From Moderator: Peter Barus is a great friend, going back a half dozen years or so. When first I knew him, he was an out-east big city guy, a computer specialist, an excellent trainer and all around good guy. Two or three years ago or so he and his spouse moved into the very rural […]
Years ago, in some unremembered periodical, I recall seeing two seemingly identical black and white photos. Both were of some stern looking Communists during Stalin’s time: all men wearing suits. The casual observer would have seen no difference in the photos. But the caption pointed the reader to a particular place in the photo. In […]
Note responses section at end of this post. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in a clinic waiting room while one of my kids was having an eye appointment. I happened to pick up the latest issue of Time magazine (Sep 17, 09), whose cover story is the right-wing flamethrower (he and his large following would […]
This morning, at the State Capitol Rotunda in St. Paul, I’m honored to read two brief tributes to WWII veterans which appear in the 2009 edition of the MN Blue Book, being released today. I saw a flier on “Vote in Honor of a Veteran” in the summer of 2008, and wrote the two tributes […]
See comment at end of post Annelee Woodstrom is 83 years young today, and what a remarkable 83 years it has been. She’s one of my role models. What a life. What an example. We saw her reading from her book “War Child, Growing Up in Adolf Hitler’s Germany” one week ago today. We were […]
Wednesday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune carried a long front-page article about a U.S. Senate action “to prohibit the Department of Housing and Urban Development from giving federal housing money to [ACORN #mce_temp_url# ]… because of some “ACORN workers, who appeared to blithely encourage postitution and tax evasion…[through] amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and pimp and recorded on […]
Saturday, during President Obama’s time in Minneapolis, a friend of mine did a little experiment with the protestors outside. Bruce explains it best: “At the Obama rally on Saturday, I approached several anti-reformers as a panhandler asking for a handout to help me pay my lapsing health insurance premiums, Some told me to ask the […]
Overnight I had a vivid dream, which usually means something has been on my mind. This one was in a large room, filled with many people, many “mad as hell” about the descent of their local newspaper into (they felt) irrelevance. In my case, the dream was about the newspaper we subscribe to and read […]
UPDATE at end of this post A family wedding occupied our time on Saturday September 12; absent that I probably would have stood in line to try to get into the local Target Center in Minneapolis to hear President Obama on Health Care Reform. As expected, he filled the house with more than 17,000 local […]
At my age, it’s a given that I’ve been to many weddings over the years. Yesterdays was a bit more special than most, even though I had no direct involvement with it, other than attending and participating as a guest (the bride-to-be was my wife’s niece). Sometime after the wedding and the dinner, somebody mentioned […]