The Nooner | Chicago news and beyond | December 12, 2011

The bees who make this delicious local honey could use your help.

The Nooner: Chicago news and beyond
In today's news: A runaway wedding dress

iPhone nabs robbers
Catching home invaders? There’s an app for that. A couple of alleged burglars were located using the GPS tracking application on one of the phones they stole. The two men have been charged in a three-stop robbery spree that included two North Side homes and one in University Village.  In each case, the men kicked in the door of the house and pistol-whipped the occupants, in one case herding three people into a bathroom at gunpoint.

Help the honeybees!
I’ve got a soft spot for honeybees. Really, who doesn’t (other than bee-allergic people, naturally)? So I’d like to bring to your attention the plight of the Chicago Honey Co-Op: They’ve lost the land where their hives have stood for eight years, and need to raise $20,000 in moving costs to get their bees settled somewhere new. You can donate to Co-op’s cause at the Crossroads Fund here.

Marina City: enviro-scrubber in the sky?
I love it when designers dream big. Paris-based Influx_Studio (yep, there’s an underscore in the name) has released a pie-in-the-sky plan to turn the Marina City Towers into clean-and-green eco-corn-cobs. The environmentally friendly retrofit would come complete with greenhouses, an algae bioreactor (to produce power), solar panels (ditto), carbon dioxide scrubbers to clean the air and rainwater harvesting. The result would be a totally sustainable building.

Runaway wedding dress
An Iowa couple had their wedding dress—and the car it was in—stolen when they came to Chicago to get married. But this past Saturday morning, two CPD officers pulled over a vehicle on the West Side and lo and behold, the wedding dress was still in the trunk. The wedding was the same day, but officers got the dress back on time, and the bride was able to wear “something borrowed” (by thieves) on her big day.

Whoa, exploded house
A probable gas explosion at a house in Skokie caused what looks to be the entire front of the house to basically disappear. Firefighters were called to the building, which was engulfed in flames, around 8:30 this morning. At least one man was injured in the blast; here’s hoping that he was outside the house, rather than in it, when the explosion happened. Sir, I am crossing my fingers for you.