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In the annals of my television viewing history–right up there with the last Seinfeld episode and the first South Park I ever saw (the one about Mr. Hankey)–Thursday, March 2, 2000, shall forever be etched. That was the day 3Com spun off its growing PalmPilot business in an initial public offering. Why? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While the financial world holds its breath for the outcome of the regularly scheduled meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, Haines follows Allen Greenspan’s briefcase as he walks to the gathering....

By Michael Miner In the Tribune Bernie Lincicome railed against “the essential dishonesty, the basic fraud of the thing. Every yard in a football game is under dispute, every inch is to be won. Otherwise this might as well be soccer or lawn croquet.” What happened at the Super Bowl happened last fall in fine newspapers everywhere. The Gil Thorp comic strip appears daily in the Tribune sports section, but perhaps Lincicome doesn’t read it....

Short, white-haired, plainspoken Grace Paley is the patron saint–or the feminist, pacifist, leftist, Jewish matron saint–of those of us who believe in combining the artistic and the activist life. (Not that we necessarily do it, but we believe in it.) There’s the Paley whose last fiction collection was a National Book Award finalist, and the Paley who’s lain down on the steps of the Pentagon to protest the arms race. She traveled to Hanoi in 1969, has had stories published in the New Yorker as well as defunct political magazines, and became known as a writer’s writer for her distinctive voice....

LOS VAN VAN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s quite a bit of boasting on Los Van Van’s new Llego . . . Van Van (“Van Van Is Here”) (Caliente/Atlantic): on the opener, “Permiso que llego Van Van,” no less than the Afro-Cuban saints are singing the group’s praises, and on “La bomba soy yo” lead singer Mario “Mayito” Rivers shrugs off any and all who’d question his talent....

By Deanna Isaacs Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since early childhood, says Fleming, now 32, “I’ve seen the ghosts, I’ve seen the angels, I’ve seen the demons.” Son of one of the toughest men ever to play in the National Hockey League, onetime Blackhawk Reggie Fleming, Chris was raised in the northwest suburbs and still lives in Hoffman Estates. His mother, a flight attendant who believed in the spirit world, was frequently gone overnight–and it was during her absences that the ghosts were most likely to appear....

Lead Stories Municipal Crises Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An official in New Zealand proposed in September that the historic Maori name of Te Hupenui be restored to the village currently known as Greytown, even though Te Hupenui roughly translates as “the big snot.” And the San Jose Mercury News reported in May that Don Wolfe, mayor of Saratoga, California, was seeking to change the local perception that the city’s name (derived from the Iroquois) means “floating scum on the water....

Even the best Chicago-based improv troupes can suffer from lassitude, knowing they don’t have to try too hard because their fellow improvisers in the audience will stick with them no matter what. Jill Benjamin and Seth Meyers are a little different, however: ImprovOlympic alums, they really earned their chops before paying crowds at the Amsterdam-based for-profit Boom Chicago–and it shows in their energy, their accessibility, and their constant interaction with the audience....

Saturday, October 18, 5:05 PM Dispatcher: OK, well I just sat down, I’ll hold you down on it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Unidentified caller Number one: Take one in and do yer… Dispatcher: 2535, got a domestic battery, 3600 block of North Avenue, says there’s a male Hispanic beating up his girlfriend, she’s walking eastbound on North Avenue, 3600 block. Unidentified caller number eight: That freak?...

Blue Man Group But it isn’t until you’re seated under the web of tubes that surrounds the audience that you realize Blue Man is something more than performance art. What’s the tip-off? It might be the raincoats provided to audience members in the first eight rows. It might be the digital readout that introduces special members of the audience and encourages everyone to speak to them in unison, behavior more appropriate to a wedding banquet or a baseball game than to performance art....

Yes, Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer-winning musical Disneyfies the mid-80s downtown arts scene, dressing everyone alike–struggling artists, drug addicts, even the homeless–in chic boho clothing. And yes, the play heterosexualizes the AIDS epidemic, making us care more about the straight HIV-positive couple at the center of the story than the sexless but sweet gay couple. Yes, Larson’s rock score sounds about 15 years behind the times, the filmmaker-narrator clearly doesn’t know how to operate a Bolex movie camera, and the play ends with a kitschy miracle right out of E....

Cecil, you are my hero. My ultimate goal in life is to be the polymath you are. My question concerns a mythical “chicken gun” used for testing jet engines. I have heard tales of store-bought poultry being shot out of a gun at 500 mph into a running jet engine to test the engine’s mettle should a pigeon or some other fowl have the misfortune to cross paths with a 747....

Why does a nuclear explosion form a mushroom-shaped cloud? If you would tell me why frantic and furious fusion and fission have a fondness for the fungus form, I would certainly appreciate it. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shame on you, Paul. You know I cringe at F-words. You don’t need an atom bomb to make a mushroom cloud, just convection. Mushroom clouds typically occur when an explosion produces a massive fireball....

By Brian Steele “Well,” Williamson mumbles, “I don’t know.” ooo Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Merker’s father ran a used-furniture business–also called Betty’s, after his wife–for more than 20 years, but he died in 1986. The family owned the building where he’d kept his furniture, says Merker, who used to run a hot dog stand in Portage Park. “After my dad died, I told my mother, ‘Let’s open this up....

By Michael Miner For weeks City Hall engaged in fruitless conversation with Chicago’s publishers over introducing the news racks here. The talks went nowhere for many reasons. The papers foresaw a loss of control, a concern any paper worth its salt immediately raises to a constitutional crisis. Within broad limits, a paper is free to place its honor boxes where it wants them, redeploy them to chase changing markets, service them, and adorn them with placards screaming each day’s scoop....

Dear Ms. Levine: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have been a fan of Lynne Jordan and the Shivers since seeing them perform for the first time in June of 1995. I have gone out of my way to find out where she and the band have performed at every opportunity. Every performance has been stellar. Every time I have seen them perform before a crowd they completely rocked the house....

Since the rise of the conservative Islamic Taliban regime in 1996, the lives of women in Afghanistan have changed dramatically. Women who had held professional jobs for years were told they were no longer allowed to work outside the home. In public they were now required to wear a burqa–a cumbersome head-to-toe garment with an opaque mesh veil covering the eyes–and to be chaperoned by a male relative at all times....

By Michael Miner “Never once did he say he was proud of what he’d done. That’s what I was waiting to hear….I figured that if you tried to gut somebody in public, you’d have the guts to stand up for what you did.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But Schmidt knew Kass hadn’t traveled to Beverly to work up a column on the probity of mergers and acquisitions....

It Ain’t Hummel Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In those days people were ready to dip their dicks into anything,” she says. She experimented with various casting substances for two years, including sand and water, wax, clay, and even aluminum foil, but it wasn’t until she discovered the alginates used in dental molds that her scheme began to solidify. And even that method required some refinement....

Hed TK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McCourt’s resignations came suddenly. In March he produced a revival of Lillian Hellman’s melodrama Toys in the Attic in association with American Blues. Now, following that show’s financial failure, McCourt says he’s concerned the company is expanding too fast. American Blues has just hired a full-time artistic director, Brian Russell (formerly associate artistic director of Northlight Theatre), and plans to mount four plays next season after producing only one show this season on its own, The Flight of the Phoenix....

Pigs at the Trough of Attention Radiant Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the world of performance–and especially the world of performance monologues–such likability is gold. And the Sweat Girls have enough to fill Fort Knox. Like the Sock Monkeys, they make no great display of skill in Pigs at the Trough of Attention, their eighth collective effort since their 1993 premiere I’m Sweating Under My Breasts....