If you want to witness the Babe Ruth of local bowling—as in, the hardest-hitting bowler in town—show up at Timber Lanes on a Monday night during the men’s league, which runs from September through May. Then head in the direction of the loudest-crashing pins. You’ll come face-to-face with Keith Porter, a 53-year-old barrel-chested man who doesn’t knock down the pins so much as blast them to smithereens. A head chef at the Children’s Home and Aid Society—he prepares meals for the kids—Porter’s got a 200 average....

The Reader’s Choice: Heart of Gold Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Show houses and lofts have a well-deserved reputation as dirty, ramshackle, and out of control. Broken toilets, broken PAs, some dude in leggings doing embarrassing dance moves, the one drunk idiot who always seems to piss on the radiator and stink the joint up—they’re all part of the charm. But Heart of Gold, a finished private loft, is one of very few that combine the best qualities of a club and a house show....

The Reader’s Choice: Carnitas Don Pedro Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sunday-morning pork rush at Carnitas Don Pedro presents a trial of forbearance appropriate for the after-church crowd. First you have to worm your way between two counters and a handful of small tables to the back of the line, which may snake into the kitchen, where sturdy men are stirring giant copper vats of pig parts with paddles....

“I do not love roasting coffee,” says David Meyers. “I don’t want to spend my life doing this. I only want to do it one or two days a week.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Meyers is the roaster, packer, marketer, and delivery guy behind tiny independent Resistance Coffee. “Pretty much everything I do comes out of anarchist activism,” he says. “Rather than being just an end in itself, [coffee] is a way to build community and further these social goals....

On December 30, 2003, Joan Didion lost her screenwriting partner and husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne. They’d just come home from visiting their daughter, Quintana Roo, who was lying unconscious in a Manhattan hospital ICU. Didion was making dinner and Dunne dropped dead of a coronary, just like that. If you already know the story, it’s probably because Didion made it the starting point for The Year of Magical Thinking, her best-selling memoir of coping with grief....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When I came across a blog post about aged eggnog recently, though, I was intrigued. According to Michael Ruhlman, the eggnog should be aged for at least 30 days but you can keep it (refrigerated) for up to three years, and the taste will continue developing over time. The secret, apparently, is an insanely high alcohol content, which kills any salmonella that may be lurking in the raw eggs....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley, who comes as close as we get to a reformer, won the Democratic primary in the Fifth Congressional District special election. Thirty-second Ward committeeman John Fritchey, who was running too, didn’t win in his own ward. Alderman Eugene Schulter couldn’t deliver his 47th Ward for Fritchey (Quigley won it). Powerhouse aldermen William Banks, Patrick Levar, and Richard Mell couldn’t deliver a majority for Fritchey in their wards....

This touring program continues Friday through Thursday, May 11 through 17, at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $9, $5 for members, and all screenings are by video projection. For more information call 773-281-4114 or see facets.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RThe Camden 28 Anthony Giacchino’s dramatic 2006 documentary revisits the 1971 burglary of a draft office in Camden, New Jersey, by Catholic pacifists protesting the Vietnam war....

How many times can she bat those eyes? Really, the answer won’t change. Reason being there has been one too many times where the little me has tapped the real me on the shoulder and has said “dude, can we please leave?” Normally I can tell him to just chill out and wait a minute but then he reminds me of all the times he so patiently waited with wide eyes and repeatedly tugged on my ear and stomped on my shoulder while chanting “let’s go!...

You couldn’t get much farther from the frothy romance of Bollywood than this grim but moving independent drama by Anurag Kashyap. Ruth (Kalki Koechlin), an Anglo-Indian beauty traumatized by her mother’s death and her sister’s suicide, immigrates from the UK to Mumbai to track down her absentee father. Her life there is defined by men and their crummy desires: she works in a massage parlor, giving hand jobs for extra cash, and her boyfriend is a miserable drug addict who badgers her for sex....

Spotted in Chinatown: another prospective urban izakaya. Executive chef Kee Chan, formerly of Heat and Mulan, plans to open Lure Izakaya (2017 S. Wells, 312-225-8989) any day now pending inspections, and is currently accepting applications for all positions through his website (lurechicago.com) and Facebook page. In addition to Japanese small plates and grilled items in the $5-$8 range, he’ll be serving rolls and a $10-$12 fusion menu with dishes like a seafood stew with cod, lamb, and greens....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before the Bulls won all their championships, back when they were trying to get past the NBA champion Detroit Pistons, the great Charles Cherney took a fantastic shot of Michael Jordan. It found him crumpled on the Bulls’ bench, having been beaten into submission by the “Bad Boy” Pistons during what must have been the 1990 NBA Eastern Conference finals....

It’s the opinion of a number of people—professionals and laymen alike—that we’ve entered a second golden age of television. This is simultaneously great and really annoying. As the New York Times’ David Carr wrote, “The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet and threatening to consume my waking life in the process.” Review (Comedy Central)One of the best episodes of television this year also had the best title: “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes....

Bronte Remy Bumppo Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Theirs is a story tailor-made for drama: God on one side, nature on the other, and a singular trio of authoresses—plus their troubled only brother—in between. The sisters quietly defied the conventions of 1840s England (when women were barred from using the the Bronte’s local library) by creating two of the most memorable novels in the canon, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, with its fearsome “madwoman in the attic,” and Wuthering Heights (which received perhaps the greatest compliment any British novel can earn: a Monty Python parody, in which the doomed lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, proclaim their undying passion for each other via semaphore)....

When the world paused this summer to look back on Michael Jackson’s extraordinary career, one chapter was missing from all the retrospectives, which skipped straight from the Jackson Five’s formation in Gary, Indiana, to their explosive rise to stardom on Motown Records. Though every last recording by Elvis and the Beatles—the only other pop stars of Jackson’s magnitude—has been meticulously documented, not even the most obsessive collectors have the whole story behind “Big Boy,” the Jackson Five’s first single....

Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) is remembered as one of the great political films of its era—who could forget its climactic melding of fact and fiction, shot in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention, in which Robert Forster’s TV news cameraman is swept into the real-life chaos of police and protesters? Medium Cool is also recognized as a pointed early critique of the news media, noting the amoral detachment of TV journalists and the collusion between their corporate bosses and the government to shape a political narrative....

Everyone is familiar with the song that goes “There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance.” What’s the origin of this mysterious song and its seemingly Egyptian melody? –Martin C. Arno, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bloom was in charge of entertaining the rustics at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. His assignment: set up an amusement park outside the main fairgrounds as a counterpoint to the more highbrow offerings inside....

Every show at Chicago’s 14th annual World Music Festival is free—even the ones in conventional venues (Martyrs’, the Mayne Stage, Reggie’s Rock Club) rather than in city facilities, museums, or parks. That’s a first for the festival, and it’s about the only piece of good news concerning this year’s installment, unless you count the simple fact that it’s happening—the city’s excellent Music Without Borders series in Millennium Park didn’t return for summer 2012....

Bethany McLean, financial reporter and coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room, the 2004 book on Enron, is keeping an eye on: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Enron TimeLine’s production was great at capturing the almost Shakespearean human drama that was the Enron saga. It wasn’t so much about really complicated business things or villains who set out to do bad things, like deliberately destroy a company and cost people their life savings, as it was a story about very human failings that lead to disaster....

Standing in the stark white stage lights in a darkened theater on the third floor of the Center on Halsted, stripped of a beat and sharing a spoken-word bill with a group of teenagers he’s coached on both poetry and survival, Tim’m West is doing something rare, even among musicians who’ve pioneered a sound: he’s turning his art into something bigger. The Center on Halsted offers a safe environment for troubled and homeless LGBTQ youth, and as the Center’s associate youth director, West brings to that mission a personal history that ties queer masculinity to genre-bending hip-hop....