For years I’ve tolerated my friend’s need for a strict vegan diet. I am lectured nearly daily about the benefits of veganism and the injustice of my murderous, meat-craving lifestyle. It’s gotten to the point that we can’t go out anywhere decent because there are few places vegan-friendly enough to suit his tastes. He has many redeeming qualities, so our friendship remains strong despite our philosophical differences. However, if there were an issue that would be a deal breaker, it would be his terrible, terrible gas....

Saturday 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DANIEL GIVENS On his second album, Dayclear & First Dark (Aesthetics), producer and ex-Chicagoan Daniel Givens uses more purely electronic settings than he has in the past for his somber, quasi-poetic musings. Fellow Chicago expat Matana Roberts plays sax on one track and Semay Wu plays cello on two more; but mostly stuttering beats, liquid synthetic bass, and spare ambient drift envelop his spoken-word meditations on the twin psychic obstacles that gay black men face in America....

Gymnasts are not like dancers. They tend to be more heavily muscled, and the competitive nature of the sport means they communicate physical and mental tension, not emotion or ease. But gymnastics is a lot more commercially viable than dance, which may be the raison d’etre for this project: Aeros is a supposedly dancelike presentation of gymnastics meant to rival Stomp in its popularity (Stomp creators Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas also happen to be on Aeros’s creative team)....

All in the Timing, Ad Astra Theatre Company, at the Cornservatory, and Welcome to the Moon, Ad Astra Theatre Company, at the Cornservatory. These two programs of one-acts serve as showcases for the new Ad Astra Theatre Company–or that’s the theory anyway. In fact the material is weak and treacherous enough, and directed poorly enough, that the actors benefit little from the exposure. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » David Ives in All in the Timing uses his knack for word salad to demonstrate that language impedes rather than contributes to communication....

One day in February, Joe Royer took some time off from his job as a part-time teacher at Saint Bruno’s to drive around the southwest side and take pictures. At 49th and the Stevenson, he caught an eerie glimpse of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. “Right as I see the river, there was this monolith of an electrical plant–it looked like a castle,” he says. “I knew I had to get down there....

Writers’ Theater Chicago continues to hack out the terms of its move from the back room of Books on Vernon, down the street, and around the corner to the Women’s Library Club of Glencoe. The troupe’s waiting for the club to approve a contract that’ll give them a lease on a larger performance space. It’s a slow process and the space will need work–executive director John W. Adams says that if they get the go-ahead in March, the curtain won’t go up on their first show there until September 2003....

No question about it, live music can be liberating, inducing in dancers an energy and spontaneity impossible with a recorded score. Watching a rehearsal of Cerqua Rivera Art Experience, a troupe made up of dancers and Joe Cerqua’s jazz band, I was struck by the general air of freedom and good humor, even though I arrived a good three hours into the session on a hot day and they were all exhausted....

Burlesque is at its bawdy best in the Lavender Cabaret’s remount of this multimedia show, which intersperses amusing variety acts with provocative stripteases. Lead stripper Michelle “Toots” L’amour choreographed the numbers, directed with Franky Vivid, and wrote the dialogue with Vivid and comic Ed Furman. But she and the other four strip artists don’t take any of this too seriously. The glitter, feathers, and garters of the women’s costumes are accompanied by a sly wink, and risque parodies of television commercials, performed between the acts, send the message that sex is fun....

When Soviet cosmonaut Anatoly Pavlovich Artsebarski climbed into his rocket on its launchpad in Kazakhstan on May 18, 1991, he had little idea that his country was about to go through a major political upheaval. As commander of the Soyuz TM-12 spacecraft, he blasted off with two crewmates–Sergei Krikalev and Helen Sharman–to rendezvous and dock with the space station Mir. After Sharman returned to earth a few days later with the station’s previous two-man crew, Artsebarski and Krikalev settled in for a long stay in orbit....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Some underreported November results: Former Florida shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem (his legal name) lost a bid to become Pinellas County sheriff, while Tampa radio personality Dave “the Dwarf” Flood wasn’t elected to a conservation-panel seat (though each got between 25 and 30 percent of the vote). Juan Olivares, up for reelection as mayor of Arvin, California, was arrested on child molestation charges the day before polling....

Working night shift puts a dent in your nightclubbing, but it’s fair to say that on many occasions people from the nightclubs visit here. One night we had all kinds of overdoses. I was working in the ICU–we never get any young bodies over there. So we get a young body, a guy dressed all in black. He was an overdose on that date-rape drug, what’s it called? DHE or GBD or something....

David Auburn’s absorbing psychological mystery-cum-romantic drama, seen here in a touring edition of the Tony-winning Broadway production, is set in the sprawling, run-down Hyde Park home of a brilliant but mentally ill University of Chicago math guru, Robert, and his 25-year-old daughter and caregiver, Catherine. She has inherited some of her dad’s intellect but also some of his instability; how much of each is uncertain, which terrifies Catherine as she contemplates her future following Robert’s death....

I’m hoping you can help me. My boyfriend wants nothing more than to have me pee on him. I really want to do this, but my body will not cooperate. I’m usually able to pee whether I feel the need to or not, such as when the doctor needs a sample, so this is very frustrating. I’ve tried the obvious, like drinking tons of water, but it didn’t help. I’ve tried sitting on the toilet until I start to urinate, then stopping and running back to squat over him, but that didn’t work either....

I need help understanding a recently observed trend. As a physician, I see lots of naked bodies. For several years I’ve noticed that, generally speaking, many straight patients (men and women) in their 20s have trimmed and/or coiffed pubic hair. A lot of the men tell me that their girlfriends prefer it that way; some have said, “It makes me feel cooler and cleaner.” Occasionally I have to treat folliculitis (an infection/inflammation at the base of the hair follicles) caused by overaggressive shaving....

I don’t know if it had anything to do with the groundhog seeing its shadow, but March madness arrived about six weeks early this year. Actually, the Illinois High School Association brought it on by ending the practice of giving a berth to the Public League boys’ and girls’ champions in the state tournaments’ so-called Elite Eight. In theory the change would allow more than one Chicago team to go downstate; in actuality, the IHSA stacked the deck against the top city teams by putting them in the same sectionals and supersectionals....

New year, new coaches, new players–same old Bears. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Smith said anxious no doubt he meant expectant, but he had it right in stressing the anxiety. Without middle linebacker Brian Urlacher, who’d injured a calf in the previous game, the Bears’ defense was open to slashing, spinning runs up the middle by Edgerrin James, which gave Manning an extra option he didn’t need in order to pick the Bears apart by air....

Yannick Demmerle Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Demmerle, who’s 33, was born and raised in a small French town near the German border; seven of his eight photographs at Vedanta–his first one-person show in the United States–were taken in northern German forests. Quiet and contemplative, they seem to address not the viewer as a member of a group, the way Gursky’s and Struth’s do, but the individual viewer–as do the paintings of 19th-century German romantic Caspar David Friedrich, one of Demmerle’s influences....

On a recent reading tour Janet Desaulniers wowed audiences by telling them how she sold the first story she ever sent out–a semiautobiographical shortie about a college grad who moves back in with her mom–to the New Yorker when she was 25. Then she really shocked them by telling them how long it took for her first book to get into print. First contracted by Alfred A. Knopf about 20 years ago, her story collection What You’ve Been Missing was just published by the University of Iowa Press in October....

Time for Her Solo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Card didn’t beat out 109 other candidates for the job on charm alone. Raised in California, she became a serious violin student after a third-grade teacher opened a cabinet and spoke the magic words: “What instrument do you want to play?” A Stanford graduate, she earned an MBA at the University of Southern California and joined the operations staff of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she rose to orchestra manager....

Fat Possum Records, launched nine years ago in Oxford, Mississippi, is best known for rough-edged recordings of modern Delta blues shouters like R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and T-Model Ford; the label’s owners, Matthew Johnson and Bruce Watson, coaxed rural players off front stoops and out of juke joints, much as John Fahey and Bill Barth did in mid-60s Memphis. But in 1996, staggering under its debts, Fat Possum was bailed out by LA punk label Epitaph....