“ Free Pre-Paid Cremation! Details Inside" Purveyors of direct mail have many different ways to get you to open junk mail. The most common tactic is to create a sense of urgency. The actual verbiage can vary but the undertone is this: Open this fucking letter...
Visitors might wrongly assume that Bend is a bastion of crunchy, left-wing, kombucha swilling vegans who wear hemp, recycle toilet paper and look forward to listening to NPR’s Wait-Wait-Don’t Tell Me on weekends. After all, this is the small, outdoorsy city that shows up in...
“You got any trash for me?” asked the cute teenage girl at the Shell station dressed in an all-white 1950s soda-jerk style uniform. I thought I had heard her wrong. New to Oregon and its delightful law mandating that gas station attendants, not customers, pump the...
There are plenty of places to commune with nature in and around Bend, but I’d be hard pressed to think of a better place to spend the night than in a tent by the banks of the Metolius River at the Allen Springs Campground inside...
Where else but in Bend, Oregon can you take out 100 books at a time and then return them up to 7 days late with no fine? I’ll be damned if I know. We moved to Bend from Evanston, Illinois, and I used to be...
If a place like Sparks Lake existed within 100 miles of a major city, the place would be a zoo. Thankfully it’s in Central Oregon, just about a 40-minute drive from Bend along the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway. On a recent Saturday morning, there were...
The evolution of digital photography has made it cost effective to be a narcissist. And the emergence of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others provides today’s Digital Narcissist (DN)-LOOK AT ME! LIKE THIS! FOLLOW ME!- with ample platforms to indulge their apparently...
When you’re traveling across America via our interstate highways, it’s easy to slip into a zombie-like trance where you are still awake and alive but only in a technical sense. For all intents and purposes, you are a dead man driving- drifting from one chain...
Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed. Why does seemingly every corporation in America place this empty warning in their phone tree message? I’m going to answer my own question here: because they know we are impatient bastards who want to press 0 to...
I don’t expect PR flacks to be creative writers, but a little originality would be nice for a change. This morning I read this story in The New York Timesabout how Rutgers University cut their new quarterback, Philip Nelson, after he was implicated in a...
Is it my imagination or is every shitty fast food restaurant in America using the word “Tuscan” to describe menu items that have no connection to Tuscany whatsoever? First, at the risk of sounding like a big, I’ve been to Tuscany so give me a...
The news this week that Pope Francis told a woman married to a divorced man that she had the right to take communion had me thinking about another initiative I’d like to see the Pontiff tackle: streamlining mass. Don’t get me wrong- I’d also like...
White Sox fans are used to feeling like members of a cult, shunned by Chicagoland’s mainstream Cubbie-centric culture; their rooting allegiance considered nothing more than a deviant fetish. But until this week, I never considered the fact that this cultural bias would spill over into...
36 brochures, weighing in at a total of 4.2 pounds, 23 business cards, a flash drive from Indonesia, a microfiber cloth from Quebec, and a bookmark from Yap, a remote Pacific island where they still use stone money. That’s what I brought home from my...
Poor Ethan Couch. Poor little rich kid, 16 years old, from North Texas was so spoiled rotten that he had no idea that there was anything wrong with driving well over the speed limit, shitfaced, three times the legal limit and carrying seven friends in...
If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I sometimes like to share nuggets of wisdom with you, my dear readers. Here’s a tip I learned from reading a story in theBuffalo News today: if you’re on your way to court...
For more than four years, the parents of David Gimelfarb, a graduate student from Highland Park who went missing while on a hike in Costa Rica in 2009, have maintained hope that their son is still alive. They have returned to Costa Rica each August,...
I’ve been a compulsive traveler for more than twenty years. During that time, I have taken well over 100 trips to 45 U.S. states, 6 Canadian provinces and more than 50 countries. I have never, ever regretted a single trip. Travel is the one expenditure...
My son James is only 4 but he’s already smart enough to know that he doesn’t want to work for a living. His preschool is hosting a career dress up day this week where the students are supposed to dress up like a person working...
Every time I come back to the U.S. from a Mediterranean country, I feel like I live in the quietest, most boring place on earth. And I live in Chicago, dear reader, not Glad Valley, South Dakota, (America’s McFarthest place) or Henderson, Nevada. (The most...
I’m all for cheap drinks but sometimes a drink is so cheap you can’t help but be suspicious. On a recent trip to Spain I found myself shopping for sangria in a Barcelona supermarket. There were three choices: one was ˆ1.35, another ˆ1.10, and a...
I’m a curmudgeon, I know. But at the risk of sounding like the late Andy Rooney, can someone please tell me why the fuck anyone would spend good money on a magnet that says “Yay! Me!” I saw this and dozens of other “Yay!” magnets...
If someone asked you, at age 5, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What would you have said? My five-year-old son, Leo, graduated from preschool today and while you might laugh at the notion of a preschool commencement exercise, I have...
It was a perfectly imperfect game. Everyone made contact with the ball. Eventually. Errors were made- typically several on each play, though I’m not sure how the scoring works when teammates tackle each other in a rugby scrum fighting for a ground ball. And no...
If I ever become the world’s fattest man, I won’t be granting any interviews. And I definitely won’t be posing for photo shoots. I read with fascination astory by Sarah Lyall in The New York Times last week about Paul Mason, a British man who...
My three-year-old son, James, is a brutally honest lad. “Daddy, I love mommy better than you,” he says just about every week. And he’s not kidding either. When my wife is out of town, he acts more loving toward me, but as soon as she returns, he’s...
I’m the kind of guy who never forgets a good cookie. Eleven years ago, I worked for a publisher- Northwestern University Press in Evanston- and I used to frequent a place called Al’s Deli that had otherworldly butter cookies. Al’s was one of the few...
I don’t expect other parents to mirror my parenting style but sometimes there is real peer pressure to conform to how other parents want you to act. My sons, ages 3 and 5, like to play at Barnes & Noble, because they have a huge...
In an age where texts, tweets and Facebook posts are all but replacing live telephone conversations, it’s becoming harder and harder to connect with friends on the phone. It’s almost embarrassing how often I play phone tag with friends and family members. It is not...
How great is the Evanston library? Let me answer the question by relaying a conversation we had with a librarian there last week while signing up for library cards. “Now, you can take out up to 75 books at a time,” she said, before my wife...