There's a lot competing for your attention, between work, family and play, so our staffers picked eight stories that may have passed you by this week.
• Would you believe these images of Chicago were made with an iPad fingerpainting app? Lakeview artist Steve Connell traded brushes for pixels and produced a stunning series of nighttime paintings of Chicago landmarks, such as Wrigley Field, the Aragon, the Green Mill and Gene & Georgetti's.
He said the "Brushes" app allows for a painterly, loose style — without the clean up and expense of traditional painting. Connell can zoom in, move around and broaden brushstrokes.
"My joke is that I'm painting again like I did when I was 5," Connell said. "I'm coming full-circle."
• George Swirderski doesn't live in the Field Museum, but you wouldn't be crazy for thinking he did. The former Portage Park resident's Palatine home is a shrine to his taxidermy business and passion for big-game hunting.
Many of the hundreds of big-game prizes — including lions, leopards, bison, tigers, musk ox, grizzly bear, wolves, springbok, warthogs and fox — are ones he successfully hunted on expeditions all over the planet.
As for taxidermy: "I looked at it with great passion," he said. "My background in fine arts probably contributed to my success in this field. Always the goal has been to give as much life to the [animals] as possible."
• Acclaimed director David Lynch is helping women touched by Chicago's violence heal with a method called Transcendental Meditation.
The New York-based foundation that bears his name teaches T.M. on American Indian reservations, in prisons and schools, to homeless people, to former soldiers suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and to victims of war in Africa, according to the organization's website.
Recently, the David Lynch Foundation added to that list Chicago mothers living in the wake of a child's murder.
• Coming soon to Bucktown: "a neighborhood living room," in the form of a bar/bed-and-breakfast called The Leavitt Street Inn and Tavern. It's currently known as Mickey's Tavern, and four Bucktown couples have purchased the building with some big goals.
"It will be a community amenity, a neighborhood living room," new owner Teddy Harris said.
• Edgewater's Senn High School was once an educational backwater. But since the arrival of Principal Susan Lofton, the school has had a remarkable turnaround, and is now one of the top high schools in the city. This year it's seeing its largest freshman class in years.
Students like freshman Tom Ruby, who didn't get into a selective enrollment school, think they're better off at Senn: "I'm glad I didn't get into Lane [Tech], or whatever."
• Don't kill the messenger, but this winter could be the second coming of Chiberia.
• Now that's motivation: Angela Broadway learned to swim in January. Now, after losing 60 pounds, she's ready to take part in the Chicago Triathlon Saturday.
Broadway said she is ready for the challenge. She said exercising and eating better has helped replace her depression with confidence and helped her face her personal demons.
“This is what gave me life,” Broadway said. “When I went out and did my training, it lifted a tremendous weight from me.”
• Could Pullman be named a national park? That's what residents are pushing for, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he'd personally take the issue up with President Obama.
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