Lead Story The Litigious Society Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Orange County, California, in May psychologist Michael Cohn filed a class-action suit against the Los Angeles Angels baseball team seeking $4,000 damages for each of the male fans and female fans under 18 who attended the Angels game on Mother’s Day 2005 and weren’t given a complimentary tote bag. And in June Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal–the notorious terrorist of the 70s and 80s now serving life in a French prison for three murders–filed a lawsuit alleging that the former head of French foreign intelligence illegally had him kidnapped in 1994 at a clinic in Khartoum, Sudan, while he was sedated prior to liposuction....

For the last three years twentysomething monologuist Brian Lobel has been touring festivals, universities, and medical schools with Ball, his “traumedy” about surviving testicular cancer. By his own admission, he worked overtime to keep that piece tidy and inspirational (it runs July 26-August 27 at Bailiwick Repertory as part of Bailiwick’s “Pride 2006” series). In this dishy, messy sequel he explains tongue in cheek why he left the “uncomfortable parts” out of Ball: “Trashy stories about faggotry and STDs belied my cancer’s purity....

Ben Joravsky might have been a bit more inquisitive about the issues at stake in the South Loop rather than simply transcribing the complaints of next-door neighbors and the developer’s defense [The Works, September 30]. For one thing, the Near South Community Plan says nothing about a park on the northwest corner of Polk and Clark; it makes vague mention of the possibility on undeveloped land at Taylor and Clark. Besides, two parks already exist within 400 feet of the Terrapin site, and a new 3....

Shut Up and Starve Are Chicago actors underpaid? Well, duh. But can they complain about it in print? Earlier this summer well-regarded actor Jay Whittaker leveled with Tribune reporter Sid Smith about the economic reality of a full-time thespian in Chicago–even one who has relatively steady work with the city’s best theaters. In Smith’s piece, “Chicago Theater’s Unsung Heroes,” four other actors spoke about general experiences: taking commercial jobs to supplement theater earnings, depending on spouses to be the breadwinners, watching a colleague greet the birth of a child with financial despair....

Last May local comedy impresario Mike Oquendo got an unexpected phone call. “You know you’re doing the work of the devil,” the caller said. Oquendo realized the man was protesting Proud to Laugh, a gay comedy showcase he’d organized as a fund-raiser for this year’s Gay Games, and laughed. Oquendo, who bears a passing resemblance to Ozzie Guillen, grew up in Wrigleyville. “Back then it was all black and Puerto Rican,” he says....

On November 18, Paige Sarlin joined 100 others at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, to give the Kodak Carousel slide projector a proper send-off to the great darkened family room in the sky. The last of the trusty machines, which had been in continuous production since 1961, shuttled off the assembly line on October 22, 2004, deemed obsolete by Kodak brass in an audiovisual future dominated by digital cameras and PowerPoint....

To the editor, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I write to thank you for including Duke’s Bar in Rogers Park among your recommended neighborhood taverns in the recent “Chicago 101” issue [“The Neighborhood Tavern,” September 22]. However, it is evident that the author of the article hasn’t set foot in Duke’s in more than a year. The bar has been under new ownership (my own) since September 2005....

Various health and yoga Web sites claim that iceberg lettuce contains chemicals similar to laudanum, morphine, or other opiates. There are also reports of people being admitted to hospitals after injecting themselves with lettuce extracts and papers about smoking lettuce. I have found no information about the chemical constitution of lettuce that mentions morphine or opiates. Are there such things in supermarket lettuce? –Curious Lettuce Eater, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I suppose there are plenty of ways to describe my current attitude toward rock music. Readers may consider me jaded, negative, and plain hostile toward the stuff, but in reality I still like it. It’s not so much that I’ve grown harder to impress as I age—a common enough plight for someone who’s spent many years writing about music—but I think I’ve just realized how much other stuff exists in the world....

Lyn Hughes should have known better. You can’t offend your alderman, even inadvertently, and expect the city to treat you fairly. Shaw managed to become a big shot in his ward again, but by the end of the 90s his organization was being challenged by a new political coalition led by Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. and the Reverend James Meeks. In 1999 Shaw stepped down as alderman to run for the Cook County Board of Review and slated his son, Herbert Shaw, to run for his old seat....

The woman who might be Chicago’s most-read political writer doesn’t have an office. On most days Georgia Logothetis, 23, is either at home in the same Rogers Park three-flat where she lives with her parents or at DePaul University’s downtown campus. About four or five times a day, taking a break from constitutional law homework or prepping for a moot-court trial, she’ll type a righteously indignant rant clobbering the Republican Party on Iraq, warrantless spying, and the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal....

When Nicole Mitchell fell in love with jazz, she fell hard. It was 1986, and she was in her second year of college. She’d been studying classical flute since age 15 and played in two different youth orchestras. But then she took a class in jazz improvisation from the great trombonist Jimmy Cheatham, and within months she was spending most of her free time on the streets of San Diego, improvising for spare change....

You shop, you vote. According to the business group Local First Chicago, every time you spend money via computer, phone, catalog, or physical store you’re helping to decide whether locally owned businesses will survive to keep their neighborhoods unique and prosperous. She’d also like you to know that most of the Grind’s employees live in the neighborhood and walk to work. She buys her coffee from Intelligentsia on Fulton and her baked goods from Southport Bakery, Labriola Baking in Alsip, Sweet Thang on North Avenue, and other local suppliers....

Bardo Pond may have gone three years without putting out a proper record of songs, but the Philadelphia-based quintet hasn’t been slacking. Instead they’ve focused on no-net improvisation–recording a fantastic collaboration with Charalambides guitarist Tom Carter and issuing a CD-R series of practice-space jams that were later cherry-picked for the double-disc set Selections: Volumes I-IV–and honing their production skills in the studio they’ve owned since the late 90s. They’ve returned to actual songs with the new Ticket Crystals (ATP), a record that’s equal parts spontaneous invention and studio intervention, and also the group’s most ambitious and diverse effort to date....

Boy Gets Girl | Eclipse Theatre Company INFO 773-871-3000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Playwright Rebecca Gilman has made a lot of missteps in recent work, venturing into cartoonish class politics in 2001’s Blue Surge and 2005’s Dollhouse. But her Boy Gets Girl–a hit at the Goodman in 2000–shows off her strengths: acidic observational humor based on the human urge for self-aggrandizement and the deft creation of a pervasive sense of menace....

Fiddlehead Cafe Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can’t say Fiddlehead Cafe doesn’t do its darndest to please. This casual, warm, wine-centric cafe from two Bin 36 alums opened last month in the corner storefront formerly occupied by Square Kitchen. The name, after the fern, is meant to reflect both the restaurant’s commitment to a seasonal menu and its proximity to the Old Town School of Folk Music, just up the street....

Most of Kate McQuillen’s 13 watercolors, wall installations, and silk screens at Caro d’Offay are “translations” of e-mails, letters, and voice mails she’s received. McQuillen used a different method for each translation and reveals neither the encoding system nor the original message, creating a sense of hidden meaning that causes the viewer to reflect on the mysteries of language. The watercolors’ pale, sensuous colors and elegant geometrical designs are especially appealing....

Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney has built a national reputation on local work–including the Cesar Chavez Multicultural Academic Center in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, the Little Village Family Resource Center, and the Jubilee Family Resource Center in North Lawndale. Often working within a tight budget on unpromising sites, she’s used form, color, and light in place of expensive materials to give her buildings visual depth and excitement. Her vocabulary includes contrasting strips of colored brick, bright yellow roofs, windows cut into the wall at odd angles, and sunny, colorful interiors....

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s documentary about U.S. soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery, stationed at a luxurious palace built by Saddam Hussein, is the first comprehensive film account I’ve seen of the Iraq occupation from the perspective of the soldiers; essentially this is their film. Most of the bullshit comes from Donald Rumsfeld, and no commentary is needed to clarify its inadequacy. I’m uncomfortable with how some of the narrative and musical strategies contrive to evoke Apocalypse Now, especially considering the filmmakers’ relative lack of illusions about the war....

Though this production inaugurates a space for “artists working outside the traditional methodology of the text-based theater,” director Blake Montgomery’s elegant, clean-lined Hamlet is radical only in that it returns the play to its roots, stripping away centuries of convention and received wisdom. There is one departure from the text, however: the final scene is played first. This produces a kaleidoscope effect–one little twist, and all the pieces fall into a new pattern....