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During the recent coverage of the Super Bowl I read something about New York City officials being concerned that people watching the game on TV might all go to the bathroom during the commercials and flush the toilet at the same time, causing a catastrophic pressure drop. Was this for real? Did anything really happen? –Listener, Paul Brian show, WGN radio, Chicago Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The thing you have to understand, friend, is that New York is a giant media circus, and everybody feels like they have to get into the act....

Why should I care about the barometric pressure? Just about every TV weather report I’ve ever seen mentions it, along with whether it’s rising or falling, as if this is supposed to be meaningful. Well, not to me it isn’t. What’s the story? Is this just a useless piece of erudition the weather creatures throw in to make their forecasts sound scientific, or am I missing out on something? –Mary M....

Two Nice Girls–there’re four of them, they’re not girls, and no, they’re not always nice–are an acoustic-based outfit from Austin who’ve leavened a lot of the folkie airiness of most women’s music with (a) a little rock ‘n’ roll and (b) a political clearheadedness that produces fine moments like “For the Inauguration.” (“Is this my good fortune? / Am I finally in luck? / Now what I receive is a kinder and gender fuck....

Bill Muhlenfeld, owner of a mortgage company, got the message about the Tibetan cause while walking past the building housing the Chinese consulate at Michigan and Monroe, where a group of picketers offered him a leaflet. Steve and Nina Schroeder–a banker and a museum curator–became converts during a 1987 sight-seeing trip to Tibet. They were unprepared for the misery they witnessed. An old monk pulled them aside one day, took a notebook from the folds of his robe, and showed them a picture of the forbidden Tibetan flag he had carefully drawn....

“Prisons are basically patriarchal institutions–they are set up for men,” says Brenda Webb, executive director of Chicago Filmmakers. “In some jails women get men’s shorts. They don’t get female underwear. Everything is oriented toward men.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Webb had been interested in prisons for a long time. “When I was an undergraduate in psychology I wanted to be a prison psychologist, because I was convinced that all prisoners were basically political prisoners....

You’re walking north on Dearborn through Printer’s Row, portfolio in hand, and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself and about the early-morning showing you’ve just wrapped up. Work’s picking up, the lean years are just about behind you now. You feel confident. You take long strides. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Out of the corner of your eye you see a fellow cutting a diagonal across the street; he’s walking right toward you....

This session of raw west-side blues should serve as a reminder of some of the diamonds Chicago’s still got buried in its own backyard. Abe “Little Smokey” Smothers is a purveyor of straight-ahead 50s-style Chicago blues guitar. Imbued with enough Delta influences to keep it honest but revved up with improvisational imagination for a modern urban context, his fretwork retains the harsh exuberance of his stints with greats like Howlin’ Wolf buoyed by an underlying tenderness that seems to be a family trait: it runs through his work and that of his brother Otis “Big Smokey....

As a tribute to harmonica genius Little Walter, this pairing of one of today’s top young harp men with a 1950s Chicago legend might rankle some purists, who would probably prefer a harmonica player more solidly in Walter’s mold, such as Carey Bell or Little Willie Anderson. But they’re missing the point. Harpist Billy Branch is exploratory and unafraid to challenge the stylistic limitations of the blues just as Walter was, and Louis Myers was never content to remain a slave to tradition; he’s capable of laying down everything from traditional Robert Johnson-style finger picking to sophisticated jazz blues stylings to contemporary pop....

Friday 6 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When Salman Rushdie went into hiding last year, one inadvertent victim of the whole mess was his wife, Marianne Wiggins. Her novel John Dollar, described by some critics as a disturbing female version of Lord of the Flies, had just hit U.S. bookstores. After she went underground with Rushdie, her publisher canceled all promotional appearances, including one at Barbara’s Bookstore....

Friday 23 Professional storyteller Beth Horner often uses music in her presentations, and William Chin, artistic director of the chamber group the Oriana Singers, says he’s long been intrigued by the idea of combining music with other art forms. Tonight and tomorrow, Horner and the Oriana Singers team up to present The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Other Stories, which focuses on love, war, and the sea. Horner will tell stories drawn from Appalachian, Asian, and English folktales; Oriana will perform songs by Holst, Britten, Jannequin, and others....

Marriages made in (yuppie) heaven. “Big weddings are back,” writes Jenifer Blackman in Today’s Chicago Woman (January 1988). “Even couples where one or both partners were previously married are opting for the two to three hundred person guest list,” and a reception costing as much as $15,000. Many dual-career couples have more money than time and so hire wedding consultants. “Even engagements have become longer in order to accommodate the long-range planning, a reasonable decision considering Chicago’s luxury hotels, churches and temples can be booked solid years in advance....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m not sure which I found more distressing, Bill Wyman’s account of the homophobia and anti-Semitism that have characterized Public Enemy’s career, or his blase attitude toward these views [“Bringing the noise: Public Enemy on the front lines,” August 31]. Mr. Wyman proposes that because the group’s former “minister of information,” Professor Griff, has been the recipient of racist oppression, his bigotry should be taken less seriously....

KAREN FINLEY You had to laugh. I mean, it was so absurd. Here was this incredibly earnest woman, clumping around in red galoshes and ranting against the patriarchy as she slapped shit-brown icing on her scrawny flesh. Hardly sexy. And yet Jesse Helms and the Idiot Right are busy attacking Finley as the height of subversive lasciviousness, making her a focus for their campaign against obscenity in the arts. This–nothing more than this dripping mess of sugar-glazed half-naked artist–was all they were scared of....

DYING IS PRIVATE: THE SATCH AND MO PLAY If a playwright is honest, he can be forgiven a lot. A play may be unfocused and awkwardly structured, but a few elements of truth make it worth seeing. On the other hand, some perfectly structured and tautly developed plays can be so dishonest as to seem a maddening waste of time. Beau O’Reilly’s Dying Is Private: The Satch and Mo Play lacks a sense of pace, and its plot lurches haltingly from one scene to the next....

The prevailing wisdom is that as people get older they tend to settle down a bit, but not Hal Russell: as he’s done throughout the career of his NRG Ensemble, the drummer/vibist/saxophonist/trumpeter turns the prevailing wisdom on its head. If anything, his music seems to grow more outrageous, unexpected, and raucously delightful each year. And flat-out funny: the man who once opened a concert with his band running around the stage wearing gas masks–who has composed an entire suite loopily based on the characters and musical themes of The Sound of Music–last year released an album called Hal on Earth, featuring the unforgettably self-effacing “Hal the Weenie....

“My older siblings convinced me early on that I couldn’t sing and generally was incapable of doing anything respectable,” says New York-based performance artist Jana Haimsohn. Judging from her solo explorations of movement and sound, one of her responses was to act as weird as possible. But beneath Haimsohn’s repertoire of unearthly high-pitched vocals, powerful body work, and spaced-out comic characterizations, there is clearly a very serious personal mission: to unleash in herself, and maybe in her audience, a primal inner power and clean out the accumulated crap of urban living....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If WNUA is serious about the “acoustic jazz” as Mr. Ruffin says they are (“What Is Jazz?,” November 12), they wouldn’t ghettoize it in a few off-hours radio programs. They would play it at the peak of their radio audience. Mr. Ruffin calls the “classic” jazz listeners that don’t like WNUA “close minded.” I am sure most jazz listeners have tuned into WNUA, hoping for a radio station that plays jazz, and disliked it because what they found instead was superficial elevator music....

When he’s taking care of business, trumpeter Malachi Thompson can strike a finely tuned balance between the roots of modern jazz and the wilder offshoots of the music’s avant-garde–hence the Freebop Band’s name. (And the last time he played in Chicago he was all business, playing with maximum fire and minimum jive.) But the buzz about tonight’s performance centers on Billy Harper–who, along with George Adams and Jan Garbarek, was one of the three tenor saxophonists to dominate the 1970s....

Mark Murphy’s music is not universally respected. In fact, I can think of no other singer so influential who is disliked by so many critics. Should this bother you? Probably not; it certainly doesn’t bother Murphy, who continues to compel the rest of us with his refusal to relax, his abhorrence of complacency. His rich baritone has a distinctive authority that’s rare in any idiom; what’s more, he is one of the very few jazz singers who understand the real demands and possibilities of jazz improvisation....

With the aid of a beautiful voice, good technique, intelligence, and a relentlessly positive attitude, young tenor Donald Kaasch is building a career. Through November 19, he’s facing one of the most challenging parts in the modern repertoire: the grueling title role in Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe at Lyric Opera. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His is one of the most conspicuous success stories of the Lyric’s apprentice program, the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists....