There were 7ish teams including Chef Matt and his Tardy Assistant (moi) entered as The Uncertainty Principle with a self-titled debut Chili.

Skirving killed it with 5 meats and a signature “Kick at the end.”

Please comment/like this post on Facebook and do what else you will what it as specified below. I am experimenting with a Public Domain Footer for my 2012 works, this is a re-mix of 1 I made in 2011 for the danoff dot org index. What do you think? htricker@yahoo.com @danoff @mrd 

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To the extent possible under law, Charles Jeffrey Danoff has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Chillin w/Chili & Chi CityChicagolandians. This work is published from: United States.

Please Kopimi, that is share and remix, this webpage.

The Official Chicago ZIne Fest Postcard Schedule. Image courtesy of Chicago Zine Fest

Starting this morning through dusk, Matt was kind enough to work with me at The Uncertainty Principle Table (#74a) at Chicago Zine Fest 2012. Together we watched hundreds of folks gather and shuffle by our table.

Zines are usually independently published print collections of prose, poetry, comics. Zines-fromlondonsymp07 by Mcld CCASA licensed and taken from the Zine Making Wikibook.

It would’ve been nice if even 1 of them stopped by to say hi …

jk. A good number of people stopped by, including a few folks who bought copies. More people paused to peruse an issue or two and more than that slowed before neither buying anything, nor reading a “zine drive-by” if you will.

Fun questions included:

• So what is this about?
• The Uncertainty Principle is a bi-monthly collection of creations on 1 topic: Women, Maths and Popcorn for example (I’d be pointing at the copies on the table as I was talking). To celebrate each issue we have a release party where Matt spins, we have more live acts, I do a reading and …
• What are the CD’s
• I’d naturally let our Resident Disc Jockey field those questions, we had his Cross Words and Live Hegemony CD’s on display, plus gave out free copies of “Uncertainty Principle Demo”.
• What is its connection to The Uncertainty Principle?
• I am not a physicist, but from what I know The Uncertainty Principle deals with objects being disparate and also having meaning together for brief periods of time and The UP has authors coming together around one topic, but taking it in their own direction.

Attendees, Zinesters (people who make zines and exhibiting them at a table), Staff (Leslie answered questions very helpfully & knowledgeably for me both online and at the event, now that’s customer service!) and Volunteers alike were all really friendly. I had no idea Chicagoland had so many zine publishers and that people would travel solely for a Zine Fest. Gentleman to my left, Tom of Zombie Soy Bot, had traveled from Pittsburgh and another group of female zinesters came up from Kentucky. I came away digging the culture and looking forward to a future zine event; look out Milwaukee!

I’m just a fan, but my take on the Concept is:

Late night TV show (e.g. Conan/Letterman/Carson) streamed live from a Chicago bar, with an audience of whoever walks in.

I’m biased because I like Ben, but I think it seems pretty frigging cool and I’m not sure why it hasn’t been done before. Went with Matt to tonight’s premiere and we watched as the show unfolded featuring star guest Hal Sparks. It was surreal to watch it streaming on the flat screens, turn to see Mr. Sparks actually talking to the host, and then see people looking up who Hal was on Wikipedia via their smart phones (and the sophisticated among them hopefully tweeting/denting as well) simultaneously.

If you liked this post, please peruse my other work on danoff dot org, learn in my Teaching Laboratory and buy my book. If you have ideas about what you read please leave them in the comments, tweet them to @danoff or  e-mail them to htricker@yahoo.com. Thanks for reading and in advance for your correspondence.

Note the eGen TV logo is their property. The text of this post is Copyright (C) 2012 by Charles Jeffrey Danoff licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.1 Japan license. I, Charlie, give you permission to republish, remix, kopimi, make millions off, or do anything else you’d like this work without permission as long as you attribute me and state the license.

Post-graduation I have submitted to two conferences on sports statistics, each of which has turned me down on the fair grounds that its not clear I’ve finished my research. Recently I have been taking notes about my big curiosity, “How to build an NBA dynasty” but have yet to make it into a formal research paper.

These ideas have been on my mind lately, because I am thinking about submitting work for the next Sloan Sports conference in March 2012. The internet gave me a helpful push on how linking basketball and econ can be done well (albeit not academically) via Malcolm Gladwell‘s first piece for Grantland “‘Psychic Benefits’ and the NBA Lockout“. I particularly like how he takes current economic theory and writes in a way that’s accessible to everyone.

In a recent academic paper, the economist Jonathan Lanning has also shown that almost without exception integration in the 1940s and 1950s had an immediate and significant positive impact on a team’s attendance — even in cities where you might not think the fan base would be enthusiastic. Lanning calculates, in fact, that almost no team in baseball had as much to gain financially from bringing in black players as the Red Sox, particularly since they were losing money in the 1940s. Yawkey’s bigotry left millions of dollars on the table.

as the years of not blogging have started to pile up, more and more of my thoughts are no longer online. Back in the day, I blogged nearly everything so giving someone my perspective on any topic required only that I copy/paste a URL into a chat window or an email. …  As I begin what is might be the biggest transition in my life in my new role as the Director of the MIT Media Lab, it seems like my blog would be a good place to document my thoughts through this transition.

He then links to an older post with blogging advice whose first tip is right up my alley. “1 – You’re probably stupid”

As I continue the exciting transition in my own life sharing more thoughts here would probably be wise.

Image Copyright (C) 2011 Ryan Yast. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Re-published with permission.

p.s. Jason (author of A Failed Entertainment & friend) is working on a cool website: My Free Concert, that lists free concerts and parties in NYC.

Had my 7th lesson at the Korean Cultural Center of Chicago, or KCCoC this morning. Worked our way through formal and informal telephone English again. Below is a video of the 5th lesson to give you more context about how we work. If you can’t see the video, click here to watch.

If you have any ideas to improve the lesson, please leave them in the comments or e-mail them to charles@danoff.org … We’re going to talk about formal + informal telephone English again next week, so if you have any ideas for example conversations, please share them.

On the note of what I was writing about yesterday, watched a documentary with Mom n’ Pop tonight about Vidal Sassoon.

Turns out it took him 9 years of study on his own to develop the geometrical skills necessary for the revolutionary 5-point cut.

Have a lot more nights at the desk if I’m going to get my businesses and writing to the place I want.

Vidall Sassoon Behind The Scenes, by Vasilios Sfinarolakis from the Wikimedia Commons. 2010. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licensed. It’s an image of “Recording tracks for the Vidal Sassoon Documentary with music supervisor David Spelman and Director Craig Tieper.”

or something to that effect were Jeffrey’s parting words for me tonight as he headed South for a night out in the Chi. He was commenting on my hopes for the evening: relax and get to bed early. I agreed with his sentiment then and now.

In fact, its exactly what I wanted to hear. Its what I need to be doing right now in order to reach my goals: be boring. It doesn’t mean I move back to Japan and become a monk, nor that I cease partying in Chicago and elsewhere.

What it does mean is that more often than I have been, I need to be boring, i.e. sitting at my desk and working. Just do it.

Tonight Dad and I watched 13 Assassins, which relates to this post in the sense that “true” samurai (or at least my interpretation of the movie’s definition) study the sword for life. When chosen for the film’s mission, many commented that they’d been training and preparing years for this opportunity.

Similarly, as I blogged about before, Warren Buffett worked for 6 years out of his house building his business. Furthermore bands are forced to toil in obscurity before the make it big, like OFWGKTA who started in 2007 and went 4 years hacking in LA before they got huge (and are coming to Chicago on Sunday).

Should also be noted that the majority of samurai, entrepreneurs and musicians never get a “big” opportunity for honor in battle, lots of profits or sold-out stadiums, and that some of those who *do* didn’t necessarily put the work in to get there.

Nevertheless, the point I’m trying to get at is that to reach my goals (i.e. make money via businesses I’ve started and have millions of people reading my prose) its time to be boring more often. DFW’s “late” book had some helpful ideas here too, according to one of his old classmates.

A good way for me to walk the walk would be by blogging here everyday.

Friday night Brad and Ali

Br-ali are the cute couple on my left, shots from a visit of theirs.

were happily married.

They were kind enough to invite brad’s scalywag homies from college.

Following a beautiful ceremony early Friday evening, the reception was at “Market Street” this slick venue with a massive indoor courtyard (avec skylight) where we ate dinner, then took heavily to the drink and dance floor.

A beautiful evening was followed by a beautiful day spent living like local Minnetonkans, out on the lake.

Time sorta melted away out there. As the sun did inevitably slip away, our captain (Brad’s boy Ian) conducted us to Filbert’s a tasty joint made even tastier that instead of a car parking lot, all the locals competed for spots with their boats.

Photographs (from top): Red carpet shot from the Entourage Weeknights Wandering Red Carpet’s Chicago Max Bar. Next photos from the wedding are courtesy and Copyright © 2011 Kevan Hayat. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Final shots courtesy and Copyright © 2011 Alex Moaba.