Author: The Rake

  • The Backyard Beat

    Brian Lambert [“Local News, Global Profits,” June] thinks covering and reporting local news is “easy to do—any writer can read the minutes of a planning commission meeting, or watch a ball game and file a story about it.” Apparently he has never covered local news. Or covered it conscientiously. I won’t bother pointing out how…

  • Death of a Sunday Ritual

    As we enter the modern age of paperless-ness, there seems to be an increased hue and cry bemoaning the impending loss of the paper newspaper. I’m one of those people. What will I line my bird cage with, wrap my fish in, or spread across my floor as I paint my living room? Will newspapers…

  • British Virgin Islands

    The attached photo is of me and my wife Christine Homsey sailing a 52 foot Beneteau Oceanis 523 in the Sir Francis Drake Channel just South of the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. We are part of a group that every few years charters sailboats bareboat (we crew the boat ourselves) in…

  • Panama

    Margaret Lonergan in Panama Author(s) and Location: Margaret Lonergan, Minneapolis

  • Smells Like [insert town name here] Spirit

    How sad and impoverished must life be for the anosmiacs among us, those poor wretches who have lost the ability to smell? C’est tragique! as Marcel Proust might say, who also said, “When nothing else remains from the past, friends and things long gone, the odors from their living remain as tiny drops of their…

  • Charles Lazarus’s Playlist

    The Minnesota Orchestra’s concert on July 21 will celebrate the talent of one of its own, the trumpeter and jazz composer Charles Lazarus. Not only will Lazarus play as a soloist, but the program will include a selection of his original compositions, which will be paired with Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s seminal 1861 symphony Night in…