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I headed north last week to do Savage Love Live—a rapid-fire, slightly tipsy Q&A session—at the University of Alaska Anchorage. It was my third visit to UAA, and it was a blast. All of the questions in this week’s column were submitted to me by UAA students and staffers. A You’re not getting peed on. Science says female ejaculate ≠ urine. But don’t take my word for it, TW: ask your girlfriend to piss on you sometime, and see if you can’t tell the difference....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’m almost two weeks late in hearing about this, but I’m assuming other latecomers will be interested as well in the op-ed piece published by Mia Farrow and her son Ronan in the March 28 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Titled “The Genocide Olympics,” the Farrows’ article attacks Steven Spielberg for his friendliness in agreeing to help stage the Olympics ceremonies in Beijing, thereby implicitly putting some kind of seal of approval on China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide, which the Farrows have recently been observing firsthand....

Shoppers and gawkers checking out the 17th annual SOFA Chicago decorative arts show on Navy Pier this weekend will find a pair of new attractions: the Intuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art and the inaugural Cowan’s and Clark & Del Vecchio auction of 20th-century ceramics. Featuring 16 dealers from across the country, the Intuit show is being produced this year for the first time by the Art Fair Company, which owns SOFA and hopes for audience crossover between the two....

Rhys Chatham’s brand-new release, A Crimson Grail (Table of the Elements), is beyond epic. The composition that gives the disc its name was scored for 400 electric guitars and performed only once, in October 2005, under the towering dome of Paris’s Basilique du Sacre Coeur, which acted as a resonating chamber to generate huge clouds of sound that swooped and spiraled like an albatross riding an updraft. It’s a logical extension of his 1989 composition An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, scored for 100 guitars and staged 20 times to date, but Chatham laid out the basic vocabulary of A Crimson Grail–the use of overtones as melodic material and the combination of classical rigor with rock’s wall of amplified sound–30 years ago, in one of his very earliest pieces for the instrument....

QI’m a 25-year-old male. I’m a zoophile and always have been. I’m a longtime reader (I’m sure you’re thrilled), so I know my interests aren’t on your approved list of sexual activities. Not trying to argue that point. However, it’s clear what turns my head when I walk down the street and it’s never the person holding the leash. I know from your column and many other sources that once your brain is “wired” a certain way, “rewiring” it is unlikely (snowball’s chance in hell), so this isn’t going to go away....

If playwright Sheila Callaghan had trusted her characters, she might have written a fine play. The relationship she creates between grad student roommates Anima, a drunken party girl, and Christa, an anal-retentive academic, is borderline Neil Simon schematic. But in Libby Ford’s Collision Theatre Company production, a committed cast makes the women’s fervent struggle to maintain their friendship while falling in love with the same man disarmingly poignant. Callaghan reveals keen insights into the human heart, yet for every meaningful plot step forward she indulges in a half dozen quirky, overwritten digressions: choral singing of James Taylor songs, nightmarish intrusions by Anima’s Leave It to Beaver family, advice-giving visitations from an androgynous Virgin Mary....

The morning bell rang 20 minutes ago at Henson elementary, but the stragglers are still drifting in. At a counter inside the front door, the head security guard, Kelvyn Cockrell, greets them all by name and fills out their tardy slips. A sixth-grade girl in braids and barrettes approaches along with her brother, a second grader in a baseball cap. Cockrell asks the girl, who was absent the day before, if she’s feeling better....

State’s attorney candidate Tommy Brewer started off the week of January 14 by absorbing some bad news. “I just found out that the Sun-Times endorsed Larry Suffredin,” he told me by cell phone as he drove to the Cook County courthouse at 26th and California. And arguably more, especially in a year when independence and change are leading campaign themes. For the first time in decades, there’s no incumbent in the race for state’s attorney....

For a guy promising to run the most transparent administration in Chicago history, Mayor Emanuel isn’t afraid to steal a trick or two from the masters of the old machine, starting with the great Mayor Daley. Though now that I think about it, Mayor Emanuel’s smart enough to have figured this one out on his own. In most instances, it’s clear which committee should handle the proposal—zoning matters go to the zoning committee, for instance....

Captain Roger Bay has been making arrests in tough neighborhoods for almost three decades, but in the last few years he’s come to believe that’s not good enough. At the same time, the liquor store next door made its sales through a walk-up window. Customers would drink on the sidewalk. Since he began working as a watch commander in the 11th District five years ago, Bay has been on a mission to immerse himself in the neighborhoods where he’s charged with fighting crime....

Mouzam Makkar, actor and writer is considering a new career as a cheesemonger thanks to: Mastering Cheese I love cheese. I’m of the opinion that you can add cheese to anything and it would only make it better. Well, maybe not to sushi but never say never! I realized, however, that I didn’t know anything about this ancient food so I picked up a copy of Mastering Cheese: Lessons for Connoisseurship From a Maître Fromager by Max McCalman....

QI am a 26-year-old straight guy. My straightness and guyness are recent revelations, and it feels amazing to be able to confidently state this. Here is my trouble: I’ve had gender issues for the past five years. My now ex-girlfriend of three years said she couldn’t be with me anymore due to these issues. Our breakup was a result of my apathy in the bedroom, which was tied to my gender issues, and her fears of me transitioning into a woman....

“We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” Martin Luther King Jr. told the rapt throng on the National Mall 50 years ago. The 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington Fifty years later, participants in the March on Washington still hoping for justice A new generation of activists fights injustice, from school cuts to Trayvon Martin The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which he gave the speech, commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation....

In the opening sequence of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)— considered by some the greatest British film ever made—a young army officer commanding a mock invasion receives orders to attack at midnight but, citing the surprise assault on Pearl Harbor, instead moves in at 6 PM. When he and his men arrive at a Turkish bath in London and capture the enemy commander, a rotund old major general wearing nothing but a towel and a walrus mustache, the younger man can’t resist jeering at him and his quaint code of honor....

On December 14 I turned on the radio and heard something I’d never dreamed I’d hear: Mayor Daley blasting a government subsidy to a corporation as unwarranted and shameful. Over the years the mayor’s been more than generous as far as city-financed handouts go. But he came down hard on the idea of the state buying Wrigley Field from the Chicago Cubs. Could it be the mayor’s had a change of heart?...

The 11th annual Asian American Showcase, presented by the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media and the Gene Siskel Film Center, runs Friday, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Baby Johnny Ching’s velvety digital cinematography and an authoritative supporting performance by veteran character actor Tzi Ma (The Quiet American) distinguish this 2005 gangster drama set in east Los Angeles. A motherless Asian-American kid falls in with the hoodlums next door and kills their criminal rival; years later he’s released from prison and heads straight back into trouble....

Between the Bun BURGERS, ICE CREAM | LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | OPEN LATE: FRIDAY & SATURDAY TILL 11 | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED AMERICAN, BURGERS | BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | OPEN LATE: 24 HOURS EVERY DAY | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED BURGERS | LUNCH, DINNER: SEVEN DAYS | OPEN LATE: FRIDAY & SATURDAY TILL MIDNIGHT | RESERVATIONS NOT ACCEPTED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This South Loop quick-service joint promises all-natural burgers and sandwiches, fresh-cut fries fried in oil free of trans fats and seasoned with sea salt, plus extras like cage-free organic eggs, nitrate-free bacon, and Wisconsin-made cheeses....

There’s a new McMansion up at 1806 N. Wood. A hulking pile of concrete-colored blocks towering over neighboring homes to the south and north, it was built after 32nd Ward alderman Ted Matlak ushered a zoning change through the City Council allowing the developer, Prime Property, to construct a wider, taller home than the lot’s previous zoning permitted. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most of his zoning changes, like the one at 1806 N....

Complicated Horse Emergency, aka sometimes-local artists Drew Ziegler and Randall Christopher Bailey, have created an elaborate set for their nonsense musical Time Never Stops (Mr. Most Smartest) that looks like a shantytown built by magpies, elves, and perverts. From one end or the other of this hand-painted 270-degree panorama of cobbled-together alley detritus, moronic psychopaths emerge–a dictator made of tin foil, a wiggly brain-eater, vampires who suck blood out of a giant ass–and commit purposeless acts of consumption, vandalism, or time travel....

The Deftones never really fit nu-metal’s dumb-thug stereotype, but because they had a long-standing relationship with Korn and occasionally shared a stage with Limp Bizkit, they were guilty by association. Time seems to have absolved them: over the last decade they’ve displayed enough artistic vision to earn some cred and a fan base that extends beyond black-clad teens. The “experimental alternative rock band” description in their Wikipedia entry might be a bit generous, but then again, how many Billboard-chart acts can you name that apply the Slint school of dynamics–sweeping, textural blasts of guitar followed by soft, dreamy quiet bits–to pop metal?...