By Jeff Balch “Three witnesses observed victim eastbound on Washington, passing Lorel. “Witnesses pursued offender to 5237 W. Lake, alley, where he was observed pulling bicycle from under vehicle.” “Truth is, this kind of thing happens a lot,” responds the Chicagoland O’Rourke participated in a memorial ride for McBride on May 2, 1999, a week after the incident. “About 150 people came, most on bikes,” he says. “Tommy’s family came. The ride went west from Daley Plaza to the 5300 block of Washington, where he died....

My friend Peter and I were driving home around two in the morning. I was at the intersection getting ready to turn, and people were coming out of My Bar as it closed. There’d been a Cubs game that night, and they were screaming “Cubs rule!,” stuff like that. A woman and her boyfriend standing at the corner shouted “Go Cubs!” and Peter, because he was drunk and stupid, yelled out “Cubs suck!...

On Wednesday they have domino night here. Dominoes is a pastime that most Puerto Ricans play. In fact, when you’re a kid the first thing you learn by seeing your great-grandfather, your grandfather, and your father is to play dominoes. It’s part of our culture. When families didn’t have money to go out, dominoes was a way to keep the family together–while mom was cooking that special meal, grandma and grandpa were showing you how to match those numbers together....

The T-shirt in Denise Mroczek’s closet with the big footprint on it was trod upon July 4, 1999, possibly by Rick Springfield. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The posters, which are fraying but were recently framed to ensure their preservation, gazed down at Mroczek the evening of August 1 as she clicked on www.rickspringfield.com. A frequent visitor, Mroczek, 33, likes to keep up with Springfield’s doings on the road, and there have been more since he emerged from the cocoon he went into shortly after the release of Rick Springfield’s Greatest Hits in 1989....

Regarding Deanna Isaacs’s Culture Club piece on Victoria Lautman [September 28], Ms. Lautman is without doubt toast. The pattern of the apparent martinet who has controlled WBEZ for the last few years is plain. Victoria Lautman has always presented an involved, dedicated, and passionate view of a diverse segment of art in Chicago. Very few reporters can make visual art work on radio, but she does. In recent months she has done a more than credible job of branching out into other topics and has been quite good as a substitute general interest program host....

[snip] Earth to Washington, D.C.: welfare reform has failed. Reduced caseloads in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program don’t mean success, notes the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in an October 7 press release–not when the Census Bureau reports that there was a marked rise in child poverty in 2003 and that “poverty and joblessness among single mothers increased significantly between 2000 and 2003.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

THOSE PEABODYS 7/18, SUBTERRANEAN This Austin buzz band is claiming its piece of the back-to-AOR action on its second album, Unite Tonight; the lesson here is that you can’t be afraid to be annoying if you’re going to try to sell this stuff straight. Bassist and front man Clarke Wilson has a scratchy squawk that sticks to the dueling Les Pauls like a patina of well-aged sweat. That is to say, this timeless trash sounds older than it is and is played with no perceptible irony....

A key scene in Drive By, an indie feature about gangbangers in Little Village, takes place under the el tracks just east of the Blue Line stop at California and Cermak. The hard-bitten Loco spies one of his fellow gang members consorting with someone from a rival crew. His gang, the Brotherhood, is under siege–targeted by other gangs, pressured by the police, and betrayed from within. Loco figures he’s looking at the turncoat and decides to shut him up for good....

What was a guy like me doing without life insurance? Forty-five, married, two kids, with home owners and car insurance, and health insurance for the first time in many years, but no life insurance. So I applied for a policy, which meant submitting to a blood test. My application was denied. I remembered the last time I shot up. It was 20 years ago, with my friend P., in January 1983....

On the cover of last year’s terrific Sad Girl (Diesel Only) Amy Allison sits at a bar, slumped forlornly over a drink. And inside, with a backing band called the Maudlins stirring up an elegant, detailed mix of pedal-steel-soaked country and blue-eyed soul, she laments her poor luck in love and her self-destructive habits with such vehemence that when she declares, “And it’s not just an act, it’s a matter of fact,” you believe it....

Friday 12/5 – Thursday 12/11 6 SATURDAY The Zen Buddhist Temple resurrected the quarterly magazine Spring Wind: Buddhist Cultural Forum two years ago because after 9/11 “we thought we needed to get Buddhist insight out to the public,” according to a spokesperson. Tonight’s Zen Buddhist Temple Holiday Auction will serve as a fund-raiser for the glossy black-and-white magazine, which is sold via subscription and at bookstores and health food stores around the country....

Friday 1/12 – Thursday 1/18 13 SATURDAY Local songwriter Frank Polancic spent five years and thousands of dollars attending scores of seminars, showcases, and networking events in Nashville, New York, and Los Angeles, where he “heard professionals talk about why some people get ahead and why some people spend their whole lives in small nightclubs.” But it wasn’t until he attended a seminar with Jai Josefs, author of Writing Music for Hit Songs, that he realized no one else was delivering the nuts and bolts of how to write good pop songs....

After years of toiling in the contemporary music trenches, David Robertson is now a regular guest conductor with major symphony orchestras and next season will start as the Saint Louis Symphony’s music director. Musicians like working with him, and audiences appreciate his precision. This program of rarely heard early- to mid-20th-century pieces plays to his strengths. He and the CSO will collaborate with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in a performance of Bernstein’s brief Prelude, Fugue and Riffs for clarinet and jazz combo, choreographed by Daniel Ezralow....

Ignoring the No Trespassing signs, Stuart Dybek parks at the end of an unnamed gravel road near I-55 and Western, then pushes through weeds and brush to the rocky bank that slopes north toward the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It’s a bright blue August afternoon, and soon he’s standing in the shadow of what he calls the “jackknife bridge”–the historic “Eight Track” railroad bridge. That bridge has made cameo appearances in many of Dybek’s stories and poems, most which are based on his experiences growing up as a second-generation Polish-American in Pilsen and Little Village in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s....

Cupid: Drawn and Quartered, Black Jack Productions, at the Cornservatory. Love is not only blind–it’s evenhanded, descending upon the freakish and the average alike. This evening of four one-acts explores love among couples on the peculiar side. Stephen Gregg’s The Sex Lives of Superheroes revolves around a blind date: Michael (Philip Winston) pines for a manipulative ex-girlfriend and delivers lectures to imaginary audiences on superhero sexuality while Elenor (Molly Hale) rewrites classic love stories to give them tragic endings....

Listings of holiday craft fairs, trunk shows, open studios, and special gallery events will run through December. Send information to artlistings@ chicagoreader.com. Check back for schedule updates or call for more information. Admission is free unless otherwise noted. Photos, drawings, and other work priced at $25 and up. Through 12/31. Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Sun noon-3 PM, Flatfile Gallery, 217 N. Carpenter, 312-491-1190. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Beyondmedia Education hosts a benefit auction and holiday sale featuring work by Michelle Peterson-Albandoz, Mark DeBernardi, Nicole Hollander, and others....

The steelworker’s son was in graduate school when he got the news. His father, who was a retired pipe fitter and millwright, had pain in his back. The doctors found black spots on his kidneys and lungs, and thought it might be cancer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His father turned out to be fine, but Bruno went on to interview his neighbors, friends, and coworkers–75 in all–who were retired and living in close-knit communities in and around Youngstown....

If Sara Davis couldn’t sing, she’d have had to figure out some other way to deal with the emotional ramifications of having a total hip replacement at age 31–write a memoir, rack up a massive telephone bill, mix Vicodin with gin. Instead she put together a cabaret show about her experience. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I’d tell them I’m writing a show, and the nurse is passing it on–‘She’s writing a play....

Chris Carter is sitting in a restaurant on Lincoln Avenue playing with our minds. He hands a book to my friend Sue and tells her to pick a word. Any word at all. Memorize it. Think about it. Now close the book. While he believes in ESP, Carter, 35, doesn’t claim to have psychic powers. “People can broadcast their thoughts in ways beyond words,” he says. “What I do isn’t really an ability....

As you might expect of a rapper who’s spent a good chunk of the past decade speaking at colleges, KRS-One tends to lecture his audience. As you might also expect, the audience doesn’t always appreciate that. After he chastised chart topper Nelly last year, the younger MC’s response (as a guest on Freeway’s “Roc da Mic”) was “You’re the first rapper to get a pension.” Thing is, it sounded less like a personal attack than a general kiss-off from the hip-hop world to its elders....