Category: Favorites – Personal
-
Film Review: “The Overnighters”
I went to the Saint Anthony Main theatre on Friday night for a showing of The Overnighters. It’s a good movie. It’s worth seeing. But it’s more complicated than that. The Punched Social Ticket: In reporting on life and the people in the Square States (aka “Flyover Land”), our culture’s self-appointed elites have a fairly…
-
On A Rattlesnake Light Rail ‘cross The Hiawatha Desert
SCENE: It’s 1985. Mitch BERG – just out of college, hair waving in the breeze and his elbow resting on the sill of his open driver’s side window – barrels down North Dakota Highway 200 at 85 miles per hour in his 1973 Chevy Monte Carlo. Over the deafening racket of his small-block 350 engine (whose…
-
This Hard Land
Note to all you folks thinking of moving to North Dakota to start cashing in on the oil boom: North Dakota is cold. There aren’t a lot of trees. And outside of the eight or nine significant-sized cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown, Devil’s Lake, Bismark/Mandan, Minot, Williston, Dickinson, and maybe Valley City), there just aren’t a…
-
Streets Of Saint Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaul
I walked out Monday morning to carry a bag of trash to the dumpster. The alley was spotlessly plowed. In Saint Paul, we have to contract for our own alley plowing; on my block, we pony up about $20 a year to hire a guy who, as luck has it, lives on the same block,…
-
The Conductor
It was a chilly, rainy night in March of 1983. I had a horrible cold – but no matter. I was standing on a riser in a tumbledown little church in Pendelton, Oregon, with 69 or so other college kids. And by this time in the tour, cooped up on buses for day after…
-
Hope 73. Tyranny 0.
It’s hard for us, today, to picture what the world was like seventy years ago. For the better part of a decade, much of the world’s intelligentsia actively wondered if democracy’s day had come and gone. Various flavors of totalitarianism – whose ghastly crimes against humanity had been hidden from the world by a compliant…
-
My Tax Day At The Capitol Mall
So I not only got to attend the Tea Party at the State Capitol yesterday, but it was my immense privilege to be the lead-off speaker; mine was the first in a long stream of excellent speeches, including that of my NARN cohost Ed Morrissey, whose speech I videotaped and is currently up at Hot Air,…
-
Titanic Stabilizes At -12,000 Feet
Just as people who move to New York from elsewhere become the most preening, arrogant New Yorkers, some of us who come to conservatism from liberalism are the most vituperative about our rejection of vast swathes of our former beliefs. So I don’t give liberals a whole lot of credence on economics. Still, it can be…
-
The Small War, Part I
I’m splitting this into two parts; once I started writing, I just couldn’t stop. I have a few things to establish before I get into my post proper. ———- Statement: Administration 2, Demcrats/media 1. We’ll come back to that. ———- For those of you who think I never pay the Demcrats a complement, stand by…
-
It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part XL
Tonight was the big night. Sunday, December 28, 1986. It was going to be a huge night on two fronts. The evening would kick off with my band’s first gig at Williams’ Uptown Bar on Hennepin in Minneapolis. Then, after load-out, I’d race out to KSTP to do my show. I was going to interview…