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So far nobody knows what the 28-inch scapula Rob Peterson found in South Dakota belongs to. Three years ago the Clarendon Hills native spotted a tiny bit of bone poking out of a claylike deposit at the bottom of a hill in Harding County. It was the first day of the digging season, his second summer guiding fossil hunters for Paleo Prospectors, a commercial outfit that takes amateur paleontologists to privately owned properties out west to look for dinosaur bones and other fossils....

By Ben Joravsky The waiter brought cheesecake and coffee. Doris and Helen went to the restroom. Mooney thanked union leaders Michael Williams, Pamelyn Massarsky, Norma White, and Melvin Wilson for their years of service. What she didn’t say is that they were part of the elected CTU leadership recently ousted by the rank and file for being too compliant with the central office and too autocratic with the membership. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

When I was growing up on Long Island, every town had at least one rock band called the Long Island Sound. In 1996 guitarist and scholar Benjamin Lapidus, who still lives there, founded Sonido Isleno (“Island Sound”), twisting the pun to reflect his interest in Caribbean music. Lapidus focuses on the tres, a small Cuban guitar with three sets of doubled strings; because each pair is tuned to the same note, the instrument has a reduced range, but the doubled strings give it a quavery, multidimensional sound, a bit like a mandolin’s....

Batting practice is one of baseball’s strongest allures. The name itself has a pleasant association: as almost everyone who has played or plays baseball likes to hit, what could be better than practicing it? The rhythmic pock pock of bat on ball–from both the cage and coaches hitting fungoes–creates a soothing sort of music, especially as it echoes around a mostly empty stadium. The prevailing mood is of relaxed concentration. Pitchers stand in groups in the outfield, and infielders toss their mitts at line drives sailing over their heads....

Actor David Morse, who’s spent the last 20 years kicking around network television (St. Elsewhere) and building up an resume of impressive movie credits (Dancer in the Dark, The Green Mile), establishes himself as a truly formidable presence in this powerful first feature by Alex and Andrew Smith. A young athlete (Ryan Gosling), still smarting from his estranged father’s suicide, is cut from his high school football squad and recruited by a volatile drifter from west Texas (Morse) to play quarterback for his down-and-dirty semipro team....

There are few success stories more gratifying than writer-director Richard Maxwell’s. During the early 1990s he toiled in semiobscurity with the Cook County Theater Department, living and working in a near-south-side loft with a committed band of avant-garde pranksters who weren’t afraid to let the ridiculous overshadow the sublime: for the climax of their inexplicable production of The Wizard of Oz, Cook County cofounder Gary Wilmes leaped from the loft’s second-story fire escape onto a pile of boxes in the alley below, stripped off all his clothes, and ran naked for several blocks....

How could a study on obesity be so thin? Smart Growth America and the Surface Transportation Policy Project have found that fat is correlated with sprawl–well, sort of. Two of their researchers, Barbara McCann and Reid Ewing, write in “Measuring the Health Effects of Sprawl” (September): “The people living in the most sprawling areas are likely to weigh six pounds more than people in the most compact county.” Even more underwhelming are the extremes in northeastern Illinois, where the expected average weight of a person who’s five foot seven is 165....

There’s something violent about Prey, Ron De Jesus’s new work for this venerable company, and yet the piece remains fluid and pretty. It seems De Jesus, a former Hubbard Street dancer now performing on Broadway in Twyla Tharp’s Movin’ Out, has a story to tell. It may have something to do with the oppression of women, who are often chased around by the men in this dance–in one phrase, a man walks up to a woman purposefully and encircles her with his arms....

In the Neighborhood News section of the January 5 edition of the Reader, you had an article about the Portage Park area. My family has lived in this neighborhood for eight and a half years and loves the area. Are there things that could be better? Sure. Are we happy about the empty storefronts and vacant lots? No. But many of us are certainly not happy with the attitude of Ms....

‘Cause grandma’s from Backwoods, Mississippi, she can go to work on cornbread and buttermilk, or cornbread and beans, or well, cornbread and anything all smashed up in a bowl, but you live in Chicago and are only country by association, so you’ll need something green like greens, cabbage, or spinach to accompany your cornbread. Choose one, and then toss the leaves in a big pot. Fill half the pot with water if you’ve chosen greens or cabbage, and not quite half a pot for spinach....

Nu jazz is the new acid jazz. Like the catchall coinage that preceded it, nu jazz covers everything from French jazz-house outfit St. Germain to veteran Chicago jazz-folk singer Terry Callier, but the group most representative of its sound is the six-member Berlin squad Jazzanova. They make chilled-out club-oriented stuff kissed by Fender Rhodes snippets and tropical rhythmic accents, but it really has nothing to do with jazz. Jazzanova’s six producer/DJs have established a big reputation over the past five years both as a DJ collective and as dance remixers....

In 1992 Doug Seibold, the executive editor of Noble Press, opened a manuscript by a writer from New York named Jill Nelson. The incendiary but often very funny memoir abut her life as a black upper-middle-class woman, especially her grueling experience working for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, had been rejected by over 30 publishers. Reading it, Seibold could see why they would be reluctant to touch it. “Jill’s book was what I came to learn was very characteristic for Jill....

A key Russian formalist text, Viktor Shklovsky’s remarkable novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923) was based on a correspondence between the author and fellow expatriate Elsa Triolet, which ensued after Triolet asked him not to write her love letters and he responded with many different kinds of lyrical sublimation. For this beautifully composed and poetically edited experimental film (1998, 58 min.), Jacki Ochs asked American poet Lyn Hejinian and Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko to start a correspondence based on ordinary words like home, poverty, book, violence, and window, a project that lasted five years while each poet learned the other’s language....

Though he won’t turn 60 till next year, Monty Alexander is already one of the grand old men of piano jazz. It’s been nearly five decades since he cut his first hits in his native Jamaica, at age 14, and 40 years since Frank Sinatra heard him in Vegas and gave his stamp of approval. Soon after, in the mid-60s, bassist Ray Brown took Alexander under his wing, providing both platform and imprimatur for the young pianist’s kaleidoscopic technique and soulful swing....

Neil Halstead’s first band, Slowdive, generated a dense wall of sound that marked them as a second-generation shoegazer band alongside kindred spirits like early Blur and Swervedriver. His second, Mojave 3, dropped the noise in favor of rustic, country-tinged singer-songwriter fare. But Sleeping on Roads (4AD), Halstead’s solo debut, is more compelling than anything either band did, because he’s found a way to reconcile folky lyricism with sound for sound’s sake....

Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In April the Denver fire department, responding to an emergency call from the adjacent city of Montbello, discovered that a woman had been trapped in her home when tumbleweeds filled her yard and jammed against her house to a height of 16 feet….And in January, residents of Kennewick, Washington, were deluged with tumbleweeds “as big as Buicks,” according to one man, including a small number that seemed to have come from the highly contaminated Hanford Nuclear Reservation....

The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever Of course, obtaining the rights to chart-topping songs is prohibitively expensive, which is one reason you may never have heard a mashup: most of them are illegal. You’d think Aguilera would welcome the kind of hip validation a duet with the Strokes would bring, but her management put the kibosh on “A Stroke of Genius” just as it was starting to take off in England....

I am a 22-year-old virgin going to college in Texas. I have never had a girlfriend (from a stupid foreign culture, my mom doesn’t allow dating, etc) and will wind up in an arranged marriage in two years. What point is there for me to get in a relationship when I’m destined for an arranged marriage? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But hey, what do I know?...

Sun-Times Picks a Fight They told Slezak that the restaurant where their party of six went for breakfast was slow to seat them, slow to take their order, and slow to serve it–and the eggs arrived cold. Stopping at a mall, Brawner picked up a ski hat and asked what it cost. “You can’t afford it,” said the saleswoman. “We never thought it was about our color,” Ranger told Slezak. The twins are black....

Those Who Can, Teach Baldacci is evidence for the proposition that sometimes the best way to remain idealistic about the work you do is to change it. In 1999 Baldacci was in her mid-40s, and she’d already been a reporter, editor, columnist, and editorial writer at the Sun-Times. There was precious little left in the business that she hadn’t experienced, and a fair amount that she had no wish to experience again....