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Last Saturday, I cheered for Notre Dame in its showdown with the University of Southern California. Not that I’m so fond of the Irish, although I do admit to liking them the way I like the New York Yankees, in that baseball and college football always seem more interesting when there are good teams to either hate or admire in these franchises. And not that I like USC so well, either: an early infatuation with its Trojan mascot, mounted on a white horse, evaporated almost as rapidly as a later infatuation with the USC cheerleaders....

Shooting someone in the head is more complicated than it sounds, as the first Godfather movie demonstrated so well. For instance, in paintball–the modern adult game version of war–head shots are against the rules. So as Michael Corleone discovered, the victim doesn’t always die neatly and quietly. In fact in paintball he doesn’t die at all. Instead of indecorously losing his brains, he’s more likely to indecorously lose his temper and swear a blue streak....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Irving Thalberg did lead a philosopher’s life [June 3], but was it a meaningful one? He decided not to produce films like his father in favor of living a philosopher’s life. By “philosophy” he meant primarily “decision theory.” This is a completely theoretical study with little application to daily life. What point is there in such a life except to other “professional” philosophers?...

In olden days sports reporters described how one team won and the other lost, often slipping in some fancy language to impress their readers. (“Outlined against a blue gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again.”) This kind of writing was OK, but so un-Freudian. “The Bulls and a city now face an emotionless series. [Pat] Riley, the motivator with all the psychobabble catchwords, already is trying to inspire his players with bold talk....

To the editors: African Americans have ceaselessly tried to escape that dual categorization. Today’s young (as well as the not so young) black professionals are burdened with the insistence by society that they are not just American, but black and American, or African and American; whether they like it or not. The maintenance of white supremacy demands it. Many of the black professionals are extremely unhappy with the situation; even though, individually and in the aggregate, in much better position throughout the society, than their predecessor African Americans ever were....

Friday 11 One of Channel 19’s original programs will get a private screening today when Nelani McClendon’s 30-minute documentary Multi-Ethnic Americans: How We View Ourselves is featured at the Biracial Family Network of Chicago monthly meeting. Beginning at 10 this morning at Saint Paul and the Redeemer Church, 50th and Dorchester in Hyde Park, the video will be followed by a discussion led by Ramona Douglass. It’s all free. Call 288-3644 for more information....

AUGUST Saturday 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Did you know that our Greek Town–said to have been the nation’s largest in its heyday–lays claim to inventing both the soda fountain and the ice cream sundae? The Greek Town Association says that by 1920 the ethnic enclave included as many as 10,000 businesses–until the Eisenhower and the University of Illinois effectively nuked the community....

Most musicians acknowledge their influences by performing their mentors’ material, or maybe writing a new song in an old master’s style and dedicating it to him. Fernando Jones goes farther: he puts together a day-long blues festival and hires his teachers to play there. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Big brother Foree used to take Jones down to Theresa’s, and the boy’s eyes were widened by the exhilarating music and exotically smoky atmosphere....

Civic Center Tries to Collect Its Debts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Civic Center for Performing Arts is reportedly preparing to file suit against Wisdom Bridge Theatre to collect approximately $38,000 still due in production costs from Kabuki Faust and Hamlet, presented by Wisdom Bridge at the Civic Theatre in 1986. A Civic Center source close to the developments said the organization has tried to secure the money through every means possible, including a collection agency, but with no success....

The Illinois chorus frog is a fossorial amphibian. I think it should be our state fossorial amphibian, but I’ll get back to that later. After a few days Brown emptied the aquaria and counted the mealworms. There were still 500 in the control aquarium, but only about 450 in the other two tanks. And when he “sacrificed” the frogs (scientists always use that term when they have to kill an animal in an experiment; I imagine them operating with obsidian knives, but they probably use stainless steel) he found the missing mealworms, partially digested, in their stomachs....

I have been compiling the results of nesting surveys carried out by volunteers with the North Branch Prairie Project at four forest preserves along the North Branch of the Chicago River. All four sites are being restored by the NBPP, and our bird surveys are part of a continuing effort to record the changes in plant and animal life produced by the restoration. Despite this variety, there is a substantial similarity in the bird life of the four sites....

In 1931, when A. W. Schorger published The Birds of Dane County, Wisconsin, the American redstart was one of the most common nesting birds in the county. It was, he wrote, “second only to yellow warblers in point of numbers,” and he added that “every woodland contains at least one or more nesting pairs.” He has discovered that many species of woodland birds are area-sensitive, that the size of a woodland is as important to these species as the kinds, and sizes, of trees and shrubs that grow in it....

The first call for the ordination of women in the Catholic Church came in the 1930s from a little-known British organization called the Saint Joan’s Alliance. With utmost deference, the group submitted a petition to the Vatican that said, “Should the Church in her wisdom and in her good time decide to extend to women the dignity of the priesthood, women would be willing and eager to respond.” The society has submitted similar petitions every year since....

McDonald’s moved into the neighborhood, in the 1400 block of North Clybourn on the edge of Cabrini-Green, in 1971 but pulled down its yellow plastic arches in 1977. The company claimed poor revenues were the reason for the rare failure. It’s not often that Big Mac suffers a black eye. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today what one finds inside is Lee Samawi, a bearded, smiling entrepreneur who two months ago took over the cavelike building....

When you whip somebody, it’s important not to hit the kidneys, behind the knees, or that small part just below the solar plexus. “It’ll make you throw up,” explains Gabrielle Antolovich, the 1990 International Ms. Leather, who is pacing back and forth in the front of the Executive House’s Miro Room with a slow, deliberate casualness. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Still, Antolovich, selected at the women’s contest a few months ago, is a bit of a celebrity among the men and women here....

On June 6, 1985, in Our Lady of the Rosary cemetery in Embu, Brazil, the grave of Wolfgang Gerhard was opened and the skeletal remains were clumsily removed. The Brazilian police, acting on information received from German authorities, believed they were digging up the final hideout of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. In 1984, 40 years after their arrival in Auschwitz and a year before the discovery of the body in Brazil, the two sisters set out to locate and organize the twins who had survived the camp....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Contrary to his cheerful, self-congratulatory conviction, Michael Miner is not “Ready for (School) Reform” [October 20]. Instead, he is part of the problem. He lives in a neighborhood where he has NEVER BEEN INSIDE THE LOCAL SCHOOLS except to vote NOW–but leaves it for the “less than equal children of “negroes, foreigners and Catholics.”‘ Nothing the reformers can do will solve the problem of people like Miner who feel (and felt) no obligation to become involved in–even, perish the thought, USE their own local schools....

It’s no wonder that when the Philadelphia pulp writer David Goodis died in 1967, none of his 17 novels were in print in this country but 12 were still in circulation in France. To the French, Goodis was–and still is–a dearly loved hard-boiled, hard-drinking pop existentialist, unrecognized for his literary genius and snubbed by the fame he pursued ever since the publication of his first book in 1938. While Goodis’s return to print hasn’t sparked the cultish enthusiasm the recent Jim Thompson revival triggered, his books outdo Thompson’s for their tangled plots, brooding characters, and–atypical for the genre–singular women....

Long before the Chicago school reform plan officially went into effect this month, cynics were carping that it would never work. It’s the folly of innocents who don’t appreciate the depths of corruption and ineptitude that prevail in this city, they say. They sneer at the do-gooders who spent months hammering out the legislation. One professor of education at the University of Chicago points out that “to succeed, the plan requires 4,800 hardworking, intelligent, conscientious, honest volunteer parents and community residents and 1,200 teachers with the same qualities who are willing to work after their normal school days–4,800 parents and community members in evenly divided packages of eight and 1,200 teachers in packages of two....

SHELDON B. SMITH Faced with the impossible, in this solo Sheldon B. Smith gives us a portrait of a politically correct dancer trying to do the impossible. Smith starts by jogging around the Link’s Hall stage and waving at the audience, like Jordan during warm-ups, as a punk song hammers its unintelligible message. Just when Smith looks like he’s ready to launch into the meat of the dance, he signals to the stage manager to cut the music and asks for different music, for “a lighter, 60s sort of thing....