Is it true that Egyptians use mummies for fuel to heat their food? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story isn’t that Egyptians use mummies to heat their food now, it’s that they used them in the 19th century to fuel their locomotives. We owe this wonderful conceit to Mark Twain, who in The Innocents Abroad (1869) writes, “The fuel [Egyptian railroaders] use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and....

UPI RIP Whenever I remember my two years at United Press International I think of this dubious project. Still, they were good years. I was so young and ignorant that I could be paid virtually nothing and think it a fortune. And if UPI journalism wasn’t deep it was wide. Somewhere in almost every major city on earth a door opened onto a bureau full of chattering UPI teletypes, a door I was entitled to open....

Surely the Information Armageddon is at hand. In 1983 crusading-reporter-turned-journalism-professor Ben Bagdikian deplored the fact that 50 corporations controlled most of what Americans saw, heard, and read. Their CEOs, he observed with alarm, could all meet in one large room. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McChesney is a man of the left. He’d like to “detach the control of capital over our journalism and culture,” and he does his bit against capitalism as one of three editors of the 52-year-old independent socialist magazine Monthly Review and as an adviser to Chicago Media Watch, a group that goads local media to be more open to leftist viewpoints....

Children are not necessarily more discerning theatergoers than adults–but they tend to be much more open about their dissatisfaction. Emerald City Theatre Company’s musical–based on three stories by Maurice Sendak, including his single most famous tale–held my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter spellbound for its full 70 minutes, though she did fidget whenever things got too scary, moving from her seat to Mommy’s lap. Afterward she was full of questions about the props, costumes, puppets, and set pieces used to re-create Sendak’s rich, mysterious, monster-filled worlds....

“It becomes important to evaluate what our life has meant. We weren’t just here and passed on,” says actress Uta Hagen in Studs Terkel’s book about “death, rebirth, and hunger for a faith.” Hagen, who died last January, is one of almost 30 people depicted in director-adapter Derek Goldman’s chamber-theater production, being performed as part of Steppenwolf’s interdisciplinary “Traffic” series. An ensemble of company members and guests portrays a wide range of Terkel’s interviewees....

By her own account, Soraya Sheppard’s recipe for koeksisters (pronounced “cake-sisters”) goes back to “my grandmother, who learned it from her mother.” The fried dough cakes dipped in chilled syrup are a popular treat in South Africa, where Sheppard grew up. Though her ancestry is Malaysian, the family had migrated to Johannesburg by the time she was born, and her grandmother ran a business selling koeksisters. “Most of the women those days weren’t even educated,” says Sheppard....

Once upon a time (as all good stories must begin), a six-by-six-foot crate from Colombia, weighing in at 1,100 pounds, arrived at Chicago customs. Following protocol, several officials and a police dog examined the package to make sure the contents were legal. Instead of contraband, they discovered a metallic box with a long metal rod running lengthwise through the middle. The recipient, Luis Montoya, called down to Canal Street to claim his package, explained to the officials that they had unpacked a rotisserie handcrafted in his homeland....

Ten years ago, on her summer break from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Vesna Rebernak returned to her native Yugoslavia to visit her parents. The family lived in Ptuj, a small Slovenian town about 20 miles south of the Austrian border. “I was driving around thinking, ‘Oh, this is the most beautiful country,’” Rebernak recalls. “Suddenly there were all these tanks and they are blocking the bridges, blocking the roads....

BENNY GOLSON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When tenor saxist Benny Golson hit the scene in the late 1950s, playing with Dizzy Gillespie and then the first great edition of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, he quickly made his mark–a superlative player, he’d been shaped by bebop, but his large sound had more in common with swing-era giant Coleman Hawkins than any bop tenor man....

The current trend in underground music is cross-pollination, with artists in what have often been considered distinct idioms–free jazz, traditional folk, psychedelia–exploring the primitivist elements common to them all. This weekend in Minneapolis, the second DeStijl/Freedom From Festival of Music will reflect this volatility, bringing together electronic noisemaker Emil Beaulieau, the snarling saxes-and-guitar trio Borbetomagus, free-jazz saxophonist Arthur Doyle, violin minimalist Tony Conrad, Swedish psychedelicists Trad Gras Och Stenar, and neofolk spaz Devendra Banhart, among many others....

How often do we get a chance to see acrobats like Toronto’s High Strung Aerial Dance company float gracefully above us in the shadow of tall buildings? Or be confronted by a sideshow spectacle from another era, like Thom Sellectomy swallowing two-foot swords and five-foot balloons? Last year when producer John Mills and the New East Side Association proposed a four-day festival of sidewalk entertainment, audiences anticipated little more than another street fair–certainly not a pocket-size carnival....

Cats and Dogs (and Other Tails), Greta Mae Productions, at the Chicago Actors Studio. Imagine being set up on a blind date by your soon-to-be ex-spouse, who then joins you, accompanied by her new lover. That stomach-wrenching situation is the anchor but not the sum total of this quirky, highly original evening. Cherie Vogelstein’s script is sliced into five- to ten-minute scenes, with unrelated improvisation-based monologues inserted between them. Opening-night topics (they change for each performance) varied from feeling retarded in tap class (been there) to eating peanut butter to prevent harsh movie-set lights from giving you cancer....

An increasing number of musicians pander to the public’s dwindling attention span, but there are still some folks who like to take their time. French electronic composer Eliane Radigue is one; if you want to get anything out of her work, you’ll have to surrender yourself to it for more than an hour. During the 1950s Radigue studied with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry–heavies of musique concrete and electroacoustic music–but she eventually broke rank....

To many restaurant-goers, the ubiquitous term “contemporary American cuisine” conjures images of elaborate ingredient combinations tortured into show-offy contrivances–the purple potato-pomegranate-ponzu syndrome. Joel Findlay, chef-owner of 302 West in Geneva, calls those creations “silly fusion experiments”–and he abhors them. “I’m haunted by Julia Child’s remark, that you know four people spent five minutes with their fingers all over everything on that plate,” he says. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Mr. Jones’s eighth-grade math class is working on geometry. Last Friday the students measured all six interior angles of a hexagon and added up the results. Everyone got a total of approximately 720 degrees. Today they soon agree that that number would stay the same even if the hexagon’s shape changed. Jacquille: “Seven hundred twenty.” Jones’s lesson wouldn’t seem familiar in Japan or Germany. In those countries the class would typically have proceeded in a different direction, according to James Stigler and James Hiebert in The Teaching Gap, which is based in part on the TIMSS videos....

New York MC J-Live caught a good break in 1995, when the hip-hop magazine The Source singled him out for its Unsigned Hype column. A couple of independent singles the following year bolstered his rep and eventually won him a contract with Payday/London. But his debut album, The Best Part, which was supposed to drop in 1999, was lost in the shuffle during corporate restructuring. Bootlegs of the record circulated constantly until it was finally released officially in 2001 on Triple Threat/Seven Heads....

A good drummer makes any ensemble sound better, and the packed schedules of Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake testify to the esteem in which they’re held by fellow musicians around the globe. Zerang’s split-second reactions and rapid-fire embellishments have challenged improvisers like Swedish pianist Sten Sandell, English saxophonist John Butcher, and Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk to outdo themselves. Bassist-producer Bill Laswell, free-jazz patriarch Pharoah Sanders, Israeli-born reedist Assif Tsahar, and many others have repeatedly called upon Drake’s ability to locate a steady pulse in the midst of abstraction–or, conversely, to add multiple levels of complexity to the deepest grooves....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In August the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Massachusetts, reported that local superintendent of schools Wilfredo T. Laboy had recently failed the basic English proficiency test required of all teachers in the state–for the third time. A state education commissioner said that Laboy was doing “an excellent job” but that he was still going to have to pass the test....

By Ted Kleine “Not many seamens visit Chicago,” he notes. “These vessels should be specially designed.” This is Mitirevs’s first call in Chicago. He prepared the crew by playing the Richard Gere film No Mercy in the TV lounge. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Those times in Russia, nobody could go abroad, but seaman had this privilege. A lot of people join just for this reason....

When this brawny free-jazz group made its debut, here in Chicago back in 1997, it was as an octet–a configuration meant to summon the spirit of another eight-piece band, which had immortalized itself nearly three decades earlier. Machine Gun, the classic 1968 octet recording by German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, was one of the earliest and most brutal expressions of a new European jazz aesthetic that made no attempt to replicate the blues-derived models current in America....