To hear the story the state’s attorney tells, this is a case of mighty versus meek. The defendants say the charges against them are fabricated and that they are the real victims–manhandled and detained by a squad of goony McCormick Place security guards. “Look at us, then look at them, and you’ll see how ludicrous this is,” says Segal, a Chicago public school teacher. “Those guards are huge; they could crush us like we were ants....

The ninth annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, runs from Friday, September 24, through Thursday, October 7. Film and video screenings will be held at Pipers Alley, 1608 N. Wells; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at the University of Chicago’s Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St.; at the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall, 5811 S. Ellis; at Columbia College, 623 S....

Court of Last Resort What a lucky man! When Justice James Heiple of the Illinois Supreme Court wrote the unanimous opinion ordering the return of “baby Richard” to his biological parents, the occasion limited him to a discussion of the case. The petition for a rehearing gave Heiple the chance last week to let go at his enemies. Especially Bob Greene: “In support of his objective, Greene brings to bear the tools of the demagogue, namely, incomplete information, falsity, half-truths, character assassination and spurious argumentation....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Abysmal,” “loutish,” “dreary”? Come on, Jack. Our past work (whose past work, by the way, Jack? Maestro Subgum and the Whole’s? Jeff Dorchen’s? The Curious Theatre Branch’s? It wasn’t clear who you were critiquing) was described as always in the past “dancing on the edge of self-indulgence . . . until now, by plan or plain dumb luck ....

You’re supposed to call it in-line skating, because Rollerblade is the registered trademark of Rollerblade Inc., just as you’re supposed to say facial tissue instead of Kleenex. But let’s be honest here. They’re not roller blades, they’re not in-line skates; they’re roller skates. Maybe they don’t have metal wheels, pom-pom laces, or a key so you can extend them over your sneakers, but they’re the same thing. And they are everywhere....

More than two decades ago these Bay Area trailblazers started out putting a much-needed contemporary spin on the hallowed performing tradition of the string quartet. Never mind that they’ve yet to become compelling interpreters of the classical canon: as hip champions of the new they’re uncannily skillful in appealing to baby boomers and Generation Xers, a demographic now coveted by concert presenters. A list of the venues they’ve played on their increasingly frequent visits here–Park West, Ravinia, and finally Orchestra Hall under the sponsorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–demonstrates how warmly the establishment has embraced these former avant-gardists....

Lead Story Georgia state representative Jimmy Benefield, 52, admitted in August that he had brought a dildo onto the floor of the legislature, but he denied having shown it to the 14-year-old legislative assistant who had reported that someone had shown a dildo to him. According to two lobbyists, Benefield occasionally walked around the halls wearing the dildo under an apron over his suit and flashing it at passersby. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Lead Story Police in Urbandale, Iowa, arrested one of their own in January. James R. Trimble, a 43-year-old cop, part-time antidrug crusader, and part-time girls’ basketball coach, was charged with trafficking in marijuana and methamphetamine. According to the Des Moines Register, Trimble was also driving around with “scores” of sex videotapes in his car and had a “sexual device inserted into his body”–a device that “was connected to a battery pack....

“I don’t know that there’s anything outstanding, really, to tell you about,” says Cary Stauffacher’s grandmother Ruth Corrine Hammer, sitting in her backyard in Monroe, Wisconsin. “I’ve reached the age of 85 and I’m still doing my own housework and I try to keep my house in perfect order all the time. That’s the only thing worth mentioning.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ruth, whose husband Walter died ten years ago, is in a lawn chair with her back to her granddaughter’s camera....

PHANTOM OF THE COUNTRY PALACE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The play opens in familiar territory–the La Scala opera house in Milan–where an American soprano named Christine receives news of her mother’s death and grows homesick for her hometown, Nashville. Despite the pleading of Antonio, her devoted suitor, she returns there and becomes a backup singer at the famous Country Palace for Miss Sally, the Queen of Country Music, whose husband, Major Billy, owns the Palace....

Freud has had a rough year. He’s been the subject of a small flood of hostile books, some challenging his personal and professional ethics, others the tenets of his work. In last year’s A Most Dangerous Method, a typical example of the genre, John Kerr traced the rift between Freud and Jung to a complex, sordid sexual psychodrama that involved both men in illicit affairs and a kind of mutual blackmail....

Let no one deny that the Straight Dope exerts a mighty influence on society–even Japanese society. Years ago, to illustrate a column on male lactation, the incandescently gifted Slug Signorino drew a shirtless, macho man mountain wearing a kind of harness/brassiere with baby bottles in place of the bra cups. (See page 322 of More of the Straight Dope.) In accordance with Calvin Trillin’s observation that nowadays it’s difficult to invent a comic premise so outlandish that it won’t sooner or later be overtaken by reality–Trillin called this “being blindsided by the truth”–I submit to you the enclosed book, 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions, by Kenji Kawakami....

One of the strangest things about the elusive career of Otto Preminger (1905-1986) is that it remains elusive not because of the man’s invisibility but because of his relative omnipresence in the public eye. Though never as familiar as Alfred Hitchcock, he cut an imposing figure in the media, registering much more than either John Ford or Howard Hawks. Preminger was well known for his Nazi roles in Margin for Error (1943) and Stalag 17 (1953), for appearing in TV guest spots on Batman and Laugh-In and numerous talk shows, as a colorful player in Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic, and for grabbing headlines as the man who defied the Production Code of the 50s and the lingering Hollywood blacklist of the 60s while grandly mounting well-publicized movie versions of best-sellers like Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, Advise and Consent, and The Cardinal....

Edmund O’Brien didn’t go to the University of Chicago in 1989 to become an actor. “Actually, my parents sent me there because it didn’t have a theater program,” he says, laughing. “My oldest brother had broken my parents’ heart by dropping out of a PhD program at Princeton to go into acting.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But before the year was out O’Brien was a member of Off-Off Campus, sacrificing all of his free time working on the group’s Second City-style revues....

I push past hot-dog carts and curbside vendors into the Criminal Court Building, where a scruffy handwritten sign directs women to the left, men to the right, through metal detectors and X-ray machines and periodic friskings. Other signs prohibit things like magic markers and “seriously short shorts.” In the hall we are lined up in twos like in grade school. The guard escorting us to the courtroom has an Elvis hair helmet, plastic-pink cheeks, and thick-lensed glasses that magnify her grape eye shadow....

Friday 2 If you’re interested in dinosaurs or bats, today’s your day. First off, the largest mounted dinosaur in the Western Hemisphere bows at the Field Museum today: it’s a four-story-high, 85-ton brachiosaurus, a long-necked beast more than twice as big as a brontosaurus. It was excavated in Colorado in 1900 by a Field Museum paleontologist. The museum’s at Roosevelt Road and Lake Shore Drive, and it’s open 9 to 5 every day; admission is $4, $2....

Friday 15 Still have a dried-out fire hazard around the house? You can recycle your Christmas tree for free from 9 to 2 today at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, 2001 N. Clark. Last year the museum chipped nearly 10,000 trees into mulch and it’s hoping for an even better turnout this year. They’d like the trees–sans ornaments and lights, please–brought around to the academy’s back entrance, on Stockton Drive in Lincoln Park....

The worst you can say about the annual Gridiron Show–a spoofy musical revue on politics put on by local journalists–is that it’s generally a lot better than you’d expect. Nominally overseen by the Chicago Headline Club, the show is actually written, directed, and cast by a different group of independents each year. With new ideas, revisions, and substitutions a distraction until the last minute, they generally do an amusing job; some of the skits even nonjournalists or nonpolitical types might like....

Like most of the UK’s volatile dance scene–a quickly evolving culture of techno, hip-hop, ambient, breakbeat, and acid house–jungle music is almost strictly a club thing; you dance to it, but you don’t buy the records. Artists hide behind names like Omni Trio, Spring Heel Jack, DJ Krust, Rogue Unit, and Dillinja, but Goldie is beginning to become a well-known face. His increasing popularity, his remixes for folks like Scarface and Bjork (who headlines this show), and, more important, a debut album that manages real cohesion–Timeless (ffrr/Metalheads)–suggest he’ll remain vital beyond tomorrow morning....

McManic Productions, Chicago Fringe Festival, at the Organic Theater. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Joy’s education is abruptly curtailed by her mother’s seduction of the principal, the young pilgrim sets forth for Toronto, where she’s mugged for the first of many times, then taken in by a convent but soon after rejected as a bride of Christ. A private conversation with Jesus offers no more enlightenment: “Are you coming back again?...