The stand-up comic has a long resume featuring numerous forms of (largely pimp-based) humor — film and TV highlights include "First Sunday," "Wild 'n Out" and "The Boondocks" — but despite his onstage persona, Williams struck a decidedly thoughtful, low-key tone during his recent conversation with Express, making exactly one joke. So, we talked about books.

» EXPRESS: Where does your fascination with pimping come from?
» WILLIAMS: I like the fact that it's remained consistent all the way through, as the oldest profession — the mindset required on both ends of it — the teamwork involved and the benefit at the end. I've studied the story from a lot of different angles. It keeps changing for me. It keeps getting on a different level.

» EXPRESS: You've adopted enough kids to start a basketball team — with subs. How did that come about?
» WILLIAMS: It's kinda redemption: If you do bad in your life, you try and do some good things. You try to do the best that you can. I started that prior to getting famous. It was something I needed to do. And it turned out to be a good situation for the kids and for me. It changed me.

"Genres are just what other people make them; they're boxes people keep music in by what they say about it," Mills said.

It's a rapid evolution for the artist, who was only 18 years old in 2003, when he came out of nowhere to win the Mercury Prize, awarded yearly to the best album in the United Kingdom and Ireland, for his debut, "Boy in da Corner." Now, with his third album, last year's "Maths and English" a runner-up, Rascal isn't shy about giving the people what they want.

"That's the whole thing about being an artist and an entertainer at the same time: As much as I'm getting my fill making my music and filling my creative desire or whatever, I'm f***ing trying to fulfill what everyone else wants as well — seeing what people like and take to," Mills said. "The more I branch out and try out new stuff, the more I find out what that is."

While sticking to his garage-rap roots, "Maths and English" moves away from his previous efforts into a hip-hop style cleaned of grime.

Maybe because it's a dumb question.

Or maybe because BSP fills enormous venues in Europe but remains the object of (admittedly fanatical) cult devotion on this side of the water.

"It's kind of a head[trip], America, at first," Noble says. "Then you realize each state is like its own country."

Especially D.C., where BSP plays this week.

"Each has its different language, even though they're so similar. At first, we were like, ‘Argh, they're ruining the English language!'"

And he laughs.

But since 1995, earthquake refugees in Japan, Turkey and India, among other places, have received elegant paper-tube houses designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who has also created churches, museum installations and several unforgettable expo pavilions from paper and cardboard.

After studying at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Cooper Union, Ban caught critics' eyes with a series of villas in the mountains around Nagano, Japan, before he burst onto the global scene with his provisional houses built from pulp products.

The structures are not usually all paper — there is rain and fire to consider, so you might find plastics as well as bamboo or cane, but they seem always to satisfy the building-code cops. And they're typically not permanent but do recycle nicely.

"We're excited about a lot of the bands we're playing with on this tour," Extine says. "We like playing shows we would want to go to ourselves." On the road again to support their third full-length release, "Poisonous Times," the band is more or less scheduled to play every night for the next two months without a break. "It's a punk tradition, says Extine. "Touring is work, though — it's a risk every time."

The way he sees it, "the natural life span of a band is probably about a year or two." That's funny, because the Old Haunts are going on year seven. Despite a slew of lineup changes over the years, the band is still going strong with a new grrrl on drums, Toby Vail, late of Bikini Kill.

Coupling is culture, the creation of an ever-evolving two-person civilization. Each pairing creates its own language, music, play — all of which evaporate on parting. Or on simply being exposed to another person.

And yet coupling is precisely what Amy Sillman is interested in. The painter asked friends to pose, then made taut, rubbery representational ink sketches, some of which hang at the entrance to her Hirshhorn "Directions" show, subtitled "Third Person Singular." In the gallery behind are the larger abstract oils they sometimes led to, sometimes followed.

But that's not what this "Intimate Evening With Lynda Carter" is about.

Before she was Miss World USA or wearing satin tights fighting for our rights as television's Wonder Woman, Carter was well-known on the club circuit as a singer.

She also spent much of her youth touring with various bands until she traded life on the road for the role of a leading lady. So Carter's latest journey back to the stage isn't uncharted territory by any means.

» Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th St. NW; 6:30 p.m., free; 202-387-7638. (U St.-Cardozo)

Probably only one: David Rothenberg.

Though he's fairly tight with the legendary folk singer, Rothenberg is clearly more fascinated by grooving with the natural world. A few years ago, he was making sweet sounds with creatures that fly for his book, "Why Birds Sing." Now, he's waxing poetic (and scientific) about underwater tunes in his new book, "Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound."

"Once you start hearing [whales' sounds] for the first time, you think it's kind of strange," says Rothenberg, 45, who is an accomplished jazz musician, "but after a while, you start to hear that there are these patterns with structure to them. It's very interesting."

"Thousand Mile Song," which comes with a CD of "whale music" recorded live and produced in the studio by Rothenberg, documents one man's quest to listen to and learn from the unique rhythms and noises whales produce underwater. Scientists know very little about why whales sing, and maybe even less about whether anyone can actually interact with the nautical beasts through human instruments and sounds. But that didn't stop the professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology from playing his clarinet for whales from Russia to Vancouver to Hawaii.

How, exactly, would one pull off that sort of interspecies interaction, you might ask?

Classes range from how to get out of a ticket to teaching philosophy to third-graders. The best part is each class is free. Thank goodness, because those "Everything you wanted to know about Giant Pandas" classes (yep, it's real) tend to be pricey.

Written by Express contributor Robyn Mincher