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From the pages of Crank How About That Anti-Semitism in Star Trek? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I began wondering what happened to the Jews in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. First, I dismissed the question–after all, plenty of cultures and religions are noticeably absent from Star Trek. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Jews are present in Star Trek in the form of the Ferengi, everyone’s favorite greedy schemesters....

Dear editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anna Weaver should be applauded, not reprimanded, for her great innovative work on helping to save Chicago’s historical architecture that is being lost and plundered at a staggering rate. She is setting a new standard for the preservation movement in Chicago. Ms. Weaver has helped the Tree Studios and Medinah Temple fight to exist, selflessly, as all her hard work is on a volunteer basis....

gallag.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your article “Sticking Point” [Neighborhood News, January 16] made it seem as if the Gateway Plaza shopping center emerged from a shrouded process that ignored the wishes of the Rogers Park community. Quite the opposite is true. There is tremendous support for Gateway, and there have been numerous opportunities for community input. Over the last year and a half I personally attended a total of 17 community meetings and small group sessions with other local organizations to discuss the many facets of the project–including the need to acquire the Pivot Point site....

TAKAKO MINEKAWA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There are a lot of things that bug me about Takako Minekawa’s new album, Cloudy Cloud Calculator (Emperor Norton), but I have to give the Tokyo pop star credit for stuffing some genuinely weird shit into her shiny happy tunes. On her first U.S. release, Roomic Cube (March), Minekawa was backed by Buffalo Daughter, who lent some heft and unpredictability to her singsongy hooks, knocking her bubblegum melodies askew with lite art-rock moves....

The Radical Royko But the recently published collection One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko is a refreshing reminder. From his first to his last, it’s got 110 columns–almost 34 years of daily writing. In column after column he wrote about the little guy getting screwed by the hacks and nitwits who run City Hall. They should change the city’s motto from Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) to Ubi Est Mea (Where’s Mine?...

While sex without reproduction seems like a better goal, I heard that turkeys can actually reproduce without sex. I know they’re stupid/primitive, but can this be true? –Rory Pfotenhauer, Delores, Colorado Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You heard right, compadre. Parthenogenesis–reproduction without benefit of sex–occurs spontaneously in a handful of species, most of them fairly simple but some surprisingly complex. The turkey is the foremost example of the latter group, with the virgin birth rate in some breeds approaching 40 percent....

Can eating foods with poppy seeds (i.e., bagels, muffins, etc) really cause someone to fail a routine corporate drug test? I’ve heard the answer is yes, but I am a skeptic. Aren’t drug tests specialized? Are they really testing for opium, which I understand to be the only drug made from the poppy? And even if the test did search for opium, wouldn’t the number of poppy seeds needed to make even a minute amount of opium be far greater than that in the foods we eat poppy seeds in?...

Audience: The Vanek Plays As if that weren’t punishment enough, the once popular writer, one of the flowers of the Prague Spring, was under constant surveillance by the state police, and his employers were given a full account of who this dangerous man was and promised the full blessing of the state for any information they might be able to provide about his extracurricular life: where he went, with whom, what he read....

A Brighter Summer Day Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve never read Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, but Edward Yang’s astonishing 230-minute epic (1991), set over one Taipei school year in the early 60s, would fully warrant the subtitle “A Taiwanese Tragedy.” A powerful statement from Yang’s generation about what it means to be Taiwanese, it has a novelistic richness of character, setting, and milieu unmatched by any other 90s film (a richness only partially apparent in its three-hour version)....

Chicago International Children’s Film Festival See Critic’s Choice. (Pipers Alley, 9:45 am) Digging to China Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Directed by actor Timothy Hutton, this tale of emotional bonding between a precocious ten-year-old girl (Evan Rachel Wood) and a mentally retarded man (Kevin Bacon) functions mainly as an actors’ showcase. Wood is right on target as Harriet, a smart-ass with a fervid imagination whose glamorous goofball of a mother (Cathy Moriarty) and promiscuous but boring sister (Mary Stuart Masterson) feel trapped in the small Pennsylvania town where they run a motel....

Why do we always get historic preservation when we don’t want it? Looking for information about current “temporary” Chicago Public School structures, Jim O’Rourke found eight “Willis Wagons” lined up on the playground of the Yates School. He writes in Substance (January), “Since making this discovery and discussing it with others, Substance has learned that there are in fact other ‘Willis Wagons’ scattered across the city. Willis Wagons, which were named by Civil Rights activists in the 1960’s after Supt....

“Regrettably, it sometimes takes concern about the middle class to get school boards to invest in quality,” writes Linda Lenz in Catalyst (November). “That’s what happened some 20 years ago, when Waller High School was converted into Lincoln Park High School, and nearby LaSalle, Newberry and Franklin elementary schools became specialty schools. Better late than never. While these programs were designed to keep or lure the middle class, they benefit low-income kids, too....

Friday 3/27 – Thursday 4/2 28 SATURDAY Hard-core birders get up at strange hours and sit in cramped spaces awaiting the objects of their obsession. Backyard birders like me sit in comfortable chairs, look out our windows, and shout and point when we see something colorful fly by. At today’s Birding America III conference, experts will identify exactly what just went by and tell you where to find more of them in or near the Chicago area....

By Ben Joravsky “I don’t want to personalize the issue, but we’re very disappointed by the reaction of the law school to this,” says Nicole Been, a graduate student of art. “They haven’t even issued an official apology. It’s like they’re pretending it didn’t happen, like they’re sweeping it all under a rug.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When we graduate we get a master’s degree in fine arts, which, as you can imagine, is of limited practicality,” says Mike Dreeben, a student sculptor....

Robert Stepto and his family used to spend summer vacations in Michigan at their pink-and-white cottage in the all-black resort town of Idlewild. Not that there were many choices for African-American families on holiday. “Today people wouldn’t think twice about taking the kids to Disney World or whatnot,” he says. “I grew up in an era in which the whole idea of going to Florida for vacation was the furthest thing from our minds....

JAZZ MEMBERS BIG BAND WITH JOHN VON OHLEN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Despite his gigs and recording dates with small groups, John Von Ohlen has never shed the title “big-band drummer.” Nor should he: although a whiff of anachronism accompanies the phrase, it’s an enviable distinction. Many otherwise excellent percussionists simply can’t keep a 12- to 18-piece orchestra humming smoothly. A big-band drummer needs more than a full but crisp kit sound, indomitable precision, and a loose swing even within a tight arrangement; he’s also got to have a sheepdog’s knack for knowing which members of the flock have strayed and how to nudge them back in line....

Jump Rhythm Jazz Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Billy Siegenfeld, dancing off the beat is more than an aesthetic choice–it’s a moral statement. “A whole generation has been conditioned to be on the beat–get the papers in on time, feed the correct command to the computer, and so on,” he said in an interview in Dance Magazine. “Syncopation is a wonderful tool, because it constantly drives you away from being ‘right....

Lead Stories Constable Carol Hashimoto told the Edmonton Journal in January that she had recently spoken to a man who was racked with guilt because he had driven home from Edmonton to Valleyview, Alberta, four hours away, without his driver’s license, which he had left in his hotel room. And in Charlotte, North Carolina, at his February sentencing for laundering money, John Calvin Hodge Sr., 69, revealed that he had declared his $40,000 laundering fee on his tax return....

In the summer of 1996, things were going great for the sketch comedy troupe Ectomorph. Its members–Bart Heird, Darren Bodeker, and Jim Kopsian–were regulars at the Improv nightclub, performing to enthusiastic crowds of up to 500 a night. Their rise to fame and fortune seemed assured. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The group disbanded not long after, but last year Ectomorph came roaring back with a vengeance....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music from Chicago’s fringe began as part of the Bucktown Arts Fest; now it’s produced by the Curious Theatre Branch. Taking its name from surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s use of the term “rhinocerontic” (it means real big), the Rhino Fest, now in its 11th year, features shows by such local notables as Theater for the Age of Gold, the Billy Goat Experiment, Blair Thomas, Antonio Sacre, John Musial, and Theater Oobleck in addition to the Curious folks....