Author: Jeremy Stratton

  • Simulated Madness

    Who could forget the game last December when Douglas Stewart, the low-scoring walk-on from Minneapolis, stepped out from the shadows of his all-conference teammates to lead the Annapolis Fightin’ Crabs to a national championship? You’re forgiven if you don’t follow the defending champs; they don’t, alas, exist in the realm people persist in calling the…

  • “No, man, you cannot divide by zero!”

    Many years ago, someone scratched these words on the metal divider of a men’s room stall in a pizza joint near Hamline University in St. Paul: “Anonymous dialogue is a means of sanity.” The self-reflective statement could hold many meanings. It might look inward to the author’s motives—one can almost hear the sigh of mental…

  • Pipe Dreams

    Pipe smokers like to claim they live longer than nonsmokers. More than four decades after the fact, they’ll still cite a 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking, which stated: “Death rates for pipe smokers are little if at all higher than for non-smokers …” That report and others that followed warned of negative health effects…

  • Sol Food

    The call came on a cloudless weekday afternoon. “Hey, it’s Luther, I’m going to take off early and fire up the parabolic.” Needless to say, I rushed right over. “Fire” is not exactly the right word in this instance, as the only flame involved in the parabolic’s operation is more than ninety-one million miles from…