Last year my town made it illegal to use a “hands-on” cell phone while driving–hands-free phones are still OK. Since laws here tend to get passed on the basis of what will look good in the newspapers, I’m wondering: How dangerous is cell phone use in cars really? You see drivers all the time drinking coffee, putting on makeup, chatting with passengers, etc. As distractions go, the only obvious difference with cell phones is that they’re relatively new and thus a target for legislative busybodies and the easily alarmed–there was all that noise a while back about cell phones causing brain cancer....

Early this morning after a night of drinking I woke up and really had to pee. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. But what happens if I don’t? Is there a long-term health risk if I regularly choose to hold it? If alcohol is thrown into the equation, are there other effects or considerations? –Matt Groves, Valdez, Alaska Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When you drink, liquid passes from your stomach and small intestine into your bloodstream....

Why don’t trees grow on the Great Plains? If there’s enough rain and sun to grow grass, what’s stopping the forest from taking over, say, Kansas? –workerant, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Except it’s not that simple, you knuckleheads. True, the plains themselves–anything west of Omaha, roughly–are too arid to support trees. But that doesn’t explain the “prairie peninsula.” By this we mean the immense wedge of grassland that extends eastward from the Great Plains through Iowa and Illinois, over parts of Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin, and into western Indiana, with isolated patches in Michigan and Ohio....

One of the leading figures in Amsterdam’s dynamic jazz scene, Tobias Delius happens to be a terrific clarinetist, but it’s the way he plays tenor saxophone that really makes me jump: he combines the breathy, low-register sensuality of Ben Webster, the terse, jagged phrasing of Archie Shepp, and the full-bodied agility of Sonny Rollins in a style that’s beholden to no one. Heard in a relatively open-ended setting, as on the eponymous debut of the collective Apa Ini, he demonstrates a brilliant ability to joust and tango with another horn (in this case Hilary Jeffery’s trombone), exploring rich contrapuntal improv and extended lines in which the simplest phrases are unspooled into an endless string of permutations....

The City Council’s May 26 votes on Wal-Mart violated so many council protocols that even the experts are baffled. “If you figure out what’s going on, please let me know,” says 35th Ward alderman Rey Colon. “I was there, and I still can’t figure it out.” So let’s take it point by point. “Daley’s no dummy,” says one northwest-side alderman. “He doesn’t want to get blamed for Wal-Mart coming here, and he doesn’t want to get blamed for running them out of town....

Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock To an outsider the entire concept seems doomed to fail, starting with the rock. Here’s a musical form aping a secular style whose lifeblood is venality and sin being shackled to a religion–most often an evangelical strain of American Protestantism–that abhors not only sin but in a lot of cases that kind of music. According to most of the players interviewed in Andrew Beaujon’s new rock-critical-cum-sociological study, Body Piercing Saved My Life, even the fans understand that most of it sucks....

Metal has such a cozy relationship with the infernal that it’s easy to assume it really is all about the devil, just like mama always said. But I’d argue that the real fascination isn’t with hellfire but rather with eschatology and omnipotence, and that you can make music that sounds like the end of the world without putting your money on the number of the beast–if the devil is heavy, after all, it stands to reason that God is even heavier....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a recent article in the New Yorker, music critic Sasha Frere-Jones examines four artists that have recently covered Joy Division’s immortal “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” He devotes only a single sentence to the best version, recorded by Norway’s Susanna & the Magical Orchestra. (It’s actually duo of singer Susanna Wallumrod and keyboardist Morten Qvenild, who’s also a member of the jazz trio In the Country....

The votes in last month’s primary hadn’t even been counted when union activist Matt Brandon began working on the next big prize: the February 2007 aldermanic elections. As he sees it, one of the biggest problems in Chicago politics is a City Council that’s too compliant with the mayor and out of touch with the needs of unionized public employees. So he plans to rally his union behind a slate of labor-friendly, independent-minded challengers in almost every ward, sending out campaign workers to get them elected....

Stephen Belber’s comedy drama features one fabulous character: 62-year-old Tobi, a bisexual dancer-choreographer with lots of ripsnortin’ throwaway lines. The two others are a married couple who arrive at his apartment, doggedly pursuing the agenda that ostensibly gives this rambling, overlong work a through line. In Lauren Golanty’s staging for Appetite Theatre, Michael D. Graham has a ball as the bitchy, irresponsible, very funny dancer. Krista Forster does her womanly best with the role of the saintly wife, and Christopher C....

She’s Done Worse Life is war to reporters in Possley’s line of work. For the past several years he and a few colleagues have churned out investigations of prosecutorial misconduct and wrongful convictions. These series have yet to win the Tribune the Pulitzer they deserve, and they’ve offended just about every prosecutor in America. Earlier this year Possley sat in the dock for weeks as a jury decided a defamation suit brought by one of them, Du Page County’s Thomas Knight....

MINDY SMITH 2/13, SCHUBAS Slipped in among stars like Shania Twain and Alison Krauss on last fall’s Dolly Parton tribute album, Just Because I’m a Woman, this clarion-voiced young singer-songwriter turned heads with her version of “Jolene,” and she’s since formally launched her career with One Moment More (Vanguard). She’s got tons of potential–she can sound as shy as Suzanne Vega or as full of conviction as Sandy Denny–but as of now her singing is well out in front of her songwriting....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Film comedies have always been a problem for me, since for the most part I don’t find ’em “funny.” (Funny: what’s that? When you laugh, I guess, though Rob Zombie movies—or Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil: Extinction … can’t hardly wait for that one!—probably don’t count.) And with the recent canonization of everything Judd Apatow touches, things are looking bleaker all the time, at least from my side of the aisle....

It was an odd choice to open Judy Veramendi’s play about turn-of-the-century Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini on Valentine’s Day: it condemns the illusions of romantic love and the snares of sexual passion. Agustini’s writing about sex shocked the public, and her determination to continue writing after she was married made her personal life a battle. Acclaimed at 21, she was dead at 27 by her husband’s hand. Veramendi fills her protofeminist story with anachronisms, referring to a character’s psychological troubles as “depression” (then called neurasthenia) and to societal constraints in terms common to second-wave feminism....

Wyoming, the “Equality State,” seems to be the place for gay tragedy. Though Ang Lee’s Oscar contender speaks for closeted cowboys everywhere, Moises Kaufman’s 2000 play reminds us that a real-life tragedy happened there in 1998. Where Brokeback Mountain ends with a murder, The Laramie Project begins with one: the homophobic killing of 21-year-old college student Matthew Shepard. But the townsfolk’s reactions–as captured by Kaufman’s original Tectonic Theater Project actors, who interviewed and portrayed them–count as much as re-creating the murder....

What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States Though the sports arena is often used to stage morality plays shoring up the status quo–no other country in the world kicks off every game with the national anthem, Zirin says–he believes it once was a ring where the establishment was challenged and can be again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Makes sense to me....

Friday 4 Saturday 5 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » LOS CENZONTLES This group is the live-performance face of the Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center, a community-oriented music and dance school in San Pablo, California, that’s sort of like the Old Town School of Folk Music. Many such folkloric ensembles sound quaint and stale, but under the guidance of musical director Eugene Rodriguez, Los Cenzontles (Aztec for “the Mockingbirds”) take a lively, catholic approach to Mexico’s various folk forms....

Ixcapuzalco/La Bonita Restaurante Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Frontera/Topolobampo alum Geno Bahena opened his first upscale Mexican restaurant, Ixcapuzalco, in Logan Square in 2000, he might’ve griddled the image of the Virgin in a tortilla for all the eager Bayless adherents who flocked there, tired of waiting for tables downtown. Bahena’s sublime daily moles heralded the spread of the Gospel According to Rick: that Mexico had a vast and sophisticated cuisine yet to be truly appreciated by non-Mexicans....

Watching Winard Harper behind his drum set, it’s easy to forget he’s hard at work: his effortless ebullience and high-wattage smile remind you why they call it playing music. Like a Formula One car, he combines explosive energy with technical wizardry, his hard swing sweetly lubricated by the sophisticated feel of his favorite Blue Note and Prestige recordings of the 50s and 60s. Harper’s own groups, two-horn combos patterned after those of his chief model, Art Blakey, are the best way to enjoy him, but he brings the same strengths to a session as a sideman: on a new recording by Parisian vocalist Sara Lazarus, he creates a perfect mix of accent and flow at almost every tempo....

The Cubs came home to die last week. Having already lost five in a row on the road, including a three-game sweep in New York at the hands of the hated Mets, they returned to Wrigley Field three games under .500 and fading in the wild-card race. The first team they faced was the Cincinnati Reds, the generally woeful division rivals who’d crushed the Cubs’ playoff hopes a year ago by beating them three straight the last week of the season....