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Dept. of overdeveloped ethics. “Growing food is one of those areas where, at present, our moral intentions are ahead of our practical abilities,” writes Jean Blackwood in the Animals’ Agenda (January/February). “When I’m poisoning squash bugs and harmless bystanders, blasting aphids with insecticidal soap, or stomping blister beetles by the hundreds, I don’t feel like a very authentic animal rights person…. There is no kind way to kill. There are no shelters for unwanted blister beetles....

Vittorio Gassman as a middle-aged playboy who takes law student Jean-Louis Trintignant under his wing, the better to teach him the cynical lessons of modern Italian living. Dino Risi’s corrosive social comedy managed to combine the aggressive energy of the French New Wave and the dissipated drift of Antoniennui in away that seemed fresh and daring in the Italian commercial cinema of 1962. It still holds up a quarter of a century later, though Risi’s attachment to surfaces (the superficial as corollary of the social) looks a bit less like criticism and a bit more like complicity....

Maybe you didn’t notice, but 1989 saw the end of history as we know it. While the world’s attention was fixed on the struggles in Prague, Berlin, and San Salvador, the outcome of the human project was already being summed up in America’s middlebrow journals of opinion, where Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” became the most talked-about article since David Stockman gave away the game of the Reagan administration in the Atlantic Monthly....

To the editors: This letter is in response to your article published in the Reader “Babies Wanted” [May 12]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My husband and I adopted a baby through Family Counseling Clinic, Inc., located in Grayslake, Ill. Once we had made our decision to adopt, we read books and articles on the subject and decided to seek help from the Family Counseling Clinic....

According to its corporate literature, the company sponsoring today’s lunch lecture is “designed to assist employers with employee termination issues and, after termination, to help separated employees develop skills and define career strategies to assist them in finding new employment.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Today, Right Associates has brought Carole Hyatt, author of Shifting Gears–How to Master Career Change and Find the Work That’s Right for You, to Chicago to talk about her book....

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Picture Michael Maggio’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a miniature golf course. Not just any miniature golf course: a really cool miniature golf course, like the one in the mall on North Clybourn, where each hole’s designed by an artist and you find yourself putting around skeleton bones or across rooftops. A bright, hip, postmodern parody of a miniature golf course that kids the game even as it invites you to play it....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rosenbaum finds fault for not including Fischinger, McLaren, Soundies and Scopitones. In the first two instances, the inclusion of contemporary examples of visual music is ignored by Rosenbaum, but this line of analysis just barely begins to beg the real question. Why not include Busby Berkeley musicals, Richard Lester Beatles films, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Monkees episodes, Snader Telescriptions or opera?...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Dr. John P. Quinn’s letter (in the February 26 issue) criticizing the January 22 article on environmental illness and candida is a classic example of the proverbial blind men examining the elephant, each with his own slant, finding what he is familiar with. When will such doctors stop hiding their ignorance behind obfuscatory language, condemning an extensive amount of clinical evidence simply because it does not come within their purview?...

A remarkably accomplished and beautiful second feature by English playwright Stephen Poliakoff, whose previous movie (the 1987 Hidden City) apparently hasn’t been shown in the U.S., this lyrical drama might be described as a period film about the present. The plot concerns an incestuous affair that suddenly develops between a grown brother (Clive Owen) and sister (Saskia Reeves) who grew up with separate parents; the sister, now married to a wealthy entrepreneur (Alan Rickman), insists on ending the affair after the brother becomes hopelessly smitten with her....

For People Who Like to Smoke Jim McCormick smokes. He’s 69 and he’s smoked for 55 years. He says he likes to smoke. He says, “I actually believe I can outrace a doctor. I think I’m in very good health.” Nine years ago, we reviewed a novel by McCormick called Last Seen Alive. It was a gloomy thriller set in Berlin and we liked it a lot. We admired sentences like this one: “In the formal coldness of the morning the thought of himself squatting over her was both sad and comic, yet their passion had been very real....

Internationally Famous If the Chicago papers had pursued this interesting local angle, they would have written that the focus of those allegations was Jon Burge, who from 1981 to ’86 commanded Area Two Violent Crimes and today has risen to commander of detectives in Area Three. The allegations against Burge were examined at great length 18 months ago in the Reader. John Conroy’s article, entitled “House of Screams,” prompted the AI inquiry, which compounded pressure from watchdog groups such as Citizens Alert that finally led to a fresh investigation of Burge by the Office of Professional Standards....

The big bands may never have died, but the jump bands–those smaller, looser, roadhouse-rockin’ groups that presaged the advent of rhythm and blues–certainly did. Except for Louis Jordan, the Savoy Sultans, and one or two others, the jump bands were obsolete by the early 50s. So the modern presence of the Cheathams’ little big band, which is based in San Diego, is all the more surprising–as is its recent commercial success....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In some ways, Tom Boeker’s review of The Knee Plays [May 27] is as tantalizing as the performance he attended. In the context of his tone, his motives are surprisingly–even astonishingly–paradoxical. The Regular Guy of WXRT would hardly have endured two minutes of avant-garde anything, yet Mr. Boeker lasted the two hours of a “pain in the ass....

She greeted her guest at the door wearing a slinky low-cut garment designed to entice even the most monogamous man. Her gracious offer of champagne followed by a warm smile was an unneeded aphrodisiac. Models clad in revealing gowns prancing among onlooking men swarming to the “men only” hours at lingerie shops have revolutionized forever the traditional Valentine gifts of cards, candies, and flowers. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

“Boycott the Tribune and the Sun-Times and turn off Channel Two,” blared the loudspeaker atop the van. They were waiting for Savage, who was scheduled to speak to the Movement to Empower Black Media in Chicago rally at the People’s Community Church across the street at 56 E. 48th St. “And 5, 7, 9, and 11,” yelled Cokely, his index finger poking the air. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

MOLIERE at the UIC Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moliere, by Mikhail Bulgakov, might be more appropriately titled The Last Days of Moliere. The works of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to us as Moliere, are full of tales of old men trying to marry young girls. His plays usually end with the elderly lecher seeing the error of his ways and the natural order restored....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hoorah for Sara Frankel (Reading: “Tedium Is the Message,” 4/1/88). I can’t believe that she is on the Spring side of, say forty-five? She makes mature observations on the state of American fiction, especially short story writing. As a writer on the Fall side of birthdays, my observation is that we have a full-grown(?) generation of television reared writers who have limited ability to use the language because their metaphors are static visuals developed within limited, programmed structures....

A dark, inconsolable face peers out from the cover of the catalog accompanying the Art Institute’s exhibit of photographs by Paul Strand. The artist’s name appears above the handsome face. A man of reserve, he was so rarely photographed that you might take it as a self-portrait. Actually it’s Rebecca, Strand’s first wife, the woman he photographed more intimately and more often than anyone else in his life. Her long hair pulled back, she stares into her husband’s camera from an unfathomable distance, estranged by a palpable sadness, a liquid glint in her eyes....

When it comes to naming kids, some parents are well intentioned but unimaginative. Their kids wind up with glamorous show-biz names like Vanna, Farrah, Sylvester, and probably even Pee Wee. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » William Perry is one person whose parents could not have foreseen his fate. For three years now Perry, a manager at a Chicago insurance company, has regularly received phone calls at all hours of the day and night from giggling children, prank-playing men, and pleading women....

The chemicals are still winning. Number of commercial growers of organic fruits and vegetables in Illinois: 113. Number of commercial growers who use synthetic fertilizers and pesticides: 16,783 (Illinois Research, Fall/Winter 1990). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Segregation of kids with disabilities in Chicago is extreme,” says Tom Hehir, associate superintendent of special education for the Chicago Public Schools, interviewed in Independent Life (Spring), the newsletter of Access Living on South Peoria....