Bill Heirens, infamous as Chicago’s “Lipstick Killer,” is the longest-serving inmate in the Illinois prison system. He’s been behind bars since the age of 17, when he confessed to three gruesome murders that dominated the news headlines throughout the summer of ’46. Meanwhile, the graying prison population has placed new demands on an already burdened prison health system, forcing medical workers to provide care that sometimes doesn’t meet IDOC’s own standards....

[Plus: Sweet Specials: A roundup of Chicago restaurants offering Valentine’s Day dinner] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Savvy food pairings could help people appreciate dessert wines, but that raises another problem: The general rule is that the dessert wine should be as sweet or sweeter than the dessert so that the wine isn’t overpowered. Yet how’s the average diner to know how sweet a wine is when even those with the same name, for example Beerenauslese, can vary widely depending on the sugar-acid balance, grape variety, year, and a host of other factors?...

GHOSTS BOHEMIAN THEATRE ENSEMBLE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And yet there’s still a bit of creakiness in the play’s bones—which may account for why the tale of long-suffering Helene Alving and her tormented son, Oswald, gets fewer revivals than a feminist evergreen like A Doll’s House. Though London critic Clement Scott famously decried Ghosts in 1891 as “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly,” there’s not that much about it that’s gasp-worthy anymore....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t a very good weekend for moviegoing, as I was kept in with my first bad cold of the season. I experienced one of those fits of congestion where it feels like your head is underwater for a couple days, making it difficult to focus on a movie even at home. For some, that’s a good excuse to put on an old favorite of which they’ve committed large sections to memory, the familiar sights and sounds providing comfort in a time of displeasure....

It’s the Thursday before Christmas, and 17-year-old Dikembe Caston, who raps under the name Kembe X, is hanging out at his house with his crew—a collective of hip-hop fiends and friends that he calls the Village. He lives in suburban South Holland with his mom, Jacquelyn Caston, and a younger sister, and he and his frequent partner, Alex Wiley, have both dropped out of high school. Download two tracks by the Village (Kembe X and Alex Wiley), including the previously unreleased “Tell They Ass Wassup....

I first heard these guys on a friend’s soft-rock podcast, between tunes by Firefall and Al Stewart, and my initial thought was, Oh man, what Chris de Burgh song is this, and how have I never heard it in 25 years of exposure to light-FM radio? Regardless of your feelings about Chris de Burgh, that ought to persuade you that Midlake’s take on “yacht rock” is as authentic as they come (nothing against Cheer-Accident or Bobby Conn, but their pop material is way too perverse to pass for the real thing)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like I’ve said before, I’m aware that being an early adopter is a sucker’s game and that the iPad is far from a perfect device (I still have a hard time believing it doesn’t have USB ports). But the minute someone makes an iPad app that does something like what the Hobnox Audiotool does as a Web-based Flash program, I am positive that my present resolve not to give Apple several hundred more dollars of my money will shatter like a plate glass window hit with an 808-emulating brick....

It was unseasonably chilly in the basement of Christopher Peters and Shane Gabier’s Humboldt Park two-flat—or maybe it just seemed that way, since they were unpacking clothes and accessories from the 2009 spring/summer collection of their line, Creatures of the Wind. Some of them looked a little worse for wear—straw hats smooshed, fringe tangled—but the men were unfazed. The items had just come back from a New York photo shoot for W magazine, the monthly Conde Nast fashion glossy, which has slated a profile of the designers for March....

Pavement reunion rumors have been going around for about ten years now, or since the band was in the midst of its long, drawn-out, and passive-aggressive breakup. So far none of them have come even close to being true, but Brooklyn Vegan’s reporting that a “reliable source” has tipped them off to a series of Pavement festival appearances next year. By now a reunited Pavement isn’t an outlandish idea. Their best records have all been given the deluxe reissue treatment and in the decade since they last played indie rock has grown from a semi-niche market to something that could be said to compete with the mainstream if the barriers between “mainstream” and “indie” hadn’t been almost completely demolished....

This formerly frustrated wife, separated after eight years of marriage, is acting on the stuff I fantasized about while I was with my straitlaced husband. I’ve done the sex-friends thing and the sex-in-a-hotel-with-a-stranger-during-a-business-trip thing, but I have yet to do the one thing I’m most interested in: a threesome with two men. I have ads up on two Web sites–Lavalife and seeking arrangement.com–and I want your opinion about a guy I chatted with regarding a two-man/one-woman threesome....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Another summer weekend in Chicago, another big street fair. This weekend Wicker Park Fest returns with three stages of indie rock of all stripes and sizes. Cursive and the Budos Band are the big names on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, and other acts include the Baseball Project (with former Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, and the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn), Foxy Shazam, Screaming Females, and Tim Fite....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After Tony Hu, is there a more recognizable Chinatown celebrity than Liu Chang Ming? You may not know his name, but if you’ve strolled past Hing Kee in the mall over the last few years, you’ve probably seen him in action in the front window, his brawny, tatted forearms pulling, twisting, bouncing, and folding long, thick ropes of dough into dozens of strands of perfect fresh noodles....

Barcelona-based music festival Sonar organized small events last year in New York and Washington, D.C., and it presents its first full-scale U.S. event in Chicago from Thu 9/9 through Sat 9/11. Sonar Chicago includes movies, lectures, multimedia art, an online radio station, and of course music—Sonar features an international lineup of circuit benders, soundscape artists, DJs, programmers, and instrument designers, with a focus on electronic experimentation. Thursday’s program, at Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, begins at noon and includes Kid Koala’s live-band project the Slew and Detroit electronic-music artist Jimmy Edgar....

Mike Sula Kimchi pancake, Ahjoomah’s Apron When I was in Korea, the only time I ever heard the word ajumma was late at night in bars, when it was barked out by drunken salarymen in the direction of harried older women, followed by an order for more food or soju. It took me a long time before I could be convinced that it wasn’t (necessarily) a rude way to address someone....

Director Mick Napier’s heady new musical profiles inventors and inventions great, small, wonderful, odious, and otherwise. Ambling genially from infotainment to parodic “eureka!” re-creations to Lehrer-esque feats of elocution, it’s Annoyance at its most Neo-Futuristic. The cast members wrote the scenes and songs (with musical director Lisa McQueen), and thanks to their assurance and smarts, the show’s ruminative eclecticism becomes as much a strength as a weakness. Avoiding formula leads to loopily hilarious discoveries like Rich Sohn’s prop-comic Leonardo da Vinci and a search for the superlative that preceded the invention of “sliced bread....

thursday24 Thursday24 Eddy Current Suppression RingBert JanschShane PerlowinSleepy SunOmar Souleyman Friday25 Eddy Current Suppression RingJohn Lee Hooker Jr.Melvins Saturday26 Burger Records Caravan of StarsFang IslandBert JanschShane PerlowinShellshagWoven Bones Sunday27 Fang IslandShane Perlowin Monday28 Huntsville, On Fillmore with Nels ClineShane Perlowin Tuesday29 Huntsville Wednesday30 Grant Park Orchestra with Krzysztof Jablonski BERT JANSCH Don’t let anyone tell you getting older is easy; since Bert Jansch turned 60, life has dealt him a travail to go along with every triumph....

Katie Johnston-Smith, Gorilla Tango Theatre executive producer, is flipping through: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I recently read Dollhouse Volume 1 and absolutely loved it! It spins off of Joss Whedon’s brilliant but short-lived show, also named Dollhouse. The story is set in a dystopian future in which the secretive Rossum Corporation programs individuals to become “dolls,” wiping their minds and installing new personalities and skills to suit the needs of its wealthy clients....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few weeks ago I tagged along with a group of Chicago chefs on a field trip to Coopersville, Michigan to make a batch of raw milk cheddar at Grassfields Organic Cheese, operated by Jesse and Betsy Meerman. The group, which included Paul Virant of Vie, Rick Gresh of David Burke’s Primehouse, Marianne Sundquist of In Fine Spirits, former Sepia chef Kendal Duque, Sarah McDonnell of Broadway Cellars, and Jimmy Bannos of Heaven on Seven and his son Jimmy Jr....

This past August the renowned Japanese animation outfit Studio Ghibli announced that it would halt production temporarily to ponder its creative and financial future following the retirement of director and founding member Hayao Miyazaki. For years Miyazaki has been the international face of Ghibli, with such critical and commercial hits as Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and The Wind Rises (2013). But Isao Takahata, who partnered with Miyazaki and producer Toshio Suzuki to create the studio back in 1985, is no slouch either: his filmography ranges from the tragic masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies (1988), about two orphans struggling to survive the horror and privation of postwar Japan, to the wacky, Simpsons-esque My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wilmette Life reports that the Wilmette Park District has canceled an outdoor community theater production of Ragtime–you know, the hit musical based on a celebrated novel by E.L. Doctorow–because the script contains the so-called “n-word.” (Niggling? Numbing? Nasty?) Authorities feared that residents would hear the derogatory term over the Gillson Park PA system and think . . . what?...