Rusty Reed is a bit disappointed in how little Chicagoans know about turtles. “People keep saying they’ve never seen a turtle like Crunch,” he says, “but there was an even bigger one at the Brookfield Zoo for 45 years!” Reed is the owner of Crunch, a creamy green, 165-pound alligator snapping turtle who is over four feet long and somewhere between 150 and 200 years old. Crunch is in town as one of the hot attractions at the 2006 Chicagoland Outdoor Show in Rosemont, where he’s sitting motionless on the rocks at the bottom of his illuminated travel aquarium....

Good bands don’t need to reinvent themselves with every record to keep fans. San Francisco’s Numbers have toured for two years on more or less the same batch of stripped-down songs, and they’ve yet to wear out their welcome. (Their crowd doesn’t even seem to mind that they’ve released a handful of those tracks, like, four times.) On their new In My Mind All the Time (Tigerbeat6), their fork-in-a-socket boogie hasn’t gotten any more sophisticated, but they’re devoted minimalists, not simpletons....

After his last encore, Rjyan Kidwell usually remembers to take care of introductions. His hair stringy with sweat, his bare chest shining, he gestures toward his band–singer Roby Newton, who’s also his wife, and drummer Cale Parks. “Thanks,” he says. “We’re Cex.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kidwell has been Cex since high school, when he spent his evenings dinking around on his parents’ computer....

It’s been months since Johnny Lira didn’t get the job he wanted with the state, but folks up on the northwest side are still talking about how Governor Rod Blagojevich turned his back on his old friend. While out on bail, Lira got caught trying to rob the safe in an office near Kedzie and Addison. “This is how stupid I was,” he says. “I needed money to hire a lawyer for the first case....

friday31 Dan Sartain “Young girls are stupid / and they’re cruel / but I still want them,” sings Dan Sartain on “Young Girls,” the best track on Join Dan Sartain, released last year on Swami. But despite all this macho melodrama, Sartain’s hardly the rockabilly savior the UK press has painted him to be. A lanky Alabaman with the face of a cretin, he’s just a shack rocker who’s ditched the basement scuzz for studio clarity but keeps on singing about getting in fights, getting fucked-up, and getting in trouble with women....

Here are a few points in response to the first part of Jay F. Shachter’s October 13 letter (“Gay Marriage and the Law”) challenging L. Olson’s allegedly imaginative Bible paraphrasing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Score the first round for Shachter. The King James Bible sentences priests’ daughters who become prostitutes to death by fire, not stoning. However, this frivolous nit-picking fails to undermine the main point in Olson’s letter about the Christian right justifying its unfavorable moral views on homosexuality and most things sex (as well as the right to impose these views on people with different views) with an inconsistently literal interpretation of the Old Testament....

North Carolina soul journeyman ANTHONY HAMILTON began recording in the early 90s, but his early albums were either ignored or unreleased thanks to label snafus. His luck changed with 2003’s Comin’ From Where I’m From, an understated gem that showed off his Bill Withers-esque voice and set him apart from his peers–Hamilton refused to either indulge in neosoul nostalgia or settle for empty bedroom whispers. The album went platinum, and success seems to have boosted his confidence: for the follow-up, last year’s Ain’t Nobody Worryin’ (So So Def/Zomba), he sings with even greater intensity, and though different producers tend to play most of the instruments, the album feels like a genuine live-band recording....

Cristina Cordova’s interest in the body’s expressiveness was sparked by the ballet classes she took as a child in Puerto Rico. “Every aspect of the body is engaged in dance,” she says. “You modulate and optimize every gesture. That clearly transfers to the sculpture that I do, where I want every figure to carry a sense of that energy. I’ve always felt comfortable with the language that generates from the body and creates a communication that goes beyond words....

Why We Fight Why We Fight makes good on this ambition, opening with President Eisenhower’s prophetic 1961 farewell speech, in which he identified the military-industrial complex as a threat to democratic governance, and following this premise through 9/11 and the Iraq war. Jarecki looks at the arms industry’s cozy relationship with Congress and visits one of the neocon think tanks where the Bush Doctrine was hatched. He revisits Dick Cheney’s career with Halliburton and the administration’s massaging of the facts in the case against Saddam Hussein....

As befits a temperamental, piano-plunking misunderstood artiste, Fiona Apple has always had a contentious relationship with the commercial pressures of fame. Her first video, in which she crawled around in a see-through bra and panty set, may have kept the world watching as she balled her fists and shook them, but she’s since lobbed blazing barbs at her record company for sexing up her image, and two years ago had a very public falling-out with the label over the direction of her music....

Woody Allen’s 1975 comedy is nominally set in ancient Greece, but it’s a New York Jewish sort of Greece like the one in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And once the action starts leaking out into the present day–anachronisms piling up like crazy–the Greek part falls away and it’s just plain New York Jewish. Chemically Imbalanced Comedy’s first mistake is failing to see how crucial the NYJ thing is....

Mark Twain famously remarked that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. The converse might be said about the music of Wagner’s most ardent follower, Anton Bruckner, whose critics often cite both his intoxicating sound and his lack of compositional refinement. His Seventh Symphony contains some noble, powerful, and incredibly beautiful music. Expression and form are particularly well-balanced in the first movement, and while the second movement adagio was inspired by a premonition of his beloved Wagner’s death, the symphony remains an optimistic work....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But as several Chicagoist commenters pointed out, there are exceptions to this rule all over the place: film critics get to see movies for free, music reviewers get promo CDs, book reviewers get free books. But a movie, CD, or book is a fixed product–there’s nothing a publisher can do to make the free book qualitatively better than the one someone else pays $22....

Guitarist Juan Carmona was born and raised in Lyon, France, but his roots are in Spain, and he has a deep affinity for Spanish flamenco in its purest form. He began playing guitar at ten and later moved to Paris, where he studied and eventually taught flamenco at the National Conservatory of Music. But in the mid-80s he decided that he could only fully master the style by going to its source, so he moved to the flamenco center of Jerez, where he spent nearly a decade studying and performing with some of the music’s greatest talents before returning to Paris....

There’s little reason nowadays to stage Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s 17th-century fable about a prince who forgives his father for mistreating him, a theme also reflected in a subplot in which an abandoned wife reunites with her faithless spouse. In the hope of rendering these stories palatable to modern sensibilities, adapter Adam Webster takes considerable liberties with the text, and this LiveWire Theater staging features plenty of spectacle, perhaps in the same hope....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Former Chicagoan Sean Carroll, who blogs at Cosmic Variance, learned something at the fall meeting of the Illinois and Iowa sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers: “High-school science teachers live in a very different world than professional researchers. Typically a ‘department’ is only one person, and when it comes to resources one has to be a little creative....

Both the title and the witty, urbane narration delivered by Alexandra Stewart are quintessential Chris Marker, yet this 42-minute essay (2001) about the work of photographer Denise Bellon is in fact a collaboration between Marker and Bellon’s son Yannick, a director in his own right who has been making films since 1947. Most of the Denise Bellon photography on-screen comes from France in the late 30s, and the sense of history is as sharp and inflected with literary irony as in Marker’s other films....

Like its inspiration, Puccini’s La boheme, this Broadway hit is a counterculture soap opera whose simultaneously stereotypical and archetypal crises are made credible and immediate by rousing songs and unshakable optimism in the face of death and despair. The inventively arranged score–by Jonathan Larson, who died at 35 just days before the show’s 1996 premiere–is a rapturous outpouring of catchy melodies and driving rhythms. Like George Gershwin, another brilliant tunesmith who died young, Larson draws on a wide range of genres (hard rock, power pop, soul, gospel, techno, reggae, rap) yet infuses the whole with a personality that’s uniquely his own....

RESTAURANTS $ (2 reports) Southern/Soul Food | Breakfast, lunch, dinner: Sunday-Monday, Wednesday-Saturday | Closed Tuesday Boo’s Soul Food Cafe8414 S. Ashland | 773-298-9997 “Eat your heart out!” proclaims the menu board at this tiny, whimsically named cafe in Heart of Chicago, and it’s no joke: the portions threaten to spill over the edge of the plates. But it’s hard to be anything other than a hearty eater here—the food is pretty damn good....

Radically witty comedian Sarah Silverman–who’s been lurking around the edges of TV and movies since she debuted on Saturday Night Live in 1993–gets her big coming-out party with this video of her stage show, shot at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood. There are onstage musical numbers with a backup band, and the show is augmented with backstage bits featuring Bob Odenkirk, but the main attraction is Silverman’s daring stand-up act, a revival of classic 50s sick humor that leaves you questioning your own laughter....