Icy What You Did There

As I was herniating myself the other day while out shoveling my driveway for the 87th time this winter after a surprise un-forecasted overnight snow of seven inches, I stopped to try and remember what my lawn looked like and got to conTIMplating exactly why I live in Minnesota, being that it is so nonsensically cold here that Satan has his own line of credit at the local Burlington Coat Factory.

Why would anybody voluntarily reside where you have to watch heart-warming movies to keep your body temperature at a survivable level and the phrase ‘beating the heat’ has no meaning other than an NBA win over Miami?

Then there is the whole ‘Neighbor Challenge’ thing.  Notice our Christmas card from 2010: Continue reading →

This is it! The Diet Starts…Monday

Oh how I love New Year’s with all of its revelry in celebration of an arbitrary moment in the incessantly monotonous passage of time.  What better reason to party?  What I don’t love however, is that it is (once again) time to be pressured into taking stock of my stockiness, throw my considerable weight around in considering my considerable weight, and ask myself why I don’t look like the touched-up models and celebrities I see in photo-shopped magazines and professionally enhanced videos.  Is it because I am (ulp) normal?

Well, I’ve (once gain) had it with being normal!  I look and feel like an average human!  Ugh!  And so over the New Year I have (once again) resolved to immerse my typical averageness in the very American and very lucrative dieting and starvation industry so I can more closely resemble the media fantasies we all know and worship. Continue reading →

Am I Racist if I Dream of a White Christmas?

Evidently writing about racism is like working for the CIA:  just when I thought I was done and out, they pull me back in.  Race, racism, race baiting, race profiling, race walking, race horses, race for the cure, emb-race the suck—enough already!  It’s time that we as a culture dug deep, looked within, and somehow found the strength to stop being so stupid.

The latest manufactured media hullabaloo is about the race of Santa Claus.  That’s right, Santa Claus.  And it all started with Slate blogger Aisha Harris.

Who?

Exactly.

Aisha got everybody riled up by saying that Santa should be a penguin.

A what?

Exactly. Continue reading →

I Love Making Up Non-Fiction

About a year ago I waxed eloquent in Pulitzer-winning fashion about my favorite fiction books.  Since then I have been swamped with an e-mail asking about my favorite non-fiction books, to which I have been hesitant to respond because non-fiction books are hard—especially when being thrown at you for taping the end of the Alabama-Auburn game over one’s wedding video.

In my defense, I have already watched the end of that game way more often than any wedding video.

And in retrospect, my defense is perhaps not as strong as I had anticipated.

The problem with ranking non-fiction books is that when you combine the sheer number of categories with varying personal tastes you almost have a possibility for every time Lorde is played on the radio.  Continue reading →