A Country Editor Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I wasn’t comfortable commuting back and forth to Indiana, sleeping in hotels in Indiana–it kind of sucked,” says Rodkin. (Lake’s offices are in La Porte.) “And the people I work with in Chicago are the people I prefer to work with. It’s a journalists’ culture here, people who operate at a certain level. Chicago journalists are the tribe I was born into....

This terrific sketch show from the Crying Diamonds blends creative physical comedy with risky political and religious humor and bright, idiosyncratic vignettes on romance. The central recurring characters are two geeky lovebirds whose history is told from end to beginning, Memento-style, throughout the show. Other, unrelated sketches include a rap about communism, a caveman musing on the conclave choosing a new spiritual leader, and a press conference in which Osama bin Laden announces that he’s cured cancer....

There are some who believe in the romantic notion that banging around long enough without rational constraint will eventually result in something brilliant. For certain purer devotees of the primitive, banging around without rational constraint is brilliant in and of itself. Feels (Fat Cat) has sorely disappointed the latter, or at least confused them enough to suggest that ANIMAL COLLECTIVE has grown more conventional or rock or song-oriented or some such craziness....

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who hate to dress up for even normal formal occasions and those who embrace every available opportunity to put on a costume. Like all Renaissance fairs, Bristol–full of falconry and jousting and shyuk-yuk swordsmen telling amusingly anachronistic post-Freudian jokes–is fun mostly thanks to the latter. This year the Faire, which has as its ongoing premise a visit of Queen Elizabeth I and her court to the seaside town of Bristol, features the Dreadnought, a replica of a period sailing ship, moored in a small lake for sailing demos, history lessons, and yet more off-color jokes....

Not many women who grew up in nice big colonial houses in the Boston burbs can get away with presenting fictionalized personal crises as musical entertainment. But Amanda Palmer, singer and keyboardist for the gothy, uberdramatic duo the DRESDEN DOLLS, spins her tales with such punch and skill it’s hard not to give her a big fat pass–even if onstage she and drummer Brian Viglione lay on both the pancake makeup and the mime shtick with a trowel....

It takes ambition to perform E.E. Cummings’s seldom produced 1924 play, which includes circus and vaudeville elements representing dreams and the subconscious as well as tedious scenes depicting the decline of a romance. In her director’s note, Whitney Blakemore writes that Him was “completely original for its time,” yet today it doesn’t feel so groundbreaking. Alison Siple’s costume designs are pleasantly whimsical, Robert Whitaker’s set sometimes elicits exciting images, and a live band adds energy to the second act....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The police department disbands its Special Operations Section. SOS officers had the freedom to move to high-crime spots citywide and were credited by the department with reducing violence. Critics, on the other hand, long complained that many SOS officers were overzealous and quick to use excessive force. This summer aldermen learned that officers from the elite unit led the department in collecting misconduct complaints; others were charged with home invasion and kidnapping, and one with plotting to murder another officer....

If you missed Lookingglass’s Sita Ram, whose sold-out run ended last weekend, you might try Natya Dance Theatre’s new Margam: The Sacred Path. Far more traditional, it celebrates the pop musical’s origins: bharata natyam, a classical Indian form that relates Hindu stories through the poses and gestures codified in a 2,000-year-old text, the Natya-sastra. Still, purists might object to Margam. Artistic director Hema Rajagopalan aims to balance tradition and innovation by using the customary costumes, movements, musical accompaniment, and narratives–12th- and 18th-century poetry sung live–but adds English translations in voice-over....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Zimbabwe, facing severe shortages of both food and laborers to work farmland seized by the government, is reportedly considering an unlikely program to bring foreign visitors to the country. A November article in a state-controlled newspaper outlined the “Obesity Tourism Strategy,” in which overweight vacationers (in particular Americans, who according to the article spend $6 billion a year on “useless” dieting aids) would be encouraged to come to Zimbabwe and “provide labor for farms in the hope of shedding weight....

Off the Record? Yeah, Right Journalists get annoyed at sources who won’t go on the record, and the ones I talk to like to stay on the record themselves. When they go off–usually because they want to keep their jobs–they often apologize. Who should come? “Reporters… editors…lawyers…students…citizens concerned about the First Amendment.” In other words, anyone who wanted to. Yet the discussion would be off the record. The flyer made this clear over and over....

This musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the 1975 screen parody of the King Arthur legend, achieves a very high level of tuneful hilarity. Monty Python standard-bearer Eric Idle’s script, bolstered with songs by Idle and John Du Prez, is directed by comic genius Mike Nichols, who’s assembled a crack cast headed by David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria, powerhouse diva Sara Ramirez, and Rocky Horror Picture Show star Tim Curry....

The Eames Era is a likable band. Just likable: they’re not ingratiating, arresting, magnetic, or particularly overwhelming. So anybody who demands mighty revelations or raw passion from art won’t get much satisfaction out of Double Dutch (C Student), the first full-length from the Baton Rouge indie-pop quintet. I’ll admit that the band’s curious lack of neuroses can leech the music’s immediacy–the twin guitars often cooperate too smoothly to generate frisson, and the bottom end sometimes bounds forward without achieving any real ebullience....

More quirky than funny, this scattershot hour-long chronicle by the sketch-comedy ensemble Backrow depicts seven childhood friends, now grown-ups, who took an oath of fealty to protect the stereotypical burg of Fardale from a child-devouring monster they also faced as kids. The joke is that life’s distractions and the friends’ own inherent obnoxiousness have undermined their dedication to the cause: only two show up to beard the creature in its lair when it reappears....

I just read in an academic paper (Macintyre and Sooman, Lancet, 1991) that in modern populations, the cuckoldry rate–i.e., the rate at which men are deceived into raising offspring that are genetically not their own–is 10 to 15 percent. This would make genealogy and family reunions a moot point. What’s the straight dope? –Curious, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perhaps for this reason, some possibly iffy statistics on cuckoldry–or nonpaternity, as the killjoy experts more often call it–have wound up with an outsize place in discussion of the matter....

Is there any basis to accusations of Coca-Cola’s having tortured, killed, or otherwise violated the human rights of workers in Latin America? I am a student in college and have heard much mention of these supposed “facts.” I am not sure what to make of them, and am wondering if you could reveal the truth. –Yeh Kahn Yiin, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Second, detailed allegations have been made not about multiple murders but one murder, specifically that of Isidro Gil, a union leader who was gunned down on December 5, 1996, at the entrance to a Coca-Cola plant in the Colombian town of Carepa....

Contemporary psychedelia often raises the question, hasn’t inner space been explored enough already? Well, yes and no. The psychedelic experience, like the religious one, is unique to the individual–while there’s no denying the commonalities, everyone interprets it his own way. Japanese guitarist Kawabata Makoto takes cues from past masters in pursuing his own voyages and leading his cosmic crew. This spring he released a solo tribute to the classic Popol Vuh album Hosianna Mantra....

Except when I’ve been embarrassingly fucked-up, I’ve never used the word “righteous” as a synonym for “cool”–that’s something I associate with freakily intense, gruff-voiced NA members who call white guys “brother.” But it’d seem wrong to describe the Black Diamond Heavies and their gnarlified blues rock without using bro language, so I’ll go ahead and call them righteous. I walked into the middle of their set at the Bottle a few months ago, well after they’d locked into the burly groove they do best....

As a lad, Dan Pieczonka cadged free liver from Schlesinger’s butcher shop at the corner of Western and Armitage. He and his pals would cut it to pieces, anchor them to lines of string, then toss them into a Humboldt Park pond. When a crayfish took hold they’d yank it ashore and dump it in a bucket. After collecting a dozen or so they’d hop a bus to the North Avenue pier and bait perch with them....

Cursive’s 1997 debut, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, was so grossly pregnant with cliches–dramatic stops and starts, romantic travails painted in big tragic strokes–that it took me eight years to give the band another chance. I jumped back in with last year’s The Difference Between Houses and Homes, a collection of singles and unreleased tracks from 1995 to 2001, and while the whole thing was still heavy on the emo, the songs had gotten classier as the years progressed–all it took was the addition of some strings and a little restraint....

For all that it leaves to be desired, this new musical by David Rush and Errol Pearlman generates a surprising charm over the course of two acts. Built around Ashkenazic folktales about Chelm, a village populated entirely by fools, the Chicago Jewish Theatre production suffers greatly from director Kevin Heckman’s head-scratchingly inept attempts at visual storytelling. The occasional bright spots in Pearlman’s score are overpowered by monotonous presentation. And Rush’s lyrics can be cloying or clumsy, contributing to an overall sense that this is more a workshop than a premiere....