Week Around The Ists

Gaia comes to Chicago (Photo by TEFennell4 via Flickr)

Chicagoist was very visual-themed this week. Art Shay's weekly peek into his photography archives focused on his time in postwar Japan with the MacArthur Occupation. They found a map that, while not taking the lay of the land into consideration, did give some idea of how a tsunami the magnitude of the one that hit Japan could damage Chicago. Another map they discovered (for $600) was cut out from an exacto knife and one large piece of paper. A New York Street artist named Gaia left her calling card across the city. And, for St. Patrick's Day, the staff created a bingo game based on the cliche that "everyone's Irish on St. Patrick's Day."

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the ist-a-verse...

• Gothamist ran across the hipster trap—bike chain, Holga, American Spirits, PBR, sunglasses—in Williamsburg and then joined its creators in the next logical offering: Bridge and tunnel traps.
• Seattlest looked to the heavens to check out the super moon, welcomed a new restaurant critic, appreciated our local bus drivers in the form of haiku and pondered what, exactly, is the process for artificially inseminating an elephant.
• Bostonist prepared for two St. Patrick's Day parades on Sunday because it's apparently bad for veterans to oppose war. We learned that St. Patrick's Day in 2011 means you can buy a "Gaelic Empanada" at a local restaurant. Other new things in the Hub include a museum dedicated to the history of Massachusetts General Hospital.
• DCist successfully opened its fifth annual Exposed photography exhibit, but spent the rest of its time last week following a jaw-dropping murder investigation in normally-quiet Bethesda: last weekend, 30-year-old Jayna Murray and 27-year-old Brittany Norwood were found beaten inside a Lululemon Athletica store, with Murray dead -- but when police made an arrest in the case, the individual they took into custody was Norwood, who reportedly lied to the police about being sexually assaulted and had beaten herself after allegedly killing Murray.
• We had a lot to say about UCLA student Alexandra Wallace's anti-Asian video rant.