated some military rules via his Twitter account. Kirk, a Naval Reservist, is under scrutiny from The Capitol Fax for a pair of tweets that went up on his campaign twitter account while he was on active duty and may have violated rules. He revealed his location, which violates military rules, and because the twitter account is part of his U.S. Senate campaign, he may be in trouble because military rules prohibit certain political activities while on active duty. A Kirk spokesman told Rich Miller at Capitol Fax that it wasn't Kirk but rather a staffer who posted those tweets on Kirk's account. The Navy told Miller they are, "going to be looking into the matter.” [via ChicagoNow]

An uptown woman is being sued by the real estate company that owns her apartment for a defamatory tweet the woman put up on her public Twitter account. Amanda Bonnen allegedly tweeted on May 12, "Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay." Now Horizon Group Management says that statement has caused harm to their reputation and they're suing for more than $50,000 in damages. [CBS 2]

Dan O'Neil, brother of The CTA Tattler's Kevin O'Neil, keeps us posted on some changes he's making to CTA Tweets, his CTA alert Twitter feed. Check out his assessment of the original project and how he's working on improving it with your help.

Remember Current's first hilarious take on Twitter? Now they're back with a follow-up that looks at the spate of celebrity Twitter accounts. [via Sun-Times]

It's a good day if you're tired of higher taxes. WBEZ reports the Cook County Commission has just voted 12-3 to repeal last year's one percentage point sales tax increase. The three votes against the appeal came from William Beavers, Robert Steele and Jerry Butler. Even more eye-opening is Tony Peraica's Twitter feed which featured the following tweets from the Commission's meeting:

Want some challenge in your recipe and have given up on the Alinea cookbook? Try the Twitter Cookbook: recipes in 140 characters or less. The info on the page reads: "Tiny recipes condensed by @Maureen. Serves 3-4. Delicious ideas from all over the world." Maureen has kindly added a cookbook glossary in case you are confused by things like "mix 2lb/kg chickn/20whlclvgarlic/t." We like things that are miniature, but typically prefer a little more direction when it comes to recipes so we scoured the tweets for an easier recipe to increase our chances of success and found this:

• The "world" (well, 30,000+ followers at least) is awaiting Oprah's entry into the Twitter universe as the talk show queen will "tweet" for the first time live on her show tomorrow morning. Prediction: it will be something about french fries.
• Speaking of fries, an elderly Naperville couple traveling back home from their winter place in Arizona stopped for lunch at McDonald's in the middle of a wind storm, and the restaurant's giant sign blew over and landed on their car, crushing them.
• Tupac's got nothing on Al Capone -- more than 60 years after the infamous gangster's death, a song Capone wrote while in prison at Alcatraz is being recorded and released by a group of musicians. "Madonna Mia" is going to be the best $.99 we've ever spent on iTunes.

We love the Brew & View. The combination of a cheap ticket, plentiful beer, a movie that's been around the block a few times, and a slaphappy audience willing to jeer whatever's showing can be lots of fun. We still have fond memories of Brew & View's screening of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, which generated endless audience commentary on Angelina Jolie's lips ("Be careful, they'll swallow you alive!")

There’s something a little irritating about the word 'Twitter.' Maybe because we hear it 10,000 times a day. Chicago is, after all, ranked third on the Twitter Cities List. And the adoration of the real-time messaging service has reached a fever pitch. Politicians doing it while in session, cable networks going ape shit over it, media moguls chronicling their craps.

Yep, seems about right.

Either this is a genius move or a case of Twitter going meta, but the Publican started serving brunch today and both Paul Kahan and his publicist Ellen Malloy have been twittering the entire service. This has only served to make us more hungry as out 1 p.m. brunch time nears.

Ah, technology. Is there anything it can't do? Aldermen on Facebook and Mayor Daley on the YouTubes? What's next? How about a Cook County Commissioner on Twitter? Better yet, how about a Cook County Commissioner on Twitter who "live-tweets" board meetings? Thank goodness for Tony Peraica, who has taken to Twittering the board meetings using the "#cooklive" hash. You can check out Tony's Twitter here.

So over here at Chicagoist, we’re constantly online, playing with social media instead of doing household chores. Since we’re so obsessed, we sometimes come across things that make us scratch our collective heads. Such was the case this evening. We searched “Chicago” on Twitter, to add one or two new voices to the constant twittering thrum.

In an effort to keep riders up to date with delays and announcements, the CTA Tattler has initiated CTATweet, an unofficial Twitter site to enable CTA riders to share alerts including reroutes, stoppages, and other CTA-related issues immediately with other riders. Given the CTA's tendency to randomly shutdown or reroute buses without much notice to riders, this sounds good to me.

WBEZ's experimental user-generated Vocalo station has a Twitter feed. And they want to hear from you! Badly!