John Sheridan is a union buster. At least that’s how union organizers see him. He prefers to see himself as a management consultant in “proactive employee relations.” For the past 33 years, when employers have wanted to thwart union organizing drives, win contract concessions, get rid of unions, or take preemptive action to head off even the potential of a union, they’ve called on Jack Sheridan. Sheridan, now 58, also says he’s ashamed of many of his fellow antiunion organizers, who engage in illegal and unethical tactics to bust unions....

To the editors: Cecil Adams’s answer about which bullet hits the ground faster [Straight Dope, December 16] is right, but for the wrong reasons. There is a much stronger reason than curvature of the earth why the dropped bullet hits the ground faster than the fired one, namely air resistance. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Air resistance is a force which tends to slow down an object, and its strength is roughly proportional to the square of the speed of the object....

One day last May, three undercover cops from the vice squad arrested Frances Monica Franson on charges of prostitution. Franson and one of the cops had sequestered themselves in a private north-side apartment. The cop asked for services, Franson stated her price, and money exchanged hands. “[Franson was] arrested after she offered to perform an act of sexual penetration (oral copulation) with [the arresting officer] for the sum of $400,” the police report reads....

This varied collection of shorts represents a certain improvement over the International Tournee of Animation in terms of overall quality. An organization based in La Jolla called Mellow Madness has put it together, and after many successful years on the west coast is taking the show on the road, in competition with the International Tournee. A greater interest in the hallucinatory describes part of the different emphasis, although the selection is no less international: films from Hungary, Canada, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, the USSR, and the U....

Last Sunday was the vernal equinox, or, as we say in English, the first day of spring. It is an occasion that often slips by unnoticed in Chicago. For us, late March brings blizzards more often than balmy breezes and nodding daffodils. We have to wait a whole month before the first pale green leaves emerge on the trees. On the 20th, we enjoyed 12 hours and 11 minutes of daylight....

Certain medical problems are a pleasure to treat–when the diagnosis can be made with confidence and no major inconvenience to the patient, when the treatment is effective and safe, when the cure is complete. By all rights, strep throat should be one of these diagnoses. Sure enough, the suckers grow. And thanks to the wonders of antibiotics, Missy is able to return to choir practice. In a voice-over, Peck muses: “The specter of rheumatic fever, which used to lurk behind every sore throat, no longer haunts our children....

In a biting cold wind, on a hillside overlooking the huge round metal bins and spidery auger pipes of the Pro Farmer Grain Elevator just outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Paul Simon was worriedly testing his microphone. TV reporters shivered as their camera crews calculated angles and sound technicians tried to deal with the wind noise. “He’ll talk about grain exports and the embargo,” an advance man confided urgently. “He’ll mention Gephardt by name....

If Dylan married the sensibilities of Elvis and Rimbaud, X pulled off a similar trick with Hank Williams and William Burroughs–all, of course, within the confines of the genre of LA gutter punk in the late 1970s. Lovers John Doe and Exene were riotous romantics adrift in a milieu that didn’t allow for much hope; but they persevered and found at least a measure of redemption in their last, melancholy albums (particularly See How We Are)....

This show should bring some historical perspective to the current rap-music furor; it may also refamiliarize contemporary audiences with the affirming message of liberation that lies at the roots of the form. The Last Poets were, along with Gil Scott-Heron, among the most important chroniclers of the urban revolt of the 60s and early 70s. Buoyed by a propulsive African polyrhythmic base, their readings were unabashedly revolutionary–fierce yet laced with profound love and hope for the future....

Spalding Gray is charming and cruel. He doesn’t look charming and cruel; charming and cruel is tall and handsome and strong, in the Bronze Aryan manner of a Calvin Klein model. With his smallish build, his surprised eyebrows, and those plaid back-to-school shirts he seems to want to turn into a trademark, Gray evokes something more like smart and whiny. More like the WASP Woody Allen somebody once called him. But looks, as somebody else once said, can be deceiving....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, Mr. Adams, there is a Lake Lillian. Our city is not located “south” of Bird Island; rather it is north of Bird Island. Lake Lillian is located in the South Central part of the State of Minnesota. We are approximately 90 miles west of the Twin Cities. The lakes in the Lake Lillian area have attracted man for many centuries....

JIM SELF AND DANCERS Look at Scraping Bottoms, for example, a solo choreographed and performed by Self and costumed by Frank Moore, Self’s artistic partner. In this dance, Self was dressed in a highly stylized tuxedo, with the arms and legs somehow reinforced to look squared off, as if the dancer’s limbs were jointed two-by-fours. He performed a collection of erratic, explosive, pointing gestures, alternately exhibiting the rigid control of a ballet dancer and the flaccid spinelessness of a rag doll....

“You are never more than six miles from a lake, river or stream, no matter where you may be standing in St. Joseph County, Michigan,” boasts a tourism brochure. The county is awfully watery, with seven rivers and 55 lakes in a tabletop-shaped area that’s about 12 miles by 11 miles. Its name derives from its largest river, the Saint Joseph, which runs diagonally across the county northeast to southeast. La Salle paddled the rivers and its tributaries in the mid-17th century for his French employers....

THE BAY AT NICE The premises of both plays are certainly serviceable enough for coffee-table drama. In The Bay at Nice the 1956 acquisition by the Leningrad Art Museum of a painting that may or may not be an unfinished masterpiece by the late Henri Matisse results in the summoning of Valentina Nrovka, formerly a student of Matisse’s, to identify it. This errand also provides the occasion for her daughter, Sophia, to announce her intention to leave her boring bureaucrat husband for a lover twice her age and half her social equal (Peter is 63 and works for the department of sanitation)....

I never saw her face during the entire time–not more than an hour, though it seemed much longer–that she was being insulted and baited by her husband. We were sitting in Ditka’s waiting for women’s boxing to begin. Chris Kreuz, a feisty local, would be defending her title against a New York challenger. The warm-up bouts, however, featured males flailing and weaving about the makeshift ring that had been constructed in the middle of the bar....

“It’s a big event anytime the sun comes out, so we bring everything up,” says Paul Collard dryly, tipping his head toward makeshift wooden tables covered with wires, monitors, and a nine-inch-square plastic lens mounted on a stand. “By the time we get it all set up, the sun’s gone.” But not today. A faint acrid smell wafts across the roof, and Collard springs to tip the lens so the intense point of light it’s creating hits metal instead of a smoking spot of plywood....

I recently celebrated my 30th birthday, and am in the initial stages of what I hope will be a serious and long-lasting relationship. My dilemma is this: I’ve never been told the story of “the birds and the bees.” I’ve traveled around the world and am not an inexperienced person, but this missing piece of information may be the reason I haven’t, up till now, been truly successful in love. Please give me the straight dope on the origin of the phrase “the birds and the bees” and the details of the act(s) as it (or they) relate to man....

A friend recently told me that her boss, an Orthodox Jew, could not eat M&M’s due to their shells being coated with beetle juice. Restricting bug intake doesn’t seem extraordinary considering Talmudic law (which might be more discerning than federal food regulations but who knows), but what about the accusation that insects are being used to make the candy coating that melts in your mouth, not in your hand? –Michael Chelm, Los Angeles...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians were concerned with the relationship between Spirit and Matter, a dichotomy between two kinds of real substance established in the second chapter of Genesis which has plagued religious and scientific thought ever since. Unlike modern fundamentalists, who are content simply to declare that prayer can turn away hurricanes, the Scholastics wanted to know how it did so; in other words, how the two kinds of substance co-existed and affected each other....

They’re building a strip mall on the old, deserted blacktop lot–now covered with ice–out behind the Berwyn Avenue elevated stop in Edgewater. Well, so long as you’re asking, alderman, here’s what the mall’s critics say. The mall will dislocate small businesses; divert revenues needed by other, more worthy ventures; enrich a developer named Charles Markopoulos (who could not be reached for comment) with a municipal bailout he does not deserve; and spur gentrification, which will uproot the area’s poor....