static homepage / listing posts / latex

Hi there.

i’ve got three little questions regarding wordpress, i’d really appreciate it if you guys could help me out.

first, I want my front page to display a static page, i know, Settings–>Reading–>Front Page Displays: A Static Page.
i’ve set that, and it works perfectly, except that i have no idea how i can access my blog now! everytime I hit “Home” , or give the browser my blog’s address, it jumps to the static page i’ve set. how’s it possible to access the main index?

second, i want to list in a page, all the posts that are in a specific category (or have a particular tag). list them like, show their subjects each in a row. i read the documentation on this page, came up with this piece of script,

<?php
query_posts(‘category_name=Questions and Answers’);
?>

but this will show the posts entirely, not just their subjects. any suggestions?

also, i read that the newer versions of wordpress support LaTeX, my blog’s running on 2.5, but when i put latex scripts in my posts, they simply show up as plain text – am i doing something wrong?

Thanks in Advance:)