I’ve been scouring Craigslist for a place in Washington, D.C., where I’ll be moving in a couple of weeks. The nation’s capital is an expensive place to live, and apartments go quickly, so I find myself emailing hordes of strangers each day in hopes that one of them will have a roof that suits my needs, costs the right amount and becomes available within my timeframe. This process has led to countless hours online, a bout with carpal tunnel syndrome and some very suspect responses from property owners.

On Sunday afternoon, a few dozen people gathered at Champaign’s West Side Park to send a clear message to Rep. Tim Johnson, the Republican congressman who represents Illinois’s 15th Congressional District. The message: It’s time to prioritize legislation that addresses the causes and effects of global warming.

As development continues on a number of buildings in and around Campustown, the University of Illinois’s skyline begins to take new shape.

Among the construction projects slated for late-summer completion are the Urban Outfitters/office building at 507 E. Green Street and the Burnham310 residences on Springfield Avenue (both pictured).

If you go to Wikipedia and type in “Council of Chiefs,” what you’ll find is a very brief entry on a “non-profit organization that was created in honor of Chief Illiniwek at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.” At the bottom of the page, there are two suggested links: one to a site that hasn’t been updated since the mascot’s demise and the other to a Facebook group called “Save the Chief.”

Here’s how the group, which has 65 members, describes itself: “For everyone who thinks its [sic] extremely gay that they want to change our mascot to ‘THE ORANGE CRUSH’ or something else gay like it.”

After 15 years as one of Champaign’s prominent sports bars and billiards joints, Jillian’s has closed.

Employees got word on Sunday and by the end of the day Jillian’s had shut its doors for good. The “Champaign” link on the corporate website now leads to a blank page.

Jillian’s — a 20,000-square-foot space featuring pool tables, games and large TVs — was located at 1201 S. Neil Street, west of Memorial Stadium.

Forget about finding a quiet room with a comfortable bed.

If you show up at Urbana’s Holiday Inn tonight, chances are good that comfort’s the last thing on your mind.

At 8:30 p.m., Courage Fighting Championships 11 kicks off. There will be fighting in cages, fighting among men, fighting among women and fighting for the CFC national championship.

Courage Fighting Championships, the full-contact brainchild of Decatur’s Jason Reinhardt, is a breeding ground for talented mixed martial arts fighters looking to climb the ladder into the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the major leagues of ultimate fighting. This is an ascent that’s familiar to the 38-year-old Reinhardt, who’s been practicing martial arts since he was nine years old and who held championship belts in numerous mixed martial arts organizations before making his UFC debut in November 2007.

When Julian Burger takes the lectern at the University of Illinois tonight, he’ll turn his attention to one question: What’s the state of human rights in today’s world?

As the guest speaker at the 17th Annual Daniel S. Sanders Peace & Social Justice Lecture, Burger will deliver a talk titled, “After 60 Years of Human Rights: Is there Cause for Celebration?” Burger is well qualified to address this topic; he currently serves as the coordinator of the Indigenous and Minorities Unit at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which his based in Geneva, Switzerland. He’s also an internationally renowned authority on indigenous cultures and human rights.

Now that spring seems to have officially sprung, students at the University of Illinois are rediscovering the quad. More than a dozen organizations lined the walkway just outside the south end of the Illini Union this afternoon, and hundreds of students found places to relax in the grass. Look for temperatures near 80 for the next few days, but storms and chillier weather are just around the corner. Monday's forecast? A high of 48 and plenty wet.

Champaign-Urbana knows a thing or two about healthy writing scenes. After all, the University of Illinois is home to one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious creative writing programs as well as one of the nation’s leading journalism schools. A top-shelf literary magazine is housed here Ninth Letter and a recent National Book Award winner lives here (Richard Powers) and one of America’s most esteemed poets teaches here (Brigit Pegeen Kelly) and an authorial authority on U.S. media hosts a local radio show here every week (Bob McChesney) and — and the list could go on for pages.

But C-U isn’t the only writers’ haven in this neck of the woods. Tonight at 6:30 p.m. the Rantoul Public Library will host a local author panel discussion featuring nine area writers and a representative from Mahomet’s Mayhaven Press.

After a windy weekend rife with threats of snow (which never quite materialized), the weather is beginning to return to its springtime form. Still a little chilly, sure, but this morning's benevolent skies above St. Matthew Catholic Church in Champaign will usher in afternoon temperatures in the lower 50s. By Thursday, the thermometer will be climbing toward 70.

It’s 1939 and a small Polish village is overtaken by Soviet forces. A young boy, Wesley Adamczyk, along with his family, is taken captive, deported and sent to a series of brutal camps in Siberia. In the far reaches of a frozen and unfamiliar continent, they encounter everything from scorpions to communist double agents.

Adamczyk’s childhood was as difficult and unique as they come, and he will bring his story to the Urbana Free Library this Sunday, April 6, at 2 p.m. The author will read an excerpt from his memoir, When God Looked the Other Way, followed by a screening of Children of Exile, a documentary based on Adamczyk’s memoir.

In the early going of Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas Iscariot works himself to a boil. He’s come to recognize that the entire messianic enterprise that he’s hitched his star to isn’t necessarily a surefire success. In fact, it’s beginning to look like Jesus and his entire band of apostles might be on the verge of disbandment — even destruction — at the hands of the Roman power machine. Judas is scared. After Jesus ignores several of his pleas, Judas bellows, “All your followers are blind/Too much heaven on their minds/It was beautiful but now it’s sour/Yes it’s all gone sour.”

But to say that Judas and Jesus had merely an antagonistic relationship is to ignore the complexity of their friendship, says Matt Fear, who’s directing the Champaign-Urbana Theatre Company’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar at Champaign’s Virginia Theatre Thursday through Sunday.

The Fighting Illini women's softball team was set to welcome the Loyola Ramblers to Champaign-Urbana yesterday, but persistent rains caused Illinois's home-opening doubleheader to be canceled. The game hasn't been rescheduled.

The unranked Illini will have a few days to rest before they march into Columbus to face the 22nd-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes in Sunday's Big Ten opener. The doubleheader will begin at 11 a.m. and will be rebroadcast on the Big Ten Network starting at 5 p.m. Sunday.

The stretch of Springfield Avenue that runs through campus, between Neil Street and Lincoln Avenue, has never been about great heights. From Am-Ko to several-story apartment buildings to the regal but relatively low-lying Grainger Library and Uni High, Springfield has long been, to a degree, a vertically modest road.

But the Springfield landscape is changing with the erection of Burnham310, an 18-story residential structure on Springfield between Third and Fourth streets.

The Illinois men’s basketball team fell short in the Big Ten Championship game in Indianapolis yesterday, losing to Wisconsin 61–48. With the season over, Assembly Hall, which last hosted the men’s team on March 8 and the women’s team on March 2, has begun a hiatus from college hoops that will last until October. Next on tap at Assembly Hall: Cheap Trick and Joan Jett on March 28.

A few months ago, Louis Lefebvre and two other biological researchers published an article on kleptoparasitism, the act of snatching food that someone (or something) else has already gathered. Along with his colleagues, Lefebvre, who specializes in birds, constructs a scientific study that examines the ornithological equivalent of this question: Why did your buddy suddenly start stealing your Big Mac and fries rather than just getting his own? Is it because he's bigger than you? Was it the way he was raised? Is there simply no safe place for you to stash that fast-food feast until the bully has gone away? Or maybe because his brain's telling him there's an advantage to grabbing your goods?

Criminal law, finance, tenant rights and employee rights are the topics of a three-part series beginning this weekend at the Champaign Public Library.

Presented by students at the University of Illinois College of Law, “Know Your Rights: How to Deal with Cops, Money, and Your Boss” offers a layman’s guide to the legal snafus often encountered by members of the Champaign-Urbana community. The series, which begins this Saturday and ends March 15, will offer interpretations of basic laws as well as advice on how to handle common legal frustrations.

Back in July 2005, on an otherwise forgettable Thursday morning, a writer by the name of Oronte Churm sprung onto the national literary scene. That day, he turned up as a new columnist on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the web headquarters of University of Illinois alum Dave Eggers’ indie publishing empire. The title of Mr. Churm’s column was “Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University,” and he introduced himself like this: “I teach in the English Department of what I'll be calling Hinterland University, Inner Station campus. It’s a Big 10 school, with enough very polite (mostly white suburban) kids to form two or three infantry divisions in Iraq, which most will never have to consider.”

The article also included this disclaimer: “Oronte Churm in an obvious pseudonym.”

The new dorm at the St. John’s Newman Catholic Center at the University of Illinois has become a significant player in the campus skyline. Set to be completed in July 2008, Newman Hall now has 85% of its brick exterior complete and crews are currently working on the interior. “We lost a little time in the hard winter months,” said Mark Randall, director of advancement at the Newman Center, but he added that the project remains on schedule to welcome new students in August 2008. “We have more applications than we have beds,” Randall said. The official dedication ceremony will be held Sept. 6–7, 2008.

Thursday nights are wine nights when you’re wiling the evening away at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Sponsored by a rotating cast of local businesses (Bacaro, the Corkscrew, Friar Tuck, jim gould and Sun Singer) who know a thing or two about top-quality inebriants, the “Krannert Uncorked” tastings offer the opportunity to spend your happy hour sampling new wines and taking in some live music.

Tonight’s featured wines, selected and supplied by Sun Singer, all come from South Africa: a 2006 Bon Cap “The Ruins” white; a 2005 Bon Cap Pinotage; and a 2006 Bon Cap "The Ruins Red." Sips are free and glasses are available at a discounted price.

Local jazz ensemble, the Darden Purcell Quartet, will provide the music. The event kicks off at 5 p.m. in the lobby of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Goodwin Avenue on the University of Illinois campus.

Painting courtesy of Elin Pendleton

Students at the University of Illinois disappear into a foggy quad on Monday afternoon. After an evening of hail and ice, central Illinoisans woke to a quilt of fog that thickened as the day went on. Rain showers, thunderstorms and snow are in the forecast for the next few days.

Workers braved temperatures in the teens this afternoon to keep the construction moving at 507 E. Green Street in Campustown. The new building is set to house Urban Outfitters in its first two floors with five stories of office space up above. According to a representative at the University of Illinois News Bureau, the project remains on schedule and Urban Outfitters — as well as the university’s Office of Public Affairs and other occupants to be determined in the coming months — will be open for business by August 2008.

Something odd happens every year around this time. Longtime runners and newbies alike, all of them fully aware of the unfriendly temperatures lurking right beyond their doors, fish their sneakers out of the closet, tighten their laces and set out into the chilly air to cover miles of terrain by swift foot.

For many, this is more than the result of a valiant New Year’s resolution that — let’s be honest — is likely to wither away in a few weeks’ time; instead, this is the beginning of months of training for the 5k, the 10k, the half marathon or, the biggest of them all, the 26.2-mile haul known as the marathon.

The race of all races is the subject of Spirit of the Marathon, a documentary film by Mark Jonathan Harris, Jon Dunham and Gwendolen Twist that’s playing tonight only at the Savoy 16 movie theatre on Route 45.

Flurries continued to dust the University of Illinois campus on Tuesday morning, but snow will soon give way to another round of frigid temperatures. How cold is it going to get? Keep an eye on the university's Department of Atmospheric Sciences website for the latest.

Five years into his NFL career, Romo and his headline-hogging social life are far from the relative quiet of Charleston, Illinois, fifty miles south of Champaign- Urbana. In Charleston, which is home to Eastern Illinois University, Romo was a man known about campus for winning the Division I-AA’s prestigious Walter Payton Award after climbing to number three in all-time Ohio Valley Conference passing yards with 8,212. But despite his talents on the field, he was merely a solid player at a mid-sized college on the prairie, and the national tabloids cared little about what he did on a Friday night.

Twelve teams are in; 20 are out. At this time of year, when the mercury dips and the circle of competitors contracts, fans find themselves navigating that great expanse known as the human emotional landscape. For some, there’s relief (i.e., the Tennessee Titan fan). For others, there’s confidence bordering on hubris (i.e., the New England Patriot fan). And yet for others, there’s a sense of deep vulnerability (i.e., the Miami Dolphin fan, or the St. Louis Rams fan, or the New York Jets fan, or — well, you get the picture).

In the final installment of the Polite Power Rankings this season, we’ll devote the bulk of our time to the teams whose fans occupy the brighter side of that emotional continuum. These teams, of course, are the playoff contenders. Enjoy the January showdowns….

For Illinois football fans, it’s been a hard couple of years. But patience breeds reward — at least when you’re being patient with Coach of the Year Ron Zook’s Fighting Illini. The 9–3 team arrived in southern California on Christmas night, beginning a week of preparation (and vacation) before they face off with the seventh-ranked USC Trojans in the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl.

As you settle in front of your flat screen with a bowl of orange and blue nacho chips at your side, keep these five questions in mind. In all likelihood, the answers to these questions will play into the outcome of the game.

Saturday night promises to be the kind of night that any good football fan lives for: the family around, the weekend in full swing, Illinois’ Rose Bowl appearance just a few days off, and the chance to watch the New England Patriots (with a likely win over the New York Giants at the Meadowlands) sweep the regular season and solidify themselves as official front runners for the title of “Greatest NFL Team Forever and Ever—and Nineteen-Seventy-What?”

The Dolphins won, breaking a 14-game losing spree, and the Patriots also won, keeping their history-sculpting win streak alive. The local-favorite Chicago Bears made the NFL headlines this week as well, becoming one of many recent Super Bowl runner-ups to find themselves officially eliminated from the playoffs. Now is the time of year when fantasy leagues come to end and families full of football diehards abandon their holiday shopping to watch their teams complete the process of sinking or swimming. If your team’s still treading water, a telling weekend awaits.

If you count the guys on each team’s eight-man practice squad, there are currently more than 1,950 players in the NFL — and 19 of these saw their college action at the University of Illinois. Among them, Kelvin Hayden and Aaron Moorehead (both with the Indianapolis Colts) picked up Super Bowl rings in last year’s big show, and Jameel Cook (now a Houston Texan, but a former Tampa Bay Buccaneer) got his own hardware in early 2003. But only one active Illinois alum has two rings, and that’s New England Patriots free safety Eugene Wilson. Following an unflinching defeat Sunday over the Pittsburgh Steelers — viewed by many as the last hope to take down the Pats — the Patriots look well on their way to putting Wilson and his teammates in the history books as the first franchise to go undefeated in the regular season in nearly 35 years. And if all goes according to Bill Belichick’s plan, Wilson will have another ring to add to his collection.

Half-empty parking lots and darkened storefronts were the result of a massive power outage Sunday in Champaign–Urbana’s commerce district.

As of 1 p.m. Sunday, nearly all businesses and restaurants north of Marketview Drive were without power. The Market Place Mall was also affected.

Say what you want about luck or wobbly refs or divine intervention. The fact of the matter is that even the royalty of the NFL needs, on occasion, a little help from the opponent to keep a reign going. Yes, I’m talking about the Patriots vs. the Ravens. Sure, the Pats, facing likely defeat, came back like champions. But, in the final minutes, the Ravens (some of them, at least) played like men determined to lose. An ill-advised time out? Bart Scott’s double penalty of angry passion? The NFL cherishes its brutes, but it’s the players with the smarts that prevail in the end.

After last week’s Polite Power Rankings hit the virtual newsstands, a reader offered this advice: “Instead of profiling the top 16, you should do random teams throughout…. That way, if I’m a fan of a weaker team I can occasionally look forward to your coverage of my team.” My initial reaction was: What’s a Raiders fan doing in the middle of Illinois? But the truth is, sports fans migrate and they bring their teams with them, and in a university town full of transplants and transients, there just may be some Dolphins diehards looking for a fix. So each week, the Polite Power Rankings will profile the top five teams and a selection of 11 others from among the list.

If you’re free on a Sunday afternoon, stop by one of the so-called sports bars in town: Jillian’s or Buffalo Wild Wings or Billy Barooz or the Esquire. You may be surprised to find that Bears jerseys don’t rein supreme. Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Dallas, Denver — these cities and more have their representatives in Champaign–Urbana. But regardless of where they hail from, all fans want to know who’s good, who’s better and who’s best. And for these fans, we inaugurate the Polite Power Rankings.

In week ten of a disappointing 2007 season for the Bears, veteran Brian Griese suffered a sprained left shoulder that sent him to the sidelines and opened the door for a Grossman return.