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Dear Reader, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As a Loyola faculty member, I would like to thank you for your coverage of the current unrest at Loyola [January 7]. I found your coverage to be more fair and balanced than that of the Chicago Tribune. I am surprised, however, that Loyola 2000 is still being portrayed as the root of the problem. In fact, many faculty feel that the current situation is the result of six and a half years of poor management....

When Mandy Patinkin unveiled his new one-man show on Broadway September 10, he closed the evening with what a New York Times critic called a “heavy-handed” medley of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s blistering “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” (“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late…to hate all the people your relatives hate”) and Stephen Sondheim’s aching, lyrical “Children Will Listen” (“Careful the things you say, children will listen”). Subsequent events proved Patinkin’s choice to be agonizingly timely....

On recent albums German duo Mouse on Mars inserted conventional instruments into their matrix of rubbery, squelchy electronics, emphasizing texture and color and drifting away from their techno roots. But constant aesthetic reconfigurations are a crucial part of their approach, and on Radical Connector (Thrill Jockey) Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma have shifted again, returning to predominantly synthetic sounds, thumping club beats, and pop hooks. Connector is the first of their albums with vocals on every track, and the singing is mostly handled by the group’s off-and-on drummer, Dodo Nkishi; more often than not, his voice is vocoderized and chopped up until it’s just another blurp in the swarm of oscillator textures....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For 23 years Dennis Hope, 55, of Gardnerville, Nevada, has operated a business that sells deeds of title to land on the moon, Mars, and Venus. In September Hope told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he’s earned $6.25 million so far, or an average of $272,000 a year–the current price of an acre is $19.99 (plus $1....

My friend Sue is my neighbor. She lives in the building across the street from me. We face each other–we do fashion shows on the balcony before we come here and compare notes on our cordless phones. One night Sue called me up and said, “Can you hear that? There’s a guy on his balcony above you playing guitar.” I said, “Yes, I can vaguely hear him playing something.” This went on for a while last summer: she would be on her balcony and I would be on mine and we would be serenaded each night for half an hour or so....

Remember that reader who suggested you take submissions for the most embarrassing masturbation story? You promised your readers a contest, with prizes awarded to the author of the best (or worst) story. Did the events of September 11 preempt your contest? If so, I feel cheated. But first a few notes about how we narrowed down the field: All stories that sounded like urban legends were discarded, as were all tales involving parental discovery....

The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, Equity Library Theatre Chicago, at Breadline Theatre. The oversexed bigamist at the center of Arthur Miller’s 1991 play, Lyman Felt, might be Willy Loman after a self-help workshop. A bastard for the ages, Felt is a ruthless, calculating salesman who justifies his transgressions by maintaining that “the first rule of life is betrayal.” But the similarities between him and Loman end with the job and the affairs, just as the only similarity between The Ride Down Mt....

A good friend of mine, a Chinese born in Nanking, China, told me that many Chinese (including himself) do not need to use deodorant. “We don’t have sweat glands under our arms,” he said, “We don’t need to use deodorant.” I’d always thought that all humans were endowed with similar glands and organs. We all have lungs, livers, hearts, lymph glands, etc. Is Mr. Fu wrong? He’s rarely wrong about anything, honest....

It was a Sunday. We called a cab, and we were riding to the hospital. I said to Vince, “Wouldn’t it be a beautiful day to go on a picnic?” The driver turned around and looked at me like I was out of my mind. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » She was born in two and a half hours. In those days the father didn’t go into the delivery room....

Friday 11/21 – Thursday 11/27 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Skinny girls are in, but fat’s where it’s at,” says Patrick Lovelace, who started holding Big Beautiful Woman events three years ago under the moniker Big Boi ’00 Entertainment. All sizes are welcome to attend the monthly theme dances, but their purpose is “to glorify big, beautiful women”–and the ratio is usually three girls for every boy....

Canceled Stamps Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Artists Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna were pleasantly surprised last November when they got a call from the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum of the Chicago Academy of Sciences asking if they’d be interested in doing an exhibit there. Thompson and Hernandez de Luna are known for the pseudostamps they’ve been making and mailing for about a decade: subversive little satires that look enough like the real thing to get delivered....

The 15th annual Chicago Humanities Festival, this year themed “Time,” continues through November 14, offering dozens of lectures, readings, and discussions by an international collection of writers, artists, and scholars as well as film screenings and theatrical and musical performances. Unless otherwise noted, all programs are $5 in advance, $6 (cash only) at the door. (Tickets for some sold-out programs may become available; check at the venue 20-30 minutes before the program....

City Hall’s Virgin Ears Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But not too hard for an unidentified City Hall staffer, who took down the portrait the day after the exhibit went on display and then informed city public health officials. These officials, in turn, told Jim Pickett, a “Faces of AIDS” coordinator and the principal writer of its accompanying book. Pickett says the project was meant to give voice to a variety of experiences but AIDS activists have to pick their battles....

Fairport Convention They’re the progenitors of British folk rock, which draws much more heavily on traditional music than its American cousin. In fact, Fairport’s repertoire and the traditions associated with it define the band more than any specific personnel: they’ve gone through more than 20 musicians over the years, and the lineups that recorded, for instance, 1969’s What We Did on Our Holidays and 1973’s Nine have exactly zero members in common....

Long Day’s Journey Into Night For years I’ve been hoping the American critical establishment would break its infatuation with Eugene O’Neill, who is supposed to have single-handedly transformed superficial, derivative American theater into a serious art form, detailing the American social and psychic landscape more accurately than any other playwright before or since. All this about a writer who has to his name more clumsy, forced, second-rate scripts than masterpieces. All this about a man who, in Mary McCarthy’s telling phrase, wrote with “the wooden verisimilitude, the flat dead echoless sound of stale slang....

This combination all but suggested itself. The two Pauls have had an occasional percussion duo since the 1970s (and even started a label together, Po Torch). Lytton and Vandermark have an ongoing collaboration. The latter already works with two drummers in his Sound in Action Trio, and he and Lovens have already improvised together a couple times in a trio with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. The Pauls have much in common: as second-generation free improvisers who grew up in the wake of John Stevens’s and Han Bennink’s noisy chopwork, they favor fast, clattery textures, often made by dragging or placing or bouncing objects on top of the drums....

Why does it sound like Dwayne Sodahberk is making techno for Saab commercials? Oh, because sometimes he is. If you like your analog wizardry sans footage of winding mountain roads and dashboards, there’s Partying Without Inhibition or Dignity (Tigerbeat6), an EP bubbling with low-end growls, bright plings, and the beat of windshield wipers that can’t keep up with a downpour, bathed throughout in that strange gray before-the-storm brightness. All this impeccable timing and structural mastery would be close to insufferable if it weren’t for the sticky white-noise interference he slides in and expertly yanks back out....

One night last year I walked into my dorm room to go to bed, interrupting my roommate while he was having sex with his girlfriend. The room was pitch-black, so they would have noticed me entering the room thanks to the light spilling in from the hall. However, I reasoned, if I simply flopped on my bed and went to sleep, they would never know I’d seen them. So that’s what I did....

Mr. Rosenbaum, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than one critic has touched on the apparent Matrix influence on the film, and one critic, I believe at the Village Voice, mentioned that CT, HD served to irrefutably exemplify the international influence of The Matrix since its fight scenes are Matrix-esque. What all these people are forgetting is that (a) the fight scenes have been choreographed by the same man who did them in The Matrix, and it wouldn’t be right to say that a man influenced himself, exactly, and (b) this very same man was himself influenced by countless Hong Kong pictures–the same pictures that Ang Lee set out to emulate and homage–all of which came long before The Matrix....

The corner tank in the corridor behind the Illinois Lakes and Rivers gallery at the Shedd Aquarium isn’t pretty, but to the 260 sturgeon inside it’s home. When placed in the concrete tub 14 months ago, the fish were mere fingerlings, about four inches long; now they’re two feet long or longer, with dorsal spikes you could cut your finger on and powerful mouths that can suck a round goby out from under a rock–which is just the job that Roger Klocek, the aquarium’s senior conservation biologist, raised them to do....