There is nothing quite like the camaraderie of hockey fans. Understand, I’m not insisting it’s superior to the camaraderie of Cubs fans in the Wrigley Field bleachers, or Bears fans tailgating outside Soldier Field, or White Sox fans watching a road game from Puffer’s in Bridgeport. But it’s extraordinary and unique, especially in Chicago, where hockey fans are so mistreated by the Blackhawks ownership. The people who continue to come out to the United Center to see the Hawks–drinking in the stadium bars beforehand, smoking in the corner enclaves between periods, bringing their kids along to instruct them in the ways of the hockey aficionado–are among my favorite fans in the city....

Matching wine to cuisines it isn’t traditionally drunk with–Caribbean, Latin American, Asian–is the focus of this periodic feature, in which we pick a BYO restaurant, sample a few dishes, and recommend some wines. Pastelitos de masa (ground pork empanadas) 1, 3 $1.50 $7.50 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This cheerful and expansive Uptown dining room is one of the few in town serving Salvadoran cuisine....

For the past month tenants in the Flat Iron Building have been trying unsuccessfully to meet with Bob Berger, owner, over the installation of Internet cameras in the common areas of the building and outside on the street. Finally he’s come clean. As he said in your article [July 13], his plan is to put the Flat Iron on the Web “around the world, around the clock” via the Internet, all to accommodate his desire to launch his new sitcom....

When the Terra Museum’s door slammed shut forever last week, the reverberations were felt down the street at the Art Institute. According to folks at the Terra, the closing of the boutique museum on North Michigan led to two big changes at the grander institution. Beginning in January, 50 of the Terra’s most valued paintings and 350 works on paper will be ensconced at the Art Institute on long-term loan. The combination of the two museums’ holdings will create one of the world’s best collections of American art, Terra officials say....

An account of Byther Smith’s early days almost reads like a parody of the archetypal hard-luck-bluesman story. He was born in Mississippi in 1932. His mother died in childbirth when he was a toddler, his father died six months later, and one of his sisters was killed in a fire not long after that (all of which Smith recounts in “Live On and Sing the Blues” on his 1988 Razor LP, Housefire)....

Pierre Boulez’s glory days as a composer are behind him: his best, most radical music (Le marteau sans maitre, Pli selon pli, Le soleil des eaux) dates back to the 1950s and ’60s. As a conductor, however, the erstwhile enfant terrible has eased into the role of sagacious partisan, a sympathetic interpreter of contemporary music who can guide listeners through the thickets of the unfamiliar. His interests may shift from Mahler to Debussy, from Stravinsky to Schoenberg to Scriabin, but his conducting is invariably lucid and precise–so much so, in fact, that his approach has been criticized for being too clinical, for emphasizing structure over emotion....

The second annual Children’s Humanities Festival starts a week earlier than its parent fest, the Chicago Humanities Festival (see next week’s Reader for schedule). Events run October 29 through November 14. Unless otherwise noted, all programs are $5 in advance, $6 (cash only) at the door. Students and educators are admitted free, but reservations are required. Tickets are available by phone at 312-494-9509 or online at www.chfestival.org. Call 312-661-1028 for more information....

Crowning George II was the least of the Supremes’ mistakes, according to local attorney and novelist Scott Turow, writing in the Washington Post National Weekly (December 25-January 1). The real transgression was the way they did it. “Legal Realism, the dominant school of jurisprudence in the 20th century, recognized that when judges are free to choose, they will fashion rules that mirror their own ideologies.” Hence the Legal Realists did their best to “erect a tradition that minimized the occasions when judges could do that....

Listening to Blues on the Internet (Delmark), the latest album by septuagenarian Emery “Detroit Junior” Williams Jr., you’d never know he’s been battling health problems for more than a decade. Despite bouts of kidney trouble and diabetes, the jubilance of his rock ‘n’ roll-flavored piano style hasn’t diminished, and his vocals–which have become increasingly hoarse in recent years–sound almost miraculously supple. Williams is best known for his song “Call My Job,” a hit for Albert King in the mid-70s, and he reprises it for the new album, leaving room for a sassy spoken-word cameo by local blues singer Zora Young....

The Roseland Little League folded in 1997, and soon its ball fields, at 125th Place and South Michigan, were thick with weeds. The wooden bleachers were already dilapidated, the fences broken. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two years later Anthony Beale, an Allstate Insurance systems analyst who would soon be elected alderman of the Ninth Ward, saw the potential in the run-down ball fields....

People sometimes stop into Kim Soss’s store, Arrow, and think they’ve wandered into someone’s living room. “I’ve had people walk into the store and go, ‘Do you live here?’” she says. She doesn’t, but she might as well. The carefully placed modernist furniture in the small storefront showroom was all handpicked by the proprietor herself, who often can be found sitting at her desk knitting. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Dear editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » State’s attorney O’Brien claims that Lee Robin was faking insanity at the time of his acquittal, but now claims that the mental illness that caused Robin to decompensate 13 years ago will happen again. Well, which is it? Is he a sane and calculating killer or someone who, because he decompensated, killed two people he loved very much?...

My Fair Lady, Court Theatre, at Chicago Center for the Performing Arts. Over the decades since its 1956 premiere, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion has come to epitomize the opulent, even bloated museum pieces of an earlier Broadway era. But Court Theatre’s brilliant, stripped-down reinterpretation gives the material new life, dispensing with large chorus numbers and lavish design to focus on the show’s Shavian soul–the test of wills between phonetics teacher Henry Higgins and cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle, who blossoms into a refined, well-spoken, thoroughly independent woman under his tutelage....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In July in Ogden, Utah, a judge allowed Richard Quinton Gunn to act as his own attorney in his aggravated-murder appeal: he’d decided to withdraw his guilty plea after the jury at his sentencing hearing gave him life without parole after deliberating just two hours. Following his arrest Gunn had confessed to killing his elderly tenant using a crowbar, a butcher knife, a handsaw, a fireplace poker, a 12-inch bolt, a straight razor, an ax, walking canes, a pool cue, and a large salad fork....

Over the years, various rabble-rousers have led sit-ins, marches, and boycotts to protest one municipal plan or another. But Pat Quinn and his band of neighborhood activists are using a relatively unusual strategy to fight the proposed $587-million Bears stadium–shame. The Bears deal is backed by Governor George Ryan and Mayor Daley and by former governor James Thompson, who lobbied for it on the statehouse floor. So far it’s been approved by the City Council, the state legislature, and the Chicago Plan Commission, because very few elected officials have seemed willing to defy its powerful supporters....

BLOODSHOT RECORDS 100TH RELEASE PARTY 12/13, HIDEOUT Only a hundred? Hasn’t this champion local indie put out a record like every week for the past eight years? Their 100th release, Making Singles, Drinking Doubles, gathers together 18 out-of-print singles and unreleased tracks, showcasing the label’s brightest stars as they let their hair down. The pleasures here are loose and ephemeral–the Waco Brothers rejuvenating Jimmy Cliff’s played-to-death classic “The Harder They Come,” Moonshine Willy’s inspired bluegrass take on XTC’s “Complicated Game” (Bloodshot’s first single), the Volebeats’ version of “Maggot Brain Parts 1 & 2,” whose cover sleeve features a Delilah’s staffer buried up to her neck, in an imitation of the original Funkadelic art....

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Nuggets, Lenny Kaye’s classic compilation of late-60s garage rock, and even die-hard fans of the genre–myself included–must admit that at this point a quartet of kids playing fuzz-toned R & B is about as threatening as a handful of seniors getting together to play hot jazz. But these days purity is its own form of rebellion, and few bands tend to the flame as lovingly as New York’s Mooney Suzuki....

What exactly is fire? I know it’s combustion of fuel, blah, blah…but what is it exactly? Is it purely energy? What state of matter is it? I suspect it’s highly energetic gases, whose energy state is so high that they emit light, and thus we see flame, with the hotter flames being higher in electromagnetic energy. But I’ve never seen any source explaining exactly what fire is. Can it be ionized?...

My wife is about to take a group of Girl Scouts camping and needed a propane lantern. When I went to install the wicks, a warning label informed me that the wicks were radioactive. Being a nuclear medicine tech, I had access to a Geiger counter, and brother, they weren’t kidding. Is Saddam taking his vengeance by slowly wiping out campers in this country? What gives? Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Trivial Pursuits, Visions & Voices Theatre Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. A number of potentially intriguing elements fail to jell in this drama by Chicago playwright Brian Alan Hill, artistic director of this new ensemble. Crammed with many hints but few discoveries, it focuses on Byrne Dante (Christopher Carrier), a master physicist who’s become a modern-day Robinson Crusoe cut off in his book-laden apartment with a childlike Friday (the comically deft E....