Just links today… hmmm, where to start?

Well, it is, as you know, Halloween weekend, which, judging by the elevated hype and hysteria, has been promoted to national holiday status. If that’s the case, you might as well have some good Halloween music to go along with it. And a candy corn flag.

Somehow it seems fitting [...]

You know what The West Wing needs? Besides a kick in the pants? A Reality-Track. Like a laugh track, that ubiquitous background gurgle of the sitcoms. But instead of coming in at the punch lines, it would appear at those perfect moments when the show mutilates reality like a street mime playing Hamlet.

When those moments [...]

It’s a little hard to take the electoral process seriously with people like Puff Daddy reminding me to “Vote or Die.”

There he is on television, along with a gaggle of celebrity friends, urging me to vote. This is done mostly through t-shirts bearing the threatening slogan, but also through hip-hop music, which we all know [...]

From the end of my street I can see all the skyscrapers of Minneapolis. If that isn’t evidence of what a big small city Minneapolis is, nothing ever will be. There are about four or five real skyscrapers in that city across the river. The whole mass of big, shiny glass buildings occupies only a [...]

Oh how I wish Garrison Keillor were my puppy. I would feed him and take him for walks and build him a doghouse of scrap wood and bent nails. In return, he would love me and smile at me in that expressionless way of his. On Saturdays he would tell me jokes and sing old [...]

I.F.S has passed. He was about six months old.

What his life lacked in length, it made up for in fullness. Toward the end he had a large tank with a water filter. He had a neon lump of molded plastic in the shape of some kind of coral formation. He was, by all accounts, a [...]

When you scavenge for newspapers in the cafeteria at work, you’re not bound to get the best pickings. There’s always an abundance of sports sections lying around, but though I’ve tried, I just can’t get into reading them. The only games I might care about are the ones I watched on TV the night before [...]

I had a busy day at work today. For me, that looks a lot different than you might expect. For a firefighter, a busy day involves riding in the truck, running into burning buildings, sliding down the pole (do they still do that?), etc. For my mom, who designs closets, a busy day means driving [...]

Friday night I went with my girlfriend and her family to see a choral group called Chanticleer. It’s about a dozen men, most young, one with a lengthy handlebar moustache, who sing everything from medieval church music to Miles Davis. Also a song by a Korean composer that sounded like a sped up recording of [...]

There are so many things in an old house that don’t come with instructions. Or if they do, those instructions were lost long ago. The instructions to some of the things in my house were lost before I was born.

Maybe even before my parents were born.

But yesterday when I went down to the basement to [...]