Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Charles Storch worked for the Tribune for 30 years. Years ago he gave me more competition than I could handle as a media writer. His most recent assignment has been covering the arts and philanthropy. He wrote an item recently about the MacArthur Foundation giving $250,000 to Pro Publica, the not-for-profit news room created last year in New York City to do investigative journalism....

All throughout a recent Sunday morning, Cambodians filed into the Uptown Kampuchean Buddhist temple Watt Khmer Metta, toting cylindrical tiffin tins filled with hot, home-cooked food. They climbed the stairs to the third floor, where they portioned their curries, salads, noodles, vegetables, soups, rice, and sweets into small dishes before prostrating themselves and placing the food on a dais before the temple’s two monks. It was more than the pair—who only eat once a day—could possibly make a dent in, but it wasn’t really intended for them anyway....

THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS There are some pieces I like. I’m a sucker for superhero parody, and Eric Haven turns in a fine example of the form, with overwrought pulp-pastiche art, damsels getting blown serendipitously out of their clothes, and the furry hero Mongoose locked in eternal battle with evil reptiles. Michael Kupperman’s werewolf-battles-mutant-flower piece showcases his stilted yet precise surrealism, even if it lacks the satirical bite of his best work....

It’s July 12, 1979, and the White Sox, ten games behind the California Angels in the American League West, are playing the Detroit Tigers in a twilight doubleheader. It’s not just Teen Night at Comiskey Park—it’s also Disco Demolition Night. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Tribune sports section this morning made no mention of the event, but the paper’s sports columnists and editorial board will soon be excoriating everyone involved....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “If there’s anything left on the table we weren’t able to solve, I don’t know what it is,” Reilly said Thursday afternoon, just before the City Council’s zoning committee approved the hospital’s plan with Reilly’s support. Reilly said this with a tone of both relief and weariness. After months of deliberation, negotiations between the hospital and members of the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents (SOAR) finally ended with a deal Wednesday afternoon....

“Audio is an amazing medium for telling stories,” says Third Coast International Audio Festival founder Johanna Zorn. “It creates pictures in the mind’s eye that can be so much more illustrative than actual pictures. It tears down barriers, opening your mind and ears.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “It’s extraordinary, still, when you hear it,” Zorn says. “And it was life-changing for me. I thought, ‘Why isn’t radio considered on a par with film in terms of documentary work?...

That’s THC as in tetrahydrocannabinol–but this stand-up showcase isn’t just for stoners. Originally a monthly gig at the Hollywood Improv with a rotating lineup, it’s now touring four cities with three comics performing wide-ranging observational humor complemented by sketch comedy. All three are relatively unknown but boast long resumes of stage and screen work. Doug Benson, who did season four of Last Comic Standing, jokes about masturbating to marijuana centerfolds in High Times (an early sponsor), and Best Week Ever talking head Al Madrigal plunders his half-Mexican, half-Sicilian heritage....

“I ‘m a maximalist,” says Neil G., seated on an armless purple club chair, surrounded by futuristic, museum-quality Italian lamps. A display case on the coffee table houses pieces from his collection of antique grand tour souvenirs—replicas of famous sculptures and such, from the days when no upper-class education was complete without a trek through the cultural capitals of Europe. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Neil’s parents were collectors....

Tasneem Paghdiwala’s April 6 Reader article about Doggie Do Right and my approach to dog training [“Who Should You Trust to Train Your Dog?”] was slanted, biased, poorly researched, and amateurish. In my 10 years as a professional dog trainer, not 12 as reported by Tasneem, which illustrates her inability to report real facts accurately, I have successfully helped thousands of dog owners and their pets. It is unfortunate that Tasneem did not interview any of these satisfied customers and chose instead to write a biased and untrue story based on a small, disgruntled, ignorant, group of animal rights sympathizers, who I will refer to henceforth as the West Loop Wackos....

I listened to Barack Obama’s jobs speech on my way to see American Blues Theater’s Waiting for Lefty. American blues, indeed. Clifford Odets’s fiery 1935 one-act supplied an almost creepily apt counterpoint to the President’s address. The play starts out at a union hall where cabbies are debating the pros and cons of calling a strike. A commie-baiting, cigar-chomping union honcho is there to explain why this is a politically bad moment to walk out—and lean on troublemakers if persuasion doesn’t work....

Shock Corridor The Northwest Chicago Film Society enters the final stretch of its winter programming with a screening of Samuel Fuller’s classic Park Row. Having spent time as a crime reporter in New York City, a pulp fiction novelist, and a foot soldier in World War II, Fuller is cinema’s consummate journeyman, a notorious raconteur whose fiery personality revealed itself in each of his films. Decades of critical appraisal have put Fuller in his rightful place among the very best American filmmakers, yet some of his most vital work, including Park Row, remains underseen....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Sunday, Michigan-based noise trio Wolf Eyes will be playing at the Owl in celebration of the late-night watering hole’s two-year anniversary. This show is part of a live music series that’s been going on at the bar since the winter, and has grown exceptionally since its first few shows, which featured mainly local garage acts. In June the bar booked its first big-time event: a “secret show” of sorts with legendary electronic-psych group Silver Apples....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m now a couple of days into the CMJ Music Marathon, which is basically an endurance challenge crossed with a test of your scheduling skills and knowledge of NYC geography, so I’m perhaps not operating at peak mental capacity, but I had the thought a few minutes ago during my first viewing of the video for “The Boys,” Cassie’s new single with Nicki Minaj, that Nicki Minaj videos might be the most perfect form of entertainment yet devised....

Roe v. Wade legalized abortion everywhere in the U.S. up to the point at which the fetus is viable outside the womb, but determining when this transformation actually takes place is up to the states. Forty-one states place prohibitions on abortion at some point in the pregnancy, meaning late-term abortions come with substantial caveats and requirements; eight states have banned abortions after 20 or 22 weeks. Of all abortions, fewer than 1 percent take place in the third trimester....

Tim Kinsella is a musician who’s played with Cap’n Jazz, Owls, Joan of Arc, and Make Believe; and author of the forthcoming novel The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense (October 2011, Featherproof) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sam’s locker was next to mine, but we didn’t immediately hit it off. Though conspicuous as the only two students in the AP classes outpunking each other in combat boots and clashing plaids (even matching Bad Brains shirts the day after they played the Vic), it wasn’t until week three, when I interrupted biology class with a loud belch—and Sam immediately echoed me with a spot-on belch impersonation—that we finally broke the ice....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week’s Soundboard is front-loaded with great shows over the next four evenings, starting with a rare two-night stand on Thursday and Friday at the Hideout by guitar-pop visionaries the dB’s—whose Chris Stamey was interviewed by Eleventh Dream Day’s Rick Rizzo this week in Artist on Artist. Also getting underway on Thursday night is the third iteration of the Neon Marshmallow Festival, which runs through Sunday at the Burlington Bar....

I would never assemble a year-end list to support some kind of thesis. But looking over my ten favorite movies of 2007—Atonement, Away From Her, Gone Baby Gone, In the Valley of Elah, Into Great Silence, Lake of Fire, My Kid Could Paint That, Reservation Road, Strange Culture, and Things We Lost in the Fire—I’m struck by how many of them turn on the question of responsibility. In some cases they’re about people weighing their responsibility to others; in some cases they highlight our responsibility to larger ideals....

REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT SHATTERED GLOBE THEATRE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But if there’s a director in Chicago who can make mid-20th-century realism fresh and compelling, it’s Louis Contey. He depicted bruised souls and vanishing dreams with a sure hand in his production of Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost for TimeLine last August. In Shattered Globe’s Requiem, Contey sets the terms early, opening with a grueling bout between a horrifically bloodied and exhausted Mountain and a younger challenger....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nothing can wreck the mellow vibe of wasting your Sunday afternoon in a dive bar shooting pool and listening to the Misfits like news that your property may at the moment be on fire. I learned that lesson yesterday when I got a couple of calls from people asking whether my band still practiced at CPE Sound (MySpace page here) on Hoyne and Carroll, as the building it’s in had been burning for part of the day....

For years politics in East Village and Ukrainian Village was dominated by one man: Big Dan Rostenkowski. Inheriting the 32nd Ward Democratic organization built by his father, longtime alderman Joe, he held office—state rep, committeeman, congressman—for more than 40 years. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rostenkowski and Gabinski controlled their villagers with the stick of brute force and fearmongering and the carrot of services like garbage collection and snow removal....