Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although it’s been overshadowed by the long history of statistical analysis in baseball, there’s a lot of interesting number crunching going on in the “nondiscrete” sports, like basketball and hockey. A lot of it has to do with adjusted plus/minus ratings. The traditional plus/minus statistic in hockey gives a player one point for each goal that his team scores and deducts one point for each goal against, only when he’s on the ice....

NBC Don’t look behind you, Katherine. Watching Monday night’s news coverage out of Ferguson, Missouri, it became increasingly annoying to hear newscasters refer to the “emotional” reaction protesters had to a grand jury’s refusal to indict officer Darren Wilson for the murder of unarmed black teen Michael Brown. Sure, anger qualifies as an emotion. And, yeah, some of the demonstrators’ more destructive activities couldn’t exactly be considered intellectual in their planning or execution....

In recent years filmmaker John Carpenter has benefited from widespread critical reappraisal of some of his more ambitiously strange movies, such as Big Trouble in Little China and the disturbingly prescient They Live, which fared poorly compared to his blockbuster masterpieces Halloween and The Thing. “It’s a nice feeling,” Carpenter says by phone from his office in Los Angeles. “I just wish they had been received better in the beginning.”...

QI’m a gay man who has been seeing a devout Christian guy for one year. We have a great relationship. We have many of the same interests and respect each other’s feelings and beliefs. However, I am a Catholic who is not that religious, and he is an Orthodox Christian. AWe’ve had all sorts of guest experts in the column over the years. Sex researchers, sex workers, medical doctors, sociologists, psychologists, academics, marriage activists, trans activists, and on and on....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Carl Segvich’s attitude toward John Daley and his older brother the mayor can only be classified as loathing, if not obsession, and over the last few years he’s run a series of suicide campaigns against them and their allies. In 2003 Segvich lost an unwinnable race against 11th Ward alderman James Balcer, who shares an office with John Daley; in 2004 he fell 40 votes short in a challenge against the ward’s silent and inactive GOP committeeman, George Preski (whose wife is an aide for the Chicago Board of Elections); in 2006, Segvich took on John Daley for county commissioner and, as expected, got crushed; and last year he lost another bout with Balcer....

When the severely beaten body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was pulled from Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River in 1955, word didn’t have to travel far in order to reach John Lewis. The now Georgia congressman and longtime civil rights activist was a year older than Till when news of his murder made its way to nearby Troy, Alabama, where Lewis was born and raised. “I was fifteen, black, at the edge of my own manhood, just like him,” Lewis wrote about Till in his 1998 memoir Walking With the Wind....

Raising More Questions About Rahm’s Residency But I find it interesting that no one seems to have produced an actual affidavit. The jurisdiction whose procedures I know most about would keep affidavits for more than a year after the election. Was there really an affidavit? Or was there a phone call? What did happen? We don’t know at this point. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For Cecil Adams’s evaluation of Rahm’s residency problem, see last week’s Straight Dope Chicago at chicago....

Just Doing Our Job What a week for Daley’s real Chicago to rear its head. I wonder how many people can connect the dots with how his crazy Ren 2010 program—school closings, reshuffled kids, and fired veteran teachers—has escalated the gang violence he doesn’t stop. —Sharon Schmidt Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I realize that’s it’s more arcane IOC politics than anything else that doomed this bid, but at least it doomed it....

Keep the Olympics Out of Our Parks Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Even if the Olympic bid is won by Chicago, it is not too late to put a stop to the nefarious plans for Washington Park. There is no good reason why the stadium venue cannot be changed to a much better nonpark location on existing vacant land, i.e., the old industrial clearance area south of 79th Street....

John H. White/Sun-Times Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy announced yesterday that a man has been charged in the slaying of six-month-old Jonylah Watkins and the wounding of her father Jonathan. When six-month-old Jonylah Watkins was fatally shot in Woodlawn by an unknown offender in March, police quickly pointed the finger in the usual direction. “There’s very strong gang overtones to this particular event,” superintendent Garry McCarthy told reporters at a news conference the day after the shooting....

Justin Luety The 35th annual International Mr. Leather On Saturday night I sat between an Australian and a German leather daddy as we watched the Pecs and Personality portion of the 35th annual International Mr. Leather Contest. Fifty-one men, wearing mostly jockstraps or some other type of assless leather, were lined up onstage at the Vic Theatre. My wardrobe completely lacks leather (except for boots—which are amateur compared to IML footwear), and I was the only person in the crowd, including press, not wearing some type of gear....

When the Chicago Latino Film Festival opens this week, it won’t include a blood-and-gore offering by Chicago filmmaker Ricardo Islas. Islas has been a fest regular since 1996, contributing flicks from his Alpha Studios with titles like To Kill a Killer, Night Fangs, and Lockout. He says they drew “decent” attendance and inspired lively discussions, so he was surprised when this year’s submission, El Dia de los Muertos—in which an impoverished Mexican immigrant falls victim to a band of American punks who get their kicks by making snuff videos—was rejected....

Rock & Roll: Impatience is the little Lucky Pierre piece that almost couldn’t. After three years, personnel changes, and long stretches when construction left the group without a rehearsal space, the quartet was still struggling to meld disparate elements–Microsoft clip art, Boeing’s arts-giving priorities, the fundamentals of PowerPoint, a highly fictionalized biography of AC/DC front man Bon Scott–into the kind of beguiling, enigmatic piece that has made them Chicago’s most entertaining performance art troupe....

I was recently seeing an alpha-male type–Ivy League grad, big executive, loud laugh, etc. He found me on a Web site, one thing led to another, and he wound up showing me pictures of him in his ex-girlfriend’s panties. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By threatening to create a YouTube slide show using the pics Alpha Male already sent you, LMFP, or by threatening to e-mail the pics to everybody@hisplaceofemployment....

In April of 1897, Michael Kenna—better known as “Hinky Dink” on account of his diminutive stature—was elected alderman for the 1st Ward, known today as the Near South Side but back then as the Levee District and the city’s vice capital, home to saloons, whorehouses, opium joints, and one establishment called Bucket of Blood. Kenna himself was the proprietor of the Workingman’s Exchange, a saloon that sold the cheapest beer in Chicago....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And on Sunday at the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, at 5 PM, two films from very different points in Wiseman’s career will be screening in 16-millimeter: Titicut Follies (1967, 84 min.), his first film as director, and the masterful Public Housing (1997, 195 min.), which looked at life inside the Ida B. Wells complex. The movie established Wiseman’s rigorous documentary aesthetic—no narration, no voice-over, no graphic illustration, and certainly none of the personal song and dance we’ve come to expect from entertainers like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Frankly I don’t get it. If I had to pick one Oliveira film as an accessible primer that at the same time embodies his richly connotative aesthetic in something like full dosage, The Convent would be it, the whole symbolist schmear in one elegantly distilled package. Because there’s not a frame in this comparatively short feature (for Oliveira anyway) that doesn’t direct you elsewhere, to allusions and cultural entities beyond the phenomenological surfaces of things, a Bachelardian parsing that subverts every impulse to narrative explication....

More than a half million people died in 1965 and ’66 when the Indonesian military, capitalizing on a brief coup attempt against President Sukarno, decided to exterminate the country’s large communist party; the killings were never punished, and many of the perpetrators, who seized victims’ property as their own, are still part of the power structure there. For this unique and unforgettable documentary, Joshua Oppenheimer persuaded former executioners to create scenes about their killings, then recorded the process of their staging the vignettes, some of them done in the style of Hollywood movies....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Actually, you’d be right, but you’d be fighting an uphill battle against the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Chicago Public Library. The above quote comes from the November 20 New York Times, in which Jeff Zeleny writes about the national attention currently focused on Chicago, the home base of our next president. And just as Zeleny erroneously believes Chicago’s famous nickname originated with windbag politicians in the late 19th century — New York Sun editor Charles Dana wrote about “the nonsensical claims of that windy city” as Chicago pols loudly wooed the organizers of the 1893 world’s fair — he uses “bellowing” instead of “billowing” to describe the wind that blew toward New York from the mouths of the city’s former leaders....

For its 15th installment, Chicago’s World Music Festival has recovered from its nadir last year—a hastily assembled and underwhelming lineup that was just one by-product of a clumsy administrative overhaul that left the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events basically rudderless at the start of 2012. Festival founder Michael Orlove and his three-person team were laid off in December 2011, and though Orlove’s colleagues Carlos Tortolero and Jack McLarnan were eventually rehired, they had to organize the event in just a few short months....