Poi Dog Pondering’s first, eponymous LP (actually a major-label rerelease of a pair of indie EPs) has its light moments, but it grows on you enormously. The band is a shambling eight-person ensemble from Hawaii and recently Austin; the record is a lazily engaging romp. Songwriter-singer-tin-whistle-player Frank Orrall is at his best, I think, limning a scene like that in “Living With the Dreaming Body”; elsewhere he can get too writerly....

Occasionally people remark that “it’s too cold to snow.” Is this ever really the case? Also, while walking outdoors on cold, cloudy days I’ve noticed the air seems to warm slightly when it begins to rain or snow. Is this my imagination or does precipitation cause the temperature to rise? –M.H., Arlington, Texas Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As with many bits of folk wisdom, the idea that it can be too cold to snow is an unholy mix of fact and fantasy....

Two questions that bug me: (1) Why can’t pitchers hit? (2) Why do catchers tell the pitchers how to throw? –Earl Adkins, San Rafael, California Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As for pitchers, they can’t hit for basically one reason: they don’t bat often enough to get good at it. A National League starting pitcher would be lucky to get a hundred at bats a year, whereas a regular position player might chalk up five hundred or more....

In 1962, NBC was nervously looking around for a replacement for Jack Paar on the successful Tonight Show. Programming chief Mort Werner went scouting and came upon a young comedian who worked with a pliant sidekick named Ed McMahon. Back in New York, he announced his discovery: “I’ve found an unknown.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tom Snyder and the Tomorrow Show greeted America on October 15, 1973....

Metro High School, Chicago’s great experiment in alternative education, where teachers and students wrote their own rules and designed their own curriculum, was born in the late 1960s, when the public schools were controlled, ironically, by an authoritarian central administration. “Kimbrough and the board may think what they did is legal, but it’s certainly not moral,” says Ron Sistrunk, director of the Citywide Coalition for School Reform and a parent of a Metro student....

Artists on Loan Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wier, whose gallery opened just last summer, says he mounted the show to foster cooperation and a sense of community among art dealers battered over the past couple of years by a difficult economy and a collapsing art market. “People in the art business are pulling together more now,” notes Wier. “I am trying to get behind artists and push them in ways” they haven’t been pushed before....

No matter what I tell you, and probably even if you’ve heard their recorded collaboration (which makes up one-fourth of the double-LP Mumbo Jumbo on the entirely obscure Rift label)–whatever your preparation–you’re bound to be surprised. Frisell plays guitar and electronics, Mori is a drummer and composer, and Staley, who conceived the project, stretches the trombone into challengingly fluid sonic continua. And you still can’t imagine the results without blurring and often removing the lines between composition and improvisation, between acoustic and electronic sound, and between the percussive counterpoint posed by Staley’s trombone to the weird lyricism Frisell manages to achieve with gutturally synthesized blocks of sound....

DUET FOR ONE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The implication of Goleman’s lucid analysis is clear–the censorship of our perceptions by the unconscious leads to distorted and often bizarre interpretations of reality. While these distortions are supposed to alleviate pain–and often do, for a while–they also keep us from the truth, leaving us prone to depression, neurosis, and other forms of psychic distress. The only way to break this cycle is through self-analysis, which exposes the mischief of the unconscious mind....

Sitting at a table in the cramped upstairs offices of the Goodman Theatre, Jerome Kilty doesn’t look much like the character he plays in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. In the role of the pathetic, pipe-dreaming saloon keeper Harry Hope, Kilty looks burned-out and bedraggled; his thinning hair falls wispily over his forehead, his lips smack with alcoholic dehydration over a scruffy beard, and his eyes are dull and peevish. But offstage, one afternoon before a performance of the four-and-a-half-hour drama, Kilty cuts a neat, trim, alert appearance....

Bill Tsourapas has seen the future, and it is graffiti remover. “I talked Joe into making me a partner,” says Tsourapas. “I guess he was pretty desperate to turn to a 17-year-old kid. But I have a lot of ambition. And he liked that.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year Tsourapas and Markopoulos generated about $22,000 worth of business in a cleaning season that runs roughly from April to November....

Susan Dineff, a brown-haired woman of 28, was changing her son’s diaper when the doorbell rang at her split-level house in Hickory Hills. It was about 4 PM on a Wednesday in June of 1987, and Susie wasn’t expecting a caller. Full diaper in hand, she trooped to the door and opened it, and found a strange man standing on the far side of the screen. A companion was a step back....

To every garage band, basement jammer, and Stratocaster-copy basher in America, U2 must be the Dream personified. With scant, almost minimal musical resources, vocalist “Bono,” bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen, and guitarist “The Edge” have carved out a solid and distinct artistic identity, a huge international audience, and a critical reputation as the band of the 80s. One can easily imagine an average middle-class kid shaking the foundations of Mommy and Daddy’s suburban, home, banging away at “Sunday Bloody Sunday” with a hitherto unfathomable frenzy, and justifying it by pointing to U2’s current stature and saying, “See!...

Controlling purpose: To demonstrate the effects of liquid nitrogen on the compression of gases. Step three: Take the inflated balloon and stick it in the vat of liquid nitrogen. Disturbed by what he sees as an epidemic of scientific illiteracy, Zdunek will demonstrate some “really cool experiments” at the academy’s Winter Carnival this weekend. “When I was growing up during sputnik time,” he says, “there was a real rush to get people into things like engineering and sciences....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I employed Mr. Pensack about a year and a half ago to help me out of a serious squabble with my landlord after my roof fell in and there was no heat or hot water for about a year and a half, although I was paying approximately $3,000 per month in rent. I paid him a token fee at the beginning, rather embarrassingly low for all the work he obviously was doing for me, unlike the lawyer before him....

When he was 17, Bright Sheng heard for the first time the folk songs of the remote Chinese province of Qinghai. In 1971, the People’s Republic was in the chaotic depths of the Cultural Revolution. Along with millions of his generation, the Shanghai native who’s Lyric Opera’s current composer-in-residence was dispatched to the countryside in Chairman Mao’s massive campaign to root out class differences and inculcate peasant values in urban youths....

We watch the war begin on television. The networks’ scrambling first minutes of awareness give us a sense of helpless despair. Their disorder makes unfolding events seem runaway and the world a place out of control. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the door we say “Rich” and are ushered into a crowd of well-groomed recent-college-graduate types. We meander through the main bar and a side room full of bar games–pool tables, Foosball, shuffleboard, Pop-a-shot, puck bowling–checking each of the first floor’s five televisions....

Pamela Lillard’s bluesy urban folk-rock lands her in a ballpark with Vega, Armatrading, Cockburn, and a few others who’ve rescued forgotten kernels of coolness from the mudheap of outdated singer-songwriter cliches; her best songs are disarmingly concise pop tunes free of the narcissistic indulgence that gave “sensitive” balladeers such a bad name in the 1970s. The ever-changing Rubba Band plays arrangements that draw on gospel, folk, Latin, and R&B sources as much as from riffwise rock ‘n’ roll–but what otherwise might seem an excess of eclecticism is held together by Lillard’s dramatic honey-and-vinegar voice, a gutsy instrument that keeps her from sounding wimpy when she downshifts into the more confessional side of her repertoire....

So that’s how the pros do it! Mercantile Exchange futures trader and after-hours chef Robert J. Prosi, on his Big Boss Bar-B-Q Sauce: “I knew Big Boss was destined for success when my 11th batch came out perfectly because 11 is my lucky trading number as well.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where are the machines to photograph the license plates of the scofflaws who run the tollways?...

Shot in black and white in 1969, but neither completed nor shown until 1989, this delightful, offbeat comedy about a sad-eyed, small-time New York numbers racketeer named Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) who has just emerged from prison after many years, was written and directed by Michael Roemer, whose only well-known previous feature was the skillful Nothing but a Man (1964), about the experiences of a black couple living in Alabama. Finding that life has passed him by, Harry gamely tries to buy his way into middle-class respectability, even though his wife despises him and he’s a total stranger to his kids....

It’s hard to feel too sorry for Commonwealth Edison, the $6 billion monopoly to which we have no choice but to pay our electricity bills each month. “I don’t want to gloat,” says Howard Learner, the public interest lawyer who oversaw much of the litigation against Edison. “But this was a big, big victory.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What makes this triumph particularly delicious is that no one foresaw it ten years ago....