APRIL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two small houses that make up the Shugsep nunnery in northwest India are a haven for some 60 Tibetan Buddhist nuns who have fled harassment by Chinese authorities. But as more refugees have arrived, the damp, isolated buildings have become a leaky and overcrowded breeding ground for illness. To raise funds to build a bigger, drier nunnery, Tibetan Nuns Project directors Rinchen Khando Choegyal (sister-in-law of the Dalai Lama) and Elizabeth Napper (a Tibet scholar) have embarked on a nine-city North American tour this month....

Kristin Erickson (aka Kevin Blechdom) and Bevin Kelley (aka Blevin Blectum) studied music at Oakland’s prestigious Mills College, where the academic rigidity drove them to some serious silliness. In their duo, Blectum From Blechdom, formed in 1998, they applied their compositional smarts to puerile pop songs, often with scatalogical lyrics. While most electronic music uses sequencing software to keep the various elements in perfect sync, Erickson (who programs her own software) and Kelley (who manipulates samples) blend their sounds by ear, giving the music a decidedly unsterile quality....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In January the prime minister of Latvia, Einars Repse, complained that there was “too much foolishness” in the country’s government and announced the formation of an Anti-Absurdity Bureau to deal with it. The agency, intended to address the arbitrariness, disorganization, and laziness of the country’s civil servants, now receives about ten complaints a day, according to a newspaper in Riga, Latvia’s capital; though its office has only two employees, it has made 460 responses and referred seven cases to prosecutors....

This happened at another club with the same atmosphere. I was underage at the time. My friends and I wanted to go dance, and I set my purse on a table near us. I turned around for a moment, and when I swung back I saw a group of very large drag queens walking past and suddenly my purse was gone. I approached the bouncer and said, “I think it was the drag queens,” because they were in the right place at the right time, but I didn’t want to accuse anyone and start a fight....

Once Recited, Now Benighted Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate, is one of the more celebrated poets of our day and one of the wittiest. But Mella doesn’t see him as a writer of light verse. To Mella, light verse is poetry you both want to memorize and can. It probably rhymes. In his view, there was a “silver age” of light verse that began around the turn of the last century, and English poets such as Chesterton and Belloc and Americans such as Nash and Dorothy Parker figured prominently in it....

“I’ve taken more than one hit from a 270-pound boy,” claims Bea Zak. “Still kept goin’. I’m ready.” “We’re looking to fill about 23 spots,” says Force general manager Debra Walker. “About 140 girls expressed an interest in trying out. We had to cut it off at 60. It’s all the coaches can handle.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those who don’t make the cut will have to wait for the next tryouts, or until another women’s team comes to Chicago....

Regina, the protagonist of Marc Blitzstein’s eponymous 1949 operatic adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes, is a coldhearted southern schemer who plots against her greedy brothers and watches her husband die when she could save him by calling a doctor–unless she’s a strong-willed protofeminist with the courage to buck the patriarchy. Whether playing the coquette with an old beau or spitting verbal venom like “I hope you die soon,” she’s one of the most riveting characters in American musical theater....

Just 90 miles southwest of Chicago and a mile south of Starved Rock State Park is the village of Utica, population just shy of 1,000. It’s home to a single street of shops, including an Amish furniture seller and a scattering of curio stores and bed-and-breakfasts. Even though neighbors in nearby LaSalle-Peru accuse Utica of wanting to become the next Galena, it’s a quiet place. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Looking back in order to move forward is a time-honored approach to life’s challenges. Artistic director Anna Simone Levin was originally inspired to make Landtslayt (Yiddish for “people from the homeland”) by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but she “filtered this big idea down” into a contemplation of territoriality and defensiveness. Premiered last January during the Next Dance festival, this simultaneously violent and delicate female quartet illuminates the ritualistic frenzy often induced by self-protective impulses....

When I first started dating my boyfriend, he told me he was a “furry.” I didn’t have any idea what he meant, so he explained to me that he really wanted a costume that was basically paws, a tail, and maybe some other catlike features, and he wanted to have sex while wearing this costume. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why are some people turned on by stuffed animals?...

At the end of last week’s column you asked what we should call it when a woman fucks a man in the ass with a strap-on dildo. We should call it “a woman fucking a man in the ass with a strap-on dildo.” Does every sexual practice need a cute term? I’m sick of not being able to say everyday, previously run-of-the-mill phrases like “tossed salad” because now everyone thinks I want my ass eaten out instead of a plate of fresh vegetables....

Machinal Today we’re much more polite at openings–and most productions come across as stuffed and mounted, like the glass-eyed animals you find in cases at the Field Museum. Sometimes it seems that the only difference between shows is the quality of the taxidermy. And as sports, television, and movies have captured the partisans in our midst, there have been fewer and fewer scripts written that are even worth preserving. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

On balance, the Ponys have had a pretty good year. The LA label In the Red released their debut album, Laced With Romance, in February, and since then critical praise has been pouring in–garage-rock zines like Horizontal Action, countercultural tastemakers like Arthur and Pitchfork, and mainstream music publications like NME and Rolling Stone have all joined the chorus. Even Maxim and Entertainment Weekly have taken note of the band. Abetted by this buzz, the Ponys’ album has sold around 10,000 copies, more than respectable for an indie release....

The Roof is on Fiddler: a Musical Parody, at Improv-Olympic. There are elements of parody in T.J. Shanoff and Rich Talarico’s twisted version of the beloved musical adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s comic stories. Most notably, Shanoff has set Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics to the tunes of pop songs from the past 30 years. One of the more hilarious numbers, “Matchmaker,” is sung to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” But Shanoff and Talarico have done nothing so bold as real satire in the tradition of Mad magazine: Frank Jacobs in “Antenna on the Roof” recast the story as the tale of Tevye’s rich, middle-aged, angst-ridden grandson living in Scarsdale and dreaming of the simplicity of shtetl life....

Marshall McLuhan was a media darling in the late 60s and early 70s. I aced quite a few college papers by explaining the world in terms of his theories about communication. It sure seems to me that his ideas are evident in the impact that the Internet and computers have had on society. But I haven’t followed the field very closely since graduation, and so much about the 60s turned out to be hype....

ROCK, POP, ETC. includes hip-hop, funk, reggae, zydeco, cabaret, contemporary R&B, and some international pop. DANCE includes techno, house, electronica, ambient, and disco. FOLK & COUNTRY includes bluegrass and traditional Irish music. BLUES, GOSPEL, R&B includes traditional rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, and deep soul. JAZZ includes ragtime, swing, and fusion. INTERNATIONAL includes Indian classical music, African music, salsa, and ethnic folk genres. FAIRS & FESTIVALS are listed in a separate category without regard to music type....

Abdul Qazi opened his Afghan restaurant Kabul House on September 14, 2001–what might seem like bad timing for any restaurant to debut. A little more than a year later, business is so good that he’s about to open a second location. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In mid-2001, Qazi decided to expand. He thought his growing customer base could support a larger operation, and he wanted to be able to offer more convenient parking....

Oak Park resident Bernadette Doran was a McGraw-Hill editor and an advertising executive before she read Imagineering for Health, by bioenergetic healer Serge Kahili King, and dropped it all to study Hawaiian Huna healing and Reiki with King and others. After seven years of commuting to Kauai, she’s a certified healer who teaches the seven principles of Huna to folks who want to tap into the “instant healing power” of imagination, words, and energy....

By Ted Kleine Chow has lost to Gurevich over a dozen times, most recently at last month’s Mid-America Class Championships in the Ramada Hotel O’Hare. At first Chow dreaded him, because the grand master was winning all the tournaments in town. But lately he’s learned to think of the defeats as free lessons. Gurevich, he realizes, has an insuperable advantage over any American: he was born in the USSR, which turned out grand masters the way inner-city playgrounds turn out NBA all-stars....

Friday 10/3 – Thursday 10/9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “The primary function of art is cultural power,” says art collector Patric McCoy. “Just like people look to music, or dance, or to the spoken word to define our culture, art also defines our culture.” He and fellow collectors Carol Briggs, Joan Crisler, and Daniel Parker founded a group called Diasporal Rhythms: Collectors of Works by Contemporary Artists of African Descent as a way to promote African and African-American culture, history, and art after they met on a panel last October....