A speaker at a recent school board meeting claimed the vocabulary of the average American grade school student was 25,000 words in 1945 and about 10,000 today. This is pretty disturbing if true. What do you think? —Dave Evans, Bellingham, Washington Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Soon I found much the same information in a contemporaneous New York Times item. On examining the original research, however, it became clear someone had misconstrued it....

No new curses this time, or need for any. No goats, literal or metaphorical. No black cats, no Steve Bartman. No real chokes, only a general team-wide collapse. The Cubs were swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks in three games in the first round of the NL playoffs, and the only surprise was how quick and all but painless it was. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But anyone who thought the Cubs better than the Diamondbacks was only guessing....

Gustave Le Gray captured wet the way Monet caught light. In many of his mid-19th-century albumen prints in the basement galleries of the Art Institute, including The Great Wave, Sete, soft diagonals of beach anchor dark and light zigzagging bands of waves. Halfway up the frame the water–slapping hard in the foreground, glistening as it nears the horizon–meets a bleached sky framed by mottled clouds. Le Gray combined separate exposures of sea and sky, balancing the dynamism and solidity inherent in each....

Last year Fantasy Records released The Best of John Fahey Vol. 2: 1963-1983, positioning it as an overdue follow-up to a Fahey best-of from 1977. Fahey, the founding father of the “American primitive” steel-stringed acoustic guitar style, had died in 2001, but the label, with access to his enormous archive of tapes, included three unreleased tracks: two rerecordings of Fahey classics from the early 60s and an original called “Tuff” that no one had heard before....

Minor adjustments are huge in Sigur Ros’s world, so you could argue that Takk… (Geffen), the new album by the Icelandic quartet, is full of radical departures. Their songs now have titles, the lyrics are in Icelandic instead of the band’s invented language, Hopelandish, and the songs are more concise and glossy. Not that they’ve started using verse-chorus-verse structures and terse guitar solos on three-minute tunes, but their sonic trademarks–ethereal falsetto vocals, glacial pacing, and swirling, all-texture guitars–are reined in....

“All the pieces are in place,” coach Dave Wannstedt once infamously said of the Bears, when neither the pieces were in order nor even the places. This season’s Bulls appear to have all the pieces–perhaps too many of them–but certainly not in the proper places. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last season the Bulls put together a “drive and kick” offense: their skilled young perimeter players drove the lane, drew the defense, and dished out to a teammate for an open shot....

You have to be seriously into zines to dig this slim volume, subtitled “An Anthology of New Orleans Zines” (Last Gasp). Sprinkled with typos, misspellings, and occasional blocks of chicken scratch, it’s a primo example of warts ‘n’ all self-publishing. But there’s great documentation here of the beautiful and sordid mess that was antediluvian New Orleans, as seen through the lens of its scrappy punk underground. Edited by former Crescent City zinester Ethan Clark and organized by topic–neighborhoods, bicycles, jobs–the collection repeatedly triggers the ache that now accompanies any consideration of New Orleans....

Like Saddle Creek stablemate and fellow Robert Smith emulator Conor Oberst, the Good Life front man Tim Kasher is a literary songwriter. But where Oberst unspools endless tangles of poetic verbiage, Kasher is an economical writer of short fiction, curt and blunt. He’s also just as fatalistic and self-consciously seedy as you’d expect of a guy who name-drops Fante and Bukowski (in the same verse, no less); his new record starts, “The first time that I met her I was throwing up in the ladies’ room stall....

During a recent visit to Oak Park, some friends told me a nearby bookstore had a bunch of Studs Terkel books on sale. I went to check it out before heading back to the city, and there they were on a back table: more than half a dozen titles in brand-new condition, at remainder prices. Great–but did this mean that Studs was out of print? And why was that new copy of The Encyclopedia of Chicago selling for more than $20 off the cover price?...

Do unborn babies pee and/or defecate in the womb? –Realtime, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Urine production begins late in the first trimester, about the same time the two-inch embryo becomes a fetus. In the second half of pregnancy, fetal urine is an important constituent of amniotic fluid. By the time the kid is about ready to pop out, he or she is passing roughly a liter a day....

While Edward Albee was mining the family-as-prison metaphor early in his career, a lesser-known contemporary worked the same angle but took an increasingly naturalistic approach. Frank D. Gilroy’s 1965 The Subject Was Roses shows a young veteran on three successive mornings in the kitchen of his childhood home, where 20 years of unresolved conflicts between his parents have spun into out-and-out war. While the play deals almost entirely with surface concerns–in stark contrast to the underlying tensions of Albee’s work–its reportorial tone is nonetheless artful and engaging....

Friday 19 Sunday 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » DEAD 60S Though these Liverpool lads put out their self-titled debut LP this May in the U.S., it won’t be out till September in the UK–and consequently they’ve been beating the stateside circuit like a rug all summer, playing Lollapalooza, a leg of the Warped Tour, and a string of dates supporting the Bravery. The aforementioned LP plays a bit like a random assemblage of hooks and riffs from several different Clash records, without anything that stands out much for awfulness or for brilliance....

When violinist Andrew Bird emerged in the late 90s with his first band, the Bowl of Fire, it was clear that he was a talented musician. Too often, though, his songs sounded like student exercises–he’d tackle one style after another from song to song, as if laboring to impress a professor. By the time he released his 2001 album The Swimming Hour, he was much less self-conscious as both a performer and a songwriter, but it wasn’t until Weather Systems (2003) that everything fell into place: his immaculately crafted pop songs no longer flaunted their idiosyncrasies....

Pianist Misha Mengelberg, the leader of this ten-piece dadaist powerhouse, plays some Monkish chords on his recent solo album Senne Sing Song (Tzadik) that lag so far behind the beat you could tie them to the rhythm section like tin cans to the bumper of a wedding limo. The 70-year-old Dutchman is anything but lazy, though–he’s a backseat driver for sure, but he directs the music with perverse rigor, always frustrating its natural course....

Oracle Productions opens the doors of its new storefront theater with this 1992 Lee Blessing drama about an abusive father, his troubled son, and the Salvadoran refugee who lives with them for a time. These are turbulent waters for a maiden voyage, but director Aaron Shapiro’s production holds up reasonably well. Exploiting the cramped space and squalid-looking set, Shapiro has created a persuasive atmosphere of oppressive seediness. As the son, a victim who becomes an oppressor, Edward Beck gives a gripping performance, by turns vulnerable and menacing....

A Marxist screed in two parts by Dario Fo. Part one: a kind of visual lecture on medieval class war, organized around the figure of the jongleur–a traveling entertainer who spoke the subversive truth by seeming to be mad. Part two: Christ’s passion, dramatized from a prole-peasant point of view. As directed by John Szostek for Piccolo Theatre, the lecture’s meant to remind us that money still swears, while the dramatization seems calculated to take back Christianity from the political right....

Self-righteous, ruthless men treat women like trading cards in Shakespeare’s allegedly idyllic land, Messina. Presented with the slightest threat to their hegemony–they believe the passive, innocent Hero has betrayed her betrothed, Claudio–these men band together to humiliate her, then (so they believe) inadvertently kill her. Directors like Canada’s Marti Maraden who ignore the play’s blatantly problematic sexual politics might at least offer a giddy comedy about true love’s triumph over deception....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Chronicle story leans heavily on the idea that using canvas shopping bags instead of plastic will help. But it seems likely the problem is more insidious than that. The story claims that a recent Greenpeace report (“Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans” PDF) “found that 80 percent of the oceans’ litter originated on land.” Bad journalism — actually, Greenpeace was more equivocal: “The United Nations Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution (GESAMP) estimated that land-based sources are responsible for up to 80% of marine debris,” citing a 2005 paper by Seba Sheavly of the Ocean Conservancy (PDF) — who’s actually citing a 1991 GESAMP report....

Hot Chocolate “Crappy?” he said. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Segal’s still getting used to being in charge. She started considering opening her own place about five years ago, while working under executive chef Michael Kornick at MK and MK North. Her signature desserts such as Cake ‘n’ Shake (chocolate cake accompanied by a miniature vanilla milk shake) became cult favorites at those restaurants....

The history of bank robbery is like a history of the United States. Born of the right to bear arms (guns + greed = robbery), it’s evolved into bloodless battles between computers. Plasticene’s often humorous 90-minute show takes a quirky-compendium approach to the subject: each of the four performers adopts a criminal persona, from the famous (Jesse James, John Dillinger) to the lesser known (Willie Sutton, Phil Christopher). Though the show can get clogged with facts, and an onstage band occasionally drowns out the lines, under Dexter Bullard’s direction the actors make clever use of a few props: stanchions, the retractable tapes that connect them, and openwork metal “cages” used as bank podiums, horses, and cars....