I don't eat at McDonald's often, but it does hold that promise of convenience when I'm driving from A to B and need something in my stomach fast. Usually these days I order via the McDonald's mobile app, which can be handy when their system works. Sometimes, though,...
Nearing the end of my 60th year, I have finally read Moby-Dick, the 1851 novel by author Herman Melville about a voyage aboard the whaling ship Pequod to hunt the huge white sperm whale which previously took the leg of Captain Ahab, a monomaniacal, raging narcissist who foists this mission on his crew only after they put out to sea.
Joe Biden accomplishmentsBetter than Trump on the economy, oil, and crimeIn this August 15, 2024 segment on Morning Joe, economic analyst Steve Rattner fact-checks several of the lies Donald Trump spewed during his August 14 “economic policy” speech in North...
Live music in Kenosha is nothing new. The city has long supported a roster of bar bands that rock out on a small stage while patrons and bartenders shout over them to converse or place orders. What's new — over the past year or so — is a Kenosha venue called Fusion,...
Just before this past Christmas, my mom's cousin Wanda died. Back in Cicero, Illinois in the late 1930s, 40s, and early 50s, Wanda was like a big sister to Shirley. My own sister Karen drove us down to attend Wanda's wake and, arriving with plenty of time to spare,...
Above is a YouTube video Marty Schwartz did for Next Level Guitar demonstrating the Open G guitar tuning. Marty explains how to tune your guitar to Open G, and then shows off some of Open G's advantages. It's an easygoing, relaxed guitar lesson, and he takes his time...
As someone who's made a regular hobby of studying the Bible for about 30 years and counting, I find it hard to express how enjoyable the John P. Meier book series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus has been to read. Chapter by chapter, Meier peels away...
Right off the bat, I had two misconceptions about 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works — A True Story. One was that a book written by a Good Morning America guy would necessarily...
The SC Johnson headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin is a peculiar little enclave. The company's heritage campus includes its iconic, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Research Tower and Administration Building, as well as the Golden Rondelle Theater, transplanted from the...
Perhaps you have heard that worm castings (a.k.a. worm manure or worm humus, the digestive waste produced by earthworms) might be the finest organic fertilizer on earth. Possibly, you read somewhere that earthworms can be raised for this purpose — and also to supply...
I love to cook, and one of the easy, healthy, go-to chicken recipes that I make quite a bit is Chicken Chili with Beans. I thought I would share it — and experiment with making a YouTube cooking video. I start off by making my own beans. I use my pressure cooker,...
Who was Jesus of Nazareth, according to historical evidence? An ample crop of recent books on the "historical Jesus" has offered yet more answers to this perennial puzzle. Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth sounds very intriguing. Misquoting...
Amy was already up at 2 a.m. when the fire truck horns started blasting down our street. Mitchell School was on fire. Mitchell School and Mitchell School are co-located. The entrance to Mitchell Middle School is on Drexel Ave. at Webster St. Just south of that...
I haven't blogged in months. I've been mostly absent from Twitter and Facebook as well. Initially, I wanted to spend less time in these scattered and distracted modes of thought, and more time on focused and linear avenues like reading books. But then my wife Amy was...
The Power of Habit in paperbackUpdate: A paperback edition of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, was published on January 7, 2014. Although we may not be aware of it, we spend most of our lives doing routine things that...
Were the countless cases of "demonic possession" that have frightened people through history actually manifestations of a rare autoimmune disease with symptoms ranging from numbness, paranoia, and erratic behavior to hallucinations and catatonia? This was one of the...
My sister recently gifted me with a copy of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, published last year by Simon & Schuster. At 571 pages plus notes and index, it's a hefty volume, and Isaacson's plain and linear telling makes the book seem daunting at first...
A little while back, one of the DVDs arriving in our mail from Netflix was Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, the 2010 documentary which also aired on PBS's American Masters this past April. It occurred to me that, before viewing the disc, I should...
George Harrison, dead now almost eleven years, has remained relatively unstudied — compared with, say, fellow Beatle John Lennon — despite the richness and depth Harrison contributed to the Beatles' music, his significant post-Beatles work, and his generally...
Unfamiliar Fishes is the product a very fortunate convergence. Author Sarah Vowell has a delicious appreciation for the peculiar coincidences and ironies produced when cultures clash and combine into the slaw of American history — and Hawaii, our 50th state, is a...
Have you ever found yourself in a meeting, attempting to communicate what you know to be a sound and worthy idea, and yet every point you make is blunted and deflected by your collaborators? Perhaps there is some friction with their corporate culture, or a difference...
$1.81: The price of gas when Obama took office.In the past few days, I have seen this meme spreading on Facebook — and back in September, Michele Bachmann was saying, "The day that President Obama took office, gasoline was $1.79 a gallon." Many Facebook...
On my living room bookshelf, next to a few other books about the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, was an autobiography from 2004 I had bought some time ago, but not yet read. Chronicles: Volume One is a hardback of moderate size, containing 293 rough, deckle edge pages...
Preparing to visit Hawaii for the first time a decade ago, I read Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii, a collection of the Sacramento Union writer's dispatches in 1866 from what were then known as the Sandwich Islands. Twain's letters are an enthralling portrait of...
Dry Bones, the video above by Dan DiFelice, is something that showed up in my Vimeo inbox the other day and caught my eye. It does not use the Dry Bones song.However, both this short film and the Dry Bones song share the same inspiration: the Old Testament's Book of...
The chipmunk noise in this video was recorded on our front doorstep a couple of years ago, but we have the same situation in the backyard today. After weeks of air conditioned cabin fever during the Heat Wave of 2011, the windows are finally open here at the...
We were talking gardening with our neighbor Katie last month when she mentioned that her daughter, Mary, has an interest in Racine history and has been researching our neighborhood's past online. I handed Katie my business card and told her I would be very interested...
Thirty years ago today, Lady Diana married Prince Charles in an extravagant wedding ceremony that was broadcast around the world. I had just turned 21, and was living back at my mom's house in Kenosha after a short career in door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales and a...
Above is a YouTube video of Jackson Browne performing "The Barricades of Heaven" at the Glastonbury Festival in southwest England in June of 2010. The song — originally released on Browne's 1996 album Looking East — has been my constant earworm for several days...
Pictured here is the original idea — purple Liatris spicata spikes paired against orange Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) blossoms in one of our backyard flower beds. Both attract butterflies, both are easy-to-grow perennials, and both have similar tight flower...
The Green Bay Packers' unique history, hometown, and ownership have been in the spotlight the past few weeks, and last night MSNBC's Rachel Maddow closed her show with an admiring look (video clip above) at the NFL's only remaining old-school team town, and the...
Here's our YouTube video of the Blizzard of 2011 as we experienced it here in Racine, Wisconsin. 23.5 inches of snow fell here from Tuesday evening until Wednesday morning (February 1st and 2nd), the greatest snowfall anywhere from this storm. If we sound dead tired,...
Okay, I just saw this on the WGN News and it's pretty freaky. It's a very short segment associated with Charlie Chaplin's 1928 silent film The Circus in which a peculiar old woman is caught on film — apparently talking on a cell phone as she walks by. The sequence was...
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey recemtly, and during the hour, Oprah showed brief clips of the Harvard Commencement speech Ms. Rowling gave on June 5, 2008. Those excerpts were intriguing enough to make me want to hear the whole...
When news broke last weekend that President Barack Obama would be holding a town hall meeting here in Racine on June 30, the area media struggled to understand its purpose. On a national level, there is currently no sharper political analyst than MSNBC's Rachel...
Above is the island of Lanai in Hawaii, seen from Maui. Billionaire David H. Murdock owns 98 percent of it. He also owns Dole Food Company, real estate development company Castle & Cooke, and hundreds of thousands of acres of land in 94 countries around the world....
Here's something we watched while my blog was getting redesigned. It's the Alton Brown diet plan — the January 4 episode of Good Eats, titled "Live and Let Diet." We had noticed, going back to a recent season of Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt, that the guy had...
(Photo courtesy of The Staffordshire Hoard website.) When the school year started a few weeks ago, I began hearing a strange beeping sound in the late afternoon. After a couple of days, I finally realized it was coming from some guy over at the school. He has been...
Since we were near Sauk City, Wisconsin the Saturday before last, I thought it might be fun to look for the original Culver's Frozen Custard & ButterBurgers Restaurant opened by George Culver and his family in 1984.It wasn't difficult to find the site (it's at 716...
In late June and early July of 2003, we vacationed in the South Carolina Lowcountry, staying in Beaufort and visiting Charleston, as well as Savannah, Georgia. One of the meals we ate on the trip and have made many times since is a...
Neil Young: Heart of Gold is not Jonathan Demme's first concert documentary. He made the Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Swimming to Cambodia, which captured a monologue by Spalding Gray, in 1987. As in those two previous films, Demme again imposes a...
Pictured above is our neighbor's fence at the edge of our backyard. It's six feet tall. When we bought our house, there were old and gnarly shrubs hiding the fence — a mundane and invasive honeysuckle, a feeble forsythia, a wild weigela. While the weigela did...
For my last birthday, our wonderful friend Tracey gave me an engrossing book called Weird Wisconsin which catalogs all sorts of legends, ghost stories, local loonies, roadside oddities, peculiar collections, large fiberglass objects, and unusually positioned...
I was catching up my backlog of Internet reading and writing on this morning of the Academy Awards when a message from a Twitter followee caught my attention: I just don't understand all the Oscars coverage. It's quite pathetic. For some reason, I was instantly...
With New Orleans Mardi Gras coming up, I thought I would post a few New Orleans song suggestions for your listening and partying enhancement. Here, in no particular order, is a treasury of New Orleans and Louisiana music gems. Some are Mardi Gras music classics,...
[Monarch]Above is a catchy little production that's been making the viral rounds for a couple of weeks. Titled "If I Made a Commercial for Trader Joe's," it is described on YouTube by carlsfinefilms as an "Unauthorized commercial for Trader Joe's shot on my Palm Treo...
We have recently endured an insufferable procession of godawful movies. They show up here roughly a year after being added to our Netflix queue, so it's sometimes hard to remember who to blame for muck like Never Been Thawed or Love Actually or Dreamland — or The...
I f you ask, many people will tell you that you cannot find Indian food in Racine, Wisconsin. The one Indian restaurant we did have closed a while ago, and it was not spectacular to begin with. This is too bad. Amy is intoxicated by Indian spices. We have made many...
The Great Recession and its effect on our household budget have started producing some bizarre yearnings in me — especially when combined with the influence of our TV set. This began with a video that arrived here from Netflix. I don't know how it got added to our...
Rick Sanchez has that special something. It's more complicated than simply being someone people love to hate. There is a certain rare balance of unimaginable awfulness and underlying vulnerability that makes some of the world's biggest egos simply irresistible....
I have been a Warren Zevon fan since "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and "Werewolves of London" first hit my radio in 1978, and I even had the honor of being mistaken for him at one of Jackson Browne's Summerfest appearances around that...
Well, this is right in my wheelhouse! I watch a lot of chef shows and cooking TV, and I love strange Internet finds. There is a YouTube playlist out there intended to hold my food and cooking favorites, but there are only two videos on it so far. I never imagined...
Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field...
Here is the gumbo recipe from Alton Brown: Shrimp Gumbo.This is yet another example of why I think Good Eats is one of the best shows in the history of television: Not only does Alton Brown give us an entertaining half hour of viewing, but we also get some real life,...
6:50 a.m. — It's ten minutes before seven on the granddaddy of American holidays, and I'm not going to be sleeping anymore, but it's still ten and a half hours before kickoff, so why not put my nervous energy into something cliché — like, say, live-blogging Super Bowl...
Florence, Italy — Italian gold jewelry, including gold chains, bracelets, gold earrings, necklaces, and rings, is displayed for sale by one of the many jewelers' shops on the Ponte Vecchio, a famous hot spot for merchants...
Wilton, Wisconsin — Ghost sign advertising Gold Medal Flour on the side of Gina's Pies Are Square, a bakery and sandwich café at 400 Main St. featuring homemade pies. Many of the customers at Gina's are cyclists riding...
Memphis, Tennessee — Pictured above is the Shure 55 microphone said to have been used by Elvis Presley, and beyond it, the control room window at Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Service (now known as Sun Studio), the...