Blogs List
 Jim Anderson |
A call for withdrawalTue, October 27, 2009 @ 1:18PM In a column today in the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson calls upon President Obama to bring U.S. troops home from Afghanistan. “Obama can decide to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy or a counterterrorism strategy. He can do one or the other — not both,” Robinson writes. “If he chooses counterinsurgency, he has to send enough troops to make that strategy work. If he doesn’t want to send all those troops, he needs to pursue counterterrorism or do something else.” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is asking for 40,000 or more additional troops for counterinsurgency. Robinson says it would make no sense to try a middle path and approve a troop increase of 20,000. What will Obama do? In a speech this week, the president paid tribute to the families of 14 Americans who died Monday in helicopter crashes in Afghanistan.
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 Burt Angeli |
Crunching baseball numbersThu, October 22, 2009 @ 4:53PM Interesting baseball numbers found in the Boston Globe and Detroit Free Press: — New Chicago Cubs hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo made $600,000 tutoring the Texas Rangers for the past 15 years. That isn’t the highest wage for a hitting coach, as Kevin Long of the Yankees (almost $1 million) tops the list. Wouldn’t it make economic sense for these Major League Baseball teams to show a video of former Channing slugger Todder Lindeman and say “Hit like this?” — Arizona third baseman Mark Reynolds makes around $400,000 a year instead of something like $5 million for the only player this season with 40 home runs, 100 RBI and 20 stolen bases. He would be making more but has 138 days of service time — 141 for the big bucks. — Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander threw 11 games of 120 pitches or more this season. He totaled 3,940 pitches, more than any American League starter since Roger Clemens in 1997 with Tor.
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Cookie's blog
 Terri Castelaz |
Benefit for Gayle StrutzThu, October 15, 2009 @ 12:34PM As many of you read in The Daily News last week, Gayle (Duff) Strutz, who is a co-worker of mine at the News, was recently diagnosed with Stage 3 Adencarinoma (a form of lung cancer). Receiving the cancer diagnosis is scary enough without having to deal with the financial stress caused by the illness. Family, friends and coworkers want to help by raising money to ease the burden of these medical expenses. A fund-raiser benefit has been set for Saturday, Nov. 21, at the Uren-Cooper-Johnson American Legion Post 50 in Iron Mountain from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. A spaghetti dinner will be served for a $5 donation per person. The local band, Kamakazi Blitz will be performing throughout the day. Drawings, 50/50s and a silent auction is also in the works. Organizers are asking area businesses and the public for their help to make this benefit a success. They are in need of items that can be used for door prizes, as well as for the silent auction.
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 Ron Deuter |
Return of the Deuter BarWed, October 14, 2009 @ 11:55AM Several years ago when I was fresh out of college and living in an apartment on the northside of Chicago, I decided to build a bar. Who needs a dining room table when you can have a bar instead? I constructed it right there in the middle of the small dining area of my fourth-floor apartment - not an entirely well-thought-out plan I realized upon moving day. The bar measures about 30 inches wide by nearly six feet long. I used oak bar rail and a dark formica countertop. The base of the bar was also built with oak. For a guy who has no carpentry experience, it actually came out rather nice - dare I say classy - even though I never did finish the trim around the base. The bar hosted many memorable get togethers and poker games for the year and a half I lived in Chicago. Always the first and last stop of the night for me and my friends. Sure beat the over-priced drinks in and around Wrigley.
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 Lisa Hoffmann |
Lack of specialty booksThu, October 29, 2009 @ 10:37AM Why is it that it is so hard to find the book you are looking for at the local bookstore or department stores that sell books? Whenever I am looking for a specific book, such as a new cookbook, I can never find it. Books that are talked about on daytime talk shows are not sold in this area. Yes you can ask the store to order the book for you, but then it takes a good two weeks for it to come in. My mom says because of the remote area we live in, books are stocked by volume that sells. Either way, it’s not fair. I guess that is why more and more people turn to the Internet to order books and other items. So I will be ordering the books I am interested in online or from the author’s Web site.
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 Blaine Hyska |
I’m no weathermanMon, October 12, 2009 @ 5:38PM The Weather Channel’s Jim “where’s-my-rain-slicker” Cantore cracks me up. While discussing the hurricane season recently, he seemed disappointed no massive storms were headed Florida’s way. In fact, he had to admit that it’s been an awfully quiet hurricane season. His disappointment, it seems, does not stem from the lack of destruction. He’s no sadist. Rather, Cantore missed the opportunity to sermonize about global warming. Ever the preacher, he gets his chance a few days later. This time he is talking about the flooding in Georgia. Climate change is all about drastic changes, he says. First it will be severely dry, as Georgia experienced this summer, and then there will be flooding. That’s what we can expect with climate change, he predicts. I’m no weatherman, but I do own an umbrella. The doom-and-gloom of global warming is all the rage these days. The rant goes something like this: The Earth will be uninhabitable, and humans are all to bl.
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 Marguerite Lanthier |
Gnomes must be stoppedWed, October 14, 2009 @ 6:49PM The Associated Press is reporting that a German artist is posing 1,250 garden gnomes with their arms outstretched in the stiff-armed Hitler salute in an installation that he calls a protest of lingering fascist tendencies in German society. Artist Ottmar Hoerl posed the gnomes in the historic central marketplace of Straubing, a town in southeastern Germany. The exhibit called ‘‘dance with the devil’’ is to run through Oct. 19. Most of gnomes are black plastic, but about 20 are painted shiny gold. Displaying Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany but a court ruled earlier this year that Hoerl’s gnomes were clearly satire and thus allowed. But as local gnome-hater J** R*** (code name Clear Hair) will tell you, this isn’t really the case. That so called artist is clearly being controlled by the gnomes, who have orchestrated a secret tribute to Hitler, disguised as a protest. There is no end to what these evil little creatures will d.
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 Linda Lobeck |
Because hope mattersThu, October 22, 2009 @ 12:29PM It seems like every month certain causes are brought to our attention to raise awareness for things like leukemia, breast cancer, domestic violence, and Alzheimer's disease. Awareness is half the battle and puts these very important issues into the limelight. October is also an awareness month for two rare diseases — PSP and CBD — both diseases that my mother was diagnosed with more than four years ago. Both diseases led to her death in August at the age of 71. Until she received her "official" diagnosis at the Mayo Clinic and we had a name for what was going on with her, I had never heard of these diseases. Thank goodness we had the care of Dr. Barry Johnson locally to guide us through the continual changes in my mom's condition. PSP is Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a neurodegenerative brain disease with no known cause, treatment or cure. It is often misdiagnosed as Parkinson's disease because of the general slowing of movement.
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Tree's Random Thoughts
 Theresa Peterson |
DMB ROCKED, TINLEY PARK CRUMBLEDTue, September 29, 2009 @ 12:32P My friend and co-worker Margueite Lanthier and I have been to seven of "The Dave Matthews Band" concerts together. She has a couple more under her belt, but we hit seven together. The first one we saw was at Soldier field in Chicago, the next five at Alpine Valley in Milwaukee and the last at The First Midwest Amphitheater in Tinley Park, Illinois, south of Chicago. Of the three venues Tinley Park was most disappointing. For starters no tailgating. At the Alpine Valley events we always came hours early and geared up for the event by cooking out, listening to our favorite songs and meeting other Dave fans in the parking lot. Speaking of parking lots... This year we picked up three other friends and Dave Fans to join us at the concert, Mindy, Michelle and Sarah, so we decided to all pitch in for VIP parking. We figured $40.00 divided by five was only $8.00 a piece and we could "Drive In, Drive Out". What a waste of money.
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 Nikki Younk |
Happy Columbus DayMon, October 12, 2009 @ 4:14PM Columbus Day is a sorry excuse for a holiday. Why do we need to celebrate the 1492 “discovery” of continents that had been inhabited for thousands of years? Columbus and his fellow Europeans conquered, stole from, and passed disease on to the thriving native populations of Americas. And this guy is remembered with his own holiday? Come on. We’d do better to change “Columbus Day” to a day of remembrance for the native cultures that were wiped out by disease or assimilation. And a side note: I feel the same way about Leif Ericson. Maybe he was the first European on American soil, maybe he was.
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