America, America

I really love living where I do. The street where I live, and a few blocks on either side of mine, is listed on the National Register of Historic places. It has a high concentration of brick bungalows, which are relics from a bygone era. There’s no split-level ranches or McMansions where I live, and

Link to a post on ChicagoSideSports and in the Chicago Sun-Times

Baseball has been a big part of my life since the mid-1970s, which is as far back as I can remember anything. Twitter, on the other hand, has been in my life for just a few years. What better way to fuse the old and the new but to write about the two subjects together?

A bridge too far (with update)

The Onion is not for everyone. And that’s one of the reasons I have been a fan of theirs for so long. They push the envelope, and say the things that nobody else will. I never laugh harder at things than I do at the Onion. But tonight was different. As they were tweeting during

More to do with love

The Pete Rose story has died down by now, and I’m grateful for that. Life has moved on, as I knew it would, and it’s strange to think that it’s not even been a week since the story first appeared anywhere. Our culture and the 24-hour news cycle it has created–or that we have all

The social media president

Over the next four years, there will probably be many instances where I can look at President Obama and say “I like what he just did” It was like that when he sang “Sweet Home Chicago” at the White House recently. When Mick Jagger hands you a microphone, and Buddy Guy wants you to sing,

Quarterly Report #4

Picture from The Greenville, SC Blog How quickly the time flies! This report, in keeping with the tradition I established after beginning this blog a year ago, is meant to take stock in what I’ve done, and where I see things heading in the months ahead. First things first. The blog celebrated its first year

The Eddie Van Halen effect

Today was the first day where my blog counter has settled back to its normal level. That could mean 20 page views a day, and it could mean 2,000. But in truth, it’s somewhere in between. And unless somebody gives me an ice cream cone when the page views reach a certain level, the number

Where the traffic comes from

After checking my Gmail and Facebook accounts when I get online, this blog is usually the third thing that I look at. A guy from Jersey Shore, which I’ve never watched, has something that he calls GTL–gym, tan, laundry. Mine is a different type of progression altogether: GFB–Gmail, Facebook, blog. Not nearly as much fun,

A rapid fall

If what I’ve been reading on Twitter in the past 20 minutes or so is true (and how could Twitter ever get anything wrong?), former Penn State coach Joe Paterno is close to death. It’s shocking what has transpired with him since the Jerry Sandusky story broke last fall. The fall from the lofty pedestal

Then and now

After taking my little one to skating practice this morning, lacing up her skates and listening to the details from a sleepover party last night, I went out to the car and found a penny in the parking lot. As I have written about before in this space, I picked it up and looked at

Twitter and the #Newt

As ubiquitous as Twitter is today, it sometimes helps to remember that it’s only been around since 2006. That means that the 2008 presidential election, in which Barack Obama defeated John McCain, is the only one to have occurred in Twitter’s existence. I remember how, in those days back in 2008, candidate Obama had a

Apparently I’m from the olden days

The other night, my younger daughter and I were having dinner together. I told her that Halloween was a week away, and at this time of year, when I was her age, one of the big happenings was the annual airing of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” It was a big deal when it

From the Red Sox to the Red Ivy

The Theo Epstein signing is official, and the press conference to announce it will be held at Wrigley Field tomorrow. The Red Sox have indeed let the only winners they’ve ever had go, just as I dared them to do. So now we have our guy, and he’s getting his guys into place, and the

A bit of Tumblr in the real world

I haven’t used Tumblr too much, but it seems to have lots of possibilities. Not every place on the web allows you to share things to it with a click (are you listening, WordPress?), but going to your own dashboard and adding a link, or a picture, or anything else you want isn’t too difficult.

Here’s the story….

Would my life have been better or worse without Sherwood Schwartz? I ask that because–unlike thousands of others who work in television–his contributions really did impact my life. As a kid, I watched every episode of Gilligan’s Island, and even when I had seen a particular episode before, I would still watch it again anyway.