On May 8, a 19-year-old college freshman from Englewood named Trent Davis appeared on the WB game show Steve Harvey’s Big Time Challenge and rapped the first 600 syllables of the Declaration of Independence in less than 60 seconds. The competition for the show’s $10,000 prize was stiff: he had to beat out a six-member precision lawn-chair drill team, a man who climbed a 20-foot pole upside down, a dog that stacked Frisbees its owner had scattered around the stage, and a guy who snapped a bundle of pencils on his buttocks with an assist from his twisted-up boxer shorts....

The nuns do Vegas in writer-director Dan Goggin’s lackluster sixth take on the Nunsense franchise. Though this is a remount of an entertaining production at Drury Lane Water Tower Place last January, there’s a new cast, and the performers have less chemistry and a more sluggish sense of timing than the previous group. And Drury Lane Oakbrook’s murky acoustics ensure that even songs that should work can’t be understood. The result is fluffy but no fun....

This annual showcase of experimental theater, performance, and music runs through 10/31 at the Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston. Rhino Fest is coordinated by the Curious Theatre Branch and features emerging and established artists from Chicago’s fringe, including Theater Oobleck, the Still Point Theatre Collective, Blair Thomas, Hermit Arts, Cin Salach, Michael Martin, the Rasaka Theatre Company, and Ira Glass as well as the Curious and Prop ensembles. Performances take place in Prop’s north or south theaters, except where noted otherwise below....

Crammed with the cheapest of cheap thrills, UK garage is the genre for the ADD generation–flavorless faux dub, meathead drum ‘n’ bass, nattering techno, and thuggish rap, all in one glossy, trashy package. But London garage MC Mike Skinner, aka the Streets, has smoothed over the drum ‘n’ bass, ditched the techno, and just generally chilled the fuck out. Granted, it took him a few years to get it right: Skinner’s full-length debut, 2002’s Original Pirate Material, zoomed around so much it made me dizzy....

Michael Miner unwittingly threw down the gauntlet in his March 5 [Hot Type] column on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. A writer in the New York Times had identified “a battle between secular humanists and true believers” over the movie. Mr. Miner comments that “only occasionally is there the ardor of faith answering faith” in the debate. He’s correct, and it’s a shame, because there is a solid secular-humanist case to be made in defense of this film....

I’ve always heard that baldness in males is inherited from their mother’s father. However, I’ve seen plenty of families where the father is bald, the mother’s father has plenty of hair, and the kid is bald. So, what’s the scoop on inheriting baldness? –Debbie Brown, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As you note, popular belief has long held that male baldness is inherited through the mother, and that any lad curious about what’s in store for him hairwise should check out his mom’s father and her paternal uncles....

Michael Hopkins calls his 11 small, haunting, eerily transparent works at Navta Schulz X-ray paintings, and though some are ambiguous, others do suggest bones, perhaps a rib cage or joints. Fragile, strangely glowing presences, these untitled pieces in white ink on slate hover before the eye like ghosts. Begun in early 2004, they were inspired in part by hospital jobs Hopkins had in college two decades ago, cleaning up after surgeries and as a physical therapy technician....

Listening to Gift of Gab rhyme on Blackalicious’s 1999 EP, A2G, was like watching someone juggle flaming chain saws: he spewed a seemingly endless supply of offbeat images with the kind of speed, breath control, and stamina that made me wonder if his lungs weren’t transplanted from an elephant. To match that energy, Chief Xcel came up with the kind of rambunctious, frolicsome beats that suggested a seven-year-old on a sugar high was working behind the boards....

The 17th annual Chicago Humanities Festival, this year themed “Peace and War,” runs through 11/12, offering dozens of lectures, readings, and discussions by an international coterie of writers, artists, and scholars as well as film screenings (see reviews in Movies) and theatrical and musical performances. And for the first time the festival introduces science-focused “Wonder Cabinet” programs and free “Sidebars at the Center” events. Programs are $5 in advance, $6 (cash only) at the door, unless otherwise noted....

In his one-man show, Spencer Lord tells his own incredibly eventful life story, depicting himself as a resourceful transient drifting all over the planet and into the lives of everyone from Dolly Parton to the Dalai Lama (deemed “too giggly”). Lord’s world-weary demeanor and derisive sense of humor give his name-dropping a wry edge–and his peregrinations fascinate. But after he finds himself imprisoned on drug charges in the second act, the show veers more and more from amusing self-revelatory observations to masturbatory rambling–one criminally protracted speech about Christian persecution of Jews serves absolutely no purpose but to show off his intelligence....

Dillinger Four is not only the best punk band the midwest has produced but probably the most thoroughly midwestern punk band ever. Unpretentious, hardworking, and hard drinking, between 1998 and 2002 they delivered three albums of tightly wound pop punk-slash-hardcore that lacerated pompous hipsters as viciously as various Man figures. They big-upped Nelson Algren in song, and for as often as their concerts turned into recon missions to the farthest frontiers of good taste, I never saw them miss a note....

I’ve never seen a karaoke book that offers King Missile’s “Detachable Penis.” But there it is, alongside songs by the Buzzcocks and the Cure, Dio and Judas Priest, on the menu at Rory Lake’s Karaoke Dreams. Lake started his karaoke night four years ago at the Prodigal Son on North Halsted, and now hosts it more or less monthly in the bright and smoky basement bar of the American Legion post at 1824 W....

There’s no shortage of plays that read like classroom exercises–but Chicago playwright Belinda Bremner conceived Envoy precisely for the purpose of training actors. The story revolves around student volunteers on a philanthropic service project in an unnamed third-world country who are taken hostage by rebel guerrillas. The actors playing the diverse characters in this Echo Theatre Company debut production are given several interpretive options, and at each show a different performer makes an unscripted choice that determines the ending....

It’s hard to believe that the same Henry Rollins who declared that “sensitivity is for pussies” has spent the last few years as a solo performer detailing a set of neuroses thicker than his own neck, fussing about turning 40 and finding the right girl to settle down with. Maybe people are finally getting hip to the idea of Rollins as a monologuist a decade after he published his unhinged travelogue, Get in the Van, about his misspent youth in the punk band Black Flag....

Listeners who’ve witnessed Patricia Barber’s evolution from a superb jazz pianist to an arresting vocalist–and more recently into a full-fledged writer of musical commentary–won’t blanch at her latest project: an 11-piece song cycle inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The product of the Guggenheim fellowship she received in 2003, Mythologies is wildly eclectic, employing a variety of forms, harmonic schemes, and poetic devices, and it easily outstrips what was previously her most ambitious work, the collection of originals she wrote for 2002’s Verse (Blue Note)....

It’s been more than a year since the release of The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, but there are still good reasons to catch these metal sculptors this weekend rather than wait for the push behind their next record, due in May 2007 on Hydra Head. (A DVD is on the way too, built around a London show from 2005, but its January release date was recently scrapped....

Please tell women that low-rise jeans only look good on a handful of people. Whenever I go out, all I see are “girl love handles” (GLH) hanging over low-rise jeans. For the love of humanity, Dan! Someone needs to tell women who are overweight, tubby, fat, or just not properly proportioned to stop wearing jeans that show off or create rolls! Just today I saw a girl who would have been attractive had it not been for her damn low-rise jeans....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a mixture of synergy, opportunism, and fuzzy feel-goodness coalesce into a phenomenon quite like the story of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. The group formed in 1999 at a refugee camp in Guinea, where thousands of Sierra Leone natives had fled a brutal civil war at home. The band initially played for other refugees, which wasn’t exactly a careerist move....

Steve Stein, aka STEINSKI, became one of the most influential figures in hip-hop almost by accident. In 1983 Tommy Boy Records sponsored a remixing contest to boost the sagging sales of a 12-inch called “Play That Beat Mr. D.J.” by G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid. Stein and his pal Doug DiFranco (aka Double Dee) had their way with the track, winning the contest with a compositional patchwork of samples that was a quantum leap beyond the usual purloined bass lick or drum break–they treated sampling as an art form in its own right, not just a utilitarian shortcut, and paved the way for radical turntablists like DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist....

Bob the Brain was looking for one more winner. The final race of the Hawthorne handicapping contest was five minutes away. The horses were already on the track, and the scoreboard told him he was $3 behind the leader. The winner would take home five grand. “Of all the people to be in this tournament, Steven Walker has to come qualify!” Bob had shouted from his table in the track’s handicapping center when he heard....