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With teams in 20 cities, ComedySportz may be improv’s most recognizable franchise; the number of teams nationwide has more than doubled in the past decade, and demand only grows stronger. This weekend the funny folks at ComedySportz Chicago will be taking a break from duking it out among themselves to battle 14 teams from around the country at the ComedySportz Intra-National Tournament 2001, the first time in the contest’s 13 years that Chicago has hosted it....

Last weekend, just two weeks before the April 1 aldermanic runoff, Mayor Daley’s troops returned to the First Ward to plead with voters to reelect the incumbent, Alderman Jesse Granato. Beefy guys have brought out votes for Granato in three closely contested elections in the last eight years, but this time, says Granato’s latest opponent, Manny Flores, the strategy will backfire. Gabinski and Rostenkowski selected Granato, an obvious choice. For one thing, he’s from the area....

During his 16-year on-again, off-again affiliation with the Illinois Department of Corrections, Ron Campbell went from delinquent armed robber to jailhouse propagandist. He did five turns in the stir–for breaking into houses, setting fires, smoking pot, and stealing a van. During the last two he wrote and edited Constipation, a sardonic zine that carried his and other prisoners’ words beyond the prison walls. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I felt that it was important that people realize I’m just a regular person–under different circumstances,” says the gangly 39-year-old ex-con....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hard Times for Tree Huggers The U.S. Forest Service admitted last December that three of its employees were among the government environmentalists who planted hair from endangered lynxes in Washington state forests; according to the Washington Post, the environmentalists were trying to skew a research project in favor of restricting the forests’ development. Licensing officials in New York City refused to permit the signature event planned for the Russian festival that took place at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in February....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » According to a May report in the New York Times, an industry has sprung up in New York City over the past few years: that of advisers who counsel parents on how to get a child accepted at a prestigious nursery school (practically a prerequisite for admission to a prestigious kindergarten). The advisers charge as much as $300 an hour (or a flat $3,000), and though figures like these–and the $300,000 price tag of a complete 14-year ride in tony private schools–could easily discourage the most devoted mom and dad, the best nursery schools are still swamped with hopefuls....

Dual Exhaust may be the only Chicago team with a better record than the Bears right now. Participating in ImprovOlympic’s Cage Match last fall, improv duo Zach Ward and Beth Melewski pummeled the competition in eight straight rounds before bowing out undefeated. And this crack team’s approach to improv works even better in a noncompetitive setting: Ward and Melewski favor dramatic exposition over punch lines and trust each other’s instincts, adding layer upon layer to even the most implausible scenarios....

Last year Davey vonBohlen, lead singer and auteur of Milwaukee’s Promise Ring, underwent surgery to remove a benign growth in his brain. Since then he’s joked that the surgeon must have cut out all his fast songs along with the tumor, and the band’s fourth full-length album, Wood/Water (Anti-), proves he was only half kidding. The Promise Ring’s previous record, 1999’s Very Emergency, had positioned them as emo’s greatest hope, able to back up the heart-on-the-sleeve sentimentality of their lyrics with brisk, punky tunes....

In Vegas I made the mistake of telling my “friends” I had an “accident.” The girl giving me a lap dance was grinding too hard, and I blew my load. Within minutes the nicknames started: Sticky Pants, Pocket Paste, et cetera. I took my medicine for three days in Vegas and thought that would be the end of it. Then, before I walked in the door at home, my brother was calling me Sticky Pants....

For the past several weeks activists in Edgewater have been working behind the scenes to cut a deal with school officials on the proposed naval academy at Senn High School. “We wanted to get the board an out so they could back away from the academy,” says one community organizer who asked to remain anonymous. “We thought we had an arrangement.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It looked like the system would get the navy’s money at no political cost....

Your May 4 article “In Overtime They All Pray to the Same God” [Hot Type], provoked the following thoughts: Martin Marty of the University of Chicago, I think, agreed with me when I suggested that there is a great paucity of intellect in the realm of the Christian Right. A friend, who wrote a book on right-wing Christian education while living among them for over a year, was hounded unmercifully because he had to be saved from his Jewishness....

This weekend the School of the Art Institute will present “Nomads and Homesteaders,” a symposium on the relationship of a film to its screening habitat, which includes this program of short works selected by Brian Frye of New York’s Robert Beck Memorial Cinema. True to the Beck’s programming, it includes films in three different gauges, most of them elegiac studies of landscapes. In Opus 53, an undated and mysterious film by Eric Anderson, the camera is mounted at the rear of a moving vehicle, constantly receding from ordinary rural scenes....

Cherry Orchard It’s difficult not to view Steppenwolf’s production of Cherry Orchard–translator Curt Columbus remains faithful to Russian convention by dumping the definite article–through the lens of critic Robert Brustein’s comment that the best of Chekhov’s works concern “the prostration of the cultured elite before the forces of darkness.” When one of the characters laments, “I’m a man of good, liberal values. No one thinks much of that now,” one remembers that the cultured elite got their asses kicked on November 2....

Were vomitoriums really used in ancient Roman times so that people could throw up between courses in order to eat more? –Christine Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, neither did the Romans. While there was something called a vomitorium (from the Latin vomitus, past participle of vomere, to vomit), it wasn’t a room set aside to vomit in. Rather a vomitorium was a passageway in an amphitheater or theater that opened into a tier of seats from below or behind....

Rock, Pop, etc. BADLY DRAWN BOY, ADAM GREEN All-ages; sold out. Sat 10/26, 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage. 773-929-5959 or 312-559-1212. JONATHAN CHEN GROUP manipulates prerecorded voiceovers in The Owners, with Moira Cue, Carol Genetti & Lara Oppenheimer. Fri 11/1, 8 PM, Artemisia Gallery, third floor, 700 N. Carpenter. 312-226-7323. FOURPLAY Fri 10/25, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State. 312-443-1130 or 312-559-1212. RON HAWKING performs “His Way,” a tribute to Frank Sinatra....

Atmosphere’s MC Slug is frequently referred to as “the emo rapper,” and on the group’s new Seven’s Travels (Rhymesayers) he comes off as more than self-absorbed enough to claim the title. His rhymes are inconsistent strings of sensitive-guy self-critique, half-disguised grandiosity, and flat-out navel-gazing. In “Reflections” Slug portrays his sexual conquests as the inevitable but insufficient perks of touring life, but his claimed interest in a more substantial interaction is belied by his contempt: “I’ll give you conversation just to see if you can hold ’em / I play so dumb because I know some of these star-struck small-talk art fucks is no fun....

Friday 1/10 – Thursday 1/16 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » 11 SATURDAY Rabbits are social animals that make great pets–as long as owners know what to expect. According to the experts, they should be spayed or neutered, can be trained to use a litter box, need plenty of chew toys, and should have the run of at least part of a bunny-proofed home. The animals are the first topic of discussion in the society’s new Critter Care series, which starts today with a lecture by a representative from the Red Door Animal Shelter, a Chicago group that takes in many of the rabbits that wind up at the Anti-Cruelty Society....

“Whatever its benefits, professional advertising does not seem to have ushered in an age of cheap doctors, cheap lawyers, or even cheap accountants,” writes Michael Davis in “Perspectives on the Professions” (Spring), newsletter of IIT’s Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions. “If the professions used to be conspiracies in restraint of trade”–as stated in key 1975 and 1978 Supreme Court cases–“they do not, on the evidence, seem to have been very effective conspiracies....

Why University of Illinois and City College tuition should be slashed. According to a summary of the new book Risky Behavior Among Youth by Jonathan Gruber (“Poverty Research News,” September-October), teenagers are not pathological risk takers who ignore economic incentives. “For example, teen smoking and marijuana use decisions are found to be sensitive to the prices of these substances; teen pregnancy risk falls as the incidence of AIDS rises (raising the risk of unprotected sex) and as welfare benefits fall (lowering the potential value of support for an out-of-wedlock child)…....

I have never had the, er, pleasure of seeing Matt Gibson (Reader letters, July 6) onstage, but I can tell you (as a fellow Chicago actor) that it doesn’t take a lot of guts to sign your name to a letter in favor of Chicago critics. I thought that A Chicago Theater Artist’s letter [June 29] was pretty tame. He/she was saying what most of us in theater say behind closed doors....

JULY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shakespeare on the Green, which produces a free show on the Barat College lawn every summer, started with comedies but hadn’t done one for seven seasons prior to this year’s selection, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Now part of the DePaul University Theatre School, Shakes-peare on the Green is the biggest of the local outdoor Bard fests, drawing crowds as large as 2,000 on Saturday nights for productions regularly praised for their high quality....