All right, so Bullz-Eye is doing their most off-the-wall giveaway yet. They are giving away The Essential “Weird Al” Yankovic, a two-disc retrospective of what can only be described as satirical genius. Three runners-up will receive the CD set, and one grand prize winner will receive the CD and…a five-minute phone call with Weird Al himself! Suh-weet!

Ah, but there’s a catch. This isn’t one of those contests where you just send your name in and sit by the phone. Nope, all entrants must provide a photo of themselves dressed as Weird Al. Happy Halloween! So break out your curly-haired wig and start mugging for the camera. But before you get started, take a look at the clip that Jib Jab put together of Al’s White Stripes-riffing homage to “Match Game” panelist Charles Nelson Reilly. Funniest clip we’ve seen all year. Giddy-up, Gene!

For more information on Bullz-Eye’s Weird Al Yankovic contest, click here.

*- Odds of winning based on the number of entries. And how much you already look like Weird Al.

Everyone’s favorite bald, bespectacled techno god is launching a US tour in support of his album Wait for Me, and as a means of getting the word out, Moby and LP33.tv have devised a plan where they will give away a pair of tickets to one lucky person in each city on the tour.

But here’s the thing: this is no ‘enter your name and sit back’ contest, no sir. Contestants must log on to Moby’s Facebook page and rate the videos on his player. They will rack up one entry for each video they rate, with the opportunity to rack up more entries for every embeddable video they host on a web page. (No word on whether all videos must be rated favorably, but since this is aimed at his most dedicated fans, odds are that will not be an issue.)

To see the contest rules, click here. Good luck, y’all, bodyrock y’all.

I lived here for ten years, so it should not surprise me in the slightest that things will not go according to plan when I pop into Midway. Even a transaction as simple as a receipt for some Combos would be easy…right? Wrong. The credit card-paying woman in front of me got a receipt with no trouble, while I watched the same woman that helped her hit an infinite series of buttons over and over, only to get the “beep beep” sound again and again…and again. I eventually let it go, thinking it was just a buck and change. I collected my suitcase from baggage claim and headed for the Orange Line.

There are multiple options for riders when you are looking for train passes at the CTA. I was looking for a five-day pass, but all I saw were three-day passes, seven-day passes, and the ‘give us all your money and it will never be enough’ passes. I reluctantly bought a seven-day pass, since I knew I had a hell of a lot of train traffic in my future, and to my benefit, I at least got a pass, which the person in front of me did not, because his transaction “timed out.” I asked the machine to print a receipt, and it said ‘Okay’…then did nothing. Damn, man. I paid for two extra days of travel, and you can’t print me a receipt?

Welcome to Chicago, kids. “The city that works.” So I took my seven-day pass and went to get on the Midway stop on the Orange line. Out of curiosity, I asked the woman at the handicapped entrance, “Did they get rid of the five-day pass?” “They sell those at currency exchanges and Jewel/Osco’s,” she told me, about 30 seconds too late. How convenient, I think. That would have required me to buy a pass to get on the train, get off the train, find a currency exchange or Jewel/Osco, buy a five-day pass, then reboard. Again, welcome to Chicago, the city that works…but doesn’t print receipts.

So I jump on the Orange Line train for my hotel, and the second the doors close and the train heads on its way towards downtown…there is an inescapable whistling sound on the train. It has nothing to do with the train’s velocity – it’s just…there. So even as I try to forget everything that has happened up to this point, the damn subway train is taunting me. “You didn’t get a receipt, sucker! Ha ha hahahahahahahaha!” To make matters worse, my wife texts me later in the day and says, “Sit down,” then tells me that John Hughes is dead. This, after I saw some guy tear around the Sears Tower (technically the Willis Tower, but sorry, it’s way too soon for that) in a convertible, which instantly made me think of the garage attendants from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” taking a joy ride with a similar car. Creepy.

Friday’s forecast: Chance of thunderstorms, high ’80s. Sorry, but the day after John Hughes dies, it should rain in Chicago. The entire world lost a brother, a son, a father, an uncle, and their best friend. I know that I’m supposed to be excited about covering a music fesitval, and I am…but damn, man, I just lost John Hughes. In fact, I just talked with English Beat singer Dave Wakeling, and happened to ask him about John Hughes, Man, this makes me sad.

BE: When John Hughes contacted you in 1987 and asked you to write the title track for his latest movie, did you think that you had just been touched by the hand of God?

DW: Well, that god had touched my hand a few months before. He came backstage in Anaheim after we played a concert. And as he shook my hand, he said, “Anybody who’s got the balls to put a bassoon in a pop record, and get it in the charts, is my man.” He was referring to the bassoon part in “Tenderness” [mimics bassoon line]. We became good friends and I went to his house a few times, and he’s got a wall of records, 50 feet long, 12 feet high. You could point to anywhere on it, and he knew exactly which record it was. Far more serious about music than I ever was, that’s for sure. It was before I had become computerized – and probably before a lot of people had – so we’d talk about this idea of “She’s Having a Baby.” We both had young children and we discussed the ways it makes things better and some ways it makes things worse, and the changes it brings to couples once they start having kids. And then we started writing each other, so I wrote the first draft of “She’s Having a Baby,” and I would send it to him, and he wrote back with suggestions, or angles, where he thought the movie was going. We wrote back and forth three or four times, which I thought was one of the most exciting co-writes I’ve ever done, really. Brilliant man. I don’t even know what he does now. Did he just retire, or what?

BE: He pops out a script about once every seven years. It’s weird. He pulled a Terrence Malick; he just disappeared.

DW: I wonder what he does. I’d like to see him. Is he a happy chap, or is he a reclusive type?

BE: I honestly have no idea. I know that I miss him.

Damn. If I only knew.

If you’ve been putting off plunking down the coin for a weekend pass to this year’s Lollapalooza festival – and at $205 a pop, we can’t say we blame you – you’re in luck. Bullz-Eye, in conjunction with Island Records, is giving away a prize pack that includes two weekend passes to Lollapalooza, a $100 gas card, an Island Records Zippo lighter, a USB charger, and a download card for the 50 most popular Island Records songs of the past 50 years. We don’t know what songs will be included, but you can bet that Bob Marley, U2 and the Killers will be in there somewhere.

To enter the contest, click here. The contest ends July 31. Good luck, and if you win, do yourself a favor and don’t miss the Kaiser Chiefs on Sunday. Their live set kills.

To coincide with Black History Month, our friends at Red Music have launched Red Urban Music, a new site that covers exactly what you think it covers: their urban artists. They just rolled the site out, meaning it’s not exactly swarming with content yet (a temporary problem, we assure you), so they did what all awesome web sites do in order to attract attention: they’re giving away cool stuff.

What kind of cool stuff, you ask? How does a digital camera, an iPod and a USB turntable grab you? If we weren’t forbidden from entering the contest, you can bet that we’d be going for that USB turntable so we can convert all of our old wax. Entering the contest will also net you some new tunes, so whatcha, whatcha, whatcha waiting for? Go here and get yourself a USB turntable.