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Eight Stories You Might've Missed This Week

By DNAinfo Staff | September 19, 2014 7:37pm
 From Kanye to barbecue on demand, our staffers pick some of our favorite stories of the week.
From Kanye to barbecue on demand, our staffers pick some of our favorite stories of the week.
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DNAinfo

What did you miss this week? Our staffers bring you some of our favorite stories of the week, from a possible Kanye appearance to a barbecue hotline and urban chickens...lots of chickens.

• Who's the mystery headliner at Sunday's Aahh Fest at Union Park? Informed speculation points to Kanye West, who is involved in Donda's House, a charity named for his mother that is benefiting from the festival.

• Hungry for ribs? Dial up some barbecue from Husky Hog BBQ. No joke: the popular food truck and restaurant has a hotline for barbecue on demand.

Hungry patrons can call the restaurant at 773-442-2769, triggering Joe Woodel and his crew to smoke your ribs to order — just tell them the time you'd like to pick 'em up. Prices vary, but they're generally $12 for a half-rack and $24 for a full rack.

"It helps me control costs but for the customer, I can smoke them just for that person. That way they're getting the best of the best, the best of what I can do," he said.

• This year marks a century since World War I broke out, introducing horrific new forms of warfare and traumatizing Europe. The Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., is hosting a photo retrospective of the Great War.

The traveling exhibition features photos commissioned by Anne Morgan, the daughter of American banker J.P. Morgan, to document the work of the agency she founded to help rebuild France during the war and its aftermath in the early 1900s, the American Committee for Devastated France..

Take a tour of the city's urban chicken coops this weekend. Some city farmers have more than just chickens. In Albany Park, Eric Staswick and his wife take care of 12 garden beds and 10 chickens — plus four ducks, 7 goats and 20 quail, which he said "sounds like a lot more than it is."

The public can get a glimpse of just how active the Staswicks and their backyard crew are during the fifth annual Windy City Coop Tour on Saturday and Sunday, organized by the Chicago Chicken Enthusiasts and the nonprofit Angelic Organics Learning Center.

Homeowners from Edgewater to East Garfield Park will open up their yards and coops housing chickens and other creatures from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. It's a free, self-guided tour. For more details on the 29 locations, click here.

• Zeke Upshaw was one of the first Chicago Lab students to score a Division I basketball scholarship when he landed at Illinois State University. Now the Bronzeville native's taken his talents to Slovenia, where he suits up for KK Helios Domzale.

Upshaw hopes to continue his basketball dream for as long as he can. A possible career in the fashion industry awaits if hoops doesn't work out.

• Chicago Public Schools says it found no evidence of bullying involving the death of Peirce Elementary student Mckenzie Phlipot, who committed suicide in May. There was widespread speculation about the role of bullying in her death.

Mckenzie's family and friends have criticized the CPS investigation as incomplete.

• Four men are charged in the shooting death of 9-year-old Antonio Smith last month. Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said the men were hunting rival gang members and thought Antonio was warning the rivals when he was shot multiple times by Derrick Allmon. Allmon was released early from prison in August, after serving part of a 3-and-a-half year sentence on a gun charge, McCarthy said.

• Exposing your children to more than one language could be beneficial to their learning, University of Chicago researchers have found.

Psychologists at the university published findings in the journal Cognition this month that support the conclusion that kids exposed to other languages out in the neighborhood might be better than other kids at learning from people who speak other languages, even if they don’t fully understand.

“All of the babies in our study heard only English from their parents and caretakers, but they lived in neighborhoods where multiple languages were spoken,” said lead author Lauren Howard, a psychology doctoral student at U. of C. “Our findings showed that hearing those languages outside the home, for example at the park or on the bus, made infants more open to learning from someone who did not speak English.”

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