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A pair of loggerhead shrikes nested this year at Fermilab near Batavia in Kane County. Vicky Byre of the Chicago Academy of Sciences first saw them in early May. By May 18 there were eggs in their nest, and on June 8 five young birds were fledged. Their principal weapon is their beak, which is heavy and powerful and supported by large muscles that give loggerheads their big-headed, thick-necked look. They peck hard at anything they are trying to kill, but they kill prey mainly by biting....

Lately the newspapers have been full of stories about how the spotted owl is going to turn the Pacific Northwest into a land of ghost towns while forcing people in the rest of the country to live under bridges or in old refrigerator cartons. The problem, according to the stories, is that a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and other groups caused a federal judge to block logging on millions of acres of federally owned old-growth forests in Oregon, Washington, and northern California....

That solid red dot on my answering machine is one of the most depressing sights I’ve ever seen. It should be blinking on and off with messages. The landlord should have called. The deal should be finalized. We should be building any day now. He was supposed to call last Friday. He was supposed to call yesterday. He hasn’t called. Nobody’s called. The lease was supposed to have been signed a week ago at the latest....

Don Menza writes arrangements that would make almost any band sound good. And the Jazz Idiom Big Band–directed by one of Chicago’s most adept jazz orchestra leaders, Mayo Tiana–can make almost any arrangement sound good. So you can’t go far wrong with this one. Menza, who will perform with the band in the concert’s second half, has supplied swaggering tenor solos to the big bands of Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman, and others....

Pianist Katie Webster is one of the seminal musicians in Louisiana blues and R & B. She lent her driving boogie-woogie piano and soulful balladry to classic sides by the likes of Lonnie Brooks, Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim, and almost everyone else who passed through the legendary hit factories at Lake Charles’s Excello and Goldband Records in the 50s and 60s. Her most famous gig came when Otis Redding hired her as his pianist during the final three years of his career....

To cop from a radio soap opera of my childhood: Can this nice, young, idealistic Jewish lawyer from Hyde Park win the votes of a cold-blooded, polarized electorate in the “consolidated primary election” for mayor on February 28, 1989? Fifth Ward Alderman Lawrence S. Bloom believes he can; he believes he is building a new coalition that will take him into the mayor’s office. Bloom says that he has become more of a “regular” in the last five years....

LIVE AT 55: STORMY MONDAY BAND & LOUISIANA RED MEET CAREY BELL Earwig 4920 These three discs–two from veterans, one from a Young Turk with fire in the belly–give us reason to rejoice. Both veterans are established masters reminding us again of what killer guitar blues is really all about. Even more heartening is a young newcomer who sounds as if he might actually live up to his press releases....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You might like to take a journalistic look at programs and schools that do try to promote scholarship; the International Baccalaureate Program at Lincoln Park High School is one. Lincoln Park is the area high school for the gang members from Cabrini-Green. The Board of Education changed the name of the school and added the “I....

“Such days!–Oshkosh, Hartford, Menomonee Falls, Milwaukee, the lake, Chicago & Princeton & YOU!!” What further proof do we need of the transforming power of love than its ability to make Oshkosh seem magical? Sandburg became famous. Steichen might have. Yet this book is hers, to the extent that she wrote most of the letters, most of the longer ones, and most of the more interesting ones. Steichen was the sister of famed photographer Edward Steichen....

Eight-inch-tall Kiss dolls, whose platform shoes make up at least an inch of that height, are dancing on Dion Labriola’s dining-room table. Or at least that’s what the young film and video maker tries to imagine as he positions and repositions the figures of the glam-rock band, propping them up, leaning them against each other, and then stepping back to click the shutter on his Bolex 16-millimeter motion-picture camera. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

DANCE & MORE FOR $1.98 It’s the same with MoMing’s “Dance & More for $1.98”–though I didn’t suffer often during this engaging and frequently funny evening. This year the venerable annual showcase features 19 works by 15 neophyte choreographers and “others” (who produce the “more”). The performance lasts only a couple of hours, and you can’t beat the price–less than a third of what you’d pay for a movie. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

STACEY ELIZABETH TRIES TO CLIMB OUT OF HER NIGHTMARE and A one-hour program, “Double Quest” is “two one-act journeys” by Chicago playwright David Rush, whose short plays concern two very different people in dramatically different quests. The first, Stacey Elizabeth Tries to Climb Out of Her Nightmare, may be less than original in its subject, but its inventive structure makes up for that. The second, The Search for “The Madonna of the Secret Garden,” fares well in both regards....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Pat Stoll [“Demonstration,” May 6] would have us believe that a great injustice was done to the two girls who were allegedly struck by a professor in a three-piece suit after they unfurled a Palestinian flag at an Israel Independence Day celebration at Chicago Circle. I suggest that the facts as Stoll herself presents them show that they got precisely what they deserved....

URBAN BUSH WOMEN at the Dance Center of Columbia College October 26-28 Most of Lipstick is performed to spoken texts, and those texts become progressively more grim. To “Desire,” the dancers curl up passively on the floor, heads bowed, like Victorian maidens gazing into a brook while waiting to be discovered. “Rubio/Roman” tells a long, obscure story about a young teenager whose mother starts sleeping with a new man (“Rubio” is the generic name for any desired man in this dance)....

WHISPER INTO MY GOOD EAR Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Two old men sitting alone on a stage. From Waiting for Godot to The Zoo Story to I’m Not Rappaport, this is a situation made for drama. Max and Charlie, however, have rendezvoused on this winter beach for the purpose of committing a joint suicide. At first Charlie would seem to have every reason to pack it all in....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Our group, the Chicago-based chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, hosted a public forum for African American women candidates the week before the election and, individually, several of our business and professional women members assisted the Braun campaign with local and national fund-raising–long before EMILY’s list joined the bandwagon. Further, there were several stellar, grass-roots organizing upsets as evidenced by the victories of Senator Margaret Smith, and Representatives Monique Davis and Lovana “Lou” Jones against candidates backed by the regular Democratic organization....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Reading Jonathan Rosenbaum’s retrospective on 1987 [“Ten From ’87,” January 8] reminded me of how much I’ve been enjoying his film reviews since he joined your staff. Somehow I haven’t managed to get to as many movies over the last year as I’d have liked to, so I didn’t catch a lot of the mainstream flicks, let alone some of the more obscure ones Rosenbaum found to list, but I did really appreciate his judgment of Ishtar, a very funny satire which was most unfairly maligned by the critics (and usually on the quite irrelevant grounds of its budget), as well as his remarks on Heaven, another movie that deserved a lot better than it got....

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER With Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Ally Walker, Ed O’Ross, Jerry Orbach, Leon Rippy, Tico Wells, and Ralph Moeller. With Kurt Russell, Ray Liotta, Madeleine Stowe, Roger E. Mosley, Ken Lerner, Deborah Offner, Carmen Argenziano, and Andy Romano. With Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Tom Hanks, Jon Lovitz, David Strathairn, Garry Marshall, Megan Cavanagh, and Rosie O’Donnell. With Alec Baldwin, Meg Ryan, Sydney Walker, Ned Beatty, Patty Duke, Kathy Bates, and Richard Riehle....

BIG DEAL Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But now junk bonds have proved more junk than bond, overleveraged companies are reeling under the weight of (would you believe it!) too much debt, and the Reagan recovery looks more and more like a lavish party to which most of us weren’t invited but that we’ll be paying for for the rest of our lives. So it’s not surprising that comedy has taken a bitter turn....

Just where does the Zoo TV Outside Broadcast Tour come from? Nothing U2 has ever done–nothing any rock group has ever done–prepares one for how gripping it is as music, how compelling it is as theater, how apropos it is as pop artifact, and how knowing it is about the culture. It takes all the rock ‘n’ roll cliches, translates them into semiotics, repackages them according to the blueprints of postmodern theory, and comes up with something fresh, something prescient, something ultimately humane....