Category: Columns

  • Ripeness Is All

    We all, they say, have one book in us. God knows what mine would be. How about Good Wine Needs No Bush: Political Maunderings of an Expatriate Oenophile? Or perhaps Latin Love in a Cold Climate: Memories of a Minnesota Classicist. These are merely titles in the mind. More intriguing are authors who produce one…

  • Satan in the Litter Box

    I hate my cat. Cat people, save yourself the trouble of emailing me. And, rest assured, this is not a one-sided kind of a deal. The cat hates me, too. I know it is childish and wrong for me to hate the cat. After all, it is not her fault that I bought her. I…

  • Strong, Rugged, Somewhat Sweet

    On any list of the smaller enormities of modern life, other people’s Christmas circular letters ought to loom large. It is not the information itself that is so rebarbative. In the great scheme of things, knowing about the family’s new job/house/car/place at the lake is no more or less annoying than reading that Junior has…

  • Love That Latex!

    So, maybe by now you have seen Lars and the Real Girl. It’s a comedy set in Minnesota and the title character, Lars Lindstrom, is the sort of Norwegian bachelor Garrison Keillor never mentions. You see, Lars is a social misfit who sends away for an anatomically correct sex doll, falls in love with it,…

  • California Dreaming

    Last spring brought a nasty shock. I was walking down a leafy side street off Como Avenue, hoping to admire in passing the jolly gingerbread woodwork around the eaves of the tumbledown duplex where my POSSLQ and I shared our first Minnesota home. The place was in pretty poor nick when we rented it twenty…

  • Code Orange

    We’re all running a day late and a ten-spot short these days, but one thing’s certain. If you can’t do your Halloween candy shopping ’til 7 p.m. on All Hallows’ Eve, even though every other candy display has been stripped bare, you’ll still find racks of Circus Peanuts, a Halloween treat that ranks alongside sticking…