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Friday, March 29

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Fuel

Andrew / February 7, 2008 10:18 PM

Question suggested by Ben.
Got a question for Fuel? Send it to inbox@gapersblock.com.

freepy shwirtel / February 8, 2008 12:08 AM

I once looked up from my computer, which faced a window, to see a very very angry man across the street glaring at me. I think he thought I was staring through his window while I had been looking at my computer screen for an hour. So then I tried to focus on the screen some more, just minding my own business while he raged every time I raised my glance.

anthony / February 8, 2008 12:37 AM

I watched a man run out of an ice-cream shop followed by another man with a gun. The first man ran into a parking lot while the shooteer got down on one-knee and began firing. Thankfully he never hit the guy but the interesting part was that the guy held on to his ice cream cone while he ran. Maybe it was just instinct?

r / February 8, 2008 1:11 AM

I've seen people doing it hardcore in a car that was parked on a weird side street near my place. When going by houses, I've seen people watching TV. Cars are sexier than homes.

maardvark / February 8, 2008 1:22 AM

My freshman year of college, I lived in a room on the attic floor of the dorm. Our window was a skylight-ish sort of thing, which could be swung open, and which let out onto a narrow crenelated ledge. There was also a tree whose limbs extended onto the ledge. Anyhow, one spring afternoon I had the window open, and I was studying to a CD of Chopin preludes. When the CD got to the Raindrop Prelude, I looked up, straight into the face of this squirrel, who was sitting on that ledge right outside my window. He saw me. But he just sort of sat there quietly, with his head a little cocked. Didn't move an inch for the entire duration of that track. When the Raindrop Prelude ended--I mean, literally, a half-second into the silence after the reverberation died down from the last note--he turned and scampered off. THAT was a squirrel with taste, man.

David / February 8, 2008 8:59 AM

Up in Evanston a number of years ago, a few friends and I were walking down the sidewalk at night. We were walking past an older group of apartments, and I happened to be the only person who glanced at the right place at the right time...

to see a fully nude Alfred Hitchcock impersonator (I assume) looking contentedly out of his window, just gazing out into space.

Yuk. By the time the thin film of horror had worn off, and I started freaking out and telling my friends, he was gone. Which was probably best for all concerned.

flange / February 8, 2008 9:40 AM

the last girl i dated, it was more interesting to stare out her window than to peep in.

(i don't look like alfred hitchcock, though.)

JohnnyQ / February 8, 2008 9:48 AM

Lots of schlongs and boobies. But I prefer seeing sunbathing cats or dogs with wanderlust.

Mucky Fingers / February 8, 2008 10:38 AM

I once saw an old man sweeping his kitchen floor naked.

Fernie / February 8, 2008 10:59 AM

Years ago, my boyfriend at the time lived above a rough bar. One night we looked out the window to see a drug deal going down. The female seller pulled out a gun and set it next to her on the console while business was transacted.

james / February 8, 2008 11:52 AM

Looking out the window into an alley and parking lot behind a row of townhouses, a car parked and two guys got out and headed toward the nearest house. One of them had a shotgun. Then they went out of my sightline. I always wanted to know what happened. Maybe they lived there and just happened to have a shotgun with them wherever they'd been. But I doubt it.

yep I am that asshole / February 8, 2008 12:13 PM

PEEKING.

Not PEAKING.

(as seen on front page)

Ben / February 8, 2008 12:19 PM

As the original question suggester, let me just state for the record that I know how to spell "peeking.' (GB wrote the headline.)

I guess my answer here would be the guys in HazMat suits going into the schwanky little hotel across the street from my apartment in Lakeview, in order to dismantle the meth lab that had apparently been set up in one of its rooms.

Yikes.

annie / February 8, 2008 1:51 PM

This is more sweet than interesting. About 18 years ago I was an 8th grader and (don't ask) an altergirl and I volunteered to serve Christmas Eve Midnight mass. My dad was supposed to pick me up after mass and he never made it. Turns out, he passed out...I mean fell asleep on the couch. So I walked and I saw several moms and dads putting presents under the tree in their nightgowns and robes. It was my one true Norman Rockwell experience.

sarah / February 8, 2008 2:54 PM

While sitting on a fire escape in my old apartment in Boston, I watched a naked guy across the street get up from a nap and check out his ass in the mirror. Then put on boxers. Check out ass. Put on jeans. Check out ass. Put on shirt. Check out ass. Put on baseball hat. Check out ass.

I always wondered if he had a hat in the closet that actually made his ass look big.

printdude / February 8, 2008 3:00 PM

Real-Life driving in the manner I have only seen in Grand Theft Auto:
Backwards at 50 MPH, with a gunman out the the passenger window. Shots fire, then a 270º turn, (perfect!- how do you practice that?) then forward at 75 MPH, with a screeching halt, then running with shots fired during a foot chase.

Then the cops came and there was an ass-beatin'.

Gotta the love the Hum-boulevard!

Steven / February 8, 2008 3:29 PM

Once while riding Amtrak's Pere Marquette through the south side, I glanced out the window to see a flock of about a dozen brilliantly colored green birds flying next to the train. Then they were gone. I had caught a glimpse of Harold's Parakeets and suddenly, Amtrak didn't seem so bad.

peta / February 8, 2008 3:33 PM

A kestrel sitting on my balcony railing in the winter time. He stayed a long time.

A fire in a neighbor's kitchen. I saw the flames in her window while looking through our window, yelled to my mom, and she ran across the street to help.

Andrew / February 8, 2008 3:57 PM

"Peaking" is apparently a spelling blindspot for me. It's fixed.

corinna / February 8, 2008 4:08 PM

My college dorm was one of two towers with floor-to-ceiling windows set at a partial angle to one another. I was (am) a gossip and my roommate birded and owned binoculars.

Then I observed a friend-of-a-friend show up at 2 a.m. in the room of a guy I'd been trying to date. Shortly after the light was turned off. That cured me of my binoculars obsession.

Spook / February 8, 2008 4:41 PM

Well one day I looked out the window and there was Soulja Boy doing Superman "Crank Dat Superman Hoe", I'm not sure where the music came from?

Then when I was young back in the 80's I looked out my window and their was Micheal Jackson dressed as a zombie with 500 zombies doing a final run threw for the video Thriller!

kate / February 8, 2008 5:00 PM

At 5 am one late Saturday/early Sunday, 3 friends and I watched one friend's neighbor jerk off to a swimsuit catalog online.

Leelah / February 8, 2008 5:48 PM

I saw an attractive 20-something Asian girl sitting at her computer screen pick her nose and then eat it. I screamed to my friends, and they saw it when she did it a second time.

Mikey / February 8, 2008 7:40 PM

I thought for sure Spook would recount some grave act of social injustice he witnessed that nearly brought a tear to his eye (i.e. police brutality at the hands of Chicago's Finest, an alderman taking a bribe from a greedy condo developer in a gentrifying neighborhood, drunken Lincoln Park frat boys laughing maniacally while pissing on a ghetto baby, etc.)...

Clint / February 8, 2008 11:22 PM

Two things:

A Saturday night, and a car full of middle-aged women stops in the alley right under my winder. They hop out and one at a time, lift their skirts to pee.

The second is better: Harold's parakeets, already mentioned, gathering in the tree right outside my bedroom window last November to eat the berries before the first freeze. I'd thought they were a myth until they came to visit me.

What the..... / February 8, 2008 11:35 PM

I once looked out my window and saw a naked guy "going to town" with himself... (so to speak)
...then I realized it was my own reflection....
I'm not sayin' I'm just sayin'.....
shucks it could happen to anyone....it could....right..??

amw / February 9, 2008 5:39 PM

a woman getting car jacked by a dude in a suit & tie. okay, so maybe it was her ex-husband, and maybe the car was his, and maybe she's bad in the sack, but still!

graumach / February 10, 2008 12:35 PM

Sex & violence seems to be the common topic. Okay, then...

I remember looking out my living room window once and seeing my neighbors going at it. Thing was, the way they positioned themselves right in front of the window, I'm like 95% certain they had intended to put on a show. It definitely seemed a little, um, staged, y'know?

Funny: Driving past the graveyard between Evanston and Rogers Park, I saw a car approaching very slowly in the other lane. As it got closer, I saw that there were two scrawny brothers in the front seat. The driver had his companion by the collar with one hand, and was furiously punching him in the head and face with the other. I assumed that he must have been steering with his knees.

Frozen / February 10, 2008 3:26 PM

Hey GB,

What's with the weather info on your home page? Have you been outside at ALL today?

jp / February 10, 2008 4:12 PM

The night before the Bar exam, my friend and I stayed at a high-rise, Streeterville-area hotel within close proximity to the exam location. We were totally stressed and trying to get our minds off the exam and looked out the window to see the back of the blonde head of a woman (presumably) on her knees blowing an older-looking guy in the high-rise condo building directly across from the hotel. Weren't there curtains, you ask? Yes, there were, and they were proudly pulled back to ensure a clear view into the room. It definitely took our minds off of the exam.

Andrew / February 10, 2008 5:27 PM

@Frozen: That's Friday's weather. We update it manually, and usually skip it on the weekends. Sorry.

Elizabeth / February 11, 2008 4:01 PM

I haven't seen anything weird, but I caught a bunch of construction workers on the roof next door watching me bathe.

I thought my window was high enough that I didn't need to obstruct the view, but man was I wrong.

jill / September 29, 2009 5:38 PM

looked out my window in the afternoon when I got home from school and saw a guy in his mid 20s walking around his room naked and then started to jerk off on his bed. I have to say he had a really big one!!

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