One Friday evening last month, a group of women positioned themselves outside the Wicker Park bar Cans, pressed play on their boom box, and launched into a synchronized dance routine set to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre.” In pink T-shirts emblazoned with the words “You Can’t Touch This!” and black pants with fuchsia hands appliqued on the buttocks, they had no trouble attracting attention. When they were done, they handed out homemade flyers on sexual harassment and date rape to the crowd....

This show, in which adults interpret stories written by Chicago Public School kids, may be one of the more ingenious and pure-hearted hours of entertainment in the city: the grown-ups have great fun with, but never make fun of, their sources. Now, by adding a few holiday-themed performances to its open run, Barrel of Monkeys joins the crowd of troupes offering seasonal shows. Fans needn’t fret, however, because this exuberant group of actors, comedians, and musicians retains its unique blend of the straight-faced and the surreal whether tackling a story about “Crazy Reindeer” Bob or a song about a boy eating a Christmas ornament....

The devil is in the details for the Sea and Cake. Since forming in 1993, they’ve hardly altered their core sound–summery melodies draped over metronomic grooves–but again and again they’ve subtly retooled other aspects of their music. Over the course of five albums Sam Prekop’s vocals have grown more ethereal, the guitars have become more translucent and distant, and analog synthesizers and unfussy drum programming have come to the fore. The quartet does it again on One Bedroom (Thrill Jockey), its first album in three years, but you have to pay close attention to notice the change in direction....

Did Grigory Potemkin, one of Russian empress Catherine the Great’s ministers, actually have elaborate fake villages constructed for Catherine’s tours of the Ukraine and the Crimea? He allegedly had these “Potemkin villages” done in order to give Catherine a false impression of peace and prosperity in regions that in actuality were in turmoil and great poverty. A great example of how advisers can snow a decision maker, but did it really happen?...

There’s been a lot of talk about how the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center expected to receive 72 virgins (or 70 or 50, depending on whom you listen to) in paradise. Is this really true? (That they expected this, I mean, not that they’ll receive it.) It seems a rather unsophisticated and juvenile theology: “In heaven you can eat all the ice cream you want and stay up past ten o’clock and it’s always recess....

A recent article on the Straight Dope Web site says that in a famous 1886 case the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” having the same rights as human beings based on the 14th Amendment, which was intended to protect the rights of former slaves. Not to nitpick, but the Supreme Court made no such decision. If you look at the case in question, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, you see that the court itself never rules on personhood....

Is there any medical or scientific evidence for the practice of preventing jet lag after long plane rides by placing a lighted flashlight behind one’s knees just prior to landing? I read a short piece in an airline magazine a few years ago and finally got around to trying it on two long plane trips–to and from the eastern Mediterranean and to and from New Zealand. It worked. I had no jet lag and fell into normal wake/sleep cycles in those time zones....

Clint Eastwood’s latest slugfest, Blood Work, is ultimately just another Dirty Harry opus. And by now Harry has become boring, not because Eastwood keeps trying to redefine the character the public tends to remember him for, but because he doesn’t try to redefine the punk villains who keep Harry busy and dirty. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Much more interesting than this teenage fantasy is the mainly unseen woman character who inadvertently keeps the hero alive....

The Furtive Gaze I was carrying a camera too, but it was in my shoulder bag. I also had in there a spare copy of the brochure for “The Furtive Gaze,” an exhibition of work by four photographers and one videographer at the Museum of Contemporary Photography that’s all about voyeurs and strangers. The passenger I took for a photographer got off the el before I could hand him the brochure....

On this cold winter day, futures trader and self-professed food freak Langdon Van Ingen has a burning question for the chef he’s just watched make a lobster risotto with Meyer lemons and yellowfoot chanterelle mushrooms. “How do you keep a lobster stock from being too salty?” asks Van Ingen. Market organizers bring small local farmers into contact with buyers both vocational and recreational. Their focus is on sustainable products–that is, foodstuffs raised or prepared in a way that doesn’t damage or significantly deplete the land....

At 81 bass-baritone William Warfield might not have the stamina or the nearly flawless delivery of his younger days, but he retains the remarkable sense of drama that has made him an audience favorite for five decades. Though his debut recital in 1950 garnered impressive notices, he was ignored by the Metropolitan Opera (a racially conservative house that didn’t engage Marian Anderson until 1955) and instead found success in the theater, starring in the musical Call Me Mister....

Friday 11/23 – Thursday 11/29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 24 SATURDAY This weekend the Museum of Contemporary Art will unveil Adam Siegel’s Path of Remembrance, a community art project in memory of the victims of September 11, and waive its usual admission fees. Siegel is inviting the public to help him draw 4,000 flowers in chalk–each representing a lost life–to create a sidewalk path around the MCA, past a fire station to the lake, and back to Michigan Avenue....

Friday 8/8 – Thursday 8/14 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 9 SATURDAY Between 1903 and 1905, more than 7,000 Korean immigrants landed in Honolulu Harbor. Working on Hawaiian sugar plantations for a dollar a day, they helped finance Korea’s war for independence from Japan. Today there are some two million Korean-Americans–51,400 in Illinois. This year’s Korean Street Festival will include events marking the centennial of Korean immigration....

The Film Center’s retrospective on legendary animator Chuck Jones concludes with this program of 11 cartoons, dating from 1949 to ’65, in which Bugs Bunny and friends encounter the arts, from circus acts to TV commercials. The ones skewering the pomposity of classical-music concerts represent Jones at his best, creating an unhinged hilarity that denies any fixed definition or tradition: Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit” in the extravagantly expressionistic, wonderfully nonsensical Wagner pastiche What’s Opera, Doc?...

The Mammals have been plying their extravagantly minimal trade for three years now, interpreting the classics in gory, surreal productions that range from smart straight-ahead camp to baffling high-art abstraction. Decidedly the latter (but terrific) was last year’s Clay Continent, adapter-director Bob Fisher’s delirious collaged-text take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This remount is polished and perfected, still challenging but more accessible. Though they’ve sacrificed some of the original’s chaotic edge, the Mammals have thus achieved a cool intelligibility crucial to such language-intensive work: the blocking has been streamlined, and the sound design–previously a sometimes overwhelming echolalic tornado–has been cleaned up yet retains its throbbing menace....

The “rebirth” of rock has inspired A and R folks to toss dollars at some unlikely targets, but hey, if somebody at Warners is convinced that the next big thing will sound a lot like XTC, I’m not going to complain. Hot Hot Heat are a lot less patient with formalist exercises than their forebears were–they started out just four years ago, after all, as underground noisemakers–and they’re not afraid to bang the table when the puzzle pieces don’t quite fit together....

A half century after the onset of the Spanish civil war, Jose Luis Borau (Poachers) takes a wry look at the way different generations view politics and history, as the children of Franco’s era try to cope with a changing Spain. After a fascist general dies, his sexually repressed daughter (Carmen Maura) leaves the convent where she’s been living to return to Madrid and pay her respects, accompanied by the family’s beloved nanny (Imperio Argentina, a Spanish comedy star of the 1930s)....

Rebecca Lazier Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The evening began with a duet excerpted from A Stone’s Throw, part of her New York company’s repertory. The piece, danced by Lazier and company member Jennifer Lafferty, is startlingly erotic, though the women don’t often touch; instead each concentrates on her own body. One gesture recurs: arms crossed in front, one wrist captured by the other hand....

By Jeff Sharlet “It’s very trendy to talk about ‘vulnerable populations,’” he says, anger lacing his normally measured tone. “But to my eye, it’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable population than the terminally ill. And yet in our rush not to abandon them therapeutically, we often abandon them prognostically.” The same can’t be said for Mary O’Reilly, a south-side resident Christakis decides to check on the same afternoon that he learns of Holbrook’s death....

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: Every Shot, Every Episode Jason Salavon: Crossbred and Crystalline Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Consider the work of Mark Lombardi, who had a show here at the Bona Fide Gallery in 2000: he puts his research on corrupt corporate links on the wall in detailed diagrammatic drawings, such as George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens (1999), which maps the relationships of various bankers and oil dealers over a period of more than ten years....