Walking dogs at Chicago Animal Care and Control 2741 S. Western 312-744-5000 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the New York Times reported late last year, researchers at the University of Missouri recently found that people who walked with dogs exercised more consistently and got fitter faster than people who walked with people. Why? The humans tended to work together to find excuses not to exercise....

You probably won’t find a bargain at Dose, but that’s not to say you won’t find something precious. The year-old monthly market, which celebrates its birthday on June 24, brings together, for a day, some of Chicago’s most interesting electronics (vintage suitcase speakers from Gentleman’s Boombox), accessories (Laura Lombardi’s delicately urban necklaces fashioned from recycled material), must-have pantry items (including the retail debut this Sunday of house-milled flour and fresh pasta from Nellcote—winner of Best In-House Pasta over in our Food & Drink section), alcoholic treats (spiked snow cones from Jo Snow), and other adorable eccentricities, such as vintage camp gear and dollhouses that double as adult decor....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The mathcore maniacs are back. “The Jersey band’s onstage volatility is a sight to behold, and it’s made more than a few promoters hot under the collar—I’ve personally seen indoor fire breathing on a side stage, band members scaling at least two stories of scaffolding or crawling atop hanging light fixtures, and a swung microphone detaching from its cord and nailing a kid in the noggin, cracking it wide open,” writes Kevin Warwick....

Like a losing bingo card, this musical comedy is all over the place, incorporating numerous song styles, adult humor, romance, many flashbacks, a 15-year-old bingo-related grudge, a dying woman’s last wish, some glaringly obvious life lessons (“do your best”), and an odd (but funny) musical reimagining of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There’s some silly fun in Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid’s songs, in the cast’s ability to actually realize the stereotyped characters, and in the opportunity given the audience to play a few games of bingo over the show’s 90 minutes....

All the Oscar buzz is for Bruce Dern as a grizzled old coot sliding into dementia, but the most impressive performance in this poignant black-and-white comedy comes from Will Forte as the man’s long-suffering son, who wearily humors his dad’s conviction that he’s won a million dollars on one of those sweepstakes offers that come in the mail. Their road trip from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim the old man’s prize doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it’s ideal material for Alexander Payne, a director with great affection for the interstate (Sideways, About Schmidt)....

The title and description are pretty unambiguous, but hey, a lot of what goes on at I.O. and Second City could be filed under “interactive drinking games.” So make no mistake: this is orchestrated mass tippling first and sketch comedy second, steered “dueling pianos” style by an emcee and a handful of cheerleaders. Patrons would be well-advised to bring along liquor (the show’s BYO) and a designated driver, or barring these, a lot of patience....

From All Sides, premiering this week, is a commission by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence Mark-Anthony Turnage, working with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo. It’s Turnage’s first work for dance, and the title refers to his wish to surround the audience with sound, including offstage brass and percussion. The six short scenes–“Fanfare,” “Snapshots,” “Slow Dance,” “Tango,” “Collage,” and “Moto Perpetuo”–form a suite that reportedly spans a range of styles and moods....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Call it the Smoque effect: when the place opened last Tuesday, anticipation for Chicago’s first New Haven-style coal-oven pizza already ran high, and after glowing reports–complete with luscious pix–hit the Web, the mobs descended. By Thursday LTH diners were writing in to complain of 90-minute waits and harried service. Two days and the romance was over: frustrated posters slammed the owners for the “lack of preparation” and their failure to comp meals when the kitchen was clearly overwhelmed....

QI am a hetero female, but one of my biggest fantasies is for a guy to dress up in women’s underwear. Not full-blown drag, just a teddy, fishnets, and some heels. He doesn’t even have to act like a woman. I just want him to parade around a bit, and just for me. I’ve had the ovaries to bring this up only twice to men I’ve been with. My first boyfriend was game, but I was so insecure with my sexuality at the time that I let it go....

Local cassette-­only label Lillerne Tapes has put out more than 30 releases since 2007, which include music from Chicago’s Squish (recently signed to HoZac), Kansas City’s Cvlts, and more than a dozen other like-minded weirdos scattered across the midwest. Lillerne doesn’t exactly have a unified aesthetic, but its output usually seems to skew toward “hotbox your bedroom” foggy soundtrack drones and “no bongwater allowed on the Casio” tilted pop jams. The label’s second compilation, Lillerne Compilation #2 (duh), consists of exclusive tracks by 22 artists; it came out in a tiny physical edition two weeks ago and sold out almost immediately....

Gossip Wolf wouldn’t go door-to-door with a boom box to spread the word about very many local artists, but in the case of Jimmy Whispers we might have to. Whispers, aka the solo project of Light Pollution main man James Cicero, has virtually no Internet presence—just a Chic-a-Go-Go video from last year where he sings into a corn dog—and it’s driving us bonkers! Maybe you’ve seen his street art pasted up around the city, though: sharks with giant teeth, ice cream cones, Chicago Bulls insignia, and handguns, all emblazoned with the phrase “Summer in Pain....

Pete Crowley’s been a craft brewer all his adult life, but he was weaned on Milwaukee’s Best Light and Keystone Light. In college, he says, “I thought Spaten Oktoberfest was craft beer. That was the special beer I would drink when I wasn’t drinking garbage.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His last day there will be May 1. Crowley’s in the process of launching his own place, Haymarket Pub and Brewing, in the West Loop....

In 1987 Madison Hobley was interrogated by Burge’s unit at Area Two about a fire in Hobley’s apartment building in which seven people died, among them his wife and infant son. Though the police could produce no written evidence of it at the trial, they said Hobley confessed, and he was convicted and sentenced to death. He’d later claim he’d been tortured and there was no confession, and early in 2003 outgoing governor George Ryan pardoned him on grounds of innocence....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I actually enjoy the smell of garlic on my fingers (and it wards off vampires), but I couldn’t resist buying a bottle of Lavamani dello chef Italian liquid soap the other day while shopping for a birthday present at Merz Apothecary. The name means “it washes the chef’s hands,” and the 300 ml. pump-action bottle ($8) sports a plump, beaming, mustachioed cookie boasting of the stuff’s ability to eliminate onion, garlic, and fish odors....

If you visited the Green City Market in 2003 or 2004, you might have come across a young woman selling deliciously creamy ice cream in flavors like oven-roasted strawberry-mascarpone, gianduja, and vanilla bean. Her name was Nancy Silver, she was the pastry chef at Campagnola in Evanston, and she called her ice cream company Snookelfritz, an old German term of endearment used by her maternal grandmother. Now 36, Silver became a vegetarian in a meat-eating family at 15, and her mother told her she’d have to cook for herself, thinking that she’d give up the idea in a day....

Fraternal filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose Belgian drama The Kid With a Bike (2011) opens this week at Music Box, are justly celebrated as masters of social realism. Movies like Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002), and L’Enfant (2005) are immersive experiences, arriving at powerful epiphanies through their off-hand observation of working-poor characters. The handheld camera work, some of the most spontaneous in contemporary movies, creates the impression that we’re racing to catch up with these people, an effect that’s only enhanced by the brothers’ tendency to elide any moments of downtime....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a December dispatch from New Delhi, Reuters reported on India’s recent crackdown on violations of wildlife protection law and its repercussions for the nation’s snake charmers. Facing stricter enforcement of statutes against capturing or keeping endangered cobras, many snake charmers have left the profession their families have practiced for generations. Others continue to perform their traditional routines–except without the snakes....

The 16th European Union Film Festival continues through Thursday, March 28, at Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are selected films screening; for a complete schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. My Worst Nightmare Isabelle Huppert may be approaching self-parody as an icon of Gallic frigidity, yet the talented writer-director Anne Fontaine puts that to excellent use in this broad, obvious, but consistently funny bedroom farce....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I was saddened to learn this morning that director Tony Scott had committed suicide yesterday at the age of 68. Few contemporary directors have matured more interestingly than he did, and few took advantage of the Hollywood blockbuster for more idiosyncratic ends. The fascinating thing about Scott’s body of work starting with Enemy of the State—an impressive run that includes some grand entertainments (Spy Game, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Unstoppable), two compelling failures (Man on Fire, Domino), and one masterwork (Deja Vu)—is that it didn’t contradict the crass, commercial filmmaking of his early successes (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II), but rather honed it into a personal, expressionistic style....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Valentine’s Day weekend, River North Chicago Dance Company has hooked up with two in-demand choreographers, Lauri Stallings and Robert Battle. Stallings—a former Hubbard Street dancer who’s won commissions from American Ballet Theatre and, with Big Boi of OutKast, Atlanta Ballet—contributes the brand-new Suppose. Showcasing Stallings’s grounded yet mercurial movement, Suppose includes whirling collapses into lazy seated poses. At a preview, Stallings assured us that the movement will ultimately “drop out of [the dancers’] heads to the groin,” but it looked fine to me....