19 Minutes Past the Hour

Et tu, Charlie...

2008-05-11T10:18:00.003-05:00

Charlie, a.k.a. "Squeaky McWhimper" is seven-and-a-half hours old, and somewhat less shiny than he was in the previous picture, but still pretty cute:

Charlie, Take 1

2008-05-11T03:27:00.002-05:00

No one looks great right after they're just born. But Charlie gave it a pretty good shot:

Heeere's...

2008-05-11T03:09:00.001-05:00

Charlie Joel Teich, born 2:41 a.m., Sunday, May 11, 2008.

7 lbs., 10 1/2 oz., 19 1/2 inches.

Mom & Charlie doing great!

2:00

2008-05-11T02:04:00.002-05:00

Holding pattern here on Labor & Delivery. Gretchen got a little midnight epidural, and she's squeezing in a little rest before it's officially showtime. I've been alternating between a coffee that's gone cold and a Coke that's gone warm and a packet of Cool Ranch Doritos, which seem completely inappropriate while the nurse is in the room checking vital signs. I also managed to pull off a shower, partly because I felt disgusting, and partly because I didn't necessarily need Baby Boy Teich's first impression of his dad to be, Geez, doesn't this guy bathe? And what's up with the hat-head?

But before things get too crazy, we took a hospital self-portrait:

The 11:30 CT Update

2008-05-10T23:32:00.001-05:00

We're watching "Bowfinger." K.I.T. = "Keep it together." A good lesson for all of us, brought to you by Eddie Murphy.

And now, a message from Dairy Queen

2008-05-10T21:57:00.002-05:00

While we have a few spare moments (see previous post), a quick word about the miraculous work performed by the simple banana milk shake:

June 9th, 2004: My wife and I head out to Dairy Queen on Flagstaff's west side, as she is - at 35 weeks pregnant, craving a banana shake. We come home and her water breaks. Sylvi is born June 10th.

May 9, 2008: We've held out on Dairy Queen until Gretchen's 38th week, but finally decide it's worth trying to introduce a control group to the experiment. This time, it takes about 22 hours for Gretchen's water to break. The delay, we believe (not really), was linked to Milwaukee's lower elevation (630 feet) than Flagstaff's (7000 feet).

The labor of blogging

2008-05-10T21:42:00.003-05:00

19 Minutes is live from Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, this evening, as my wife is ready to, um, give birth.

It's an amazing and awe-inspiring time for both of us - though things are pretty slow at this moment, so mostly I'm amazed that there is wi-fi on the Labor & Delivery floor.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Notes from Red Sox Nation, Wauwatosa bureau

2008-05-03T16:13:00.002-05:00

I'm writing. Not surprising, because that's how a blog post is brought into the world. But I'm writing at a coffee shop (also not surprising) in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. The place is full; probably sixty-five or seventy people are drinking coffee and using yellow highlighters or texting whoever they text from a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon.

There are three of us in the place with baseball caps - at least baseball caps that represent a baseball team. They're all Red Sox caps, which strikes me as a little odd, since we're all of a ten-minute drive from Miller Park, which drew more than three million fans last year to watch the Brewers.

But more than casting doubt on the depth of Brewers fandom in suburban Milwaukee, it causes me concern that my Red Sox cap has become iconic, more than a Red Sox beacon in the Central Time Zone, like a Michael Jordan shirt in a remote Guatemalan village, or a Brett Favre jersey in Warsaw. Maybe the other people in the Tosa Alterra saw Tony Conigliaro play DH at Fenway Park in his short-lived comeback attempt in 1975. Maybe they pulled half their hair out every time Bob Stanley came into a game in the mid '80s. Maybe they know that before there was a Jacoby Ellsbury, there was a Steve Ellsworth, and before that, a Dick Ellsworth. But alas, I'm guessing not.

On the other hand, I've purchased two Red Sox caps in the past five years, and each time, the Red Sox won a World Series. I believe there's a direct cause-and-effect relationship there, but in case I'm not the factor at work, I urge everyone else to stop by their closest hat shop.

Admit it. You were wondering why I hadn't posted.

2008-04-30T14:48:00.003-05:00

It's been a good six months since the last activity on the 19 Minutes front. I had a variety of stories I'd concocted as to why we've been offline for so long.

But the truth is, I'd been stunned. Stunned... to read the fine print on this flyer, advertising today's now-imminent 31-cent scoop day at Baskin-Robbins, which informs me:

Limit ten scoops per person, per purchase. Really? My wife, daughter, and I are limited to only 30 scoops between us? Unless of course, we come back to the counter and make another purchase.

So we're back at work, here at the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters. After we take a Lactaid, anyway, and dig into our first ten scoops.

Let the good tidings begin, whatever they are

2007-11-24T09:14:00.000-06:00

The building managers in the mall above 19 Minutes World Media Heaquarters put up the garland and Christmas lights on November 2nd this year.

It snowed, a beautiful, light, fluffy cotton candy snow, across the upper Midwest, Wednesday morning and afternoon.

My wife and I found ourselves at the Mall of America yesterday, Black Friday. We have Chanukah and Christmas presents in place.

Yet, I was having a hard time reconciling all of this with the notion that the holiday season is beginning.

I'm currently at the Caribou Coffee in Eagan, Minnesota. Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" is playing on the sound system here. That is, perhaps, the worst holiday song ever written.

Now it feels like the holiday season.

Bill of Writes

2007-11-05T22:26:00.001-06:00

Right. I’m still out here, even though this space has been dark for some time. Much of my spare time has been consumed with writing. And as an author I know pointed out to me, “You can either write about writing, or you can just write.”

I’m just writing.

But there will be more.

Harumph.

2007-09-13T15:54:00.000-05:00

It's taken us three days, but we've finally been able to figure out what was causing all the strange characters to show up in our most recent blog post. Which is no longer our most recent blog post, since I've written this.

Don't Sit So Close to Me (2007 remix)

2007-09-06T18:50:00.000-05:00

A couple of things in the 19 Minutes Universe today, neither of which adds up to anything extremely useful, but I thought they were interesting:

The bus I take to 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters is also used to get Milwaukee high school students to and from school. As I may have noted in this space previously (but which I can’t seem to locate at this point), I apparently give off some kind of Don’t Sit Next to Me Under Any Circumstances vibe, so I don’t really get much insight into these students’ lives.

But we reached the point on the trip today when there were no other seats available. Really, every single seat, including the one next to the guy with the two large garbage bags (full of, um, I’m not sure) on the bus filled up before the one next to me, despite my recent application of anti-perspirant. And so one of the students braved whatever strange aura I give off, and sat down next to me to go about her morning ritual of listening to her iPod at brain-frying levels.

And that would be about it, except that I noticed the text book on her lap. A history book, called “The American Pageant.” The same history book I used in high school, twenty-one years ago. Which isn’t all that remarkable, I suppose, considering the book is in its 13th edition. What strikes me as remarkable is the fact that I remember the name of my high school history textbook.

Onward.

On another note, I’d like to point out that I was WAY ahead of the curve on the whole iced coffee phenomenon.

As an iced coffee fiend, I’m enjoying the ubiquitousness of frostly caffeinated beverages. As far as I’m concerned, McDonald’s iced coffee is a wonderful invention. They could start serving the stuff at Linens-n-Things, or One Hour Martinizing, or Radio Shack, and the world would be an even better place.

That’s why I was dismayed when I stopped in at a local, Milwaukee coffee purveyor Wednesday, only to find out that “iced coffee went out of season on Tuesday.” Wednesday’s high temperature in Milwaukee: 91 degrees. Sounds like hot chocolate weather to me.

But maybe I'm ahead of the curve there, too.

Friday afternoon band names

2007-08-10T16:24:00.000-05:00

First off, there's relatively new material on our spin-off blog. If you're too lazy on a Friday afternoon to go looking down the right column for the link, here it is.

Monday's show is recorded, and the climate control system here in the basement of the Shops of Grand Avenue is set comfortably on the "lukewarm sauna" setting, so our brains at 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters are coming up with nothing more complicated than hypothetical band names. On today's chart:

Bulbous Coffee Can
Croutons of Various Sizes
Soggy Cake Cone (feat. Dratsuc Nezorf)
My Wife's Birthday

Actually, that last one is more the current state of affairs than a good band name. So it goes.

Mainely lobster

2007-08-08T21:17:00.000-05:00

Not long ago in this space, shortly after returning from a brief road trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we published our first-ever dining guide, helping our millions of hypothetical (and 11 actual) readers wondering where to get the finest Cornish pasties in the greater Ironwood, Michigan metroplex.

We're just back from what's known as Midcoast Maine, where we managed to consume a year's worth of lobster in the span of a week. We thought, then, that we'd provide a similar public service in regard to eating lobster. (By "we", of course, I mean "I". One lobster roll is more than enough to meet my wife's lobster needs for the year.)

I had lobster at a variety of co-ops, roadside stands, and restaurants, and came to the following conclusion:

You just can't go wrong with lobster in Maine. I mean, you probably can, but you'd have to try pretty hard. Like, you'd need to eat at Red Lobster or something.

While we're at it, another conclusion: Everything is better with drawn butter. Except, maybe, for beef jerky.

A stroke of Nalgenius

2007-07-26T16:45:00.001-05:00

It seems trite to say that this is one of those "only in the Midwest" stories, but it does seem unlikely that this would happen in, for example, Newark. Or Long Beach. Bear with me.

It's a month ago. We're at Target, the one near Miller Park in West Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Of the three Milwaukee-area Targets we see fit to patronize, the West Milwaukee Target is the only one with a layout I can wrap my brain around. There's another Target, about four miles away whose layout is exactly the opposite of the one in West Milwaukee. This is a problem for me, because my wife is liable to send me out to Target to buy, say Sensodyne-brand toothpaste, because my autopilot will send me to the Sensodyne location imprinted in my brain, and I will return home with an acetylene torch, which might void the warranty on her electric toothbrush. So I go to the one in West Milwaukee.

None of this is especially relevant to the story that follows, but now you have some insight into my shopping psyche.

As I was saying, it's a month ago. We're at Target, the one near Miller Park in West Milwaukee. We're looking for something that comes in at a cross between a messenger bag, a backpack, and a purse, for Gretchen (to carry around her acetylene torch). Our three-year-old, apparently confident that she's mastered her tricycle, which she has owned for a month and can almost pedal up a 2% incline, decides to check out the bicycles in the next section over. "Checking out," in this case, means touching each one to see which is most likely to fall over on her so that she can injure herself, and we can sue Target for negligence and get an out-of-court settlement of 300,000 tubes of Sensodyne toothpaste. Somehow, Sylvi manages to escape the section with out breaking any bikes or bones. My wife survives another unsuccesful search for the perfect bag (enabling us to adopt bag shopping as a hobby for the indefinite future), and we go on with our day.

Halfway home, we realize Sylvi's water bottle is not in the car. Not, under ordinary circumstances, an especially big deal - only we're rapidly approaching nap time, which means that she's adopted the timbre of voice known as the International Symbol for Three-Year-Old Meltdown, namely a whine on par with a Boeing 717, or possibly a tornado siren. Plus, it's a real, live three-year-old-sized Nalgene bottle, which is de rigeur for hip three-year-olds at the zoo. So I employed the lose-lose option, which was to drop Gretchen and Sylvi off at home in a futile attempt to distract her from the trauma of Water Bottle Loss long enough to get her to nap, and I went back to Target in a futile attempt to locate the water bottle - an effort that involved an overly long conversation with the disinterested person manning the lost-and-found and a 25-minute wander through every aisle I remembered walking through earlier.

A month passes by. Sylvi has gotten over the trauma, but also has lost her status as Best-Appointed Toddler at the zoo. Still, she's hydrated, so it's all good. Gretchen has found a bag that can accommodate a driver's license, chapstick, a couple of diapers, and five years' worth of receipts, or the new Harry Potter book ("Harry Potter and the Sensodyne Brand Toothpaste") if you take everything else out of it. Now, we're at Target looking for a bag for me. My laptop, anyway.

Not only do we come up with a laptop case, but as we traverse the luggage aisle, Sylvi notes, casually - as though she had just been waiting for a trip back to the luggage aisle for the last month in order to point this out - "Oh, there's my water bottle."

Not only had the water bottle not been thrown out, taken by someone, or sent to lost-and-found, it hadn't been moved. It was still half-full of water.

And after we got home from Target today, Sylvi took a nap.

Spinning off again into Outer Blogospace

2007-07-21T22:30:00.000-05:00

Not that our fourteen loyal readers were necessarily complaining about the littany of Crohn's-related posts, but on the off-chance any of you were getting tired of references to my surgical scar and my pants size, we've decided to add a new 19 Minutes spin-off to the blogosphere. There will, naturally, be some cross-posting, because a) I'm not that creative, and b) really, you can't read too many references to my scar.

But it seemed to make sense to put some of that material in a place where people with some interest in health-related material might find it. So Crohn's stuff moves here, and we now return to writing about infomercials, comically bad drivers, and belly button lint.

Speaking of which, there's much less room in my navel these days for lint, on account of my scar.

The weighty responsibilities of pants

2007-07-17T21:51:00.000-05:00

One of the odd side effects of Crohn's disease is the vague sense of emasculation you get. If you're a guy, anyway. And not literally. But my crack medical team has me taking calcium supplements, which Walgreen's packages in a very manly pink-and-purple box. If the color scheme wasn't enough, they're called, helpfully, "Calcium for Women." It's cool, though. They taste pretty good. Better than the fish oil capsules, anyway.

My real preoccupation, though, is a strange level of concern with my pants size. Seriously. Compare the number of references to my pants in this feature before April (9) to references since the surgery (4). Okay, not a good example. But really, the fear of dropping a pant size or two is always out there, since it represents losing weight, which in turn represents my intestines, again, trying to kill me. A heavy thought to lay on Dockers, to be sure.

But pants have again been playing on my mind recently. I wore blue jeans today for the first time in more than three months. Not something that should be commemorated with a bank holiday, but it's also not something I ever expected I'd say in my life. Frankly, three hours without wearing jeans used to be a long time. One of the key reasons I've spent a career in public radio is the general acceptance of blue jeans as business attire.

But the abdominal surgery kept me from wearing a belt for a month, and I feel about as comfortable wearing jeans with no belt as I do wearing a monocle, or a New York Yankees cap. And the thing was, after a month, I decided I liked the three pairs of pants in the rotation, none of which required a belt. The beige convertible pants, the beige sort-of-but-not-really-khakis, and the olive linen pants eliminated all the excess angst of the dressing process (which, to be fair, was not much to begin with).

Two months in, I still hadn't worn a belt. But I started getting weary of finding new ways to wear a pedometer, a key card, and a cell phone with no belt, so I gave in. And finally, after three months of wearing the same three pairs of pants at work (with thanks to the patience of my co-workers), I added the jeans to the rotation this morning.

Maybe I'll wash the other three pairs now.

And on Bastille Day, too

2007-07-15T22:30:00.000-05:00

We're pretty sure this is a fever dream, but the "World Cup of American Football" appears to have been played over the weekend, resulting in a football headline of the variety that we're also pretty sure has never before been written:

Korea shocks France

Because you were wondering, we'll note that Korea's big victory was a 3-0 win earned with a field goal (by noted Korean kicker Choi Kyung Ho, no less) with 2:09 remaining in the game, played at Kawasaki Stadium in, um, Kawasaki? Kanagawa? Okay, here's a map:

It will surprise no one that the American team won the World Cup of American Football. It will, perhaps, surprise a few people to note that the previous two championships were won by Japan.

That's really all we have to say about the World Cup of American Football, except that the Swedish team has the following word prominently displayed on its website. We have no idea what it means, but it is worth reproducing:

Här!

Notes from the haystack

2007-07-09T21:42:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of things that make Crohn's Disease not much fun. Right off the bat, there's the constant desire to spell it "Chron's." Then, there's the onion ring prohibition. And the constant uncertainty over pants size. Plus, you have your minor issues, like pain, fatigue, and digestive distress.

Mostly, though, it's the feeling that the medical world is constantly doing something to you. If they're not taking large amounts of intestine out of you, they're putting probes into you, each one in a place less pleasant than the last. (We're thinking of spinning off a book: "From Colonoscopy to Cystoscopy: 50 Internal Organs to See Before You Die.")

Not a few times during the past eight months, I've gone through a test and felt, with some relief, that they couldn't dream up anything worse... only to find out a day later that not only *could* they dream up something worse, but it's something that strains the boundaries of worse.

But since my surgery in April, the total number of items poking and prodding me has been kept, blissfully, to a minimum. The exception has been one little needle every month. One lonely cc of cyanacobalamin, a.k.a. Vitamin B12. B12 deficiency is a pretty common issue in Chron -- er, Crohn's, and I'd gotten used to getting the shot once a month. I'd also gotten used to my doctors and nurses pointing out that one of these days, I ought to learn to give myself the shots. I thought it was a nice sentiment, and one I looked forward to hearing every thirty days for the next, oh, ten or twenty years.

But at my appointment last month, Sarah, my nurse practitioner, sounded a little incredulous that I'd want to come in every month for the rest of my life, just to get jabbed with a 1 cc syringe. And so I thought, Hey, it couldn't be that painful to give myself a shot, right? I mean, I enjoy removing splinters with a sewing needle, and my favorite part of eating pizza is scalding the roof of my mouth. This is just like that, only more sanitary, right? Right? Millions of diabetics give themselves shots every day. Wilford Brimley gives himself shots. It couldn't be that rough.

So I got the prescription for the syringes. I got the prescription for the B12 (which, honest to God, showed up with a label saying it was for someone named "Myrtle"). I got a lesson from one of the nurses at the hospital, who sent me home with some syringes the size of javelins to practice. She suggested I practice on an orange, but I thought they looked like they'd go right through it, so I practiced on the tires of my neighbor's pickup. Mostly, I practiced getting nervous. And I got pretty good at that.

And so I stalled. I stalled long enough that I went from thinking I could use the B12 to really needing it. I stalled long enough that my mother-in-law, a nurse, came to visit, and I seriously considered just having her give me the damn shot. But she wasn't planning on visiting every month for the indefinite future, and so I settled for having her supervise.

I washed my hands. I cleaned the top of the vial. I cleaned off my skin. I drew 1 cc of cyanacobalamin into the syringe. It's just like burning the roof of my mouth with a pizza, right? Except that it's a very sharp object that I'm about to jab into my gut. Plus, no pepperoni.

The needle was about a half-inch long and it went into the wad of skin almost without effort. And after my hands stopped shaking, I actually pushed the plunger down and gave myself the B12. It was, in all, an enjoyable experience, the First Shot of the Rest of My Life. And I look forward to the energy it'll give me. I might need it, if my neighbor figures out what happened to his tires.

Because you were hoping for more band names

2007-06-30T21:05:00.000-05:00

Two band names, courtesy of a Saturday afternoon at the Starbucks in Wauwatosa Village, Wisconsin:

The Smoking Nurses
Billy Idol Blowing His Nose

I should at least explain the second one. Amazingly enough for 2007, there was, at this particular Starbucks, a teenager doing his best impression of Billy Idol, circa 1986 - spiky blond hair (not quite bleached enough), black t-shirt, black pants, boots, the big cuff bracelet thing going on. The only thing that blew the look was the cold he had going on, which necessitated that he make constant trips to get more napkins so he could blow his nose.

Also, I'm not 100% sure whether Billy Idol had braces in 1986, but I don't remember seeing them in the video for "Rebel Yell."

I'll take that slaw, but hold the Mayo

2007-06-27T22:39:00.000-05:00

I've lived in plenty of places in the past thirty-eight years. An apartment above Willson's General Store in Lisbon, Iowa. A former Catholic School building (from the Church of the Immaculate Conception, which -- given my dating ineptitude in those days -- was appropriate) in Decorah, Iowa. A very large house divided into much smaller apartments in Postdam, New York.

But to my knowledge, all of the twenty or so places I've called home are still standing. Until, apparently, soon. Word has reached 19 Minutes International Media Headquarters of the impending demise of the College Apartments in downtown Rochester, Minnesota.

Frankly, I'm not sure how to take this news. The College Apartments were apparently the swankiest apartments in town when they were built. In 1914. By the time they housed my white naugahyde couch and Toshiba T-1200 laptop, in 1994, they were, well, okay. Reasonably priced. In decent shape. They had high ceilings and big rooms. They also had no air conditioning and a cockroach problem. Bats occasionally rode the air currents around my ceiling fan, and my car was broken into outside (which was, to my knowledge carried out with a different kind of bat).

It was the first apartment I'd had that accommodated more than one friend at a time. In an inspired bit of smug self-satisfaction, it played host to an occasional gathering of radio and newspaper reporters to mock the 10:00 news on TV. Then, we started making more friends in television, gave up the "Mock the News" parties and moved the gatherings to Newt's Bar.

And it was a comfortable place to come home to after getting my wisdom teeth out at the Mayo Clinic. I remember very little about returning home that day, actually. But fortunately, a friend, fellow radio person, and fellow College Apartments dweller drove me home after the surgery and - after I had stopped giggling and snorting from the anesthesia - left me to the cockroaches and the bats. [It was coming down off the anesthesia, I believe, that I struck an important bargain with the roaches - they would never leave the friendly confines of the kitchen, and I would refrain from blasting them with aerosol air freshener.]

And yet, the College Apartments were never what you'd call homey. [Or "homie," for that matter. But then again, everything in Minnesota is just a little too Minnesotan to be called "homie."] They looked like sort of a tudor bungalow on steroids, a strangely placed apartment complex in the midst of Rochester's forty gazillion modern hospital buildings.

My friend Matt once noted that the ideal view of Rochester was in his rear-view mirror. And I shed few tears when I moved out of the College Apartments in 1996. But part of me can't help but feel like Snoopy when he found out the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm had been replaced by a six-story parking garage. Especially given that the Mayo Clinic, which owns the building, has no plans for the site. (So yeah, why not just knock it down?)

But there is some good news to report. Willson's General Store in Lisbon, Iowa, may be long departed, but the building appears to have been reborn as the Lisbon History and Culture Center, which - if the center's website is to be believed - will play host to the big Cabbage Weigh-off in August.

So who says you can never grow home again?

Twelve years

2007-06-27T18:39:00.000-05:00

Jodi Huisentruit went missing on her way to work as an anchorwoman in Mason City, Iowa twelve years ago today. We've blogged about this before (and also, improbably, talked about it on TV), but it's worth noting that she's still missing.

The Ironwood Dining Report

2007-06-24T22:23:00.000-05:00

I'm a firm believer in eating local specialties. As long as they don't involve sheep's intestines or cobra hearts, that is. On our annual trip to Maine, I try to squeeze in at least a year's worth of lobster and locally made ice cream into a week's vacation. And so last week, as my wife and daughter and I traveled to the Western Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I went scrounging for the local delicacy: Sloppy Joe on a Stick.

No, really, U.P. cuisine is all about pasties - basically, ground beef, potatoes, and sometimes other vegetables inside a pie crust pocket, which in turn is served in a little wax paper pocket, so you can throw it in your lunch bucket, if you happen to be a miner in the 1800s, or you can eat it while you're driving your pickup and talking on your cell phone, if you're a resident of Ironwood, Michigan.

My wife and I elected to eat our pasties at her grandmother's house, a technique I'd also recommend, as long as you call her in advance. [On a related note, if you do call her, she'll answer on an honest-to-God dial phone, which actually actually makes the following ringing noise: "Ring."] Our second night in Ironwood, we tried pasties from a different shop than we usually bought them, at which point, we became obsessed with comparing the variety of pasties available across town.

Because you will no doubt all be flocking to Ironwood, Michigan, immediately after you read this, I hereby present the Official 19 Minutes Guide to the Pasties of Ironwood, Michigan. None of them should completely frighten you off:

U.P. Pasty Express. If you're driving in from the west (which means you will have just reached the edge of the earth), the U.P. Pasty Express is the first pasty shop you will encounter on U.S. 2. It has a downtown outlet, too, improbably called "The Famous Pastry Kitchen," the extra 'r' apparently thrown in to confuse tourists. The Express outlet, which isn't any faster than the downtown outlet, is a storefront in a tiny strip mall. Like all the pasty shops we visited, the pasties are cheerfully baking away in a little oven behind the counter. The pasties here had the most distinctive crust of any that we had - a chewy bread crust seemingly from the sourdough family. The filling was less exciting - it would take a tough, Finnish miner to love the meat, potatoes and onions inside. Fortunately, there are a lot of descendants of tough, Finnish miners still left in the U.P., so the Pasty Express still has plenty of devotees. I am not one of them.

Joe's Pasty Shop. Joe's is the pasty shop you'd first encounter if you were driving in from the east (which means that you will have already been driving past the edge of the earth). Joe's has a drive-through window on U.S. 2, which is, tragically, closed on Sundays and Mondays. Fortunately, they, too, have a downtown outlet, and it's reportedly open seven days a week. Joe's traditional pasties - as opposed to the Cornish pasties, which also include rutabagas(!) - are consistently strong. They contain plenty of onions, too, which gives them a distinctive taste, but also makes them literally hard for me to stomach. The real highlight at Joe's is the concept of the breakfast pasty - which replaces the standard filling with eggs, ham, bacon, and cheese (and potatoes and a scattering of onions). My wife considered it a life-changing experience.

Rigoni's Bakery. Rigoni's was the wildcard on this trip to Ironwood. We had never even noticed it before, but it's across the street from a boat shop owned by relatives of my wife, and they pegged it as their favorite, so we gave it a try. It quickly became my favorite, as well. The beef was the highest quality of the three, and was a greater proportion of the filling than what we found in any of the other pasties. The crust was flaky and light, and the whole thing gave just the slightest hint that maybe we were eating something that doesn't quite qualify as health food. The only caveat is that they ran a little low on inventory towards the end of the day, so you'll probably want to make your Rigoni's run before 4:30 in the afternoon.

So there's your guide to the Pasty Shops of Ironwood, Michigan. Tune in next time as we try to locate the restaurants in Ironwood which offer cobra hearts.

Frights of passage

2007-06-14T22:49:00.000-05:00

Lots of excitement around the 19 Minutes home office recently, as our daughter turned three years old over the weekend. But the annual rolling over of her odometer itself wasn't the real excitement; rather, it was that this year also marked Sylvi's first real birthday party.

Sure, there had been party-like events before. She actually celebrated her first birthday with her friend Phoebe, who is nine days her junior. But that was less a party than it was an experiment to see what would happen if we put frosted cupcakes in front of little kids with only a handful of teeth. Not much, as it turned out. Sylvi enjoyed moving the frosting around with her finger, and Phoebe tasted a little before turning more to the Osmosis School of eating.

And last year, Sylvi had only been in the neighborhood for a few months by the time her birthday rolled around, the result being a friend-deprived birthday celebration in the dining room mostly remembered for its hippo-shaped cake.

But in the past twelve months, Sylvi has developed both a network of friends and a taste for frosted pastries, so we figured to have found the appropriate formula for a birthday party. The only issue was what the party would physically look like. It's been a while since I've been plugged into the birthday party scene, and turns out that there are a lot of new types of parties that have sprung up since my parents brought me and six of my friends to a George Washington University basketball game in 1979.

Here in southeastern Wisconsin for example, there are a variety of different "fun" facilities which discerning parents apparently choose in an effort to keep cake frosting out of their DVR machines. All of them, for some reason, seem to be in corrugated metal buildings, in industrial parks, in distant suburbs inhabited by people with pickup trucks larger than at least three of my past apartments. Sylvi has been invited to several of these, including one in a corrugated metal building with a pool (at which it took her 45 minutes to decide she wanted to get in, leaving her a good 15 minutes of swimming enjoyment, before cake, ice cream, and the 40-minute ride home), and one in the playroom of a corrugated metal building that also housed a kiddie spa where kids can get pampered to take their minds off the day-to-day stress of reading Dr. Seuss and eating American cheese. For these parties, parents are also required to invite every child their son or daughter has ever met, in the hopes that the combined eBay resale value of the presents will be enough to offset the cost of renting the unit of fun.

So for those reasons, plus the fact that my wife and I would prefer to be locked in a room with a Yanni CD on infinite repeat than hold a party in a corrugated metal unit of fun, we decided to aim for a more low-key party. This was fine with both the parents (for example, our friend Mary, I believe, was actually looking for us to set a low-key party precedent) and the kids - who rarely ask for corrugated metal in the context of fun.

So with "low-key" in mind, we divided up the responsibilities for the party. Sylvi would be in charge of turning three. My wife, Gretchen, would get to send the invitations, go grocery shopping, make the cake (a watermelon shaped/flavored cake), provide the other snacks (watermelon), mow the lawn, and otherwise get the backyard ready for partying, three-year-old-style. After a joint trip to Target to pick out party favors, I was left with one vital responsibility: buying balloons the morning of the party. I believed I had gotten off easy. I was incorrect.

Sunday morning at 10:00 had me en route to a dollar store about fifteen minutes from our house. I've always been of two minds on the dollar store concept - on one hand, I'm a little suspicious of what happened to the merchandise to cause it to land in such a store. On the other hand, I can get behind a place where I can calculate the total cost by counting the number of items in my basket. Regardless of my sentiments, I was informed balloons were available there, and so it was my Sunday morning destination.

It had been several years since I'd last encountered a dollar store, and as my helium professional inflated the ten balloons on my list, I took a few minutes to walk around the store to see what else might make a good addition to the, uh, party oeuvre. I was delighted to discover that not only can one buy helium balloons and knock-off frisbees for a dollar, but also copies of Bob Dole's memoir and something called an ovulation predictor. I resisted the urge (telling myself that neither quite fit with the watermelon theme) but left with plenty of great ideas for future (and highly inappropriate) party ideas.

I also left with ten Mylar helium balloons, which seemed like an appropriate number, until it dawned on me that a) there was a stiff breeze blowing through the parking lot of the Dollar Tree store in West Allis, Wisconsin; and b) I needed to somehow get all ten balloons into the hatchback of a Jetta wagon. It took a good fifteen minutes, but I managed to get all the balloons in the car at the same time, and also provided the good people of West Allis with an enjoyable new spectator sport.

But I made it home with plenty of time to spare and at long last, our backyard gleaming with the reflection of sunlight off of ten Mylar balloons, it was party time. And the party was both low-key and enjoyable, notwithstanding Sylvi's initial panic that her friends were there to abscond with all her toys, which resulted in a mad dash around the backyard in an attempt to hide all her things under her shirt. A quick re-briefing session later, she was outside and hugged each of her three guests as they arrived. The watermelon cake came out perfectly, and the kids all thought the actual watermelon was great, to the extent that we had to keep reminding them not to eat the rind. Also, "pin the tail on the donkey" was played, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, except for the fact that it was my idea.

The party favors were a hit, too... with the kids, anyway - Mary complained that flashlights, stickers, and M&Ms exceeded low-key limits, but my philosophy is that party favor bags can contain gold bouillon, as far as I'm concerned, as long as they don't include anything that could be considered a noisemaker.

So in all, the birthday party was a swell experience, and we're looking forward to planning next year's event, as soon as we can coat our house in corrugated metal.

A jolt from the remote

2007-06-08T21:02:00.000-05:00

It was a long day in the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, so we decided to wind down this evening with a little TV, now that we're probably safe from having to watch any more replays depicting the demise of our beloved Ottawa Senators in the Stanley Cup. People say that television in 2007 is awful, that most of it lacks the high-minded ideals of the classic era of TV, when innovative producers created shows like "All in the Family", "Sesame Street", and of course, "Three's Company" and "Charlie's Angels."

To those people, I would like to note that there is much to be learned from an evening's winding down in front of the television.

For example, from watching just a few minutes of the Fox Soccer Channel, I have learned that there is a group of leagues called the "USL," and it features some of the stupidest franchise names in the history of organized sports. The game FSC was televising this evening involved a team called "The Montreal Impact," which sounds more like a sociological phenomenon than a soccer franchise. "The Impact" is an even more ridiculous name than "The Montreal Machine," which was a short-lived team in the "World League of American Football" in the early '90s. I can report I was one of four people who purchased a Montreal Machine cap before the team disappeared.

The WLAF eventually became NFL Europe, which has inflicted team names such as the "Frankfurt Galaxy" and the "Scotland Claymores" on the world. These names, again, do not compare to names in the various leagues of the USL, which also include "The Central Florida Kraze", "The Vermont Voltage," and their sister team in the USL women's league, "The Vermont Lady Voltage."

But that's not all I've learned this evening. I've also discovered that the network operated by the National Basketball League shows highlights from the daily media availability at the NBA finals, giving fans yet another opportunity to learn for themselves that no one has ever said anything remotely interesting at a press conference, unless you count the occasional profanity-laced tirade.

But I didn't only learn about sports this evening. I also learned that people will apparently do anything to land a slot on a reality show, ranging from planning their weddings before a television audience to subjecting themselves to an intervention. Fortunately, as with the sports highlights, I did my best to learn these things without actually watching the networks involved.

...and their hit single, "Ozone Warning"

2007-06-05T22:15:00.000-05:00

Today's great potential band name, brought to you by the Milwaukee Air Quality Index:

The Fine Particulates

Milking the home improvement theme

2007-05-29T18:52:00.000-05:00

There's lots of dust flying at the 19 Minutes homestead these days. My wife and I live in a 1925 prairie bungalow, which is - according to the experts I've interviewed for this feature - architecture-speak for "small, old house." One of the selling points to the house, as we saw it a little more than a year ago, was that it was seemingly in pretty good shape.

And it is in pretty good shape. But as with all 82-year-old houses, there are some things that need work. Unfortunately, in the case of our house, it's often hard to find these things, because they're covered in eighteen layers of paint. (Sometimes, in fact, we find the parts are constructed solely of paint.) Apparently, the standard home improvement model employed by the last several home owners was from the Paint Over It-school - a school, I'll concede, I belonged to until recently.

(Actually, as a long-time apartment renter, I belonged to a related school - the Spackle Over It-school, or more frequently, the Plug Holes in the Wall with Toothpaste-school.)

As a result, my wife, who is definitely the Tom Silva of our marriage, spends much of her free time with the heat gun, peeling the eighteen layers of paint, and the power sander, dealing with the aftermath. Mostly, I stand by with the fire extinguisher, in case we accidentally set the house on fire, which has only happened once. Her latest project has been to restore the milk delivery door (or possibly, the ice delivery door) on the side of the house to its former working condition.

She had removed the door last week, stripped the paint, repaired, the wood, and repainted it. But over the holiday weekend, we added the power sander to her arsenal. This thrilled her so much, she re-sanded the door and repainted it. I entered the picture when it came time to remount the door in the frame, which meant I could finally demonstrate my home improvement expertise, namely knowing the word "shim." But after installing the hardware, placing it in the door frame, finding out that the door wouldn't close, and reinstalling the hardware, the milk/ice/book depository door is in working condition, probably for the first time in fifty years.

To celebrate, we're considering signing up for one of the area's actual milk delivery services. They, of course, provide customers with a delivery box for milk.

Scar & Buyer

2007-05-26T22:45:00.000-05:00

Here in southeastern Wisconsin, those of us with digital cable television not only get your major networks (CBS, NBC, CNN, ESPN), your major network's close relatives (ESPN 2, C-SPAN 3, BBC America, the Fox Soccer Channel), your minor networks (Fuel, Logo, American Life?), and your minor home shopping networks (the Product Information Network? The Celebrity Shopping Network?), but we also have the exciting opportunity to watch home listings, 24 hours a day. It's sort of like a shopping channel, only the products tend to run a few dollars more than "simulated gemstone" jewelry.

And yet, the network, operated by Shorewest, a local real estate company, is oddly mesmerizing. That's partly because it's entertaining to hear the same vaguely insipid phrases used repeatedly over the course of a half-hour ("There's a place for everything in the eat-in kitchen...", "An artifical fireplace flanked by bookcases creates a dramatic focal point...")

But invariably, we end up watching it whenever - as we did this weekend - we have out of town visitors staying with us. For a while, my wife and I thought it was just a channel-surfing quirk: it's an odd channel, and there are lots of pictures of the unique diversity of homes in the region. But it dawns on me that the real estate prices, as much as the architecture, are something of a tourist attraction in this part of the world. Houses here are not the cheapest in the country. What they are is normal; what most of us in Generation X grew up accustomed to. Smaller and/or cruddier houses are less expensive - like dilapidated houses in bad neighborhood. And larger and/or nicer houses are -- get this - more expensive. Nice houses on lakes, say.

It's not a radical concept, or at least it doesn't seem like it. But several of the places we've lived in the past have experimented with another model - they've decided that all houses should be expensive. Thus, Shorewest TV at 11:30 p.m. Maybe not as cool as the Calatrava, but unique nevertheless.

And finally this evening, we at 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters would like to apologize to anyone whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the picture of my surgical scar posted on this feature several days ago. I thought it was a fairly innocuous, yet accurate representation of the strange little line that now makes its way up my abdomen. My wife, however, points out that it makes my belly button look like a softball.

So tonight, we'll try again, but instead of doing my own stunts, we're going to turn things over to an actor's portrayal, starring Lyndon Johnson as Mitch Teich:

Overall, I'd say it's an Oscar-worthy performance, and all I can say is I wish I'd thought of holding a press conference to show off my scar.

Drivers' re-education

2007-05-24T19:42:00.000-05:00

It was an exciting evening yesterday in the garage of the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, as we got our driving privileges back after six weeks, in which the closest we'd come to driving was changing the CD (currently playing: "The Backyardigans - Groove to the Music"). They were never - technically - revoked, but we figured there are enough naturally bad drivers in the greater Milwaukee area that there didn't need to be a percocet-fueled, artificially bad driver on the roads, too. Not this one, anyway. But we're down to just trace amounts of the painkiller in our system, and so we elected not to take advantage of my wife, who has been the official 19 Minutes chauffeur for the past six weeks, for last night's drive across town.

We're a little ashamed to admit that it was a bit intimidating, partly because we're not yet used to the feel of driving in boxers and we were a tad worried that it might be, er, distracting. (I'm sorry, officer. No, I don't know how fast I was going. I was, uh, making an adjustment.) More to the point (so to speak), or, to be brief, everything - since the surgery - has seemed faster and louder. Or maybe we've felt slower and quieter. Probably both. Like we're listening to a Chipmunks single at 33 r.p.m. , and it takes a minute to realize that something's different.

[Note to young readers: that's a reference to records, which were the things that came before eight-track tapes, which were the things that came before cassettes, which were the things that came before CDs, which were the things that came before you started getting all your music for free from Dave, down the hall. Nowadays, your best hope for seeing records is to go to a 1950s-themed restaurant and look for circular wax things hanging from the ceiling. Or, check out a cabinet in the house I grew up in and look for a thin black object with a label reading, "'Convoy', by C.W. McCall". ]

And throw us onto an interstate, and everything seems really fast. More than a few times in the past six weeks, we've ridden along in the passenger seat and had to close our eyes for the onramp from Highway 41. We considered trying that yesterday, but the ramp was still metered at that hour, and we were even more concerned about that potential conversation with the arresting officer than the boxers one.

So we set out, with our eyes open and our boxers on, across southeastern Wisconsin. We've written about what's wrong with Milwaukee-area drivers in the past, namely that they're aspiring to be as bad as Chicago-area drivers, plus they're holding a bratwurst in one hand, a cigarette in the other, all the while dialing a cell phone and apparently trying read the serial number on the bumper of the car in front of them.

Fortunately for the sake of future driving adventures, but unfortunately for the purposes of this blog, nothing especially interesting transpired on the highways of southeast Wisconsin last night. We made it there and back with our car intact, and no need for new boxers when we got home.

Scarplace

2007-05-22T22:21:00.000-05:00

There are apparently two kinds of people in the world. Or, at least, two kinds of readers of this fine feature:

People who read the previous post and wanted to see pictures of the spiffy pants I've acquired. I'm not sure what bizarre turn of world events has occurred that would lead me to post a link to a picture of my pants, but here you go.
People who read the previous post and who were disappointed that the reference to "show[ing] off my scar" linked not to a picture of my scar, but to an article about the pop singer Anastacia, and her very own Crohn's-related scar. If you aren't one of those people who wanted to see the scar, you might want to avoid scrolling much further.

I'm still trying to figure out the whole scar business. Thirty-eight years is a long time to get used to your real estate looking a certain way. On the other hand, after five days in the hospital and a month at home, you figure there ought to be some kind of visual proof that I had more than a hangnail removed. And as one nurse pointed out (at 4:15 a.m., no less), it's probably better that I have a scar and no internal damage than no scar and a lot of internal damage.

But it's a doozy. My surgeon (who, you'll recall, described what came out of me as a "football-sized kielbasa"), thought it was ten inches long. Even allowing for a couple of turns, I measure it at more like eight or eight-and-a-half. Anyway, I am not the only member of the family who doesn't necessarily look forward to getting into a swimsuit this summer.

Still, it's going to stick around, and so I ought to get used to it. I have noticed, for example, that when you add the belly button, it looks, just vaguely, like the old flag of the Soviet Union. But in my case, I'm sickle no longer.

All right. Because you asked.

No shirt, no shoes, no mental energy

2007-05-21T16:33:00.000-05:00

My time away from the office has given me an opportunity to devote considerable mental energy to a variety of pursuits, such as the unfairness of forcing "The Price Is Right" contestants to guess the price of a collection of books.

But it's also forced me to reconsider my connection to the world of fashion. (Or, rather, "fashion.") That's mainly because for the moment, wearing a belt or heavy-duty elastic in close proximity to a nine-inch abdominal scar is only slightly less painful than holding a belt sander to the same place. So, I've made a few modifications to the wardrobe:

Boxers. It's a different feeling, to be sure.
Pants with a half-elastic waistband. But more significantly;
I have recently procured a pair of pants that have been labeled "stylish." This was purely an accident. My sense of style has been described as "schlep," ever since my 10th grade history teacher, Mr. Schultz, declared, "Mitch? You're a schlep." The new pair of pants feature both linen fabric and a drawstring. They were on sale. They - as noted - have been described as "fashionable," a label that will hold until I spill mustard on them.

So it's a different look. At least below the waist. As for the top, I'm thinking of looking for something different. Maybe I'll take a cue from the entertainment world and go for a little something that shows off my scar.

Land of 10,000 steps

2007-05-20T16:05:00.000-05:00

So I had a month away from work. I had envisioned this month as a period in which I'd spend a lot of time in bed at first, gradually increasing my activity level, so that by the time I was ready to return to work, I'd be comfortable having my wife drive me to work, and I'd be able to walk from the car into my office. Then, I could show off my scar.

As it happened, my "Days Spent Mainly In Bed" scoreboard never ticked higher than "1" - the day of my surgery. By the time I left the hospital, I'd worn a path around the North Tower of Froedtert Lutheran Memorial Hospital, which conveniently has a large square circuit path that leads through the cardiac unit and through some of the public areas of the hospital, a fact I had to keep reminding myself as I adjusted the bag attached to my catheter.

But the point is, from the time I made it home, I was already at the stage of my recovery in which I was ready to Increase My Activity Level. As anyone who has faced a potentially long recovery can tell you, it's important to have an environment that makes it easy, even pleasurable, to exercise. Fortunately, my neighborhood is just such a place - lots of pleasant, tree-lined sidewalks, blocks of moderate length, and - most importantly - a donut shop just a quarter-mile walk from my house.

Especially at first, a quarter-mile was the perfect distance -- just long enough that (after major surgery) I was pleasantly winded by the time I got there, and in need of a nice, donut-eating breather. And likewise, the walk back was just long enough to leave me pleasantly winded and in need of a comfortable couch by the time I got home. Plus, I could justify the donuts as long as I was getting in that half-mile roundtrip walk.

The walk also put me in better touch with my neighborhood and its people, whom I can now divide into three groups: People with kids whom my wife and daughter know from various playgroups and other activities; People with kids whom I recognize from the donut shop; and people without kids whom neither my wife nor I knows.

(The problem is, I'm usually unable to distinguish the first two groups from each other. Typically, I'll be sitting in the donut shop, and I'll see a woman - sometimes a man and a woman - with a couple of kids, and I'll recognize them, but have no earthly idea whether I've been introduced to them, or whether I recognize them just because I've recognized them before. They all recognize me, of course. I'm the weird guy staring at them in the donut shop as though I recognize them.)

But sooner or later, that situation was going to end, unless my employer allowed me to produce my radio show from the donut shop. So without the quarter mile trip to Cranky Al's to inspire me, I needed a new gauge for my recuperative progress. So I've employed the services of a $5.99 pedometer from Target.

The medical, or at least the pedometer, industry believes you should walk at least 10,000 steps a day to reap the benefits of walking as exercise. My trusty pedometer helped me close in on that goal in two key ways:

I've learned that my walk to the bus in the morning is about a half-mile, or around 3100 steps.
The pedometer was so sensitive that crossing my legs while sitting at my desk generally registered as a step, and I apparently cross and recross my legs roughly 1100 times every day.

You'll notice I've switched to the past-tense. This is because in a tragic turn of events this morning, my pedometer fell into my cup of coffee and has suddenly became not sensitive at all, even less sensitive than guys in beer commercials.

In a staggering bit of frugality, I've taken it apart and put it back together several times, and I am pleased to report it no longer is non-functional as a result of falling into my coffee. It is non-functional as a result of my taking it apart and putting it back together so many times.

So I will be forced to find another way to chart the progress of my recovery. And thankfully downtown Milwaukee affords several opportunities - Dunkin' Donuts outlets at 2700 and 3300 steps from my office.

A Sens-ational recuperation

2007-05-19T17:31:00.000-05:00

Well, plenty has happened since there was activity in this space. There was, of course, the matter of the "football-sized kielbasa" (as my surgeon put it) that was removed from my abdomen. (And yes, you know you've had abdominal surgery in Wisconsin when your surgeon uses a comparison that includes both football and sausages.) That large object was otherwise known as "half of my colon," or "what had been tormenting my digestion for the past twenty years or so."

You would think that having your plumbing rerouted after thirty-eight years would mean bizarre dietary restrictions for some time after the surgery. You'd be right, but only to the extent that bagels were good and cucumbers were bad. We went out for Chinese food the night I left the hospital. (In retrospect, that may have been pushing the envelope a bit.)

But before I recap the life-changing past six weeks or so in this space, we must discuss an event of more profound proportions.

I'm not sure how my life - or the lives of many of us -- evolved to the point that the actions of men with bats, balls, and gloves, or sticks, pucks, and helmets on a television screen can move me to tears. I mean, the whole time in the hospital, I received not one get-well card from the Ottawa Senators.

But for the last ten years, my mental health, between approximately September and June, has been inextricably linked to - let's face it - an obscure hockey team from a place most Americans couldn't find on a map, even if it was a map of Ottawa. More than once, I've worn my Senators jacket in public, only to have someone come up and say, "The Senators! That's pretty neat. It's so cool that Washington has a baseball team again."

For the seven years I lived in Arizona, I dutifully showed up in Phoenix whenever the Senators played the Coyotes. There were always about twenty Sens fans at those games, and whenever the Senators scored, our "Whooo-hooos!" resounded through the arena like the cheers of Harold Stassen supporters at the Republican National Convention.

So the Senators play hockey. They have stars named "Alfredsson" and "Redden" and "Spezza "and "lesser" known players named "Corvo" and "McAmmond" and "Preissing". The one player that casual hockey fans have probably heard of is Dany Heatley, and that's only because he was involved in a reckless crash in his sports car a few years ago that killed a teammate.
What I'm saying is, you've never heard of most of them. And truth be told, if I wasn't an overly zealous Senators fan, I wouldn't, either.

And yet, for some reason, for the past decade, whenever the Senators win a game, I'm one - maybe two - iotas happier for the next 24 hours. And for most of that time, the Senators have won far more times than they've lost. But in each of the seasons they've reached the playoffs - the last nine years in a row - their season has ended with a loss. And usually an agonizing, annoying, and, well, cruddy loss. They've never had the puck bounce off a live lobster in a luxury suite and into their own goal, but it's been close.

This afternoon, the Senators beat the Buffalo Sabres to advance to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time since the team joined the National Hockey League in 1992.

They may well end this season with a loss, too. But today's game kind of makes up for the missing get-well card.

Weight off my shoulders

2007-04-16T07:37:00.000-05:00

After major, heavy-duty abdominal surgery, you would think there would be more complicated, involved instructions for my recovery than, "No heavy lifting for six weeks." But that's basically it. They're kicking me out of the hospital around noon today, and I spend the next four weeks recovering at home.

Weird.

The Old Crohn Medicine Show

2007-04-11T06:19:00.000-05:00

To my loyal readers (the four of you know who you are):

We noted in this space some months ago that we're dealing with Crohn's Disease around the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters. We're about to engage the battle, along with the services of (I hope) a very talented surgeon. We leave for the hospital in about five minutes.

There will be a terrific story to tell. But we've gotta go through it to get through it.

More to come. I promise.

If only I could write music

2007-03-06T22:56:00.000-06:00

Another band name... I'm thinking this one would be made up of country balladeers:

Tex Deductable and his Cowboy Accountants

Readers' Indigestion

2007-03-02T12:41:00.000-06:00

If Readers' Digest ever started a vaguely tasteless anecdotes column, I'd have one for them. Maybe they'll send me $300:

So I'm sent on a mission. To Walgreen's. To buy, er, feminine products. It was a big deal early in marriage, as it is with all men, until they finally come to the following important realization:

Hey! Lighten up! The cashier doesn't think they're for you, you stupid idiot!

So as I say, I've done this before, and I always carry a cheat sheet, because God forbid I buy the products with the wrong set of accoutrements. (Yes, I am aware that the accoutrements matter. Forget I mentioned it.) So I'm at the Walgreen's, carefully studying my little scrap of paper and reconciling it against the labels on the 386,295 slightly different-yet-strangely similar-looking feminine hygiene products (flex-wings? dri-weave cover? menthol?) and I look over to my right, and there's another guy, on the same errand. He's wearing a baseball cap and carrying an instrument case which I believe holds a snaredrum. He looks over at me, laughs, and says: "Man, I got my wife's shit memorized!"

...and Mitchy T on handkerchief

2007-03-01T11:21:00.000-06:00

Is there a band out there called "Post-Nasal Drip"? There must be, but I have yet to locate it. Their first album could be called "Mucinex."

The shape of pizza to come

2007-02-26T20:47:00.000-06:00

I've looked back at the photos and reconsidered the shape of my proto-pizza. It is not Antarctica, as previously claimed. It is Australia. G'day, pizza fans.

There go Mitch's dump trucks

2007-02-26T16:59:00.000-06:00

I have a dream. Not nearly so profound a dream as Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, but a dream nevertheless. I will tell you about this dream as long as you promise not to laugh, the way Juan Epstein’s girlfriend did in an episode of “Welcome Back Kotter,” when he told her he always wanted to own a fleet of dump trucks, so that when one of the dump trucks went by, everyone would say, “There go Epstein’s dump trucks.” If you will promise not to laugh, I will promise not to mention the words “dump truck” again in this posting.

My dream is to own a pizza place. I have the perfect name picked out for this pizza place, but I will not tell you, because it is so perfect, you will feel compelled to steal it and open your own pizza place. It is not “Domino’s”. Suffice it to say that there will be a theme, and the name of each individual pizza will revolve around that general theme. The name is that good.

But that is not the point. The point is, I am a journalist, and therefore have little experience making pizzas. That has changed recently, thanks to our neighbor, Susan. Susan is an educator, and thus you would not imagine that she has pizza-making savvy. You would be wrong.

Shifting out of that strange narrative tone for a minute, Susan had me and my wife and daughter over for a pizza dinner recently, and I was stunned to find out she was making her own pizza. But she was, and it appeared not to be too challenging. Of course, my role in the pizza making was limited (spreading pepperoni on top of the cheese), while hers was a little more involved (making the dough, making the sauce, rolling out the dough, chopping up the ingredients, etc.), but it led me to believe my dream is within reach.

So, thus empowered, with Susan’s recipes for dough and sauce at hand, I recently set about making my own pizza. My wife and daughter scattered to the living room, while I set about creating a masterpiece. But first, I had to locate the appropriate CD to accompany pizza making. Settling for some reason on Bebel Gilberto, I returned to the kitchen, only to decide I needed older clothes for pizza making. (You’ve probably already gathered that some of my trouble is in setting appropriate pizza-making priorities.)

The sauce came together without too much trouble. It seemed to be a matter of, mainly, dumping stuff into a pot and stirring, which is the kind of culinary art I can get behind. The dough, on the other hand – a different story. There were all sorts of cautions to use water at the proper temperature, and to add flour periodically, to make sure the dough didn’t stick to the side of the bowl. My trouble revolved around our electric mixer; namely, that I had no idea whether I was using it correctly, or if I even correctly identified the “dough hook” attachment. I was never quite sure I wasn’t using a left-handed pasta inverter, or a feta cheese crumbler.

After coming to the conclusion that the wad in the mixing bowl bore a passing resemblance to dough, I followed the directions to let it rest for a half-hour. Of course, by this time, the sauce was long complete, so I entertained myself by deciding whether, as a pizza maker, it looked better to wear my baseball cap backwards. I decided it did.

Next up, cutting the dough into thirds and rolling each into a ball. This I did, though he balls looked more like movie-style blobs of slime. No matter, I figured, they’re just going to be flattened out, anyway. Then, they each got to rest for another ten minutes. I decided to speed up the process next time, I’d just add some Tylenol PM to the mixture.

Finally, the moment of truth. Rolling out the balls of dough. It turns out that the ball shape is pretty important, so that your finished pizza is in the shape of a circle, rather than what mine turned out to look like, which was Antarctica. I called my wife and daughter in from the living room, and we added our variety of toppings to our Antarctic pizzas, and waited for them to bake.

In the end, they were… not entirely unlike pizza. Pretty decent, actually. The crust was more doughy than you might want to eat in a restaurant, but the sauce was excellent, and none of us were hospitalized. I’m definitely on a pace to open my pizza place, inasmuch as my wife is insisting it wait until after our daughter graduates from college, or roughly 19 years from now.

We're still here

2007-02-23T06:24:00.000-06:00

Hello.

We've been neglecting this space in recent weeks, mainly because we're working on another, super-secret, writing project that we'll probably start blogging about at some point, but not at 6:25 on a Friday morning. But the truth of the matter is, as far as that project goes, we are officially On A Roll, and are worried that the writing Karma gods only allow us to be on one roll at a time, lest we get salmonella poisoning.

We will return to this space again soon. Perhaps later today. The nice thing about that sentence is it is appropriate, no matter what day you're reading it.

A tsimmering issue

2007-02-07T07:50:00.000-06:00

We have a pretty busy kitchen at the 19 Minutes home office. Partly, that's because even with a pretty well-behaved two-and-a-half year old around, there are only so many restaurants that serve grilled cheese, and only so many occasions on which we want to spend an hour trying to sneak bites of our food while attempting to convince our daughter into staying in her booster chair. On the other hand, watching Sylvi order her own meals is pretty entertaining ("I want grilled cheese and moolk!", she says happily, while the waitress attempts to discern what "moolk" is).

But really, the kitchen is busy because it can be. For seven years, we lived in a townhouse with a kitchen that would have looked appropriate in a 737. And after five years, we dispensed with what was formally known as a "dining room table" but more colloquially known as "the repository of car insurance bills, 74-thousand credit card offers, and the L.L. Bean Early-Mid Winter Pre-Boxing Day Sale Catalog" and decided to embrace the notion of eating on the couch. So there really wasn't much incentive to be much more ambitious than frozen pizza. (Dining tip: For a unique twist, try adding Froot Loops to your frozen pizza. I never have, but I'll be curious to hear how it tastes.)

But now safely ensconced in Wisconsin (and you try finding another rhyme for "Wisconsin"), with a bright, yellow kitchen that features - yes - both counter space and cabinet space, we've gotten more ambitious. Ambitious to the degree that by the time Sylvi is 10 years old, she may never see us cook again, because we will have filled eight auxiliary freezers with enough leftovers to last into the Chelsea Clinton Administration. (Granted, she may still be ordering grilled cheese at that point.)

My wife is especially enjoying the opportunity. Last week that manifested itself in my mom's recipe for something called "tsimmes". Or "tzimmes", if you prefer. (Or "simmis". You get the idea.) We are, you'll recall, a Christmas tree-and-menorah sort of household. But despite her Lutheran-ness, my wife enjoys getting in touch with her inner Jewish chef. She makes a fantastic kugel. The problem, though, with most Jewish recipes - at least those handed down from generation to generation - is that they don't quite have the, um, specificity that your typical Midwestern Lutheran recipe might have, which can sometimes lead to unexpected results.

Typical Midwestern Lutheran recipe (written neatly on 3X5 index card)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar
1 12 oz. box, vermicelli noodles
1 8 oz. can, cream of mushroom soup
3 large carrots
dash of garlic powder

Typical passed-down Jewish recipe (written on coffee-stained paper that, on closer inspection, is the back of a form letter from 1973)

Preheat oven to [obscured by coffee stain].

medium-sized brick of cream cheese
box of egg noodles
4 T sugar [or maybe it's "4 t" - you can't really be sure]
4 apples (I use Jonathans)

You get the idea. Anyway, tsimmes is a beef roast-and-potatoes-and-sweet potatoes-and-carrots-and-honey dish that my mom used to make while my brother and I were lobbying for pepperoni pizza. My mom was kind enough to provide her recipe - in electronic form, actually, and with a pretty good level of detail.

My wife adapted it a little - employing a crock pot, for starters - but otherwise followed the recipe pretty closely. It turned out pretty well, though not as thick as my wife thought it
should be, considering a major section of my mom's recipe involved the thickening process. So we checked in with my mom and the following conversation ensued:

Me: So, Gretchen made your tsimmes recipe tonight.

My mom: Really? How'd it come out?

Me: Pretty good. But we had a question about the - what is it called? The
einebrine?

Mom: Right, that's the thickening. It's like when you make gravy.

Me: Right. She followed the directions, but all it did was clump up in three
or four places.

Mom: Yeah, that's what usually happens with mine. Except when I forget and
don't do the thickening at all.

In the spirit of things, I made pepperoni pizza the following night. But at least it wasn't frozen.

Definitely not mundane news

2007-01-26T14:49:00.000-06:00

My life is about to change:

Scientist develops caffeinated doughnuts

Apropos of nothing

2007-01-25T13:08:00.000-06:00

Another random band name, this one for an Irish rap act:

Homie O'Pathic

Mundane News Alert, Vol. 1

2007-01-24T21:50:00.000-06:00

We're overdue for a bath here in the 19 Minutes home office, but we wanted to relate a new, part-time quest we're on, and about which we'll try to keep you up-to-date: The Quest for the Dullest News Story of 2007.

This idea came our way on the bus this evening. Milwaukee County busses, you'll recall, are equipped with something called "Transit TV", which beams everything from trivia questions supposedly written by Pat Sajak, to weather forecasts for sporting events taking place in domed stadiums, to (really) tips for tying asparagus. In between the produced features, the network also features the first two or three sentences from stories on various newswires (a technique that renders cleverly written features completely unintelligible).

And so it was that I found myself considering this evening, "What could possibly be less relevant to the Number 31 Bus Experience than the news that furniture maker Ethan Allen reports a drop in quarterly earnings?"

I thought about it for a while, and considered going on a Quest for the Least Relevant News Story to the Number 31 Bus Experience, but then I thought it would be a challenge to report the results to a reading public that's probably not entirely familiar with the Number 31 Bus Experience, and so that would necessitate a lot of explaining each time there was an update, and frankly, I'm not that motivated. (But while we're at it, "The Number 31 Bus Experience" would make a swell name for a budding garage band.)

So instead, I've decided to go on a Quest for the Dullest News Story of 2007.

With that backstory now lodged, kidney stone-like, in your mind, the first contender comes to us from the North Platte Telegraph, from North Platte, Nebraska. I thought about disqualifying entries from Nebraska on the grounds that all news there is inherently dull, but relented after deciding any story with the word "unicameral" in it at least elicits a snicker. Anyway, I was disappointed to have missed this item on the Number 31 bus today:

Agenda action items carried over from cancelled meeting
If tonight’s agenda for the Mid-Plains Community College Board of Directors looks familiar, it should. All of the action items were carried over from the Dec. 20 board meeting that was cancelled due to adverse weather.

I imagine faithful readers of the Mid-Plains Community College Board of Directors agenda series were disappointed when they received their latest issue, only to find it was a rerun.

And while we're cruising the papers, a runner-up from the Rutland Herald in Rutland, Vermont:

Mold found in temporary office trailers in Bennington

Having worked in plenty of office buildings, let me just say that I've never worked in a place that someone hasn't - at least twice a year - sent out a nasty officewide e-mail decrying the state of decaying food in the office refrigerator. In fact, I've had some co-workers who routinely got mustard stains on their news copy - which was difficult, considering that copy was on their computer's hard drive. (Cymbal crash.) Fortunately, we never got to the point where we had a slow enough news day to report on it.

Anyway, that's the first go-round. Feel free to nominate any news items you run across that might contend for the title. Or sit back and wait for us to feed your Dull News Weekly Requirement.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Blather, rinse, repeat

2007-01-22T16:29:00.001-06:00

New rule of thumb: Never allow a new showerhead to raise your expectations excessively.

I like changing the showerhead, mainly because it's the kind of do-it-yourself homeowner project that's visible enough that it seems to carry with it an implication that it took a certain level of skill to carry off. You can drop it into conversations with friends or neighbors: "I was changing the showerhead the other day, and you wouldn't believe how much corrosion I ran on the shower stem." (This statement also wins do-it-yourself bonus points for also featuring "corrosion" and "shower stem", the latter being a term I thought I had just now made up, except that it seems to be the actual name for what I thought it was.)

Of course, changing the showerhead is probably the easiest do-it-yourself project in the bathroom. It narrowly edges out changing the toilet paper, because with the toilet paper, you always run the risk that you'll orient it with the tail facing the wrong direction.

We changed the showerhead because our previous one could blast graffiti off a subway car. This made for an invigorating morning ablution, but also depleted the hot water faster than one might like - faster than the shower at our apartment in Flagstaff, where the hot water heater was, I think, a Thermos bottle. (Also worth noting was the fact that we changed our showerhead in Flagstaff, too, a feat that so impressed our landlady that she regularly brought it up as evidence of my apparent DIY skill - and a statement I never disavowed, regardless of the fact that my wife was the one that changed the showerhead in the first place.)

So the highlight of a recent weekend was a trip to Home Depot, despite the fact that it always takes me 45 minutes to find what I'm looking for there (say, lightbulbs) and I always vow never to return. We spent a fair amount of time chasing our two-and-a-half year old away from whatever sharp objects she could find, and debating whether $79 was too much to spend on a showerhead. "Yes," was our answer.

We settled on one that promised a spa-like experience, as though rain would fall on our shampoo-laden hair.

And it's fine. I've never been to a spa, but it seems unlikely that this showerhead is replicating a $500/day experience. It does feel like a gentle rain shower, provided you live in a part of the world where the ground is porcelain and the rain is hot.

All this is to say that I have a new rule of thumb: Never allow a new showerhead to raise your expectations too much.

But you knew that already.

Maximum Bob

2007-01-20T12:20:00.000-06:00

We were pretty star struck by an interviewee in the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters yesterday. There aren't too many faces - save for family members - whom one can say they've seen on a semi-regular basis since practically the day they were born.

I wasn't watching too much television in the first few months of my life, in 1969. My parents tell me they woke me up to watch the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, but I'm not sure Neil Armstrong's visage was absorbed into my young psyche. But an addition to PBS's programming lineup in November of that year had a greater - or at least more immediate - impact.

If you mention the name "Bob" to someone younger than, roughly, 40 years old, they'll wait for a modifier. (In my life, there have been plenty of noteworthy Bobs - Radio Bob, Uncle Bob, Shish-ka-bob, Captain Kangaroo, etc.) If no modifier is forthcoming, it can only imply one person: Bob from Sesame Street. His real name is Bob McGrath.

Bob is in Milwaukee this weekend for an appearance accompanying the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra during one of its "Kinderkonzerts" (gee, can you tell this is a city with a German heritage?). And part of the interview was about his commitment to music education. His character on the show is a music teacher, and the real-life Bob worries that school budget cutbacks that eliminate music programs are creating a "cultural wasteland" in our inner cities, while the well-heeled can still afford to send their kids to private music lessons.

But mostly, I wanted to know about Sesame Street. I watched it through my childhood, watched it through my brother's childhood, and then it mainly disappeared for a few years from my consciousness. But one fateful night in college, a few of us ("odd ducks", you might call us) were perusing the comprehensive selection offered at the one video store in Mount Vernon, Iowa, when we skipped over "Diehard 2", and our eyes came to rest on: "Monster Hits". And, "Sing Yourself Silly". Which we, naturally, rented and watched that evening (though not, it should be noted, without an alcoholic beverage or perhaps two on hand). But before the night was out, we were singing along with classics like "C is for Cookie" and "Fuzzy and Blue", and newer classics like "Healthy Food", Cookie Monster's highly entertaining if half-hearted rapping effort to get kids to add things like tuna and trout to their diets, in addition to cookies. I wound up owning second-hand copies of both of those video tapes, along with a copy of the seminal history, "Sesame Street Unpaved" - all well before actually having a child. And I'll probably still be watching them well after my daughter has moved on to reruns of "Grey's Anatomy".

Sesame Street's Bob has outlasted all my other childhood icons - Walter Cronkite, Hawkeye Pierce, Dwight Evans, Cheech and Chong. So, yeah, it was an uncommon opportunity.

And Bob, thank goodness, was terrific, spinning yarns about Ralph Nader's appearance on the show (he asked to change a lyric in "The People in Your Neighborhood" to make it grammatically correct) and doing imitations of Elmo. He was also amazingly candid about the direction the show has taken in the past 10 years or so - which has been a nagging thought in the minds of almost everyone who grew up with Sesame Street. Bob, diplomatically, didn't put a value judgement on the changes (less exposure for the neighborhood, more computer animation, targeting a younger audience), but he did say - a little wistfully - that part of him misses the fun they had producing the show in its early years.

The other side effect he noted is that although the current generation of kids is still watching Sesame Street, the time has probably passed in which four- and five-year olds recognize him coming out of a store.

37-year olds are another story.

19 Minutes responds to its readers

2007-01-19T16:20:00.000-06:00

So, reader sentiment was running pretty strongly against New Layout #1, which was of course created because the 19 Minutes Technical Support Staff accidentally ruined the previous layout by tinkering too much with code that it didn't know enough about.

For those of you who missed it, here is what the brief tabloidization of this feature looked like:

In any case, the 19 Minutes Technical Support Staff hopes this latest redesign is easier on the eyes of our tens of thousands of loyal readers. Feel free to check in with your thoughts. Or feel free to switch off your computers and go on with your lives. Eat dinner. Read a book. Read the back of the cereal box. We'll wait.

Okay.

2007-01-18T16:56:00.001-06:00

What does everyone think of the new look?

Another dubious public service

2007-01-18T08:42:00.000-06:00

I’m usually something of a mess when I make it into my office. And usually, that’s the fault of my iPod, in the sense that I try to be friendly when I walk in the door. That’s difficult when you’re listening to music at potentially unhealthy levels, so my entrance usually involves a complicated ballet of removing gloves and ear muffs, and juggling them with my mug of coffee, all the while attempting to switch off the iPod and remove the headphones.

Yesterday’s arrival yielded an even more impressive picture, as I walked into the office with my jacket open, one ear bud still in place, and the other hanging at my side. Of course, that meant I was immediately greeted by our arts producer, who wanted to introduce me to the guy she was about to interview.

That guy turned out to be Milwaukee singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey, who shook my hand and immediately wanted to know what song was playing on my iPod at that instant in time. Thankfully, it was “Blown Kisses”, by Minnesota singer-songwriter Martin Zellar. Thankfully, because if your introduction to a reknowned singer-songwriter is going to be the name of the song you’re listening to, you don’t want that song to be “Surrender”, by Cheap Trick. Mulvey was duly impressed by my iPod selection. I made a mental note to check out Mulvey’s latest CD. Sheepishly, I admitted that the previous song I had listened to was “Surrender”, by Cheap Trick.

Regardless, it brought to mind a feature that’s appeared in several places (most notably around here, in the “A.V. Club” section of The Onion) in which people switch their iPods to shuffle, and then discuss – or in some cases, rationalize – the first five songs that show up.

So, not that you asked, here’s how my iPod shuffle shakes out, starting sheepishly with:

“Surrender”, by Cheap Trick. Okay, we’ll file this one under “guilty pleasure”. The first-ever rock concert I ever attended was a 1979 Cheap Trick concert at, yes, the Agridome in Regina, Saskatchewan. It was not long after their “Live at Budokan” CD (er, LP) came out, and their North American tour was paralleling a cross-country trip my family was taking. Really. Had we not seen them in Regina, we could have taken in a Cheap Trick show in Mitchell, South Dakota or Pocatello, Idaho. My connection with the group has faded since I was 10 years old, though I can still manage to name all the members of the band (Rick, Robin, Tom (Bill? Dan?), and of course Bun.) I’ve never fully comprehended “Surrender”, though its refrain (“Mommy’s all right, Daddy’s all right – they just seem a little weird…”) always seemed like a nice sentiment, and one that I hope my daughter will someday take to heart. Peter Mulvey, to his credit, gave me a pass on this one, since Milwaukeeans have apparently adopted the Rockford, Illinois-based group as a “local band”.
“Blown Kisses”, by Martin Zellar and the Hardways. I’ve been a fan of Zellar’s since I was a news reporter in Rochester, Minnesota, and hung out regularly at a bar that incessantly played his “Born Under” CD. If Bruce Springsteen had grown up in a small, industrial midwestern city, he may well have evolved into Martin Zellar, who writes with an uncommon empathy for his fellow humans and a heartbreaking understanding of his own failings. Besides that, it’s worth noting that the version of the song I was listening to is from his “Live – Two Guitars, Bass, and Drums” CD, and is WAY better than the studio version.
“Got My Own Thing”, by Liz Phair. Great – what is this, “Mitch’s Guilty Pleasure Mix”? I figure I’m too male and too old to like Liz Phair, but there’s something about her raw, in-your-face attitude that I find appealing. That said, her older stuff (from her “Exile in Guyville” era) is a better illustration of that attitude than this track, which is from her latest effort, “Somebody’s Miracle”. Regardless, I like almost the entire newer CD, in that guilty pleasure-sort-of-way.
“Your Life Is Now”, by John Cougar Mellencamp. I have no idea why this song is on my iPod. I don’t really like it that much – it is, I gather, supposed to be inspirational, a call to action, but – starting with the title - it has all the subtlety of a cinder block through a plate glass window. It sounds a little like it should be the theme to a prime-time drama on the CW network, which is to say it has a catchy melody line, but can easily be boiled down to a 30-second version in syndication.
“Why Not Wyoming”, by Amy Speace. Ah, yes, that’s much better. Thematically similar to the Mellencamp tune, in that it also gets at the endless possibilities that stretch in front of us. But it appeals much more to my metaphorical nature than the previous Mellencampiness. I don’t know a great deal about Amy Speace, but she has a nice voice with plenty of range, a good ear for lyrics, and a very nice cowboy hat. I can’t decide whether I like the song’s gratuitous public radio reference (“...drive until we fall asleep/Listening to ‘FUV…” – a reference, I’m assuming to New York public radio station WFUV), but the song has a nice, soaring feel and a little hint of pedal steel guitar, which always conjures up the image of wide open spaces. Plus, it provided the inspiration for the title of a swell previous blog post. I really like this song.

So there you have it. And if none of this was the least bit interesting to you, consider that it probably took less time to read than it would have taken to listen to each of these songs.

Also, be thankful I didn't have to rationalize Song #6 - "Doin' the Pigeon", by Bert.

Absolutely blown away

2007-01-15T16:42:00.000-06:00

Ever since dropping down in the greater Milwaukee area from the planet Neptune (er, Arizona) I've described my new environs -- without wanting to sound patronizing -- as the perfect Practice City. It has a nice downtown, with plenty of moderately tall buildings. There are a moderately plentiful number of cultural activities like art museums and theaters. We have a nice zoo. There are several sports franchises, which include some which people around the country occasionally remember (the Brewers, the Bucks), and some which people do not (the Admirals, the Wave). There are plenty of people and suburbs, but we can get most places in less than 20 minutes. In short, it's a swell place to live, but it will never be mistaken for New York, or Los Angeles, or Paris. (It would fit well in Canada.)

And today, we had a nice, moderate snowstorm. While other parts of the country were getting socked with copious amounts of snow, or dealing with the nightmare of sheet ice, the Milwaukee area picked up somewhere between 4 and 6 inches of snow. Which, in these parts, was greeted with a resounding shrug and the sound of shoveling.

So it was an unremarkable snowstorm in most ways. Except one.

Today was a day off for the government employees among us, including me. So with a two-and-a-half-year-old who enjoys sleeping until 9:00 a.m. (I don't know what we did to deserve our good fortune, but I refuse to complain), I was looking forward to a leisurely morning consisting of sleeping until 8:30, drinking coffee with ill-advised creamer products, and watching "The Price Is Right" (just to be sure that my brain cells don't get too much exercise).

Naturally, the phone rang at 7:20. It was our next-door neighbor, who has never called us in the 11 months we've lived in our house. And for that matter, she never called us before we lived next-door, but I'd ascribe that to never having heard of us. I didn't realize she even had our phone number. But there she was, on the phone at 7:20, talking to my wife. There were no context clues as to who might be on the phone as they talked, and in my early morning fog, I lost interest until I heard the phrase, "I'll send him right over".

Our next-door neighbor is an older woman, who was the recent recipient of a second-hand snowblower. This was her first opportunity to try it out, and she was having trouble getting it started.

So, under the assumption that all guys can at least fake their way through getting a gasoline engine going, she summoned the closest likely guy to take on the challenge. (And in a neighborhood of 1920s bungalows, we're pretty darn close together.) However, as faithful readers of this feature are aware, I'm not what you would call a mechanical genius. My most recent mechanical victory was taking apart my daughter's pretend camera, purchased for exactly $1.00 at Target, and coaxing the little pretend shutter into engaging a gear, which allows her to take pretend pictures of animals through the pretend viewfinder.

Unfortunately, our next-door neighbor's snowblower was real, so I was a little concerned I might not have the right stuff for the job. I was even more concerned when I was confronted with the actual snowblower, which was almost the size of my former 1983 Subaru, and included a complex, handwritten set of instructions taped to the handle, reading as follows:

To start, full choke.
Prime engine.
Move throttle to fast.
Pull hard on starter cord.

When engine has started, turn choke to off.
If engine stalls, turn choke to 1/2.
Do not allow Mitch to operate this piece of machinery.

I looked, and to my surprise, I could locate all the various parts that were described in the instructions. This was tempered by my discovery that the snowblower also had five gears, plus handles to engage the traction and auger, and a wheel with which to direct the blower itself.

But, I figured I had good blog material regardless, so I followed the instructions, and moved all the various levers and yanked on the cord. Nothing. I yanked several more times, with no success. Finally, I hit on the idea of going with the direct opposite of the instructions. It fired right up, and I blasted my way down her driveway. It took no time to make one transit. This was going to be great! I'd have both our driveways cleared by 8:30 a.m.! So of course at that point it stalled, and neither starting technique wanted to work.

I took a break and got my extension cord to power the snowblower's electric starter. At least I wouldn't have a heart attack yanking on the damn starter cord. By the time I got back, my anti-instructions technique worked, and I got it going again, this time long enough to blast another path up the driveway before it stalled again. Back to another round of moving levers, pressing starters, and asking the neighbor if the hardware store had given her any suggestions after they had tuned it up.

They hadn't, and I couldn't get it started this time, so I helped shovel enough of a path down her driveway to let her get out of her garage, and started work on my own driveway as the snowblower sat smugly idle on the sidewalk.

Until, a brainstorm: I opened the gas cap. Empty. A mechanical problem even a Wisconsin novice could solve. It fired up and didn't give me any problems for the rest of the morning, not counting the time I forgot to take it out of reverse and it smashed into my knee.

Of course, it wasn't until I was driving it back up our neighbor's driveway to put it away that I noticed the brand name: Simplicity.

Halfway to the big odometer roll-over

2007-01-12T14:59:00.000-06:00

I'd just like to take a brief break (from, uh, my actual job) to note that our feature just had its 50,000th visitor today. Thanks to the various tracking meters on our site, we'll note that it was an Internet surfer from Wilmington, Delaware doing a Google image search for pictures of a coati.

This is pretty good news (especially considering our first month of existence - January 2005 - we received a total of about 130 visits). But we're slightly disappointed that the 50,000th visit wasn't the person who happened upon our blog today after running a search for "biggest lump of ear wax".

Wristy business

2007-01-12T08:37:00.000-06:00

The relatively sudden onslaught of medical care I've been dealing with for the past six weeks has had some interesting side effects. (Figuratively, anyway. The actual medical side effects have been thankfully few.) That I've had more doctor's appointments in the past month-and-a-half than I'd had in the 10 years prior has enabled me to learn some noteworthy things about my body.

For example, I know that my blood pressure is generally some three-digit number followed by some two-digit number. For years, whenever people would recount their blood pressure scores as evidence of something (growing old? eating too many Doritos?), I'd nod knowingly, as though I actually could tell the difference between the numbers in a blood pressure reading and the numbers in a tire size.

And I've had a variety of entertaining tests that have all, for some reason, involved the consumption of unpleasant liquids followed by attempts to make humorous banter with the medical staff in various departments at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital (Jamie the CT Scan Technologist was much more receptive than the folks doing the colonoscopy, though in fairness, I may have been less funny under sedation. Or perhaps I was more funny, but the medication wiped out my memory of the witty reparteé.)

But the most remarkable finding to come out of six weeks of medical care is the discovery that I have uncommonly small wrists.

You see, Sue, my P.A. (who's essentially managing my life at this point), thought that between the condition I'm dealing with, the various medications I'm on, and the fact that I'm allergic to X-ray contrast solution (the major discovery from my CT scan), I really ought to have some kind of ID tag, in case a piano falls on me as I get off the bus in the morning ("Caution: Allergic to falling pianos").

She suggested a dog tag - not a GI-style dog tag, but a real, live brass tag you'd buy for Fido, provided you use the 1940s as your guide for naming pets.

"They're, like, 5 dollars," she said, "and you can get them in the shape of a fire hydrant, which would be a real conversation starter." I like Sue.

But I had the feeling the fire hydrant tag wouldn't be too much use, because alll the lettering would have been worn off within about four days, since I would have played with it incessantly. (Plus, my coworkers would have killed me after about 20 minutes of constant clanking, which would have negated the need for the tag.) Plus, I hate wearing necklaces.

The other option was a bracelet. I like wearing bracelets even less than I like wearing necklaces, inasmuch guys wearing them tend to look like minor characters named "Louie" in mobster movies.

But I found a place that carried a medical tag that looks like, basically, a velcro watch band. Hopefully, if an ambulance crew ever has to deal with me, someone will be curious what time it is. When it came time to order it, I looked at my wrist and decided it probably fit in the "small" category. My watch bands have always been cinched up to the last hole, or stretched to the end of the velcro strip, but it never dawned on me that my wrists were that small.

The band came in the mail the other day. It was just as advertised, so no one's going to cast me in "Godfather IV". It came in a small, Ziploc-style bag. On it, a sticker:

Small: Ages 3-9

I'm looking forward to wearing my daughter's hand-me-downs in a few months.

Stepping out into the shade

2007-01-10T08:44:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago in this space, I lamented the overabundance of options when it came to shopping. We were talking about gifts at that point – namely, how not-so-many years ago, something like a pasta maker would have made for a unique gift; today, the only way you could find a unique pasta maker is if it was emblazoned with the logo of a defunct minor league basketball franchise. (And even then, there are probably 20 Hamden Bics pasta makers on eBay.)

But there are times when overabundance, or even abundance, are fine. If you’re shopping for Pop Tarts, say, it’s nice to be able to choose between “Frosted Strawberry” and “Brown Sugar and Cinnamon”. And if you have to browse past the “Strawberry Milkshake” flavor to get to your Pop Tart of choice, well, so be it.

My needs are fairly modest. And with a metro area population of one-and-a-half million, I thought Milwaukee was excellently positioned to have a fair selection of just about anything I might desire.

And so, about a week ago, my sunglasses went missing. My guess is that there’s someone who went in to have blood drawn at the Froedtert Lutheran Memorial Hospital, and walked out with a somewhat-used pair of sunglasses that a previous patient (that’d be me) left on top of a 1998 issue of Newsweek. But they could also be underneath the driver’s seat of the car, among the gas station receipts, graham cracker crumbs, and travel brochures that temporarily occupy our 2 ½-year old, and which somehow migrate from her car seat to the front of the car.

Anyway, my office is in the basement of a downtown mall. So you’d think I’d be in an excellent position to procure a replacement set of shades. My overt goal was to get a cheaper set (you could actually put together an interesting line graph, charting my increasing age and the declining amount I’m willing to spend on sunglasses), but frankly, my real goal was to stop squinting when I walked outside.

As it turns out, sunglasses are not an easily obtainable commodity in Milwaukee in mid-January.

I brought along a co-worker with good taste in eyewear, mainly so I wouldn’t return home with a pair of sunglasses that would cause my wife to melt on the floor in a puddle of laughter.

My first stop was the T.J. Maxx located conveniently at the top of the stairs in front of my office. This is a store that sells everything from faux-zebra-skin throw blankets to reversable belts to Brett Favre jerseys. And yet there was only one sunglasses display, it was in the women’s section, and it was mostly empty.

I skipped the idea of going to a department store, partly because I thought the chances of finding inexpensive sunglasses there were small, and partly because despite the fact department stores have 17 entrances, I always manage to enter either through the perfume section or the women’s lingerie section, and both those sections frighten me.

So the next try was Walgreen’s, which I thought would be great, because then I could come back with not only sunglasses, but Tylenol, postcards, and Fiddle Faddle, too.

My co-worker and I split up and fanned out around the store. Found the cheap reading glasses. Found the eyeglass repair kits. But where the hell were the sunglasses? We flagged down a sales clerk.

“Oh, sorry, we don’t have sunglasses this of year,” she informed.

And then it dawns on me. After seven years in Arizona, in a city that gets 310 sunny days a year, I’m living in a place that’s just not that sunny, during a time of year that’s even less-sunny than usual. For a time in Arizona, I had three active pairs of sunglasses – the ones that were always around my neck, and a pair in each car (along with the pair of unknown origin that floated from car to car and was so ugly that it would only be used in a sunglass emergency, such as if I missed my exit and ended up driving into the sun). In Milwaukee, a person permanently wearing sunglasses around his neck would be pegged as an extra-cool librarian.

There turned out to be a sunglasses kiosk in the mall, operated by a person from some Eastern European country that probably isn’t all that sunny either. But all the sunglasses were $12, and we managed to find me a pair that my wife noted, “wasn’t really thinking much outside the box for you.” But I’m thinking I’d look like a pretty cool librarian.

Then, on the bus this morning. The Number 31. As we rounded the corner onto Wisconsin Avenue, a brilliant sun, just rising into the Milwaukee morning burst forth from behind the downtown buildings. And then the other epiphany hits me. On the rare occasions when it’s this sunny in January, the last thing you want to do is make the sunshine dimmer.

So the sunglasses stayed in my pocket. And of course since the forecast for the rest of the week is for increasing clouds, with rain, snow and sleet, they’ll probably stay in my pocket for a while.

We're thinking of putting up yard signs this time around

2007-01-09T09:16:00.000-06:00

Something to do before you head for the New York Times website this morning (you tell yourself you're going to read about the Democrats' response to the President's Iraq strategy, but you're really going to head straight for the article about Angelina Jolie's criticism of Madonna's adoption strategy)...

This fine feature is once again nominated for Milwaukee Blog of the Week by a fine publication called MKE (and its online version, cleverly referred to as "MKE Online"). We encourage you to surf over to the voting page. Check out some, or all, of the other blogs up for the honor. And vote. It's your chance to make history, obscure and irrelevant as that history may be.

And at least this time we're not up against a perky Marine.

We're talkin' Mighty Strange

2007-01-08T14:40:00.000-06:00

Okay, I know it's a little trite to blog about dreams, but this one was so bizarre it's hard not to comment on.

The setting: The gymnasium at Wauwatosa West High School. I've never been there, so I have no idea what it looks like (and of course, because it's a dream, I have no idea how I know it's supposed to be the gym at Wauwatosa West High School).

I'm a newspaper reporter, assigned to cover the basketball game being played at Tosa West between Michigan State University and its lesser-known rival, a school called "Marcus and the Shovel." It's a competitive game, which is surprising, because it also turns out that "Marcus and the Shovel" is attended by only 28 students (again, a fact revealed through unclear, dream-like methods).

Michigan State ended up winning the game.

It's a dream entirely not worth interpreting, except to the extent that it probably originated with a conversation I had with my brother about a recent men's volleyball game that pitted the 11th ranked Ohio State University Buckeyes against, yes, the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

And really, that's not worth interpreting, either, except that it's interesting to note that the initials "M.S." figure heavily in "Michigan State", "Marcus and the Shovel", and "Milwaukee School (of Engineering)." Also, I edited an interview that aired on our radio program this morning. The topic? Multiple Sclerosis.

All of this links, inextricably, to Mitch's Subconscious.

Friday around the radio station

2007-01-05T16:18:00.000-06:00

Two great band names that came up around the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters this afternoon:

Pepperoni Mudflap
Slovenian Nougat

A Ford, not a Lincoln

2006-12-27T09:13:00.000-06:00

Well, we didn't actually see Gerald Ford at Dunkin' Donuts this morning, but walking into the Dunkin' Donuts, we did see the headline in today's paper that the former president had died last night.

There's really not much to add, except that it's vaguely interesting to think that we may have written the last blog post referencing the erstwhile Mr. Ford while he was still alive. Even if it was an offhand reference involving strange-looking people at a donut shop.

Rex Hamilton lives

2006-12-26T14:16:00.000-06:00

We're at work in the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, today. There are apparently few other people at work in downtown Milwaukee, because our bus ride in from the 19 Minutes Suburban Satellite Office took only about 15 minutes over city streets.

The trip in to work also included a stop at Dunkin' Donuts, which brought to mind the following two ruminations:

The apostrophe at the end of the word "Dunkin'" is kind of an anachronism in today's chain-store environment. A welcome anachronism for grammar enthusiasts, but an anachronism regardless. It's as though the store was originally called "Dunking Donuts", but someone decided, "Whoa, we better make this sound more conversational!" Of course, it also makes one wonder why the name of the store isn't "Dunkin' Do'nuts", given that "donuts" is a variation of "doughnuts".
The clientele at our Dunking Doughnuts of choice this morning was, shall we say, a little offbeat. Some might have paused to consider whether there was a hobo convention going on at the nearby Midwest Airlines Center. Others may have considered it the best sighting of Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln since a 1988 spotting we remember from the men's room at a service area on I-95 in Maryland. More remarkable, perhaps, was the fact that there were three or four people at the restaurant this morning who could have been shooting for the Lincoln look, and - as far as we could tell - these people were not connected in any way except a mutual interest in doughy treats. Anyway, it got us to wondering whether there are normally that many odd ducks at the donut shop, but today, they represented a much higher proportion of the clientele at large (say, 95 percent) than on a typical weekday morning.

I'm thinking of stopping by tomorrow, just in case Gerald Ford is there.

Call me an artificial sap

2006-12-24T19:39:00.000-06:00

So there's this odd foreign object taking up real estate in our foyer these days. It's bushy and almost green, and in all seriousness, I have no idea what it's made of. It has a bunch of lights embedded in it, like so many CNN correspondents within a Sylvan Army. And what will soon be my daughter's annual December haul is strewn underneath it, atop a round red piece of felt at the object's base.

Yeah, it's a Christmas tree.

After never giving trees much thought through a Jewish childhood and early adulthood, and successfully skirting the issue through the first six years of an interfaith marriage (thanks, largely, to an apartment too small to accommodate anything larger than a ficus tree), I was prepared to weigh the arguments on either side of the debate this year.

But I got sick, and between CT scans and holiday shopping, I figured I had successfully circumnavigated the Christmas tree debate for another year.

Then, the package from my father-in-law arrived mid-week. Contained within was a well-loved, artificial Christmas tree, and three strands of multi-colored lights. My wife called me at work to apprise me of our foyer's new tenant.

I thought about it for roughly four seconds.

"Sounds great," I startled myself by saying. "I'll help you with the lights when I get home."

Somewhere inside me, I knew I was eventually going to have to decide whether having a tree was actually going to be an issue, or just another in the long list of Things I Hope To Avoid By Inaction.

I choose not to make it an issue. Yeah, part of me agrees with writer (and like me, transplanted Milwaukeean with a daughter and non-Jewish partner) Lauren Fox, who wrote in the New York Times, that "a Christmas tree is the last lost battleground of the secular Jew." Part of me worries that it's a slippery slope from here... next stop - Vacation Bible School!

But most of me looks at my wife. My Lutheran wife, who knows - and recites in Hebrew - the blessings when we light the menorah at Chanukah. Who taught our two-and-a-half year old the words "Baruch Ata Adonai" so she can join in saying the Chanukah blessings. And I think: You know, neither one of us is especially religious. But she's embraced this part of my tradition to the extent that she knows almost as much about it as I do. (For example, the first Chanukah blessing translates to, "Blessed art thou, o Lord our God... something something something... Chanukah." And, she knows that we light the menorah from right to left, as Hebrew is read. Or we light it left to right, despite how Hebrew is read.)

So rather than - passively - not minding the tree peeking out the window at us as we cruise up the driveway, I'm planning on fully enjoying the experience of one of her traditions.

And, as a side benefit, it's helping me feel that much more Jewish. Like, when I wandered into the Christmas section of Walgreen's to look for our tree's one ornament (an Eastern Bluebird with an authentic Cornell Lab of Ornithology chirp), and had to ask a salesclerk whether I had, in fact, located a Christmas tree ornament, or whether I had picked up one of those Christmas knick-knack decorations whose purpose was never explained in Hebrew school. Also, as a 37-year-old Christmas tree novice, I had no complaints with the fact that each of the strands of lights was approximately 730 feet long and managed to knot - and reknot - itself with every turn of the tree. Whereas an authoritative gentile would have ceased whistling "Sleigh Ride" and taken the name of someone's lord in vain.

So that's my rationale.

As for the string of lights in the window over the Christmas tree... well, they just look sort of nice.

I guess there is something out there for the person who has everything

2006-12-19T09:16:00.000-06:00

I used to actively enjoy shopping for gifts. I thought I had a knack for finding gifts that were uncommon (say, ice skates for my future wife), yet fit the recipient well (such as a CD of The Four Bitchin' Babes that my mom really connected with). With a few exceptions (and here I'm thinking of the calendar featuring photos of outhouses that I once gave my dad. It was an artistic calendar - the pictures were nice, but still, they were outhouses...).

But somewhere in the past few years, gift-buying has become less enjoyable. Part of the reason probably has to do with a little math that goes on in my head while I'm shopping (Well, let's see - that CD boxed set equals exactly one-and-a-half mega-packs of Pampers, minus a bottle of zinc tablets...), but I think a larger part of it is that there's too much stuff out there. The ice skates, for example, were purchased over the internet back in the days when e-commerce was a little like wading through the tiny display ads in the last few pages of the New Yorker - there wasn't necessarily that much out there, but occasionally, you ran across a real find.

In Milwaukee, though (as in all large cities), there's so much out there that it's hard to isolate the gifts that will make a real connection to the recipient. Ten years ago, finding a pasta machine (especially in Potsdam, New York) might have represented a remarkable achievement. But my office in downtown Milwaukee is directly below a Linens-n-Things which not only carries pasta makers, but probably 12 different brands and varieties (the left-handed pasta maker, the pasta maker that makes elbow macaroni, the forged steel left-handed elbow-macaroni pasta maker, etc.).

Granted, there are disadvantages to being in a place with not enough stuff. When I lived in northern New York, the options in my little town were somewhat limited, so holiday shopping involved a three-hour roundtrip to Ottawa. And for the seven previous holiday seasons, my wife and I lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, where there was exactly one of every store, and each of those stores had exactly one of every item.

I do have a few friends who, each year, make something both creative and thoughtful for the people on their holiday gift lists. And that's a strategy I could employ as well, provided my friends and relatives are hoping for a) toast, or b) copies of blog posts, printed and framed.

Anyway, this year's holiday shopping wasn't too bad, really. I thought my wife and I came up with some clever ideas that I hope will fit their recipients (figuratively, and in some cases, literally). But that unique gift idea eluded me, until I read the New York Times. And darn if the perfect gift idea hasn't already been taken:

Please Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk

Fortunately, there are still 370 shopping days until next Christmas.

News from the Coincidence Blotter

2006-12-14T11:21:00.000-06:00

...And finally tonight, we have news that the leader of the Milwaukee Junior Accountants Club has been arrested:

A 16-year-old Milwaukee girl was arrested for disorderly conduct at Mayfair Mall at 8:24 p.m. Dec. 2 after she returned a third time after being kicked out of the mall twice that same day. She had been booted from the mall for disorderly behavior and profane language. When the officer handed her the citation, she exclaimed, "Oh, wow, my boyfriend got a ticket at the mall here a while back for the exact same amount."

Several notes in search of a theme

2006-12-12T16:03:00.000-06:00

A few things on the 19 Minutes radar screen this afternoon, none of which is really worth more than a paragraph or two (and boy, that portends great things for those of you who keep reading!)...

Wauwatosa currently smells like feet, as though a train car full of old sweatsocks derailed, and the authorities forgot to mention it to the citizenry. It's hard to actually ascertain where the smell is originating, aside from being in proximity to both the railroad tracks and the Menomonee River. I initially thought it was coming from my car, but it seemed unlikely that my car would choose only to smell near railroad tracks or a river. As far as smells go, it's not as bad as the Thomas Edison Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. But it's a shade less pleasant than my college locker room after a baseball game - except on days when our locker room was shared by middle school wrestlers, which still ranks as one of the Top 10 Worst Odors of All-Time.

Also, it's been mentioned by several readers that last week's unlikely appearance by Plato at a southeast Wisconsin bus stop shelter may have been connected to a phenomenon known as Bookcrossing.com, which encourages people to catch-and-release books, and then chart their progress on the Internet. After perusing the site, I'd be inclined to agree - though the book was in funky enough shape that I didn't get close enough to see a Bookcrossing sticker. Regardless, it doesn't explain the story's other details, such as the "Pixie Power" backpack.

And then, there's this news from London's Financial Times:

European credit markets notched up a new record on Tuesday, after the spread on the so-called “Crossover index” – a basket of credit default swaps on risky European corporate bonds – tightened to its lowest level, implying that investors are now more relaxed than ever about default risk.

I would comment on this development if I had any idea what it meant.

Finally, if your plans call for you to spend any time drinking barium in the radiology department at Froedtert Lutheran Memorial Hospital in Wisconsin, keep an eye out for my dignity, which apparently went missing yesterday morning. Actually, you could do much worse than to be taken care of by the staff there (Renee and Mary were far more pleasant than the barium). On the other hand, the experience of standing around a hospital waiting area, wearing a hospital issue gown, watching "The Price Is Right", as doctors and visitors and painting crews shuttle by, is not something I've seen mentioned in the literature on Crohn's Disease. It was, however, a welcome respite from the smell of feet.

And now, this word about System Parking, Incorporated

2006-12-08T15:29:00.000-06:00

You're driving around downtown Milwaukee. It's early in the morning, say, 7:25 or so. You're in the vicinity of the historic and charming Pfister Hotel, and you're looking for a parking space. Then, on the corner of Jefferson and Mason Streets, you spy a surface lot. A large sign reads:

Parking: $2.00/first 1/2 hour
$1.00/each hour

There are lots of spaces, and it's directly across the street from the hotel where you're due in five minutes for a meeting. Looks like a great place to park.

Don't do it.

Don't park there.

Because when you emerge from your meeting, an hour later, System Parking Incorporated will have placed a sign by the lot entrance (not the entrance by which you entered the lot, mind you) that reads

"Early Bird Special: In before 9:00, out after 2:00 - $6.00"

You won't think this sign applies to you. "After all," you think, "I'm not leaving after 2:00. An hour will cost me $3.00 to park. It's not the greatest bargain in the world, but about what I'd expect to pay. I mean, the lot isn't kept up especially nicely, but I suppose it's better than parking my car in the Milwaukee River."

And yet, System Parking, Incorporated interprets the sign to mean, "If you park here before 9:00 a.m., we'll charge you $6.00." The friendly and helpful parking attendant explained the policy further as follows:

"Hey, man, it's six degrees out. Read the sign. Either pay the six dollars or we'll send you a ticket."

Ah yes, that'd be the sign, posted after the cars were parked there, at an entrance facing away from the hotel, in apparent conflict with the two other permanent signs posted on the lot.

"But what else bugs you about 'System Parking, Incorporated'?" you ask, provided you're still even reading.

We're glad you asked. System Parking, Incorporated is, naturally, the kind of company that doesn't print its phone number on its receipts, yet conveniently has a website in which the "contact us" feature is disabled. We did learn, however, that its chairman, Thomas Phillips, is a member of something called the International Parking Congress, a legislative body which we're definitely going to have to lobby.

In the meantime, as you continue to circle the block, looking for parking near the historic and charming Pfister Hotel, allow me direct you to a different Parking System: the meters on Jefferson Street.

"68th and Milwaukee": The Movie

2006-12-07T16:42:00.000-06:00

So if I were a Hollywood screenwriter, this morning’s wait at the bus stop would have resulted in the following opening scene from a yet-to-be-made movie:

The setting: A suburban bus stop. It’s an arctic morning, the sun palely shining through the columns of exhaust rising from the cars waiting at the stop sign. In the background, cars come and go from the dry cleaner. A crossing guard helps children cross the busy intersection.

Our protagonist, a mild-mannered, friendly, and follicly challenged journalist - whom we’ll call “Mitch” - waits at the bus stop, periodically tucking his head into the collar of his jacket, figuring thart breathing lint will somehow be more enjoyable than breathing the air at +6F.

A few seconds pass, and an older woman approaches. Our hero hadn’t noticed her as she walked up Milwaukee Avenue, but suddenly, there she is. She’s a little disheveled, but smiles innocuously. After a closer examination, though, our protagonist notices some unusual details: She’s wearing sweatpants. They’re in good condition, but they’re sweatpants nevertheless. She carries a backpack. But it’s a kids’ backpack, and reads “Pixie Power”. At the bottom of the backpack, a sticker is affixed, reading, "When Christ Was Born".

He smiles back at her, and the following dialogue transpires:

WOMAN WITH BACKPACK: (smiling) I’m going to leave this book here.

MITCH: Okay.

The woman smiles and sets down a paperback book on the seat in the bus shelter. A bus pulls up with an electronic sign reading “Pius XI High School”. The woman gets on the bus and disappears.

Our protagonist walks to the other end of the bus shelter and examines the book:

“The Dialogues of Plato”

He has no idea what this scene means.

Jeep... tent... boom.

2006-12-06T15:52:00.000-06:00

Big explosion in Milwaukee this morning. I imagine it's one of those scenes that'll be relegated to the "Cool Fire Footage From Around Our Nation" segment of the local news elsewhere, but the explosion, subsequent fire, and aftermath have all played out in a compelling way in the news in southeast Wisconsin today.

The 19 Minutes staff happened to be about a mile from the plant that blew up at the time it blew up this morning. We were on a city bus and heard (and felt) a really loud thud that momentarily drowned out the song on our iPod ("Sleeping Satellite" by Tasmin Archer, and God alone knows why that's lodged in our memory). Around the bus, no reaction. Everybody continues reading their Stephen King novels. We figured it was a snowball hitting the side of the bus.

Shortly thereafter, a truly impressive number of emergency vehicles went speeding by in the opposite direction. In a testament to our frighteningly dubious newsgathering abilities, it took until 2:30 this afternoon for us to connect the thud with the emergency vehicles with the explosion.

Actually, perhaps the most compelling graphic of the day came from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Seismic Center, which charted the shockwave from the blast:

What it did not chart, was the shockwave from my hand smacking my forehead after figuring out the thud from this morning's bus ride.

Living life as Page 2F instructs me

2006-12-02T08:45:00.000-06:00

I don't really put much stock into what horoscopes say. Okay, any stock. But I did think it was interesting that my horoscope on Friday, the day after I found out I have Crohn's disease, read:

"Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20): Let your gut feeling be what leads the way today."

Where I'm at (besides Wisconsin, that is)

2006-12-01T14:53:00.000-06:00

I’ve been away for awhile. I feel bad that I haven’t at least checked in to let you know what’s going on. The truth is, I just haven’t felt up to it - mentally, anyway. As for my physical well-being, I wasn’t really sure.

But the moral of the story is that sometimes hypochondriacs actually are sick. Gene Weingarten covered that topic pretty thoroughly in his book, “The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death.”, in which he chronicles his lifetime battle with hypochondria, which basically ended when it turned out that he actually had a chronic disease, Hepatitis C.

And as the 11 faithful readers of this column will likely recall (yeah, right), the 19 Minutes staff has been a long admirer of the hypochondriac lifestyle, having believed to have had any number of fatal conditions, including heart attacks that have lasted two weeks, any number of strokes, cancer, etc.

Of course, at the core of it all has been years of intestinal distress, which on good days I ascribed to having a nervous stomach; and on bad days, well, I ascribed it to having any of a number of diseases. And in retrospect, there have been plenty of bad days – including about nine months’ worth in the late ‘90s, when I dropped around 35 pounds and had roughly zero energy for long stretches. And I wasn’t really very happy. I’ll spare you the more gruesome details, but basically, my body decided it wasn’t going to digest certain foods. (“Uh, thanks, Mitch, but I’ve decided not to convert this food into anything. Thanks anyway….”)

And yet, I got better. And progressively more content with life. Leading me to believe that it was depression making me feel sick. For the last eight years or so, I’ve felt pretty good, except for the occasional stroke, diptheria bout, bubonic plague, etc., all of which – amzingly – my physical exam failed to catch.

But for the last couple of months, I’ve been a little off my game. It was a stressful move to Wisconsin, I have a much faster-paced job than before, raising a 2 ½-year-old takes a lot of energy. It seemed to make sense that I was having a little trouble adjusting. And, of course, my digestive system decided it was having trouble adjusting to the land of beer and bratwurst, too.

So I didn’t really think too much of it, except for the hypochondriac in me, who figured he was dying.

My latest physical came and went. My blood pressure was a little high, which it somehow always manages to be in a doctor’s office. My heart rate was good, and showed no signs of the 17th heart attack I’d had, just that morning.

Then, my blood work came back, and there was something screwed up. Really screwed up. My doctor ordered a retest. You know something’s seriously bad when your doctor calls with test results at 7:00 in the morning, which she did. Anyway, she thought a colonoscopy was in order, given my history of intenstinal infortitude. She thought it should be done within a month and a half, which she meant (I think) as reassurance that I wasn’t about to drop dead, but which naturally gave me 6 weeks to obsess over what it could be.

And obsess I did, especially over Thanksgiving in Minnesota, which for many people was about food, and for me was about agonizing over what kind of food would be least likely to kill me. Even better (from an anxiety standpoint) was the knowledge that waiting for me at home in Wisconsin was the prescription equivalent of a toilet plunger, designed to get me ready for an unpleasant procedure.

That was yesterday. The medical team chatted with me for a little while before they went in to look for the lost miners.

“How long have you had these symptoms,” the resident asked.

“Um, well, let’s say 15 years,” I replied.

“Huh,” he said.

And, as has been the case several times before, I really enjoyed the experience of sedation. I remember vague glimpses of my interior on a TV monitor. And some time later, I ate a muffin and had a brief conversation with the resident. I remember almost nothing about the conversation, except that they’d figured out what’s wrong with me.

Crohn’s disease, as it turns out. Pretty long-standing Crohn’s disease. In fact, probably long-standing enough to explain almost every digestive issue I’ve had for 15 years or more. Apparently, the patty melt at the Perkins Restaurant in Coralville, Iowa did not give me food poisoning after all, and I sincerely apologize if I’ve dissuaded anyone from eating there since 1991.

I’m sure I’ll blog more about the disease itself in the coming weeks or months. I’m still learning about it, myself. Suffice it to say that it’s an auto-immmune disease. Suffice it to say that my body has essentially been trying to systematically eliminate my intestines. (Which you probably would too, if you knew what I had eaten in the last couple decades.) Suffice it to say that you wouldn’t enjoy it very much.

But after 15 years of worrying, it’s actually a major weight off my shoulders - to know that all I have is this auto-immune disease for which there is no cure, varyingly successful treatments, and which will cause me periodic discomfort for the rest of my life. And really, that’s not so bad. I don’t intend to let it kick my butt.

And so, with a lighter heart, I'm back.

Now will somebody please tell me what the deal is with Michael Richards?

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2006-11-08T15:31:00.000-06:00

A very interesting election night, both in Wisconsin and around the country. That was generally a positive thing, except that the real-life radio program we produce was doing an election post-mortem. This required us to be at work around 5:45 this morning, and led us to think that there's something to be said for an election where the results are a foregone conclusion by early evening.

So, that said and with about 1 1/2 hours of sleep, a few notes from yesterday's elections:

First, a note to both losing and winning candidates. If you don't have something interesting to say in your concession or victory speech, just thank your supporters, congratulate your opponent, and let the band go back to playing Dixieland tunes. Here in Wisconsin, Republican Mark Green lost the race for governor, and delivered a concession speech that sounded as though it was either cribbed from the internet, or taken from "The Idiot's Guide to Running a Political Campaign". ("I especially want to thank my wife, [insert name], and my kids [if any], who have endured [length of campaign] with a father in absentia..."). Some minutes later, Democrat Jim Doyle delivered his victory speech, replete with platitudes copied from the same book ("...And so I say it is time to move [name of state, Congressional district, or village] forward, while preserving the way of life that we in [name of state, Congressional district, or village] have worked so hard to maintain...").

Despite working in radio, the 19 Minutes home office followed most of the returns via the television, which yielded its usual ADHD moments, as the commentators referred to graphics on the top of the screen, while a completely different set of graphics scrolled along the bottom. Our favorite scrolling result was a ballot issue in the town of Oconomowoc, which for at least a half hour showed the "No's" leading the "Yeses", by 1 vote to none. This with 9% of the precincts reporting. You know, if I'm an election official, and I've only seen one vote, I might wait to enter it into the computer.

We also enjoyed watching the national results scrolling along the bottom of the screen, featuring the last names of candidates in races we knew nothing about. Our favorite candidate last names: "Duck" (towards a daffier future), "Weed" (it's hard to run a law-and-order campaign when you're named Weed), "Goodlatte" (a great name for a Congressional coffee house), "Bugler" (Wake up, New York!), and of course the Republican running for New York's 16th Congressional District, who is named Ali Mohamed, but who of course is listed as "Mohamed, Ali". (The Greatest gathered around 4% of the vote.)

And this news from Iowa: We're glad we stayed awake in class - Dave Loebsack becomes our first former college professor to be elected to Congress, defeating 30-year incumbent Jim Leach. Equally as noteworthy as the result was the tone of the campaign, which (as noted by sources such as the Los Angeles Times) was probably the politest in the country. Considering the tone of the campaigns just one state over, we kind of miss Iowa. We also thought Chris Matthews's reference to Prof. Loebsack on MSNBC as "the guy in the crew neck sweater" was a little overly snarky, especially given the blazer he wears in his campaign photo.

We'd also be happy if more TV ads struck a tone like this one for South Dakota Democrat Stephanie Herseth (who, I'll grant you, had a pretty secure reelection bid). She also has the spiffiest campaign t-shirts on the hustings, narrowly beating out this one..

Regardless, it should be an interest next couple of years. I personally plan to get the next chapter of American political history underway with a nap.

Microsoft Thought Police on patrol

2006-11-07T08:57:00.000-06:00

This has nothing to do with anything (as is the case with this whole feature, I suppose), but for various reasons, I ended up on the main MSN page this morning. I've never really spent much time there, but it didn't surprise me to note the list of the "Most Popular People Searches" (nor did it surprise me that this list included Saddam Hussein, Madonna, and Sacha Baron Cohen).

On the other hand, I was somewhat interested to peruse a list MSN provided of "Suggested Searches". Why these searches are suggested is not disclosed, nor am I informed whether these searches are somehow, through some kind of Microsoft proprietary software, directed specifically at me. But it is interesting to consider the five "Suggested Searches" on the MSN list:

New Life Church
Self-aware elephant
Travel terrorism
New Zealand icebergs
Head lice

So okay, I can understand the inclusion of New Life Church on the list. They've been, somewhat comically, in the news lately. And, well, "self-aware elephant" might be an unusual way to research the GOP's introspective nature during this campaign season. And who can argue with looking up "travel terrorism"? I mean, it's always good to take precautions, even if my longest journey in the last few months has been to an apple orchard outside Racine, Wisconsin. (I mean, hey, you never know what's in that plastic bag between the Honey Crisps and the Empires.) But the last two kind of puzzle me. New Zealand icebergs? It's been almost 15 years since last I went to New Zealand, and even then, my concerns about icebergs were limited to whether they'd somehow impede my attempt to buy U2 tickets. And finally, of all the potential search terms MSN could have suggested, "head lice" seems odd. Unless my computer really knows something I don't.

Quaking in my oatmeal

2006-10-31T21:57:00.000-06:00

I have arrived at the conclusion that if I am ever to pull a Halloween prank, I will use oatmeal. No toilet paper in the trees. No egging the front door of a house. Just cooked oatmeal, dribbled on an (in)appropriate surface, and left there to dry.

This conclusion reached me this morning, as it does every morning I skip my early morning stop at Dunkin Donuts, and instead settle into my cubicle with a freshly irradiated bowl of oatmeal.

I’d recommend the Quaker corporation’s Maple and Brown Sugar variety, but that’s only because that’s what comes out of my microwave after a minute and 38 seconds. I have no idea whether cinammon, or French Toast-flavored oatmeal would have the same effect.

But as I say, I come to this conclusion every day I eat oatmeal. It doesn’t hit me as I eat the oatmeal; rather, it strikes me about four hours later, when I remember the mostly empty bowl is sitting on the desk surface behind my chair. At that point, it’s too late to clean it by just blasting it with hot water in the sink, and much sponge work and elbow grease ensues. If I’m especially recalcitrant, the oatmeal will have spent a full workday hardening, and my departure for the afternoon bus will be delayed while I consider my various cleaning options – which almost always results in my adding water to the bowl and sticking it back in the microwave, figuring it’ll either rehydrate the oatmeal and make it easier to remove, or the water will get hot enough that it will scald the offending oat flakes into submission.

This is all somewhat important to consider as the weather gets cooler. I am not a year-round oatmeal guy. As with hot coffee, I wait until the weather has sufficiently cooled to the point where the warm food (or drink) is a nice relief.

(I’ve never really understood the line of reasoning that says a hot beverage – say, coffee – should be the default setting in the morning, rather than a cold beverage – say, Dr Pepper. Frankly, I quite enjoy the sensation that a nice, cold carbonated beverage makes, as it burns off the colonies of film that have taken up residence in my mouth overnight.)

So with the cold snap that has settled in (and which we, in Milwaukee, refer to as “fall”), it’s getting to be oatmeal season. And oatmeal – well, it sticks to the bowl. Given my propensity for putting off cleaning the bowl, I’ve tried branching out to something less sticky.

I like grits, for example. Even the instant ones. In fact, I once was at a somewhat cozy-but-not-altogether-agreeable breakfast place in Damariscotta, Maine and ordered grits. “Oh,” the waitress said, as though to discourage my choice, “they’re just instant ones.” As I recall, she succeeded in talking me out of the grits (new rule of thumb: never order grits in a restaurant north of Maryland), despite the fact that I don’t think I could tell instant grits from, well, slow-cooked(?) grits. I don’t even know if I’ve ever had non-instant grits. Regardless, eating grits – at work – more than once or twice a month seems like it come become an affectation, like getting a “Dukes of Hazzard” desktop theme for my computer.

I’ve also given Malt-o-Meal a shot, but even when I tried the chocolate flavor, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was eating wallpaper paste, or driveway caulk, and always wound up with ¾ of a box left uneaten in my pantry. In fact, there may be one there now.

That gives me another Halloween idea.

And you can bet the Great Pumpkin won't show up, either

2006-10-30T16:40:00.000-06:00

This time last year, my then-17-month old was preparing for her first ever Halloween. She entered a costume contest (as a stadium vendor) and won, and then we shuttled her around to the homes of several of our friends so they could kvell over her other costume (a cow, which should have foreshadowed our move to the Dairy State).

So being a newcomer to southeastern Wisconsin, I was unaware that the Traditional Halloween Paradigm was in need of improvement.

By “Traditional Halloween Paradigm”, I mean the part that goes like this: It’s October 31st. You check your calendar. Ah… Halloween. If you’re a kid, you head out after dinner for trick-or-treating, hitting your immediate neighborhood, and – if your Halloween intelligence is reliable – more distant houses, which – although they’re on the periphery of your neighborhood – are handing out especially prime treats (say, full-size Snickers bars, or perhaps Lik-m-Aid).

If you’re a parent of younger children, you walk along with your kids and their friends, lurking on the curb. You’re ostensibly there to make sure the kids say “thank you” after collecting the treats that they’ll one day need Lipitor to counter. Realistically, you’re there to make sure everything is above board at those weird houses where they ask the kids to come into the kitchen to get candy.

Otherwise, you stay home and try to read, or watch TV, knowing that you’ll be interrupted every 3½ minutes by would-be licensed characters, or would-be pirates, or would-be Richard Nixons.

It’s really not that complicated.

And yet, here in the Milwaukee area, someone decided that it was a system that needed to be more complicated. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Friday published a list of 94 different municipalities and their trick-or-treat hours – from my town of Wauwatosa (1-4 pm on Sunday), to the city of Brookfield (5-7:30 pm Tuesday) to the town of Oconomowoc (4-7 pm Sunday for the Arrowhead/Stone Bank School District, and 6-8 pm Saturday for the Oconomowoc School District).

So not only do you have to know which day your municipality is holding trick-or-treating, but you have to keep track of how long it goes on (and Brookfield residents, be advised – knock on the door at 7:33 pm, and candy will not be given out).

And if that wasn’t complicated enough, within Wauwatosa, several neighborhood associations (including ours) have their own designated times for trick-or-treating – complete with sign-ups, a special candle to display in your window, and fees for the privilege of handing out candy.

My wife’s theory is that all these schemes were dreamed up by new stay-at-home moms who missed the excitement of writing memos at work, and thus needed to exert some level of bureaucracy on their new reality.

It was confusing enough that we went out for a walk yesterday afternoon without stopping to think if the ramifications. Sylvi had already gone trick or treating the day before, at the zoo, where nothing says animal conservation like a small packet of Runts handed out in the Reptile Building. And so we set out, pulling Sylvi along in her wagon. We got three houses down the street before someone came running out, holding a bucket of candy. Quickly, she was joined by the man from the next house down. Never mind that neither had a special candle in the window, and that our daughter’s only costume consisted of her fleece jacket and sunglasses (yes, she decided to go as “cool” for Halloween this year).

Of course, both homeowners also noted that she was the first kid to come by during designated trick-or-treat hours, which means that either everyone else is also baffled by the New Halloween Paradigm (a theory backed up by at least one other Milwaukee-area blogger), or - more likely - that in Wisconsin, a televised Packers game always trumps trick-or-treating.

Or maybe everyone was home, trying to figure out what “Lik-m-Aid” is.

Inconspicuous consumption

2006-10-24T16:20:00.000-05:00

Wow. That was melancholy. Remind me to go lighter on the Lunesta.

Back to our normal wackiness.

Okay, I'm still trying to figure out the Milwaukee dress code. I've lived in a variety of places in the last decade, and the last couple of stops, at least I knew where I stood.

In Washington, DC, I never quite managed to pull off the standard look. That look was: boring. I didn't own enough gray suits, nor enough black shoes to match my fellow professionals. And I didn't mind that, really. I thought the tweed blazer, solid color cotton shirt, screw-ball tie, and khakis gave me a distinctive-yet-approachable look.

My boss thought I needed more expensive-looking pants. I thought that would have necessitated ironing them, so the better solution was to move to Flagstaff and go back into public radio, where the only occasions that required wearing a tie were a) interviewing a US Senator, or b) going to a funeral. There were some optional tie occasions, too - there were people that managed to wear both ties and Birkenstocks to weddings, say. But I could safely wear a flannel shirt and jeans to work and look like roughly everyone else in town.

Like I said, I'm still trying to figure out the Milwaukee thing. It's still public radio, so my one gray suit stays in the closet, but so do my flannel shirts. But the real problem can be summed up by a recent workday:

My schedule included a trip to get the car registered, followed by my typical public radio workday, followed by an extremely atypical appearance at a charity fundraising reception and dinner.

This came on the heels of a lecture and dinner with a bunch of academics and out-of-town journalists the previous week in which I was the only male not wearing either a jacket or a tie, making me feel vaguely like someone's kid brother who'd been invited along.

So despite the fact that the fundraiser promised to serve chili, I wasn't about to fall for the underdressing trap. I dutifully threw on my DC wardrobe - khakis, dark blue Oxford shirt, blazer, semi-nice shoes. I threw a tie in my briefcase as security. (My briefcase, of course, doesn't conform to DC standards. But that is a topic for another day.)

Anyhow, I was a little overdressed for the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles, especially among the various teenagers who were there for their driver's tests. But, you know, I probably wasn't the first person ever to stop in at the DMV on his way to work. However, the DMV had issued me two license plates, which is one more than my Arizona-born car could handle, so I went off in search of a front license plate bracket...

...meaning I probably was the first person ever to stop in at Blain's Farm & Fleet on his way to work - at a public radio station, anyway. A lot of Blazers in the parking lot, but not a lot of blazers in the store. As much as I've tried - and regardless of what I've worn - I've never succeeded in being able to hold my own in any place where auto parts are sold. I'll go in to buy a couple of quarts of oil, and someone will ask me whether I want 10W30 or 5W30, and I'll be exposed as a fraud. Of course, Farm & Fleet didn't have any license plate frames, so they did their best to send me to a place that I'd look even more alien - a salvage yard. I'm not sure how Milwaukeeans are supposed to dress for a salvage yard, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the blazer-and-khakis ensemble. They referred me to a VW dealer, either because they didn't have any license plate brackets, or they figured I'd feel more at home there.

So after three hours of license plate excitement, I made it to work - the one place I feel relatively inconspicuous. I check my e-mail. At the top of the list is one from the woman who invited me to the fundraiser. It includes the following note:

I am wearing jeans, so feel free to be casual!

Did I mention that I don't get the Milwaukee dress code?

Where did that captive audience go?

2006-10-23T16:37:00.000-05:00

It used to be that I loved the sound of my own voice. Or at least I relished the idea of getting up in front of people and having them listen to me for a few minutes. Or, say, an hour. Or two.

In middle school, we would go to assemblies, and there would be some problem with the Eisenhower-era PA system, and as our principal - donned in his white belt and white patent leather shoes – struggled to get the microphone working, I would joke with my friends that that was the perfect occasion to try my stand-up routine. (What would have been included in my stand-up routine at age 13 is anyone’s guess. References to "Super Freak", probably.)

I kept up this kind of thing throughout high school. I have this recollection of being on a van ride back from a jazz festival in Williamsburg, Virginia, and maintaining a running commentary, including invented folk tales and an entire mock radio broadcast of a completely random (and fictitious) baseball game between the Texas Rangers and Seattle Mariners. I also have a recollection that it was at the request of others in the van that I kept this up for the entire ride.

[Mitch’s note: On the other hand, the van ride happened almost 20 years ago, so I concede the story might be one of those events that are, at best, exaggerated, or at worst, apocryphal (like, say, the part about the monologue coming at the request of someone else). I checked in with the only person I still know who was on that van ride and who survived my possible five-hour monologue. She reports a vague recollection of the event, but no lasting emotional scars from being subjected to it.]

All this is to say that few were surprised when I got into radio 15 years ago today. My thinking was that – as long as I was going to be talking all the time, I might as well get paid for it.

The problem is, after you’ve been talking into a microphone, in a darkened studio for so many years, the prospect of talking in front of people whom you can actually see becomes less appealing.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to moderate at an event at a local bookstore. It was a reading and discussion of the book based on NPR’s “This I Believe” series. Basically, my role involved getting up and making one vaguely humorous reference to the day’s Badgers football game, thanking everyone for being there, telling them to check out the station’s website, and then introducing the first speaker.

It went fine – the NPR groupies were out in force, and were perfectly happy to hear what I had to say for the 3 ½ minutes I was at the front of the room.

But after a decade-and-a-half of interviewing remarkable and occasionally newsworthy people – people who have interesting stories to tell - I’ve started having this nagging worry that people are expecting me to have something interesting to say, or at least to speak with a level of gravitas that seems to come naturally to many of the people on the other side of the microphone.

The truth of it is, I’d still be more comfortable making up a pretend baseball broadcast in a van on Interstate 95. Or at least in a place where my listeners don't have the option to change channels.

Playing arts

2006-10-06T16:46:00.000-05:00

Here at the radio show I produce at 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, one of my first tasks after I came on board - before I was even getting paid - was to help hire an arts producer. I undertook this for several reasons - first among them, because the station sought to enhance the arts content of the program. But more importantly, it was because I was afraid that if we didn't hire an arts producer, I would be forced to do most of our arts interviews.

I have nothing against the Arts (with a capital "A"). In fact, arts coverage is one of the areas that makes our program stand out. In the past, I've been only too happy to attempt to correctly pronounce the names of classical composers on the radio. The thing was, most of the composers weren't alive enough - and none of them was in the studio - to correct me.

Here in Milwaukee, our interviews go on at some length, giving people with an ample arts background plenty of time (and, potentially plenty of ammunition) to expose me when I'm in over my head.

So we hired this arts producer. And she does a terrific job, what with her background in being able to pronounce the names of foreign composers, and painters, and other people with more artistic talent than me. Alas, she took the job with some expectation of being able to go on vacation. Which she did last week, leaving me in the position of interviewing actual people who knew what they were talking about. This worried me somewhat.

I've never had a great deal of aptitude for fine art. Not that I don't appreciate it. (As a matter of fact, one of the art interviews I conducted last week was with a photographer whose work actually caught my eye enough that I pursued the interview myself.)

But my problem is in figuring out the vernacular with which to ask intelligent questions. I've never been able to use terms like "dynamic of form" in a sentence the way art critics do. (In fact, I'm not entirely sure what a term like "dynamic of form" even means.) The problem was that my early exposure to art consisted of half a dozen middle school field trips to the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, where the tour guide would speak to half a dozen enraptured future artists about abstract sculpture and 47 antsy non-future-artists who were anxious to go eat freeze-dried ice cream at the Air and Space Museum. ("Hey! It tastes like ice cream, but it feels like styrofoam! Cool!")

So years later, I know that a painting like this:

Is, artistically, superior to a painting like this:

But I'm hard-pressed to explain exactly why.

I did, however, learn enough from my middle school field trips to know that Vincent Van Gogh, who painted the former picture, would be jealous of the guy in the latter picture.

Driving me... to Wisconsin

2006-10-04T16:32:00.000-05:00

Before we get on to today's festivities, I'd first like to thank the National Weather Service for keeping us in Severe Thunderstorm Warnings for each of the past three nights, thus making me reluctant to turn the computer on and post to this blog, lest this turn into our last-ever posting. As it turns, out, it's our 300th.

I’ve been thinking a lot about driving lately. Partly, that’s because I have a sister who’s on the cusp of getting her driver’s license. And partly, it’s because I’ve had a driver’s license for 21 years now, which means that the little laminated card that once was the gate key to the then-exotic world of alcoholic beverages could, itself, now go out and drink.

But mostly, I’ve been thinking about driving because, well, there are a lot of cars on the road in Wisconsin. (Big surprise, that.)

Now in the 21 years I’ve been driving, I’ve lived in six states and one territory. And after each move, I’ve come to the conclusion in each place that the drivers in that locale are the worst drivers in the world. After seven months in Wisconsin, I’ve again come to that conclusion.

Bear with me, as I break down the habits of the drivers with which I’ve previously been acquainted, in sentences that feature syntax nearly as tortured as in the sentence you’re currently reading. We start with:

Maryland. Okay, perhaps not all the drivers in Maryland were the worst drivers in the world, but I was driving there, and I was certainly one of the worst drivers in the world. The highlight of my early driving career was getting my ’78 Ford Fairmont wedged against a support post in a parking garage – so tightly that I couldn’t move it backwards or forwards. A thoughtful passerby (really, a guy who was stuck behind me) came over and politely suggested that I turn the steering wheel.

Iowa. I went to college in Iowa, and my classmates from nearby states such as Minnesota and Illinois insisted that the letters "I-O-W-A" on the license plates stood for “Idiots Out Wandering Around”. Actually, I never thought the drivers there were all that bad. The only concern was that they would lose control of their pickups in their haste to wave at you as you drove by the other way. This was a concern that most veteran Iowa drivers assuaged by developing the “Wave-With-Two-Fingers-While-The-Other-Three-Hold-The-Steering Wheel” technique. Even older Iowa drivers modified the wave further by – instead of using their hands – making an almost imperceptable nod to you as you drove the other way.

Minnesota. I’m still not sure exactly why Minnesota drivers were the worst in the world. They spend a lot of time talking about the concept of “Minnesota Nice” there. And most of the drivers I encountered were relatively polite. But apparently, the police in every small town and hamlet throughout the state were convinced that drivers in Minnesota were awful. How else would you explain the police cars, poised at the village limits in each of these towns ready to pull me, er, all the bad drivers over?

New York. I lived in northern New York. Way north of “Upstate”. Way, way, north of New York City, where the drivers are so bad, it’s too obvious to write a paragraph about them. In my part of New York, the drivers were horrible too – but largely because the climate was such that you constantly had to swerve to avoid pieces of vehicles that rust had decayed so badly that they were falling apart right in front of you. Also, we were right on the Canadian border, which meant I, er, some drivers, occasionally forgot whether they were looking at the “kilometers per hour” or “miles per hour” part of the spedometer as they headed for the border to buy donuts.

Washington, DC. Dupont Circle. Chevy Chase Circle. Cars with diplomatic plates. And drivers, as Dave Barry once termed it, driving according to the traffic laws – of their own country of origin.

Arizona. The problem with Arizona drivers rested in the 300+ days of sunshine per year. All that sunshine (and in Flagstaff, the pleasant temperatures and clean air) apparently results in a pleasant, glass bubble-like sensation as many people drive there. This means that – unlike on the Washington Beltway, when you can be pretty sure they guy in front of you just intentionally cut you off, thanks to the handy gesture he also made – you’re never quite sure whether the driver of the car next to you notices, you, the stop sign, or even the road itself. On several occasions – really – I was driving up the one-way street to my house when a car would come wandering down the wrong way. The other drivers, rather than doing what a normal driving being would – namely, lean on the horn until drivers in surrounding states were aware of what was going on – calmly, pulled over and got out of the way, smiling a smile of blissful Arizona sunshine.

Finally, this brings us to Wisconsin. (Or rather, Wisconsin.) Now I’ve noted before the odd habit that some drivers in the area have – attempting to break the sound barrier between stop signs on the stretch of road in front of my house, a distance of exactly one block. But a recent trip across the state has clued me in to my other favorite (note heavy sarcasm) aspect to the Wisconsin driving experience. Apparently, drivers here believe they are possessed with super powers. You’ll be driving on, say, a stretch of Interstate 94, in the vicinity of, say, the Wisconsin Dells, or perhaps a famous interchange which rhymes with “Parquette”. You’ll be coming down a gradual decline and see, stretching in front of you, a veritable field of red brake lights. In many parts of the country (even in Arizona), this is generally a signal to slow down and wait for the cars to begin moving again. In Wisconsin, however, the belief apparently is that if you maintain your 65 mph until the very last instant, there is some possibility that the field of stopped cars in front of you will suddenly levitate and make way for a smooth sailing experience right past the Dells, or that famous interchange, or wherever.

I have come up with only one other theory to explain this. Tailgating. More than anyplace else I’ve experienced, we have this tailgating culture here. And largely, it’s seen as a good thing. You can drive down I-94 past Miller Park during afternoon rush hour and actually smell the brats grilling in the parking lot – even with your windows closed. People here tailgate before the bank opens. And so, I imagine that many drivers, having heard of tailgating used to describe a driving habit, naturally assumed this behavior was positive as well.

And so I understand why Wisconsin drivers are the worst in the world, I think. My only hope is that when one of them finally rear-ends me, they’ll also offer me a brat. With mustard and sauerkraut, please.

As a matter of fact, I can believe it's not butter

2006-09-25T17:10:00.000-05:00

Say what you want about this country, but By God, we continue to to blow away the rest of the world when it comes to one key measurement: Plastic Food Storage Containers.

Now I realize the Swedish folks at Ikea have a multitude of food storage options (which go by names like "Urk" and "Delp" and perhaps "Rodnunging"), all of which cost $3.00 and are piled in huge barrels conveniently adjacent to the cash registers, but the numbers pale in comparison to what you'll find at American malls, in stores like Linens-Containers-and-Beyond.

Here in the 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, the only thing that distinguishes our lunch today from what we brought with us in middle school is our spiffy Lock & Lock sandwich-shaped, hermetically sealed plastic container. (While we're at it, have you ever heard the word "hermetically" used in conjuction with any other word besides "sealed"? This is a situation that needs to be rectified. I'd take suggestions, but this feature is hermetically edited.)

And that's about the simplest thing on the market. The Tupperware folks have their own well-known version of the sandwich transporter, which accompanies less well-known products such as the carrot or celery holder, the Holiday Snack Canister, and (really) the Kimchi Keeper.

At the same time, our sandwich transporter is probably the most sophisticated plastic container we have at the home office. We've long been subscribers to the "Why Only Use the Margarine Tub For Margarine?" School of Food Storage. This has led to some entertaining moments, like in the brief time period in Flagstaff when we had enough room for our real-live dining room table, and we invited some real-live grown-ups over for dinner (that is, friends who we didn't ask to eat on the couch) and prepared, among other things, some real-live homemade bread.

So, of course, one of our dinner guests asked for butter, at which point I retrieved the tub labeled "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter", only to have the dinner guest report, "This looks like some kind of meat!" (And wouldn't you know he was a vegetarian.) On the upside, at least it was taco meat, and not butter 23 months past its expiration date. The downside is that no one's ever asked us to make bread again.

And so yesterday, it happened again - my wife went to butter her bagel with leftover macaroni and cheese. Fortunately, she didn't mind. Better still - it gave us a great idea for dinner.

Important news update

2006-09-19T09:13:00.000-05:00

Alas, as predicted, 19 Minutes fell short in last week's Milwaukee blog poll, losing out to the perky Marine.

Having lost out on our latest shot at fame (or, perhaps, infamy), we're back to our important mission of keeping you, the 19 Minutes reading public, informed of important world events. So we're pleased to present the following National and International Headlines, which came across the newswire this morning:

Bush to Engage Skeptical U.N. on Mideast
Israel to Withdraw All Troops By Weekend
Muslims Want Further Apology from Pope
Feds Seeking Source of E. Coli Outbreak
Toshiba to Recall Sony Laptop Batteries

and, of course, the the story that will no doubt lead tomorrow's New York Times:

Johansson Happy With Her Curvy Figure

Whether the rest of the world is happy with Scarlett Johansson's curvy figure, is, I would imagine, even more predictable than whether the perky Marine would win last week's blog contest.

Somewhere, Mr. McFeely is blushing

2006-09-14T21:50:00.000-05:00

It was a noteworthy day on the real-life radio show produced at 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters. The host of our program interviewed award-winning author (and Wisconsinite) Jane Hamilton, who has a new book out. Our arts producer scored an even bigger coup, interviewing Alan Alda, whose memoir is out in paperback. Me, I got to tour a rubber and plastics factory.

Actually, I didn't mind the task. I've always been the kind of person who will notice a random object - or a piece of an object, and marvel that there's a factory someplace that produces it. Like, there's someone who goes to work everyday, and his or her job is to manufacture the wooden handles for the miniature crash cymbals that a two-year-old girl might play in an effort to emulate Pittsburgh Symphony percussionist Tim Adams, who appeared on an episode of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood". (In fact, I happen to know just such a two-year-old girl.)

My daughter, in fact, also seems to share in my curiosity about how things are made, at least in the context of Mr. Rogers. She's far more interested in the "Picture Picture" segments on the show in which Mr. Rogers visits the Cheerios factory, or we learn how pretzels are made, than she is in the "Neighborhood of Make Believe". (This is fine with me, because something's always bugged me about King Friday, Neighbor Aber, and X the Owl.)

So today's segment, as hosted by me, could have been titled, "How Obscure Little Rubber and Silicone Parts Are Made". The company's president took me on tour of the plant, which gave me the opportunity to use words like "extruder" in a desperate attempt to sound knowledgable.

The high point of the morning - of, perhaps, my entire radio career - came about halfway through the tour. We had just looked at some round rubber objects which turned out to be the sleeves that fit on the end of a stethescope to keep it from feeling cold on your chest. (Next on Mr. Rogers: A Picture Picture video, "How Sleeves that Fit On the Ends of Stethescopes Are Made")

The next stop was at an impressive-looking form press. The plates came together around the liquid rubber, and when they separated, they revealed probably fifty small, yellow, cylindrical rubber pieces. A factory worker cheerfully pulled each one of the still-steaming hot parts off the machine and placed them in a bucket. She then cleaned off the plates with a blast of compressed air, and started the process over again. It was impressive in an industrial way, and from a radio standpoint, was the first opportunity to collect some really interesting natural, or "ambient" sound.

As I watched the process playing out again, I turned to the company president, tape rolling.

"So what are these parts being made on this particular machine?" I asked.

He thought for a half-second. "Oh, these are the drain plugs for colostomy bags," he replied.

I'm thinking I might give X the Owl another try.

Turning it on and Packing it in

2006-09-11T14:15:00.000-05:00

It was a day I had looked towards with some casual interest since the moving truck pulled into our Milwaukee area driveway and dropped off our belongings seven months ago:

Our first Packers Sunday as Wisconsin residents.

Mind you, I’m not claiming to be a life-long Packer Backer, nor am I at the point where I’m jumping on the Green Bay bandwagon (though, given the past couple of seasons, no one could accuse me of being a fair weather fan). In fact, I’m not even a huge football fan – it tends to fall below baseball and hockey in the pantheon of Sports That Keep Me Up At Night. I’m a New England Patriots fan, but I don’t own any Patriots clothing. (Well, maybe a hat. Or, two hats. Okay, two hats and a t-shirt.)

But after living in Arizona for seven years, where I once was able to buy football tickets half an hour before kickoff – at the stadium box office – I was kind of curious to see what the impact of Packer football would be on the rest of day-to-day life on a Sunday in Wisconsin.

My first indication – I went out to get bagels just before 9:00. Cruising up Bluemound Road on the western edge of town. In a charitable, Sunday-morning-and-there-are-no-cars-behind-me-sort of way, I stopped at a crosswalk to let people cross the street to get to church. Naturally, they’re all dressed nicely, but I couldn’t help but notice there’s an awful lot of green-and-gold in the average wardrobe. And perhaps more polo shirts with Green Bay “G”s than you’d see in other parts of the country.

But things were pretty subdued aside from that – a few Packers references on business signs with slide-out letters, plenty of flags flying from cars.

I had hoped to cruise the supermarkets while the game was on – you can tell how sports-mad a city is by how empty the potato chip aisles are in the grocery stores during game time. [When we lived in Arizona, my wife and I once had a going-away dinner for a friend that had the audacity to take place the night of the 7th game of the World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees. (If you can imagine.) The dinner ended mid-evening, but being pre-Tivo, we didn't want to go home and turn the TV on in the middle of the game. So we went to Target to shop for toothpaste. Not only were we just about the only ones in the store, all the TVs in the electronics section were tuned to the game, so we spent the time trying to talk to each other loudly enough to drown out the sound from the other end of the store. But I digress.]

Anyway, my wife and I got involved in an exciting afternoon of Crawl Space Insulation Repair and then it was just about time to kick off. So I grabbed my foam cheesehead – a going away present from my Arizona colleagues – and plopped myself down in front of the TV, for the first time as a proud resident of Packer Nation.

And then I watched the game. And then I dusted off my Patriots hat.

Votes and more votes

2006-09-09T21:45:00.000-05:00

First, a reminder that anyone who hasn't yet voted for this fine feature (or hasn't voted using all 17 of their alternate e-mail addresses) for Milwaukee Blog of the Week has a few more days. At least I think it's a few more days. As previously noted, I have no idea how the hardworking staff here at 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters came to be nominated, so I'm also a little fuzzy on the groundrules. In any case, if you're still waiting for the right moment to cast your vote, now's a swell time to surf over to MKE Online and click on the appropriate buttons.

After that complicated ordeal, if you're still in a voting mood - or if you need more voting practice before the upcoming general election - another popularity contest worth a web stop is the Quill Awards. I'm a mite turned-off by its self-description ("The Quill Awards pair a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz and have become the first literary prizes to reflect the tastes of the group that matters most in publishing-readers."), which seems to be a cover for giving writing awards to Anderson Cooper, Rachael Ray and Dr. Andrew Weil.

But it turns out that in my other - public radio - life, I've interviewed four authors with books nominated for Book of the Year: Sara Gruen (for "Water for Elephants"), David Maraniss ("Clemente"), Christopher Moore ("A Dirty Job"), and Catherine Gilbert Murdock ("Dairy Queen"). And I can say without question all four of their books are eminently worth reading.

[Mitch's note: Well, strictly speaking, I can't guarantee Maraniss's book is a great read. Someone on my show's staff (no one has copped to this) booked the Maraniss interview, and then didn't mention it to anyone, nor did the publisher send a copy of the book. As a result, David Maraniss and an author escort showed up early one afternoon, and no one was expecting him. Fortunately, a) Maraniss was very understanding; b) he had a copy of his own book with him; and c) he was willing to wait 15 minutes while I at least looked through the table of contents and some of the chapter headings. Fortunately, too, I had been watching a Brewers-Pirates game the night before which had gotten boring enough that the announcers had launched into two innings' worth of Roberto Clemente trivia, so his career was fresh in my mind. But I digress.]

Anyway, they're all worth voting for in their respective categories. Both Moore and Gruen are nominated in the "General Fiction" category - "Water for Elephants" was a page turner with a fun ending and and got plenty of hype, but I'd probably go with "A Dirty Job", because it introduces the concept of the "Beta Male", a concept that fits the 19 Minutes lifestyle pretty well.

Unless you have a teenaged girl in your household, you may not be familiar with "Dairy Queen". (It's nominated in the "Young Adult/Teen" category.) And that's a shame, because of the four - it's the one that had the most lasting impression. The book - which is about a Wisconsin farm girl who wants to play high school football - is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. And the narrative voice is a refreshing, authentic departure from the usual wisecracking, precocious teen protagonist. It's a good read, though I will confess to feeling a little sheepish about getting on the bus and pulling out a book adorned with a tiara-wearing cow on its cover.

I have no recommendations for the "Romance" category, though I was interested to read that one can now get Harlequin Romance books delivered directly to one's cellular phone. I can only wonder about the impact this will have on other genres. For example, the impact of the tiara-wearing cow might be minimized on a 1"X1" cell phone screen.

"I feel like I could blog all day!"

2006-09-07T12:18:00.000-05:00

Here at 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters, we're deep in the middle of our latest Midlife Crisis. (In fact, we've decided it will be easier to have one, constant, on-going midlife crisis until we're around 45. We'll let you know when it's over.)

This current crisis, however, was precipitated by the realization that we've made it to age 37 and no one has called, asking us to endorse their product. This realization hits us every morning on the bus, as we cruise past the billboard featuring former Milwaukee Brewers baseball player Gorman Thomas, plugging something called the "Sleep and Wellness Center" ("I feel like I could play ball again!" the smiling Thomas is supposedly saying, as though the only thing between Gorman Thomas staying in his 19-year-long retirement and his returning to pro ball is a good night's sleep. Although, given the Brewers' recent 10-game losing streak, signing a 55-year-old lifetime .225 hitter might actually be a savvy move. But we digress.)

The point is, here's a guy who hasn't played in a baseball game since 1986, and he's still being asked to endorse products. So I figure there must be plenty of companies providing products and services out there that would be only too happy to hire me as their celebrity endorser.

My first thought was to flash back, Gorman Thomas-like, to 1986. Twenty years ago, I was just starting my senior year of high school, which would make some kind of acne medication an obvious fit - though if I wanted the billboard to read "I feel like I could go back to high school again!", I'd probably want to endorse a product that would actually clog my pores. So I've tried to narrow down my options.

The main consumer good I purchased my senior year of high school was the Szechuan Beef at Chin & Lee's, a hole-in-the-wall take out restaurant in the Kemp Mill Shopping Center in Wheaton, Maryland. It was a remarkable food, and the perfect alternative to the school lunch, provided I remembered to take it out of my locker before it fused to my Trapper Keeper. More remarkable, though, is that a) the place still exists, with basically no change in decor in 20 years, and b) the place still exists, with basically no change in the price of the Szechuan Beef in 20 years.

On the other hand, a hole-in-the wall Chinese restaurant - even one that's lasted for more than two decades - seems unlikely to pay the six-figure endorsement deal that a blogger of the 19 Minutes stature would command. So a more viable option would seem to be approaching the Ford Motor Company to belatedly endorse my 1978 Ford Fairmont:

"Hi, I'm Mitch Teich. Father. Radio professional. Blogger. Driver. Sure, I take the bus to work. But as I cruise down Interstate 94 first thing each morning, I can't help but think how much more fun it would be in my 1978 Ford Fairmont. Vinyl front bucket seats. Three working cylinders. And plenty of room for catchy bumper stickers on the back. The '78 Ford Fairmont. Rescue yours from a junkyard near you. And for a limited time, get 75 cents in Customer Cash when you bring 15 aluminum cans with you. Tax, title, and license highly recommended."

If that doesn't work, I'm seriously thinking of approaching Dunkin' Donuts about Liquid Donut.

We'll try not to attach this to our feelings of self-worth...

2006-09-07T12:07:00.000-05:00

...but for whatever reason, this fine feature is one of five nominees for Blog of the Week at MKE Online, the web arm of a spiffy weekly lifestyle publication printed by the swell folks at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Your chance to anonymously voice your full support for the efforts of the whole 19 Minutes staff is here:

http://www.mkeonline.com/people/blogcontest.asp

We're not sure, but winning the award might just lead to that 19 Minutes movie deal we've been coveting.

The 19 Minutes Cacaphony Orchestra

2006-09-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

I’ve never really been a fan of noise. I realize there’s a certain irony in that, given that in my daily life, I produce a radio show – which means that, in essence, I produce noise for a living. But it’s a public radio show, and is thus given to muted tones, and calm conversation – occasional interviews with opera singer-types notwithstanding.

I work downtown, so there’s a certain expectation that it’ll be noisy during the day. Milwaukee, I believe, actually has a Department of Jackhammering that deploys a crack squad of jackhammerers across the downtown area each day to ensure the city’s decibel needs are met.

But in the evenings, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin is a symphony. Unfortunately, it’s often one of those symphonies that insists on playing music by modern composers less interested in melodic lines than they giving audiences an aural view of their clinical insanity. Around our house, there are several key contributors to the nightly cacaphony:

Harleys. I’m going to write this carefully, because I don’t necessarily need the wrath of the Harley-driving universe descending on this space. And hey, I have no issues with the motorcycles themselves, or most of the people that ride them. They’re all spiffy, and I’m sure I would enjoy myself if I ever traded in the Volkswagen for a Harley. Okay. Fine. So then, the issue is the complusion among some of the riders of these fine pieces of motorcyclical engineering to drive them very, um, loudly down the street. This typically happens around 9:15 pm, which, coincidentally, is about the same time I’m rocking my two-year-old, as we talk about – in her words “things to think about” as she falls asleep. We talk about zoo animals, and we talk about all the things she likes to play with, and the people who love her very much, and “PPPHHHHHWWAPPPPPPPPppppp…ppp…” we have to start over after the motorcycle goes by, on its mission of attaining the highest possible speed in between stop signs, a distance of exactly one block.

But eventually, the cycles and their riders head off to other important missions, or to wake up other two-year-olds, and I head off to bed myself a short time later. My wife shows up after a little while, and we drift off to sleep with windows open to a pleasantly cool Wisconsin evening. This is a mistake, because without fail, around 1:00 am, the local raccoons throw a nightly dinner party in our neighbor’s trash can. They clank bottles, and rummage through things, as the raccoon bouncer shrieks at the local chipmunk population to go find their own dinner party. This usually goes on for an hour, until the raccoons get on their Harleys and go to their subsequent engagements.

And then all is quiet for a five or six hours. Unless it’s trash day.

But noises have irritated me for a long time. I bombed out of my first try at college. Ostensibly, that was as a result of having a GPA so small as to only be visible with powerful magnifying devices. And that was because I never went to any of my morning classes. But I would submit that the reason I never went to any of my morning classes had to do with noise:

I would head off to bed with the best intentions around 10:00. My roommate, Pat, would get home at roughly 11:30. He would invariably try to go about his business quietly, but would invariably make the following three sounds each night, which would invariably be spaced just far enough apart that they would wake me up, and keep me awake long enough that I wasn’t in the mood to get up the next morning for a political science class at which the professor insisted on using the word “Aristotelian” to describe himself:

First, he would get out the slice of pizza he had purchased at 7-11 on the way home from wherever he went every evening (I would guess a girlfriend’s house, but I was never really sure). He would attempt to eat it quietly, but – inasmuch as he’d generally consumed a couple of beers earlier in the evening – he never quite succeeded. If it had been 19 years later, the raccoon bouncer next door would have kicked him out.

Some minutes later (just long enough that I’d start to drift back off to sleep), he’d perch by the window and light a cigarette. Or rather, he’d try to light a cigarette. Pat apparently purchased his cigarette lighters at the Bic Rejects Shop, because the lighter would never work, despite 17, 18, 26 attempts. This was followed by a (muted, public radio-style) swear word, after which he would rummage through his flannel shirts, looking for a pack of matches. The smoking itself was relatively quiet, if not odor free. But this is a rant about noise, not smell.

Finally, pizza consumed and cigarette smoked, Pat’s last remaining task was to brush his hair. I’ve never had long enough hair to relate to the need to brush one’s hair before bed. But it was 1987, and Pat had pretty long, wavy, guitar player-in-a-heavy-metal-band-style hair. And he had a metal brush. SSSSSHHHHHHHIIICCCCCK. SSSSSHHHHHHHIIICCCCCK. SSSSSHHHHHHHIIICCCCCK. SSSSSHHHHHHHIIICCCCCK. It took him a looong time to brush his hair.

And before I knew it, it was 7:15 am, and my alarm went off. And I would shut it off and go back to sleep, merrily working my way towards flunking out and losing much of my hair.

Pat, on the other hand, went on to make the Dean’s list and, I’m told, graduated with honors.

7-11 pizza, however, appears nowhere to be found.

A little something to the tune of "Walk, Don't Run"

2006-08-29T10:49:00.000-05:00

[Editor's note: Initially, I was hesitant to swap material between this space and my other fine feature. Then, I decided that hey, it's my blog and I can do whatever the heck I want. My apologies if you surfed over here from "Small Things Considered" in search of fresh material. Hey, the headline's new, anyway. And while we're at it, so is the Editor's Note...]

So, I went out for a walk this morning. I did this with some trepidation. Not because there was anything especially scary about the walk, although I never know what might happen when I spook the rabbits who have apparently taken up residence in our backyard. No, the trepidation has more to do with image.

Yes, for all the world, I look like I really ought to be jogging. In fact, every six months or so, I kick myself into gear and decide I'm going to go out running again. I tell myself, There's nothing to it. Just run a couple of blocks today. Then add another block tomorrow. And another couple of blocks the next day. Before I know it, I'll be running a mile or two every evening.

The trouble is, I hate running. I always have. Even while I was playing baseball in college and in the - relatively speaking - best shape of my life, I couldn't stand it. The difference then was that I was capable of doing it (it's amazing what having a coach shouting at you will do for your motivation). Nowadays, I run those first couple of blocks and instead of coach shouting at me, it's my legs, bellowing, What the hell are you doing to us? Did we do something to upset you? We thought baseball practice was over 14 years ago. At least take us to batting practice when this is over.

But Tosa is a jogging kind of place. At least it seems to be in the evenings when I get home from work. There is always a steady stream of nauseatingly fit-looking people cheerfully bounding by our house. And I worry that walking amongst them, even briskly, will raise all sorts of questions like, What's the deal with that guy? Doesn't he like to run? I've considered buying an enormous knee brace just for the sake of image.

I realize this is stupid. I realize that no one cares whether I'm walking or running. It's about my lungs, and heart, and legs - not the people running by my house at 7 pm.

And that's why I went walking first thing in the morning. And as it turns out, at 6:15 am, Tosa is a walking kind of place. I passed probably a dozen people, getting their blood moving in a somewhat slower fashion. Some of them were less than 103 years old, even. No one seemed anxious to break into a faster gait.

Except for the rabbits, who all seemed like they were in a big hurry.

Yilidans for a Brighter Tomorrow

2006-08-25T14:20:00.000-05:00

I haven't given up on my dream of being named Ambassador to Yilida.

Yilida, you'll recall, is the mysterious homeland of a genre of AA batteries that power an spinning, light-emitting, and seminally entertaining toy called a "meteor storm". It's a toy that graced the boxes of the 19 Minutes Playroom for months until the batteries finally ran down, at which point we opened the battery compartment to find two AA batteries labeled:

Made in Yilida

We wrote about this enigmatic place, and the exotic images conjured up by its self-described distinction, "Town of the Wire Nettings".

But lo these many months later, we still had not been able to pinpoint an exact location for Yilida on the official 19 Minutes globe. Fortunately, our previous post was able to provide the missing puzzle piece for a fellow Yilidaphile, who related the following e-mail correspondence with the makers of the Meteor Storm:

Having learned the NAME of my toy loaded with batteries from the global superpower motherland of Yilida, I Googled "'meteor storm' toy" and found a toy store selling it that identified it as a product of Schylling Toys.

Schylling has contact info so I wrote an email with the results we all longed for.

From the web page Ms. Goodwin sent me, I googled "Tanjiang Highway 325"
It led me to pages referring to this road near a city named Kaiping, which is part of Yilida's full company name. Fairly safe to assume then that Yalida is somewhere near Kaiping in Guangdong province about midway between Guangzhou and YangJiang along National Highway 325, the gray line connecting those two cities. (http://www.maps-of-china.com/guangdong-s-ow.shtml)

From: William Jacobs
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 10:17 AM
To: info@schylling.com
Subject: "Meteor Storm" batteries

Dear Schylling Toys,

I hope you can help clear up a mystery for us.
A Schylling Toys "Meteor Storm" LED toy of ours ran out of battery power and the original "Wanshifa" batteries shipped with the toys are labeled "Made in Yilida"
Can you possibly tell me where Yalida is. There is growing interest in the too-much-time-on-our-hands community.

Bill Jacobs
www.athensproject.com

On 8/22/06, Jennifer Goodwin wrote:

Thank you for your inquiry - the batteries should be labeled Made at Yilida; that is the name of the manufacturer, as can be found at http://www.yilida-battery.com/english/gongsi.htm . I hope this closes the case for you, and I hope you enjoy the English translations on their website as much as I have.

Thank you again for choosing Schylling,

Jennifer Goodwin, Customer Service
Schylling Associates

www.schylling.com www.tintoys.com

It turns out our correspondent is actually running for County Council in the former 19 Minutes stomping grounds of Montgomery County, Maryland. We'd be tempted to endorse his candidacy, except that:

a) We're reluctant to throw out the years of objectivity 19 Minutes has worked so hard to maintain, and
b) We're worried he'll use politics as a stepping-stone to land the Yilidan Ambassadorship before we can secure it.

Road trip

2006-08-20T16:20:00.000-05:00

Saturday, 11:00 am. My wife, daughter, and I made the trip up from Milwaukee in exactly and hour and 20 minutes. We're driving through the gates at Road America, in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, site of this weekend's Generac 500 auto race, a race that I'd wanted to see ever since I'd first heard of it, roughly five seconds before we passed through the gate.

Actually, the real reason we're here is to meet up with my father-in-law, whose Mazda club is having an annual get-together at the race course. (I'm also aware that, technically speaking, it's a rotary engine club, but all the engines involved happen to be inside Mazda hoods. And since I'm ill equipped to discuss anything engine-related, except on the topic of "things that might go wrong with your '85 Subaru", we'll stick to the Mazda description.) Anyway, my father-in-law has secured a pass to drive his RX-7 on the race course, and offered me the chance to ride shotgun. And as we drive through the gates, I'm debating whether to chicken out. After my one previous experience at a race track, I'm not so worried about my father-in-law's driving as much as the other yahoos who may have turned out for the event.

Saturday, 11:05. I'm feeling better already. In contrast to the crowd that showed up for last month's Craftsman Series race in their beat-up Cutlasses and Ford Rangers, the parking lot in Elkhart Lake is full of Audis, BMWs, and Jaguars. It strikes me that the drivers of these cars are less likely to drive 6 inches off our bumper than the NASCAR crowd. If this group wanted to kill me, they'd more likely use an ice pick or a poison-tipped umbrella. Still...

Saturday, 11:15. We meet up with my father-in-law, whose RX-7 is already parked in the line of cars that are going to go out on the track. There are at least a hundred cars in the queue, including such atypical race cars as a Chevy Cavalier and a VW Golf. (Now, don't get me wrong: I used to drive a Golf for several years, and it was fun, comfortable car. I'm just saying in a race between the '87 Golf and a parking meter, you'd probably do best to feed your quarters into the meter.) With so many cars in line, it strikes me that the track is probably concerned about safety. I decide to go ahead and do it.

Saturday, 11:30. Father-in-law goes off to the "drivers' meeting" with the other hundred or so drivers. No idea what they're talking about, or what directions they're getting. Meanwhile, my wife is running a "passengers' meeting" of her own:

"DO NOT DISTRACT MY DAD," she directs me.

"Not even to change the CD?" I ask.

"DO NOT TOUCH THE STEREO," she retorts.

"I wonder if he's bringing any food along," I say.

Meanwhile, our two-year-old has settled into the passenger seat of "Grandpa's race car" and takes some convincing before she extricates herself. I consider whether any Grand Prix drivers have won a race while driving with a child safety seat in the back.

Saturday, 11:45 am. It's post time, but there's a launch delay (and a mixed metaphor, to boot). I consider that if anything goes seriously wrong, it's actually my fault. My father-in-law, who lives in Minnesota, bought the car from a guy in Maryland seven or eight years ago. At the time, my wife and I were living just across the DC line. We did the scouting report on the RX-7, which meant that the original test driver... was me. And as previously noted, my car mechanics expertise is limited to figuring out how to program the presets on the stereo.

Saturday, 11:55 am. A few minutes late, we roar out on the track, behind (by my count) 17 other cars. Okay, we don't exactly roar. It turns out the first lap is a practice lap (as opposed to the other laps, which are, apparently counted in our permanent records), which means we're cruising around the four-mile-long track at an average speed of 15 mph. This is okay, because at 15 mph, I'm not too concerned when my father-in-law checks his GPS unit.

Saturday, 12:03 pm. Somewhere up ahead, the pace car accelerates. And so do we. We are actually roaring around the track. My actual role in this affair is to take pictures. And so, top down, windows down, baseball cap on my lap, car flying around turns, I'm fiddling with my father-in-law's camera, trying to figure out how to keep all the pictures from looking washed-out on a brilliantly overcast day in August.

Saturday, 12:10 pm. Okay, I've got the washed-out issue solved. Now, the question is how to take pictures that don't just look like we're driving down the highway. Because even at 80 mph, a guy driving a car looks pretty much like a guy driving a car. I decide that, hey, the top is down - I can lift the camera over the windshield and get a shot of the hood, the track, and a little of the track ambiance. At 80 mph, this is trickier than I bargained for.

Saturday, 12:20 mph, er, pm. My father-in-law handles the RX-7 pretty impressively, and the engine does have a delightful roar as he blasts it up through 3rd and 4th gear. It's a "sports car commercial" feel, rather than a "feeling of imminent death" that I imagine would be generated by a trip in a stock car around a mile-long oval. Still, there are plenty of drivers who seem like they're taking out a year's worth of rush hour frustration on the Road America track, including a Volvo driver who barrels by us on a straightaway that's not very long (or straight).

Saturday, 12:30 pm. The VW Golf is still behind us, which is - if nothing else - a morale-builder. We tend to blow him away on the straightaways, but he manages to creep up on us at turns. My father-in-law notes he thinks we've hit 90 mph, but to his credit, he's paying more attention to the track than the spedometer. I consider turning around and taking pictures out the back of the car, but to my credit, I don't.

Saturday, 12:40 pm. There's a hill on the last straightaway that leads up to the start-finish line. It's both an exhilerating and worrisome feeling to fly up that hill at 85 mph - exhilerating because the speed really is a celebration of what an automobile can do; worrisome, because one of these laps will be our last lap, and I'm a little concerned we'll fly over the crest into a forest of red tail lights and I'll regret that the car my father-in-law asked me to test drive wasn't a Sherman Tank.

Saturday, 12:43 pm. The checkered flag goes out with plenty of warning time, and we don't end up becoming permanent parts of the track (Roadkill America?). I emerge from the car with a new appreciation for performance drivers, for the rotary engine, and for sports photographers. And as I walk to where my wife and daughter have been watching, a thought comes over me. Next year, I take the Jetta Wagon on the track. With the car seat.

The Empire strikes back

2006-08-15T13:09:00.000-05:00

The 19 Minutes staff, still smarting after the demise of its monthly column in the efficiently titled Northern Arizona's Mountain Living Magazine (still ranked as one of the top free magazines available in the foyers of Flagstaff-area health clubs) , is pleased to announce its most recent spin-off.

"Small Things Considered" debuted on WauwatosaNOW.com yesterday afternoon. It'lll occasionally look somewhat like (and sometimes exactly like) this fine feature, but will pretty much be limited to local minutae. ("Minutae Rice" was a runner-up name for that blog, but was so thoroughly trashed by everyone I floated it by that I relented.)

Well keep you updated on the progress of 19 Minutes Idol, now in development by a major studio.

The "Joy" of Painting

2006-08-14T14:12:00.000-05:00

When it comes to houses, some people dream of a log cabin in the woods, some wish for a seaside cottage. Still others aspire to a romantic villa in Tuscany or a ski lodge somewhere (probably not Rhode Island).

For my wife, it's not so much the house itself, it's that she's always dreamt of having a yellow kitchen.

We've been at it for a good 30 hours now, and we're just now approaching the point which professional painters refer to as "getting there". Professional painters say this as they work to cover vast numbers of square feet on the walls of large kitchens. If only that were the issue in our case.

Our kitchen's actually a decent size - enough room for a table that we could theoretically eat breakfast on if it weren't covered with stacks of credit card offers, "welcome to the neighborhood" letters from local dentists, and postcards from realtors excitedly noting all the homes that have gone on the market since we moved in, leading us to wonder whether there's a cause-and-effect relationship at work.

Anyway, as far as kitchens go, it's probably no trickier than most. There are plenty of cabinets to work around, appliances to move, and a built-in spice rack to enable us to hold debates over accent colors.

But there was no debate this weekend over what color to paint the kitchen. As you may recall, we were predestined to have a yellow kitchen. We'd actually purchased the paint a couple of months ago from a local paint dealer who knew a Clueless Paint-Buying Husband when he saw one ("Well, if you're going to be painting a kitchen, you're definitely going to want this paint, which resists stains, washes up nicely, wins architectural design awards, pilots a race car, etc."). We chose "Van Gogh Yellow", because nothing says "cheerful kitchen" like a color named after a painter who was so depressed that he cut off his own ear. (Okay, perhaps he wasn't so much "depressed" as he was "insane", but it still seems an oddly cheerful color for the guy.)

So we set about slathering the Van Gogh onto our kitchen walls, which up to this point were painted a color called "Imodium AD Green". It turns out that in a Celebrity Color Death Match between a crazy painter and a anti-diarrheal medication, the soothing liquid wins the first two rounds.

To make matters worse, on several walls, the previous painters had attempted what the design shows refer to as a "faux finish". The trouble is, the whole concept of faux finishing revolves around replicating some kind of textured surface. If that was the case in our kitchen, the surface the previous painters were attempting to replicate was most likely that of cuttlefish parts dipped in white paint and embedded in a green wall.

So by the end of the day yesterdaysome walls looked basically yellow, except around the edges, where the Imodium AD Green stylishly showed through, giving the wall an Anti-Diarrheal Tuscan Villa look ("Hi, I'm Diane Lane for Imodium AD..."). The other walls looked basically yellow, with the occasional cuttlefish part poking through. Then, we ran out of paint, which of course meant the paint store closed at 2:00 pm on Sundays, which of course meant that I headed out to the paint store at 8:30 this morning, which of course meant that our fabulous racecar-driving paint only comes in one gallon increments, despite the fact all we have left is the edges, the area behind the refrigerator, and any remaining cuttlefish.

So the painting continues, and as my wife notes, "This kitchen had better be damn cheerful."

I'm beginning to think Van Gogh had the right idea.

Summer rerun

2006-07-28T08:39:00.000-05:00

The 19 Minutes home office is on its annual decompression trip to the mid-coast of Maine. But, so that the liquid donut business doesn't top our news for the next week-and-a-half, here's a rerun from Sunday, March 27 - for no other reason than it was the entry that popped up at random when I went looking for a rerun. Please note that my daughter is no longer 9 1/2 months old, and as a result, her experience at the Chicago Hyatt this evening (en route to Maine) will likely be a bit different.

Resort living vs. a room at the Inn: a report

So as I mentioned, we went to Tucson last week, allowing our daughter to take a vacation from the stress that's involved in being 9 ½ months old.

We stayed at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, thanks to the generosity of some key relatives of the 19 Minutes staff. But for purposes of this post, let’s pretend we paid the $279/night that our room would normally go for. That’ll make the comparison with the $46/night Holiday Inn Phoenix West work a little better, anyway. We stayed at the Holiday Inn on the trip back north.

Let me start by saying that the Loews is a very nice hotel. The service was extraordinary, and it’s tough to beat having a saguaro cactus literally just outside your door (unless you’re a sleepwalker, I suppose). But I’ve always been a little skeptical about whether I could actually tell the difference between a humorously expensive hotel room and, well, a humorously not expensive hotel room. At least I wondered whether, at $279/night, the Loews was really six times sweller than the Holiday Inn.

Our comparison breaks down into several areas. Here goes.

Location:

The Loews is located, as is everything in Tucson, roughly 75 miles from anything else. The trip off the interstate gives you a good feel for what your trip to Tucson will be like – roads that go on seemingly forever, lined with expensive brown adobe homes wedged onto the hillsides and strip malls that pop up at random intervals. It definitely discourages the riff-raff from interfering with your stay. Their cars would never make it that far.

The Holiday Inn is located a convenient 75 feet from Interstate 10, meaning the sounds you got used to on the drive will follow you into your room. The marquee out front reads “Welcome Riff-Raff.”

The pool:

The Loews has a recreation pool, a lap pool, an outdoor hot tub, and a “cooling off” pool replete with waterfall. The smell of mesquite from the surrounding desert wafts over the entire area. There are dozens of deck chairs around the recreation pool, giving vacationing investment bankers plenty of room to read the Wall Street Journal and bark at their surly underlings via cell phone while keeping one eye on their kids and another on the bikini-clad women in the neighboring chairs.

The Holiday Inn’s pool is located under an overhang at the front of the hotel. It’s walled off from the entry driveway, but even the wall doesn’t keep out the wafting aroma from the fast-food joints across the street.

The room:

Our room at the Loews had a king-sized bed, a couch, an easy chair, and a desk. The mattress had seen better days, or at least wished it had seen lighter guests. Reading material included Condé Nast Traveler, Tucson Living, and USA Today on the one day they got around to delivering it.

Our room at the Holiday Inn had a king-sized bed, an easy chair, a desk, and a refrigerator. The mattress was relatively new and pretty comfortable. Reading material included the guide to the hotel amenities and area attractions. This hit all the hot spots, including the Phoenix Zoo, the world-famous Heard Museum, a nearby batting cage, and the Garden of Jesus’ Suffering.

The bathroom:

No real complaints about the Loews bathroom, unless you count the poor audio quality on the bathroom phone. The Loews bathroom also featured a TV (though it was one of those little ones you’d take camping and not a 50-inch plasma job). It also included a humongous tub, in case our 9 1/2 –month old wanted to get her lap swimming in, as well. Nice soaps/shampoos/mysterious lotions, though for some odd reason, we were never provided with soap for the sink. Enormous towels.

The Holiday Inn bathroom had working fixtures.

Ambiance:

Loews – grand piano and lounge singer in the main foyer.

Holiday Inn – Friday night was some sort of a special “dress up like pimps and hookers” night at the sports bar just off the main foyer. Not that anyone at the Holiday Inn was calling it a foyer.

Kind of a Hobson’s choice, actually, between the two places.

Parking:

Both places noted that the parking lots were under some form of surveillance, but one got the feeling that it only actually mattered at the Holiday Inn.

**

When it comes down to it, both places served their purpose – the Loews gave us a bed and a relaxing (well, as relaxing as it was going to get with a baby around) respite from the everyday. And the Holiday Inn gave us a bed and was, on the whole, somewhat safer than actually sleeping on Interstate 10. Was the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort six times better than the Holiday Inn Phoenix West? Pretty close, actually. Though the Holiday Inn would catch up pretty darn quickly if they put that 50-inch plasma TV in the bathroom.

And now, this fine dining tale

2006-07-26T10:56:00.000-05:00

It's 8:45 am. I've forgotten to bring my packet of oatmeal to work (and besides, how many days in a row can a person eat oatmeal, even if it is of the maple and brown sugar variety?). A brisk walk up Wisconsin Avenue to the Milwaukee Bagel Company. There's a handlettered sign on the door, noting they're closed for the week. I kind of appreciate the fact that there's a bagel place in the middle of downtown that's small and funky enough that the owner can take off for a week, but for Pete's sake, I forgot my oatmeal this morning.

So I go next door. Okay, next door is a tanning salon. I go one more door down. Dunkin' Donuts. Get in touch with my inner New Englander. Shades of "Good Will Hunting" along the Milwaukee River.

Whatever. I order an iced French Vanilla coffee. Large. I'm given the option of cream and sugar. I opt for both. Extra sugar, actually. It comes back a lovely tan color.

The first sip comes through the straw accompanied by a healthy measure of sugar crystals. It takes just one more sip for me to figure it out. I'm drinking liquid donut.

This is the most perfect drink ever concocted.

Of course, I'm never allowed to drink it again.

A low interest rate

2006-07-25T16:36:00.000-05:00

One of the spiffy things about being a journalist is getting to ask nosy questions. Or at least feeling empowered, when I see something that piques my interest, to ask what the heck is going on. I do this, as long as I have a microphone with me, or at least a notebook that says "NEWS" in large letters. Otherwise, I feel like just another schmuck bugging people to know what's going on.

Anyway, the side effect to this is my inability to countenance a lack of curiosity. I don't understand the mindset of someone who - given a situation in which there are barricades, dozens of emergency vehicles, protesters holding signs, and traffic backed up for miles around - goes about his business seemingly oblivious to the scene unfolding around him.

And yet, that was the scene on the bus the other day (and here you thought I was constructing a brilliant-yet-hypothetical scenario), as several people approached the driver to ask a) why the busses were all running so late, and b) why the route had been moved to a different street than usual.

The answer, of course, was that the President of the United States was going to a fundraiser at a downtown hotel (which for some reason necessitated closing a street on one side of the hotel, but not the other). The driver claimed to have no idea what was going on - leading me to believe he either thought he was performing some sort of national security-related function by not divulging his knowledge of the situation, or he honestly hadn't bothered to ask why his route had shifted and the traffic had backed up and the protesters were spilling into the street and there were a thousand police cars with their lights flashing just down the block.

One of the less-spiffy things about being a journalist is feeling the need to inform strangers on a bus when you actually know the answer to what's happening around you.

But there are plenty of would-be reporters out there, and so I let one of the would-be journalists on the bus handle the situation. I thought about giving him my notebook that said "NEWS", but then he got the facts of the story wrong.

In case you weren't streaming

2006-07-19T17:12:00.000-05:00

We get plenty of e-mails here in 19 Minutes World Media Headquarters via that spiffy e-mail link that shows up on my profile page. Most of them, of course, are for offers for Cialis - or, as the e-mails like to call it, C!@l1s (as though spelling the name of a prescription drug with an at-sign and an exclamation point makes it seem more legitimate). But in our parallel e-mail universe, our readers are clamoring to learn what's happening in the interview wing of the 19 Minutes office complex.

This is especially key since our departure from our past headquarters rendered our podcasts inoperative. One of these days we'll get the 19 Minutes technical team to remove the outdated links.

In any case, to appease the screaming and teeming masses from our parallel universe, here are some of the highlights from our radio existence in the past few weeks:

Pauls Toutonghi has written an entertaining, mainly fictional account of a first generation Latvian-American growing up in 1989 Milwaukee. He was also a terrific interview, especially as he read from his book, "Red Weather", noting his interpretation of the protagonist's mother was based on his own mother's accent, which he conceded sounded a little too much like Count Chocula.

Hazel Barton is something of a rock star in her field, which of course you already know is the microbiology of caves. She's one of the cave explorers featured in the Imax film, "Journey Into Amazing Caves", and speaks articulately about why studying organisms called "extremophiles" is important. But she's equally eloquent about why caving will never be an "extreme" sport - mainly because no one can see your brightly colored spandex when it's underground and covered in mud. And she notes that scientists can also wear nice clothes above ground, too. Really. She said that.

In an effort to interview only people with "Hazel" in their names who like nice clothes, we also spoke with Robin Hazelwood, a Wisconsin native who managed to attend an Ivy League school while simultaneously working as a fashion model. She's also written a mainly fictional book called "Model Student" about, well, a Wisconsin native who manages to attend an Ivy League school while simultaneously working as a fashion model. To my knowledge, the book's not nominated for a Pulitzer, but it is most definitely an engaging read, and Hazelwood was a witty, candid, and thoughtful interview. We're thinking of instituting a new policy of only interviewing former fashion models.

Richard Russo's "Empire Falls" did win a Pulitzer. He was a fantastic interview, and one of the rare people who's done a million interviews and still manages to remain introspective, or at least pretends really well. I'm sure it wasn't the first time he'd noted that "the first thing an author does when he wins a Pulitzer is get Caller ID," but it still sounded fresh. We're rerunning the interview tomorrow, but if you just can't wait, the original interview is still archived, along with its spiffy picture of Russo with me. Plus, the movie adaptation of "Empire Falls" is worth checking out, though unlike our streaming audio, it's not free.

And also in recent weeks, we interviewed Minneapolis-based musician Brianna Lane, who stresses the word "music" is at the end of her URL, so that it's not confused with a former porn site. Unfortunately, the part of the interview where we attempted to justify the music wee had on our respective iPods was lost to the cutting-room floor. But her album, "Radiator", is fantastic if you're into acoustic guitar-based stuff (actually, it's fantastic regardless of your tastes), and the interview's music clips should at least whet your appetite.

From there, we're on to other important topics, like figuring out how to use "whet" in another context.

Looking for some surreal estate

2006-07-17T22:26:00.000-05:00

Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran an article about a new trend in the real estate industry - wherein home-building companies, to show off their model homes, hire actors to portray a "typical" family living in those homes. The idea, presumably, is to help potential buyers better visualize what living in these homes would be like, at least if they were better-looking and had nicer taste.

It kind of surprised me to read this story, because it was a tactic that seemed decidedly unWisconsin-like, unless things have changed radically in the four months since I moved here. But a closer inspection revealed it was a reprint of a New York Times article, datelined Santa Clarita, California. This was less surprising, considering current trends in the California real estate industry include charging $950,000 for a refrigerator carton under the 405 Freeway, plus forcing prospective buyers to write a love sonnet to the current owners, plus free pedicures for life, plus the sellers get to jump up and down yelling, "Big money!", as though they're on "Wheel of Fortune". (My wife and I considered all these options when we were considering a job in California last year, and decided moving to Jupiter was a more cost-effective option, especially considering I ended up not getting the job.)

Of course, hiring actors to hang out in Wisconsin houses might be a shrewd move, when you consider some of the houses we looked at in the Milwaukee area. For example, there was the house that was still being used as a "day care center", which meant as we were looking in the linen closet, the woman who owned the house was hanging out on the couch, smoking a cigarette and watching soap operas while the two kids in her charge slept on the couch next to her.

Most of the houses we looked at were empty, though, which meant that there would have been plenty of room for actors to ply their trades. And so in case we decide to look at houses again in the near future, allow me to help the real estate actors of the world find their motivation, because acting like the 19 Minutes household would require some specialized acting talents.

For starters, the husband and wife would need to spend much of their time debating whether it would be worse to have lace curtains in their bedroom, or no curtains at all. The husband would spend the rest of his time on the front steps, playing an incomprehensible game with his two-year-old daughter. The game basically involves taking small rocks and placing them in a plastic cup - but God forbid he tries to put the wrong rock in the plastic cup, because then all the rocks are dumped back out on the ground and the game starts over. The wife would also be in the yard, pulling weeds, then second-guessing whether they were weeds or plants that would have yielded beautiful flowers, had they only stayed in the ground for another week.

For her part, the two-year-old would divide the rest of her time between discovering the miracle of sock fuzz between her toes, and asking her dad to tell the "t-shirt story", which was the exciting story he made up on the spur of the moment about his t-shirt ("Once there was a mommy and a daddy. And one day they went to a store called 'Sam's Club' in a place called Flagstaff, Arizona...").

But there's probably a good chance that whenever we go house hunting again, the trend of hiring actors will likely have passed. And that's why I'm polishing up my sonnet writing, just in case.

Not soaring gently into that dark night

2006-07-11T16:13:00.000-05:00

And speaking of the Copper Peak International Ski Flying Facility, we've recently learned that the eagles and raptors are apparently the only ones enjoying the hill's updrafts, since skiers haven't launched themselves off the jump since 1994.

There's an interesting website that decries that fact, noting that Copper Peak should be the US ski jumping equivalent of Yankee Stadium, Lambeau Field, Churchill Downs, or the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Meanwhile, the organization that maintains Copper Peak as an observation tower in the summer has its own website, with an important message from its president.

If nothing else, at least it's not the ski jumping equivalent of Tiger Stadium.

Soaring gently into the collection

2006-07-11T15:50:00.000-05:00

I have some strange hobbies. Most of them don’t take up much time. My business card collection, for example, continues to exist much as it did when I was 15, only now it's in the basement of my own home, rather than taking up bookshelf space in my highschool-era bedroom between the Bloom County books and Spenser novels. (As an actual working person, I tend to accumulate more business cards than I did at age 15, but I'm not considering the cards strewn around my desk as part of my collection yet.)

But the more relevant hobby (to this column, anyway - it's not really relevant in any other way, shape or form) reared its head over the weekend on a trip to the western edge of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

I like picking up the tourist guides printed by local chambers of commerce. Partly, this is to find interesting stuff to do when you're in a place like Ironwood, Michigan. But more frequently, they provide a great opportunity to peruse some of the most tortured syntax in the history of the English language. Today's entry comes courtesy of the Adventure Guide published by the aforementioned town in Michigan:

On any given day, one may see a pair of Eagles or other Raptors soaring above the hillside of Copper Peak International Ski Flying Hill. Regardless of the direction of the wind, there is always a gentle updraft on the 600 foot landing slope of the only ski flying facility in the Western Hemisphere which enables these birds of prey to capture air under their wings and soar gently above the hillside.

(There are countless other ski flying facilities in the Western Hemisphere, of course, which allow the birds to soar aggressively above their respective hillsides.)

And now for something vaguely different

2006-07-06T21:47:00.000-05:00

I was never really part of the drug scene at any of the colleges I attended. This was largely because I never actually used any drugs. But I had friends in college that experimented with a variety of controlled substances (including one who used his occasional marijuana use as an excuse to his parents for his poor grades, despite the fact that the real reason was that he was spending too much time with his girlfriend. But I digress.), and they often liked to have me around as they were going through whatever they were going through. That's because I had, and continue to have bizarre thoughts like these:

It's time for Chinese restaurants to freshen up their placemats with some new zodiacal years. I'm tired of having been born in the "Year of the Rooster", though it was nice of them to swap out the word "cock" and thus eliminate 90 percent of the fun junior high school students have at Chinese restaurants. But if they can make that change, there's no reason they couldn't do something more radical. And that's why I'm proposing the following new Chinese years over the next decade:

2006: Year of the Anvil.
2007: Year of Top Soil.
2008: Year that Won't Stick to Most Dental Work
2009: Year of the Bug that's Flying Around in My Floor Lamp
2010: Year of Excedrin
2011: Year of Mucilage
2012: Year of Hogan's Heroes reruns
2013: Year of the Al Stewart hit, Year of the Cat
2014: Year of farfel
2015: Year of Pueblo, Colorado

We'll wait a little while before we propose the drawings that'll appear on the placemats.

Bizarre Thought #2: Imagine you're from a country with no tradition of cable TV. Say, Burkina Faso. Now, pretend you've traveled to the United States and are looking for educational programming on television. And now, imagine that you get confused and believe QVC is actually a university, and not a shopping channel. Think of all the wackiness that ensues when you write to pitchman Bob Bowersox and suggest he ask for a sabbatical.

(And just a reminder that rum and Cokes were the strongest thing to enter my system in college...)

and finally, Bizarre Thought #3: Wouldn't it be just incredible if Kenneth Lay died mysteriously before he could be sentenced for his role in the Enron debacle? I think that would be terrific, because it would give people something to talk about with the Vincent Foster conspiracy buffs.

But that one's way too far-fetched.

What I did on my wife's summer vacation

2006-07-02T22:27:00.000-05:00

Here in the 19 Minutes Home Office, we're around 32 hours into our latest Solo Dad experiment, while my wife is reuning with some college friends halfway across the great state of Wisconsin (well, 70 miles or so). It's not the first time we've solo'ed (note the entertaining use of the first person plural connected to the word "solo") for multiple days, but it is the first time in a while we've gotten around to blogging about it. So let's dive right and recap the weekend, and while we're at it, take a couple of gratuitous swipes at the military:

Saturday, 1:45 p.m., Madison, Wisconsin: The transfer of power officially takes place in a parking garage along State Street. There's no lowering of a flag, just my wife putting Sylvi in her car seat and kissing her on the forehead, as I drive back to Milwaukee.

Saturday, 1:50 p.m.: Sylvi may have fallen asleep, but I'm not sure, since she's wearing sunglasses and still clutching her sippy cup.

Saturday, 2:00 p.m.: I'm pretty sure she's fallen asleep, since her head is now slumped to the side and she's dropped her sippy cup. The downside to her napping on the ride home is it eliminates the possibility of my own nap later. The upsides to this are a) at least she's napping, and b) I can listen to whatever CD I want on the hour-and-a-half drive. So why am I still listening to "The Backyardigans"? Okay, just one more repeat of "A Pirate Says Arrr", and I'll switch.

Saturday, 3:25 p.m.: We're approaching Wauwatosa, and our exit. Sylvi's still asleep. There's no way I'll be able to accomplish the Car-to-Crib Sleeping Child Transfer. I may have solo'ed many a time before, but I must have been absent on that day of Parenting College. So we'll drive towards Lake Michigan - if Sylvi wakes up, she can check out the big bridges, giving the trip the veneer of a Cultural Experience.

Saturday, 3:28 p.m.: Sylvi, naturally, wakes up half a mile past our exit. She spots an airplane out the window, which gives me a great idea: "Hey, Sylvi - do you want to go watch airplanes at the airport?" She does, and we're rewarded with an observation parking lot adjacent to the runway, and which I never knew existed. Alas, the wind is blowing around 40 mph, and the takeoffs and landings are few and far between. There's also a sign advising us we can hear the planes by tuning into 88.5 fm. I do this, and tell Sylvi, and then realize that "hearing planes" for her involves a noise like "Vrrroooom!", and not the sound of people saying words like "niner". After 15 minutes of this, I decide to get the car washed.

Saturday, 4:00 p.m.: Sylvi deals with the automatic car wash pretty well, considering the enormous floppy brushes resemble Muppets from Hell (or at least Elmo after a tragic Cuisinart accident). She's fine right up until the rinse cycle, which makes sense, considering she's fine with baths right up until it's time to rinse.

Saturday, 6:00 p.m.: After a couple of Tivo'ed Mr. Rogers episodes, it's time for dinner. Just before dinner, I make the mistake of calling the Kopp's Frozen Custard flavor line, and find out the Flavor of the Day is "Sprecher Root Beer Float". This is a mistake because I'm going to be impatient for Sylvi to finish eating her dinner, whatever it turns out to be.

Saturday, 7:30 p.m.: Sylvi finishes eating her nine bites of macaroni and cheese and half a bowl of raisins. I had planned to make myself dinner after she finished eating, but at this point, I settle for the rest of her macaroni, and we set out for Kopp's.

Saturday, 7:31 p.m.: I lift her down the stairs to go out to the car and puzzle over why her pants feel wet. Perhaps it has to do with the pungent odor emanating from her posterior. Hmmm.

Saturday, 7:32 p.m.: We're back to the drawing boa- er, changing table, as we discover the World's Largest Poop has overwhelmed her Pampers and forced a last-second pants change. Sylvi requests a skort, but settles for shorts when Dad's not absolutely sure whether her skort matches her shirt, and he's pretty sure Mom has spies throughout the Milwaukee area who will rat him out if he takes his daughter out in a mismatched outfit.

Saturday, 7:40 p.m.: We're out the door. On the way, instead of asking where Mom is, she inexplicably calls for Kristi, one of my wife's college friends, whom Sylvi has basically just met today.

Saturday, 8:00 p.m.: Against my better judgement, I order two scoops of Sprecher Root Beer Float in a dish. I do this because I love both root beer floats in general and Sprecher Root Beer in particular. As it turns out, as a frozen custard flavor, Sprecher Root Beer Float is a little disappointing. Sylvi and I finish it anyway, which has me a little concerned about her readiness for bed when we get home.

Saturday, 9:15 p.m.: Apparently the custard effects are offset by her shorter-than-usual nap, and she falls asleep without even so much as one verse of "Zamboni", which, honest to God, is what she wants to hear every night.

Sunday, 7:45 a.m.: After a pretty lame edition of the Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle on NPR, I get out of bed, which isn't easy, because I celebrated a successful day of Solo Dad by watching an Atlanta Braves-Baltimore Orioles game that I recorded for no good reason, which got me into bed around 1:00 am. Sylvi probably won't wake up for at least another hour, so that gives me a little time to read the Sunday paper and take a shower without ducking my head out from behind the curtain every 15 seconds.

Sunday, 8:45 a.m.: Bingo. Sylvi's up. "All done sleeping," she announces, repeatedly, until I can make it into her room, roughly 20 seconds later.

Sunday, 9:30 a.m.: Super Solo Dad has kicked into action. We've gotten her dressed, fed her raisin bran (with a few spoonfuls of Dad's Apple Jacks, just to allowe her to appreciate the finer things in life), and we're starting to pack up for the zoo.

Sunday, 9:40 a.m.: We're in a holding pattern as I stop and try to figure out whether the name "Apple Jacks" is, in some way, clever. It seems like it ought to be a play on words of some kind. I try reversing some letters. "Japple Acks". "Ajjle Packs". I can't figure it out. This is what Will Shortz should have quizzed the puzzle contestant about this morning.

Sunday, 10:20 a.m.: Amazingly, we're closing in on the zoo. This is going to be great. It's Summerfest weekend in Milwaukee, and besides, it's only 10:20 a.m. Who the hell is going to be at the zoo this early?

Sunday, 10:22 a.m.: There's a huge line of cars waiting to get into the zoo. People wearing blue shirts with American flags and the words "Operation Freedom" are directing traffic into the parking lot. Gee, there sure are a lot of cars with USMC stickers on them. And mine with an NPR sticker. Finally, I reach the entrance booth. A teen, who looks as puzzled as I do, reports, "It's Eye-rack-ee War day at the zoo. They're expecting 17,000 people today." Great. Maybe we'll just check out the hippos and go home.

Sunday, 11:00 a.m.: There are, indeed, a lot of people at the zoo, celebrating our dubious success in Iraq by checking out the turkey vultures. And really, what are we fighting for over there, anyway, if not to preserve some people's inalienable right to smoke just 25 feet from the sign noting the "Northwestern Mutual Family Farm is a smoke-free environment"? [Gratuitous Swipe at the Military #1 follows] Anyway, our dubious success in Iraq probably shouldn't be a major surprise, considering the difficulties some of the people were having deciphering the zoo map today. On the other hand, it was a largely polite crowd, and I didn't worry about terrorists taking over the Seal and Sea Lion show.

Sunday, 1:00 p.m.: Sylvi's a huge fan of the Seal show, actually. I was sort of hedging on whether to try to wrangle her in line for 15 minutes without some parental backup. But as she usually does, Sylvi surprised me, and spent the 15 minutes entertaining everyone around by doing an interpretive dance to the Cher music blasting from inside the seal arena. (Or was that the Seal music blasting from the Cher arena?) This worked especially well, because the two-year old boy next to us in line was busy having a meltdown, which further reinforced Sylvi's image as Perfect Girl. We are rewarded with front-row seats at the Oceans of Fun show, at which we're informed that all the exhibits at the zoo attempt to accurately portray the animals' natural environment, after which we're reminded that the Oceans of Fun show is sponsored by Miller Beer, which explains the big sign but leads me to wonder what the natural environment of an Atlantic Harbor Seal actually looks like.

Sunday, 2:00 p.m.: After all the running around at the Zoo, we're primed for a nice, long nap this afternoon, which will hopefully accommodate a nap for me, too. Sylvi starts drifting off to sleep five blocks from our house, but I just manage to keep her awake...

Sunday, 4:00 p.m.: ...for the next hour and 40 minutes. Actually, I change her diaper and get her into bed with no problem. She then proceeds to have an animated conversation with whatever stuffed animals will listen. By 4:00, she's still chatting loudly, and punctuating it with loud kicks on the side of the crib. Finally, she starts calling out, "Mommy! Mommy!" I think about boycotting her until she remembers which parent has been on duty for the past 28 hours, but relent.

Sunday, 4:45 p.m. We go out to get dinner. Boston Market. I'm pretty sure we went shopping on Friday so that I could feed myself and Sylvi this weekend, but to this point, I've come up with macaroni and cheese, raisin bran, applesauce (at the zoo), and dinner out. On the other hand, she blasts through her mashed potatoes, some (yes!) more macaroni and cheese, some of my roasted chicken, and a large piece of cornbread. She falls asleep on the ride home.

Sunday, 5:30 p.m.: But as tempting as it is, there's no way I'm letting her nap at 5:15 p.m., so I wake her up, and get out the miniature soccer goal she has, along with two soccer balls. She proceeds to demonstrate that she could have beaten Brazil yesterday, as she somehow manages to dribble one ball with each foot and kicks them both into the goal. Satisfied that her full-ride scholarship to UNC is secure, she goes off to collect little rocks in a plastic cup, which she will then stir with a stick and announce "Sylvi is making smoothies." (Everything she says is in present progressive tense these days, which gives the impression of having a conversation with a Russian just learning to speak English: "Daddy is having cold coffee now...", or "Sylvi is having big poop.")

Sunday, 8:00 p.m.: We've dragged out the evening to the point I'm pretty sure she'll be off to dreamland soon. We get her changed into pajamas and she requests a longish book, "The Happy Lion", which she's figured out I'm a sucker for reading. I like the book because a) there are lots of French names (Monsieur Dupont, Madame Pinson, etc.) and I enjoy putting into use the accent I picked up in six years' worth of French classes, without having actually learned any French; b) Sylvi has already figured out how to say bonjour, which is worth the price of admission; [Gratuitous Swipe at the (French) Military #2 follows] and c) there's a great scene where the Happy Lion goes wandering down the street, cheerfully saying "Bonjour" to everyone, and the French military band immediately beats a retreat to the alleyways and sidewalk cafes. I read "The Happy Lion", sing one rendition of "Zamboni", and she's asleep.

Sunday, 10:27 p.m.: She's still asleep, despite the fact that our various Wauwatosa neighbors have decided this is a good time to shoot off fireworks, despite the fact that IT'S JULY 2nd, YOU IDIOTS! WHY CAN'T YOU GET YOUR DAMN FIREWORKS OCCASIONS RIGHT?

Of course, the better question is, why haven't I gone to sleep?

Hey Tux Boy, you breathin' my air?

2006-06-30T17:00:00.000-05:00

So it dawns on me that we've had two tuxedo references in this space in the last week. And now it's three, which actually equals the number of times I've actually worn the tuxedo I own.

I bought a tuxedo for my wedding, using the Guy Logic that says, "well hey, if the bride spends $47,000 on a dress she's only going to wear once, why shouldn't I spend a few hundred dollars on a piece of formal attire I could wear literally hundreds of times?"

I used this piece of logic even though the only previous occasions that had called on my to wear a tuxedo were a) the aforementioned Winneshiek (Iowa) County Fair Queen Pageant; b) the aforementioned (in the comments section of the same posting) Decorah (Iowa) Bridal Show; and c) my brother's wedding (not in Iowa).

If nothing else, the tuxedos employed for occasions a) and c) were at least timeless styles - no powder blue, no ruffles, no loud vest. Ironically, the Decorah Bridal Show (which was employing me as a "celebrity" escort for the women modeling the wedding gowns) put me in the least attractive of any of them - a black tuxedo with a long, white collar, giving off the effect the I had a wet towel around my neck - as though I'd just changed into my tuxedo after playing racquetball.

By the time my wedding rolled around, I was living in Flagstaff, which at the time had two formalwear options - one was a formalwear/lingerie boutique which employed a little too much red velvet in the decor for me to be comfortable with. The other was normal enough store, but after the saleswoman critized my taste enough ("Oh, cummerbunds are so 1990... What you want is a nice, flashy vest. And maybe a white collar...") that I gave up and went to San Diego to buy a tuxedo. (Hey, what's an eight-hour drive, when you consider I'll get to wear it literally thousands of times?)

So of course I wore it to my wedding. And, a year later, to a charity fundraising ball, as moral support for another guy who wanted to wear the tuxedo he had bought for his wedding. And I wore it as the Master of Ceremonies at a community orchestra concert last winter in Flagstaff, which gave me the opportunity to tell people about Handel, while at the same time trying to figure out if my cufflinks had fallen off.

I'm sure I'll get to wear it again before too long. I considered putting "owns a tuxedo" on my résumé back in my job-hunting period, but decided that would only help if I were applying for a position has a billboard model for Indian casinos, or a job drawing lottery numbers on TV.

So I'll keep looking for opportunities. Or co-workers in need of a formal racquetball game now and then.