I’ve often read that if you jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, you will accelerate to the point where hitting the water will be like hitting concrete. But my little brain keeps saying, “Yeah, but it’s WATER!” Could you jump off a bridge like the Golden Gate and contort your body in such a way that you’d survive? –Paul, Ann Arbor Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Of course not, numbskull....

Is it true the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620 because the ship ran out of beer? I have been told that barrels of beer were the most voluminous and important item in the hold because water couldn’t stay drinkable on a ship for that long. –James C., Massachusetts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On November 9, 1620 (November 19 on a modern calender), after 64 days at sea, the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod....

What’s the Straight DopeTM on trans fat? My friend the medical student says the latest studies show that even a minuscule amount of trans fat causes a huge increase in heart disease and sudden heart attacks. Meanwhile, the FDA allows foods that list partially hydrogenated oils among their ingredients to claim to have zero grams of trans fat, as long as they have less than half a gram. Is any trans fat safe?...

Russell has always been more erudite than your average singer in a cowboy shirt, though he’s maintained that jes’-plain-folks persona: in a dry southwestern drawl over elemental guitar picking, he’s spun vivid vignettes from the dark side of the arroyo. But on his latest album, the tour de force Hotwalker (Hightone), he sings tributes to Charles Bukowski (with whom he once corresponded), Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, and other boho literary types....

You’d never guess to watch her that Patti Gran has stage fright. Liz Phair used to freeze like a deer in headlights, and Chan Marshall would hide behind her hair or even turn her back on the crowd. But Gran, who sings and plays guitar with popular local art punks the New Black, is a powerful front woman with a hair-raising voice and a magnetic stage presence. Trouble is, her confidence is only a veneer....

With all the recent Gay Games hoopla, Chicago is finally getting some overdue credit for being gay friendly. In 1961 Illinois was the first state to decriminalize any private sexual behavior between consenting adults. In 1988, the City Council passed the Human Rights Ordinance, outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation and including GLBTQ folks in hate crime protections. Ten years later the rainbow pylons lining North Halsted Street were erected, giving the nation one of its first officially recognized gay ghettos....

Early in novelist Kate Atkinson’s first play, a divorced historian remarks that her recently purchased Victorian mansion once belonged to an author of “dreadful gothic romances.” All too soon we realize that Atkinson is about to present us with another–or two, actually. One is set in the present, the other in 1865 and features the house’s earlier inhabitants, but both stories revolve around a melancholy bluestocking whose orphaned status makes her vulnerable to abuse....

This annual program, coordinated by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, points to the year-round variety of local artistic activity by framing a month’s worth of events. The Chicago Art Open, presented by the Chicago Artists’ Coalition (which originated Artists’ Month in 1996), runs Mon 10/10-Mon 10/24, on the third floor of 847 W. Jackson (11 AM-5 PM daily, 312-670-2060). Most other exhibits noted in this year’s brochure are listed by venue under Galleries, here or at www....

Most exhibits cited in the program for this city-organized observance are listed under Galleries, here or at www.chicagoreader.com. For a full schedule, see chicagoartistsmonth.org or call 312-744-6630. Among this week’s highlights: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This exhibit of work by nearly 300 locals, presented by the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, closes Fri 10/21, with 6-10 PM reception, $5, 312-670-2060. Bridgeport Art Walk, Sat 10/22, noon-5 PM, at MN Gallery, 3524 S....

Comedy for Indie Rockers Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drag City has made comedy part of the mix since its earliest days: the three-day Drag City Invitational festival in 1994 included skits between acts, and the 1996 compilation The Drag City Hour was assembled like a variety-show broadcast. In 2004 the label cosponsored a show in New York that featured stand-ups Todd Barry and Laura Kightlinger, and last year’s Drag City A to Z sampler featured comedian Demetri Martin as a “narrator....

The Transit Rider (Drag City) is the fourth album from this Oakland progressive-folk duo, the brainchild of singer-songwriter Dawn McCarthy, and like its predecessors it’s a dazzling work of magic. McCarthy, abetted by her multi-instrumentalist partner, Nils Frykdahl (also of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), invents worlds as vivid and convincing as anything you’d find in a top-shelf fantasy novel, but she’s far more concise, able to say with a single line and a melodic turn–a Sandy Denny-style flutter, a controlled shriek a la Diamanda Galas–things that many artists of the acoustic bent struggle to spell out for whole careers....

When alto saxophonist Greg Osby released Banned in New York (Blue Note), an authorized bootleg recorded on a minidisc machine, in 1998, he said it was an attempt to keep pace with his musical development: by the time a studio recording came out, he’d already moved on to something new–from hip-hop fusion, for example, to his telepathically tight improvisations with pianist Jason Moran. Public (Blue Note) is his first live album since, and though Osby’s style has stabilized since the 90s, he hasn’t settled down....

A few years ago I witlessly brought a few beers to Salam, a Middle Eastern storefront on North Kedzie. The host, a man with impeccable manners, politely pretended that city law prevented us from drinking there. “Also,” he added casually, “it’s against our religion.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bringing your own bottle is a practice so established in Chicago that a place without a liquor license is commonly assumed to allow it....

In April the management company for Loft-Right, a massive glass-and-steel residence at 1237 W. Fullerton, threw a party. Outside, prospective tenants stood behind a velvet rope, taking care of business on their cell phones as they waited to be admitted to the cavernous, curving lobby, where a DJ was spinning hip-hop. A flat-screen TV showed videos and flashed logos for ESPN, Bliss, and Kiehl’s. Someone handed out goodie bags filled with CDs and cosmetics while partygoers signed up to win prizes like an iPod or a trip for two to Vegas....

For their “Lost Cheerleaders” photo series, Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler–the two-person collective New Catalogue–imagined that a “cheerleader bus overturned, and they all started wandering off in different directions. We also had the idea that they might be lost figuratively, like a lot of teenagers looking for something in their lives,” Sadler says. One cheerleader stands in a parking lot, for example, while another carries a load of firewood in a forest....

Weeds and trash, Scott Wolniak noticed after he and his wife bought their Humboldt Park home in 1998, had one thing in common: “They were very tenacious–they kept coming back.” In 2001, a year after he entered grad school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he began collecting weeds and rubbish and photographing the overgrown rectangle of parkway between his portion of the sidewalk and the street. Later one of his professors suggested he somehow re-create the rectangle, and he began making weeds out of discarded stuff, much of it scrap paper....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It remains disturbing to me that the mainline Protestant churches–communions that have always been a political mix–have been under sustained attack by the religious and political right for a generation with little to no acknowledgment from anyone in American public life–including leading politicians who are members of the denominations under attack. (Let the record show for example, that Hillary Clinton, George Bush and Dick Cheney are all members of the United Methodist Church....

Ann Worthing was cleaning out her Bucktown basement last year when she found letters she’d received as a grad student here from 1980 through ’82. “They were watermarked and moldy,” she says. “But I thought, ‘I can’t throw these out.’” They were from friends, including some exes, plus her mom, who died in 1999. “My response freaked me out because it was so intense,” Worthing says. “Just the look of the handwriting, not even the content, conjured up different times, places, and people, a constellation of memories....

In the 60s vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson stepped forward as the young champion of the style pioneered by Milt Jackson, the very personification of the instrument–and right on time. Gary Burton, two years Hutcherson’s junior, had already radically redefined the instrument’s role, in bands led by George Shearing and Stan Getz; rather than Jackson’s hornlike lines, he used a pianistic, pointillist approach, with two or three mallets in each hand. By contrast, Hutcherson stuck mainly to single-note lyricism–but he doubled the speed, complicated the rhythms, and extended the melodic range....

Until the 1990s, the only Westerners who knew much about Tannu-Tuva were stamp collectors bemused by the diamond- and triangle-shaped stamps that came from the small Russian republic on the Mongolian border. That began to change in 1987, when musicologist Ted Levin recorded the 1990 Smithsonian Folkways album Tuva: Voices From the Center of Asia, America’s first exposure to the eerie but entrancing world of Tuvan throat singing. Through some well-practiced glottal gymnastics, a singer produces two or three notes simultaneously–often a low, steady drone paired with dynamic whistling....