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We know two things about global warming. One: in the last 100 years the average temperature has risen between two-thirds and one degree Fahrenheit. Two: in the same time the amount of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere has risen about 40 percent. That may not seem like a lot–Halsted is often that much warmer than the lakefront–but remember it’s an average, and the average temperature during the most recent ice age was only nine degrees cooler than today....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » First off, I really liked Bill Wyman’s Pink Floyd article [“The Four Phases of Pink Floyd,” January 15]. It made a bunch of distinctions about the band that have long been unsaid. The shit was gratifying to hear. But for a couple of objections, centering around his Syd Barrett info, which seemed kinda garbled and superficially rendered: One, you disposed of him too easily....

Of Tom Sillitti’s 12 closest friends, a group he calls his “family,” half are sick with or have died of AIDS. “At this point, we’ve all gone through the process of losing people,” he says. “I wanted to do something more.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sillitti, whose rich, warm baritone is known to Chicago audiences from his performances with the Chicago Symphony and the William Ferris Chorale, decided to do a recital, a benefit concert for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago....

High School Confidential: The Sun-Times Sports Sex Scandal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even though competent, honorable institutions have been blind before and will be blind again to malign forces functioning silently in their midsts, in retrospect the blindness always seems inexplicable. Certainly the Sun-Times failed to explain away knowing so little about Anding. His work wasn’t one thing and his allegedly criminal life another....

INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL There’s compensation, of course, in the idea that our actors can move as well as anybody. Cooper had that walk, after all; young Brando had his slouchy violence; and Malkovich started out with Steppenwolf, which gave us the so-called Chicago style of rock ‘n’ roll acting. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But the fact is, American actors as a group don’t move any more powerfully or energetically, any more clearly or precisely or articulately than they’re supposed to talk....

About a year after King Edward VIII abdicated to many an American commoner, London audiences were treated to this piece of fluff about a Cockney tramp who inherits a noble title and tries to give it up to keep his fishmonger girlfriend. Me and My Girl ran for five years after its 1937 debut; its 1986 revival proved the show retained its spunky appeal. This touring production features James Brennan, who blends the playfully raffish charm of a Cary Grant, the manic mischief of a Danny Kaye, and the robustly graceful dancing of a Gene Kelly....

Motoring east on River Drive, away from the business district of Davenport, Iowa, at 5:15 on a Tuesday night, and the livin’ is easy. “Rush hour” sounds different in Davenport than it does in the giant important cities of America: instead of the concentrated sound of a million straining shackled engines, it’s the put-putt-put-putt of garden sprinklers and the soft hissing of summer lawns, clearly audible between the evenly spaced swooshes of the passing cars....

NOTES FROM EARTH: TWO PLAYS BY JIM NISBET Unfortunately, it’s downhill from there, at least for a while. Alas, Poor Yorick, the first of two plays by Jim Nisbet, doesn’t deliver. Maybe it was the setup. The eeriness evoked by two guys digging a hole behind an old mortuary is shattered when Jackson, the younger of the two, turns up the Rolling Stones on his jam box and starts messing with the lyrics (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash and the shit don’t pass”)....

Founded in New York City in 1972 by cellist Julian Fifer, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has followed the standard European orchestral model of being entirely self-governing; that is, rather than having an outside conductor or music director or manager dictate repertoire, programming, rehearsal techniques, or interpretive decisions, the orchestra members vote. The 26-member orchestra, which both rehearses and performs without a conductor, has chosen a bold repertoire for its present tour, which includes the legendary Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel playing the Mozart Piano Concerto no....

When we set back our clocks this fall, some may have considered it an annoyance or a convenience or wondered how the custom got started, but it’s a safe bet few thought of daylight saving time as a political issue. Yet in 1919 its continuation–it had been instituted the previous year as a wartime measure–touched off an acrimonious congressional debate. O’Malley’s treatment of the conflict over daylight saving time exemplifies his approach....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In Hammond, as your article documents, teachers play a fundamental role in making changes. In Chicago’s reform law, there is only an advisory role for most teachers to play. Thus, teachers will have to assert themselves as leadership agents but will have little codified standing in this regard. In fact, teachers are usually the last to be consulted when suggestions for change are solicited....

What is the origin of “tit for tat”? What is tat? And where can I get some in order to get the former? –PK, Baltimore You state that Cleopatra “was no more black than Shirley Temple” [August 30]. You cannot possibly know that for a fact. The proof is in your very next sentence, “No one knows what her hair, eye, and skin color were.” A truer statement would be that Cleopatra was probably no more white than Vanessa Williams....

Multiinstrumentalist (guitar, violin, drums, harmonica) Gatemouth Brown started out in various Texas-based territory bands in the 1940s and, like most Texas jazz and blues artists of that era, was heavily influenced by T-Bone Walker. Walker’s fusion of stark, intense traditional Texas blues with swinging, sophisticated jazz remains the foundation for much of Brown’s music, but Gate cannot be pigeonholed. He’s as likely to grab his fiddle and break into a torrid version of “Orange Blossom Special” as he is to evoke Walker’s cool melodicism, and lately he’s adapted himself to funk rhythms and the sonic demands of rock as well....

Courtroom Drama: How the Pros Depose Enter J. Neil Boyle. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In real life,” Boyle explained, “if a person lives more than 100 miles from court, unless he’s a material witness he can’t be subpoenaed to appear.” What a lawyer does, then, is go to the witness and, in the presence of opposing counsel–who can interrupt and object just as he would in a courtroom–grill him....

Even outside, with the doors closed, squawking and twittering fills the air. Inside a trio of ducks–a large white one and a pair of mallards–waddles freely around closely packed cages that hold a Noah’s sampling of animals: pigeons, starlings, little raccoons wrestling, baby bunnies huddling together or quietly munching a bit of salad. A house cat sleeps atop a cage full of guinea pigs. Nearby a mother opossum nurses her young....

One Saturday late last month the rain clouds went away and a dozen or so little kids lined up to use the swings at Harold’s Playlot in Hyde Park. A bunch of kids waiting to use some swings may not sound like much, but a few years ago that play lot, in East Hyde Park just north of 53rd Street and east of Hyde Park Boulevard, was filled with debris and rarely used....

Seen at 20 years’ remove from the issues that prompted its writing–the Vietnam war, Kent State, waves of ghetto riots, and grief over the murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.–Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz’s 1971 effort at a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk emerges as much richer and more universal than it originally seemed. Mass, whose influence is clear in subsequent works ranging from Evita to Cats to The Gospel at Colonus), is a theatrically vigorous reenactment and critique of Catholic and Jewish ritual, driven by some of Bernstein’s most lyrical and deeply felt music, that speaks powerfully to the conflict between our need for spiritual feeling and our tendency to smother that feeling with pomp and cynicism....

PENN & TELLER It’s so hard to stay hip. New concepts come and go like witches in Oz. And if you don’t catch them the first time, you’re lost. You’re stuck making learned faces while happy, knowledgeable people discuss them at parties. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The secret’s pretty simple, really. Postmodernism, as I understand it, is the elevation of irony to the status of style, You take some traditional form–some art or craft or aesthetic from the past–and recapitulate it in a new context, so that its meaning is transformed....

“Guillermo who?” Then why, I wondered, should I even consider missing Kate & Allie on the night of Allie’s big decision about her boyfriend’s marriage proposal? I mean here’s an American woman in her late 30s who actually doesn’t know whether she wants to marry this good-looking ex-professional football player turned sportscaster who’s so madly in love with her he’s already broadcast his feelings over the radio. Could Allie have forgotten those long, lonely sitcom seasons when all she had to look forward to on Saturday nights was Kate and the laundry basket?...

Risky Business at the Royal-George Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Perkins and Freydberg have made some daring choices in positioning and marketing their first production. The show opened here long after reaching certifiable hit status in New York, where it has been playing off-Broadway to standing-room-only houses for months with no major star to move tickets. After much deliberation, say Perkins and Freydberg, they chose to open in Chicago without a star either, opting instead for a troupe of seasoned local talent and one New York-based actress....