rakemag These are a couple of recent pics from a recent trip to Jalisco, Mexico – where humpback whales migrate for their mating season. In the first, you can see The Rake, the tops of a couple of whales, and a “water spout”. There were four males and one female in this group, where the males … Read more
Here are two photos from our recent trip to Kuwait. While there, we went to the Kuwait fish market where they hold daily auctions of local fish and “foreign” fish (caught in non-Kuwaiti waters). The action’s wild, with a few hundred buyers vying for bucketsful of various varieties of fish and shellfish to be sold … Read more
The Rake’s parenting editor Renata Frears recently had an opportunity to speak with Roy “Buck” Prescott, controversial author of Breaking the Spirit of Your Unborn Child and Breaking the Spirit of Your Newborn Child (Regnery Publishing). Prescott was in town for the first annual “It’s a Man’s World” symposium at the Best Steak House in … Read more
Fifty years ago I was a young bride planning to rent an old Iowa farmhouse. My rural mother-in-law shared her successful bedbug remedy [“A Bedtime Preyer,” April]. She said: “Wash and air-dry all bedclothes. Center the bed in the middle of the room. Put each leg (bed leg) in a pail of turpentine. Don’t smoke. … Read more
“Mom and I are standing in front of the Church on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, Russia,” wrote Ann Bernstein of Minneapolis. “The church was built on the very spot where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated on March 1, 1881. The Literary issue was a perfect travel companion in this country, where things seem familiar … Read more
Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults … Read more
Hallelujah; it’s Monday and there’s actually something of interest going on, I mean, aside from the 70-degree weather. Straight outta our March So Little Time section (I wrote this little ditty–it was a while back now–and don’t want to reinvent the wheel): Joe Boyd had his fingers in all sorts of music-history pies. While still … Read more
Using samples from obscure movies, as well as their own singing, mixing, and instrumentation, Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto construct melodic sound collages and electronic songs so catchy as to be genre defying. On the Massachusetts duo’s 2003 release, The Lemon of Pink, for example, the title track alone contains seamless movements between folk … Read more
Of all the theater companies in town, none has better taste in classic literature than Ten Thousand Things. Now, the troupe takes on Federico Garcia Lorca’s saucy Blood Wedding. Deeply poetic yet also accessible, this play sets up a gut-punching war between the heart’s passion and the human brain’s limited capacity for reason. Armed with … Read more
Despite every possible setback, The Minneapolis/ St. Paul International Film Festival soldiers on, though with fewer films (which is, perhaps, a blessing). Screenings will include Waitress, the comedy hit of this year’s Sundance film festival; it was also, tragically, the directorial debut for Adrienne Shelley, who was murdered soon after completion of this film project. … Read more