to run 10-13-95 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Why not? Looking at Washington and the O.J. trial, you’ve got to figure it gives you a lot of career options. The term is, however, somewhat imprecise. The best definition was put forth 50 years ago by L.S. Selling: “a person having a constellation of symptoms … characterized psychopathologically by a very definite tendency to tell untruths about matters which perhaps could be easily verified and which untruths may serve no obvious purpose....

I’m a fan of Bill Wyman, both in print and in the air, but his March 17th Hitsville column begs a number of questions. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » How does he know that it was Mrs. Love who he was typing phone calls with? After a bit of research into her character and a few seconds of computer twiddling I could very easily be Mrs....

With New Year’s approaching I can’t help but think of the classic movie The Blue Angel, in which hot young Marlene Dietrich lures doddering Emil Jannings away from academe and into burlesque. The last scene shows the old guy back at his deserted schoolroom, still in the chicken suit from their nightclub act. He clutches at his old desk, weeping, emitting pathetic little chicken noises, as the enormity of his squandered life comes crushing down on him....

Guitarist Charlie Hunter is no highly schooled young lion; his only formal training came at the hands of metal fusioneer Joe Satriani, and even Satriani’s influence on Hunter’s music is minimal. He didn’t woodshed exclusively in small jazz clubs, running through standards, either; he played anywhere they’d let him. Apart from busking for change throughout Europe, his first steady gig was with the San Francisco-area group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, but Hunter found their music too stifling and soon ventured out alone onto San Francisco’s vibrant scene, where kids listen to hip-hop, bebop, funk, and soul jazz interchangeably and call the whole bag acid jazz....

Dear Madam or Sir: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A “professor” who is not improving herself is not a professor. Teaching any college course, including freshman composition, the bread and butter of part-timers in English, requires continual study. This means, at minimum, keeping current in the voluminous literature on the subject and developing the intellectual content of courses. A full-time part-timer, one who teaches four, five, or six classes per semester, has to design courses, study the course material, write syllabi, plan lessons, teach classes, meet individually with her students, grade papers, and spend hours commuting from one university to another....

In the photos that adorn her albums, pianist Eliane Elias favors suggestive little dresses and indolent pouts–exactly the sort of ploy that’s traditionally used to distract consumers from artistic mediocrity. Then she starts to play and blows that theory straight to hell. While not yet a major jazz artist, Elias has established herself–on a slew of discs with the group Steps Ahead, with former husband Randy Brecker, and under her own name–as a delightfully accomplished pianist, achieving knuckle-busting improvisations, while easily navigating her polyrhythmic trio arrangements....

I’m a strong believer in sociobiology, in the idea that our everyday actions are motivated by our genes’ desire to reproduce themselves. But I’ve never considered the link between this genetic desire and what happens in our real lives to be a simple one to track. People perform actions every day and make many choices that would seem to decrease or even eliminate their potential to reproduce. (Consider, for example, the decision to wear leisure suits....

Michael Piazza Among Piazza’s obsessions are bibliophilia, measurement, leg amputation, and imprisonment. This latter theme has become increasingly important since 1993, when he started collaborating with the inmates of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (formerly the Audy Home). In fact many of the pieces in the current exhibition are works in progress from that collaboration. These pieces will undoubtedly evolve over time, because change is central to Piazza’s working process: he constantly dismantles and reassembles objects and gives them new contexts or groups them differently, recycling the elements....

This epic, compulsively watchable 169-minute documentary about two Chicago inner-city basketball whizzes, William Gates and Arthur Agee, striving to land the grades and the scholarships to make it to the big time (and stay there) is a heady dose of the American Dream and the American nightmare combined–a numbing investigation of how one point on an exam or one basket or fumble in a game can make all the difference in a family’s fortune....

When performance artist Katharine Boyd was looking for a day job, her aesthetic instincts guided her in her hunt through the want ads and Yellow Pages. Chicagoland companies named Modem Abrasive, Active Screw and Fastener, and Ad Her On intrigued her. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frigid Fluid Company was on her list; she went for an interview. “I had no idea what they did there,” says Boyd....

The ex-Blake Baby, now solo, gnaws energetically on the terrific tension she’s built up between her growing babe-ification and her heroic (heroine-ic?) dedication to undercutting it lyrically–“ugly with a capital U” indeed. Her first solo album, Hey Babe, and a handful of non-LP B-sides show her working it all out, both explicitly (“Everybody Loves Me but You,” “Ugly”) and rather less so (“Get Off Your Knees”). The brutality of her romantic toles on the two and a half or three Blake Babies albums gives her a pungent authority that carries over into Hey Babe on even the simpler love songs (“Forever Baby”) and gives the record as a whole enormous punch....

Lead Story Well-Put Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mike McElroy, explaining to the West Lake Hills, Texas, city council in August why he ought to be allowed to keep his pet donkey, Pearl, at his home despite regulations against it: “[This] is a great opportunity for our kids and other kids who come to see us to be able to recognize and identify manure, which will help them in the future....

By Sarah Bryan Miller “In the planning stages of my pieces I constantly keep in front of me the image of my musicians and their audience bored to death. So I ask myself, “What can I do to make this 10, 15, 20, 25 minutes interesting to my public? When will their interest flag, and what can I do to restore it? What purpose will this piece serve which has not been fulfilled by several other pieces by other composers?...

Snake Charmer, Black Forest Productions, at Cafe Voltaire. This play features one trim actor (Jon Smeenge) who strips down to a snakeskin thong a few minutes into the action and four actresses (Carla Hayden, Karyl Kelly, Kristin Sztengel, and Maria Perantinides) in various states of undress–one wears a corset, one a girdle with stockings, one pj’s with the top unbuttoned, one a slip and panties. In the right hands this play about a man apparently dying in a hospital and hallucinating about a foursome of succubi–who sometimes appear as nurses, sometimes as insects–who’ve come to torture and tease him could have been a sexy, offensive bit of exploitation....

Next Theatre Company. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On one hand, this Clive Barker tale offers a fascinating take on the romance of the movies, our eagerness to forget who we are in favor of fantasy lives that are peroxide-charmed or tumbleweed-tough. On the other hand, it’s a drawn-out fat joke, in which the protagonist, a 225-pound female usher, kills the bloblike monster by sitting on it....

SOUL OF THE BLUES Sweet Miss Coffy, Cadillac George Harris, George Jackson Burke’s roots are in gospel, and despite the much-vaunted historical connection between the two, gospel and blues require markedly different approaches. For all the frenetic emotionalism gospel singers often display, the good ones always remain in technical control. Gospel melody lines can be complex, and there are subtle dips, melismatic trills, and myriad other tricks a vocalist must master....

The Vortex press release read, “Those choosing to participate in the foam party will check their clothing in our check room.” I’d heard about foam parties from a friend who lives in South Beach, where they’re all the rage: a bunch of guys on a dance floor in their skivvies get all hot and bothered, then–whoosh!–a ton of foam cascades from above, engulfing the writhing group in a sea of lubricant....

THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD But the Ellison that Coash is interested in is not the enfant terrible who once dared, while still in his early 20s, to tell Isaac Asimov he was “a nothing.” It’s the older, sadder, somewhat humbler and more reflective man who emerges in the autobiographical prose published in papers such as the LA Weekly and the now-defunct LA Free Press....

Keep on going straight ahead–it looks like it’s somewhere southwest of the breastbone. “When I tell people I’m a cartographer, they think I’m a heart surgeon,” says UIC department of geography staff mapmaker Raymond Brod, quoted in UIC News (February 24). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Moral debate at the grass roots, as recorded by an anonymous teacher diarist at an unnamed city public school in Catalyst (April): “One [Local School Council] member wanted only the clinics and drug stores to handle the condoms....

The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams. For publication the week ending Friday, 08-09-96. Copyright 1996 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved. Publication without express written permission or before Monday of the week ending 08-09-96 is prohibited. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I feel your pain, brother–I’m left-handed too. So were all the major candidates in the last presidential election (assuming your idea of major is Clinton, Bush, and Perot)....