Yugoslavia, the Avoidable War Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few years ago, during an anti- NATO rally in Daley Plaza, demonstrators wore photocopied posters decorated with big bull’s-eyes and the legend “I am proud to be Serbian / Kill me.” A similar if less histrionic sense of victimhood suffuses George Bogdanich’s 165-minute video documentary Yugoslavia, the Avoidable War, which details the breakup of the Balkan state between 1991 and 1999....

I have been to the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa on a few occasions. It seems that no matter what the country is, you’re not supposed to shake with your left hand because the people “use” it to cleanse themselves in the bathroom. This is all starting to sound like urban legend stuff. It just sounds fishy that no matter what the country, someone will always tell you about the “ol’ dirty paw....

I’ve noticed that networks are always proud of how many people were watching their shows, as shown by the Nielsen ratings. Who is Nielsen, and how is he counting the 7.8 million people who were watching the latest reality show? How do they figure out what I’m watching? I have a feeling they ask a few hundred thousand people what they were watching, and just say that therefore, statistically, x number of people must’ve been watching....

Friday 22 Saturday 23 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » JOHN BISCHOFF Today, software programs like Max/MSP make it relatively easy for musicians to tweak, cut up, and recombine synthetic sounds in real time, but Bay Area composer John Bischoff was working in computer music well before the age of the laptop. In 1978 he cofounded the League of Automatic Music Composers, the first “computer network band,” and in the 90s worked with the Hub, a similar collective....

There’s a journalistic truism: only once you’ve mastered the rules of reporting and storytelling are you allowed to break them. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning guru of nonfiction narrative, breaks the cardinal rule of objectivity, weaving the story of his own quiet enlightenment into his account of the life and work of Dr. Paul Farmer, “the man who would cure the world.” Farmer, a Harvard-educated doctor and anthropologist and the founder of the international health organization Partners in Health, is an easily sanctified subject....

Indie Cafe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It may be wrong to celebrate a restaurant’s closing, but when its replacement is as good as INDIE CAFE, there’s reason to rejoice. Indie just took over the tiny space previously occupied by Lily of Thai, a comfy but mediocre neighborhood Thai place. The new restaurant serves Thai food too, along with Japanese, but it’s way above average in terms of quality, presentation, and value....

Jose Padilha’s searing Brazilian film plays like a synthesis of Pixote and Dog Day Afternoon, documenting a June 2000 incident in which a thwarted bus robbery in Rio de Janeiro turned into a nationally televised hostage crisis. Swirling around this terrifying ordeal are despairing reflections on race, class, police corruption, media sensationalism, and social inequality. Padilha opens with an elaborately conceived tracking shot that underlines the country’s severe social and economic stratification, and as he shifts between a white-hot present tinged with fear to a hallucinatory past of death, poverty, and neglect, the movie generates an almost unendurable tension....

Don’t know where the bovine right-to-privacy folks are, but this is the second year that calf birthing is offered as an attraction at the Du Page County Fair, which opens Wednesday, July 24, and continues through Sunday, July 28. Five calves are expected to make their entrance during the five-day run of this year’s “From Farm to You” extravaganza. Fair manager Ellen Sietmann says twins were born on opening day last year and “there were more people there than at the flag raising....

That new guy at the mosque–could he be an FBI agent fishing for something to investigate? If the president can do that to Khaled this week, will he try to do the same to citizens next week? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, and it’s not just Muslims who need to wonder. “For the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities, the FBI is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public, on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally,” according to Attorney General Ashcroft’s “Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations,” issued May 30....

The not-so-secret weapon behind Celia Cruz’s seemingly endless reign as queen of salsa is her unstinting consistency. The three-time Grammy winner tours like she’s drawing breath and churns out a new album almost every year without fail. Last year’s La negra tiene tumbao (Sony Discos) only reinforces her commercial steadiness; it’s full of brassy, hard-driving salsa that doesn’t let up for a minute. In recent years she’s begun to take a few creative chances in the name of demographic expansion, fusing salsa with more contemporary styles....

To the editor(s), Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The worst, as I’m sure many others are letting you know, was Neal Pollack’s February 28 whine about the amount and caliber of punditry and poetry being published about the issue [“Everybody Shut Up!”]. To call this abuse of newsprint “childish” is an insult to children; my ten-year-old and his classmates have had more interesting and enlightening chats about Iraq over juice boxes at our dining-room table....

“Contemporary quarrels over Catholic liturgy resemble clashes between competing forms of gay sensibility. Indeed, they are often those very same clashes in a different venue.” This is one of “9.5 Theses on Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism” posted by Mark Jordan, author of The Silence of Sodom, on the University of Chicago Press Web site (press.uchicago.edu). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’re Number 20! Chicago’s poverty rate dropped 2 percent, to 19....

“No other building of any type better expresses the zeitgeist,” writes Joseph Frey of the new Soldier Field in Dialogue magazine (September/October). “Chicago’s new football stadium is the ultimate setting for the…corporate gladiatorial contests that are professional football.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The welfare-reform wave. Participation in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program continued to decline during 2002 and early 2003....

BQ AFRO ROOT CUISINE, 4802 N. Clark, 773-878-7489: Husband-and-wife team Briggs and Queen Imarhiagbe serve their native Nigerian cuisine at this simple room overlooking Saint Boniface Cemetery, gladly explaining the menu and suggesting dishes. The staple starch in West African cuisine is fufu, a baseball-size round of dough made from yam, cassava, or corn flour, served here with any three of a number of meats–beef, chicken, cow leg, intestine, goat, tripe, “skin,” or fish, all prepared in a spicy tomato sauce....

Los Angeles curator and videomaker Shari Frilot selected these six films and videos; I strongly recommend three of the four that I was able to see. While filmmakers have been rephotographing and reediting Hollywood fare for decades, I’ve never seen anything quite like Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999), which he created by dismembering a horror movie and reformulating it into a stupefying collage of fragmentary images and sprocket-hole shadows in 35-millimeter ‘Scope....

By Michael Miner What we might call the Mauldin original appeared in the Sun-Times in 1964. That’s a long time ago, but the past is never safely behind us. Mauldin’s cartoon–mocking Charles de Gaulle and honoring two generations of American soldiers buried on French soil–was reprinted in McLaughlin’s old junior high school history text. He’d liked it so much he’d cut it out and framed it. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last September the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated the lawsuit filed by federal inmate William Gerber against the warden of Lancaster State Prison, who would not allow Gerber to send his semen to a Chicago sperm bank to be used in artificially inseminating his wife. The court ruled that Gerber, who’s serving a 111-year term for drugs and weapons charges, had a constitutional right to procreate…....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last month a Pennsylvania jury awarded $2.9 million to state representative Jane Baker for head injuries suffered from a traffic accident that she says left her cognitively disabled. Baker, who told the jury she “needs help with reading and understanding material and carrying on conversations” and is “virtually unemployable,” plans to run for a second term in 2002....

Oh, No! Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Janisch’s neighborhood, the 38th Precinct of the 46th Ward, had been voted dry a couple of decades ago–a piece of history he learned just after signing his lease. To reverse this, he’d need majority approval on a “go-wet referendum,” and to get one on the ballot he’d need a petition signed by 25 percent of the precinct’s nearly 600 voters....

Dear music editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I rely on music sources such as the Reader for information about what shows I might like to attend, recordings I might like to purchase, or artists I might like to investigate further. Unfortunately, your music section is lacking in editorial quality. Without adding much more to the word count of my letter, I won’t recite specific examples from recent reviews, but the ongoing juvenility I’ve suffered through from your reviewer Liz Anderson is fully illustrated in this week’s reviews of Megadeth and Gil Mantera’s Party Dream [Section 3, November 19]....