Just about everyone can name someone they know who hates meatloaf. Or yogurt, I bet you can find someone in your circle who categorically hates yogurt. But I dare you to locate someone who hates pizza. Sure, you can find a friend with tomato issues or one of those poor, lactose-intolerant freaks who cries if … Read more
DEFEND YOUR MONOGAMOUS LIFEI was enjoying Stuart Greene’s column, “Ménage à… Nah,” in your July issue [Sex & The Married Man]. I agree that sexual adventurism is definitely not for everyone. But I was amazed by this blanket statement he imposed at the end: “[Sex experts] who aren’t afraid to delve deeper into moral and … Read more
“Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the … Read more
It won’t be long now. September’s weight presses in on my teacher bones, and there’s only one way to stave it off and prepare for the shock of going back to school: Take a road trip of several thousand miles with five kids. So here we are in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where sturdy-looking Midwestern families … Read more
There’s an arbor in my neighborhood that I drive past every day. Sturdy pre-fab construction, what looks to be bare, untreated wood. It catches my eye not because it’s beautiful, but because it is goofy. It’s the placement of the thing that gets me. It’s plopped a third of the way into the front yard … Read more
When Fort Knox couldn’t hold enough gold to back all the paper money in circulation, the U.S. government in about 1913 began weaning the greenback from being a promissory note for precious metals. Instead, the mighty dollar became “fiat currency.” In other words, it became a slippery theoretical thing that depended on the Federal Reserve … Read more
Thirty columns ago, in the very first issue of The Rake — March 2002 — I wrote that “being a real brother is not as important as being a real man. Real men think for themselves and live with the consequences of their decisions.” I admit that I took some defiant pride in the not-so-veiled … Read more
Last spring, while driving down an Arizona highway searching for an alt-rock radio station, I heard a woman’s voice cry out across the airwaves, as if in primeval prayer. A guitar answered, then dropped into a thick growl of minor chords while the melody swelled with the lyrics, before the whole thing sank into the … Read more
With the State Fair’s feeble lineup sounding the traditional power chord that marks the close of the summer concert season,Twin Citizens can crawl back under the rock of pre-recorded music for the cold winter months. Even in Minnesota, the Internet has not killed the used record store, nor the people who insist on taking their … Read more
The other day about eighty thousand Christians gathered at the State Capitol for Luis Palau’s Twin Cities Festival. Just a mile away, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre, a smaller but no less devoted crowd convened at the Midwest Scrapbook Association Convention, the better to observe the objects of its own faith—designer paper and vellum and bottle … Read more