Try to settle up at the drug store by producing a pouch of cowries and the clerk will likely respond with a dumbfounded gape. Fork over a few wampums in exchange for that basket full of groceries, and the cashier will immediately reach for the switch to his blinking distress light. Yet despite modern merchants’ [...]

Readers of this blog who caught last night’s episode of the Simpsons* must be marveling at my prescience.
If you didn’t see it, Marge joined a social organization made up of fun-loving women “of a certain age.” They called themselves the Cheery Red Tomatoes, a thinly veiled nod to the notorious Red Hat Society. And just [...]

I was at the 1975 championship game between Griffin High School and Joliet Catholic, a wee lad I. A beer can collector at the time, my fondest memory of the day was my first exposure to 7oz. cans of Strohs. The guys in front of my family were drinking them, but crueling crushing them before [...]

Hollywood has traditionally given short shrift to Thanksgiving, preferring Christmas-themed movies. Recent movies such as the Ice Storm or the Myth of Fingerprints do use the November holiday as a plot point, and while these are both fine films, the only feelings of thanks they inspire is a sense of profound relief that our lives [...]

If there is a more giving and trusting people gracing this Earth than the Nigerians, I’ve yet to come across them. For the past couple of years, nary a week has passed without one of these fine souls offering to share with me great amounts of wealth if only I will [...]