Some who have followed my blog may remember that I lived in West Berlin for a time in the early 1980’s.  I took time off from graduate school, flew to Amsterdam with my Student Eurrail pass, and began what would turn out to be the/… Read full post »

There is an article in today’s Chicago Tribune about Millvina Dean.  “Who is she?&rdquo/… Read full post »

How lonely sits the city                                              &… Read full post »

Is anything for free anymore that is worth seeing?

I asked myself this question after reading Chicago Guy's piece lamenting the Chicago Art Institute’s recent decision to raise the price of admission to the museum to $18.00.  It wasn't all that long ago that the Art Institute charged abso… Read full post »

You knew the call was coming, but the resolution of the issue was still unknown.  A workforce reduction of 4% company-wide doesn’t sound too threatening, but you knew your little corner of the company was to be the primary target.  More than 4% would be affected in your office; the on/… Read full post »

Last night I watched the Milos Forman film “Goya’s Ghosts”.  The movie was made in 2006, but never received widespread distribution in the United States.  This despite the fact Milos Forman is a highly regarded, Academy Award winning director (“One Flew Over the Cuck/… Read full post »

Events in Georgia have some speculating that we may be slipping into a new Cold War.  Let’s hope such talk is exaggeration.  A generation has come of age that only knows the Cold War from the history books, or from the stories told by their parents and grandparents.  But the Cold/… Read full post »

Living in a fairly small city in the American heartland, I could at least take some comfort that the insatiable greed and irresponsibility that has brought such damage to our nation’s economy was limited, I thought, to the financial bigwigs in New York and San Francisco, and 100 miles down I-90… Read full post »

Hell arrived in the city of Dresden on February 13, 1945, at exactly thirty seconds past 10:10 PM.  At that moment a squadron of British de Havilland Mosquito fighter-bombers dropped bright red targeting flares over the German city.  Two and a half minutes later, with the Mosquitos already/… Read full post »

It's another cold, gray day Northern Illinois.  There were snow flurries yesterday, and large mounds of dirty snow still stand tall where parking lots, streets, and driveways were put to the snow plow last month.  Despite the cold temperatures, or perhaps because of them, the arrival of Mar… Read full post »

It is early September, 1683.  A large army led by the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Turks, Kara Mustafa, has broken through Austrian defenses along the border with Ottoman-occupied Hungary.  With the Austrian army scattering in retreat, Ottoman forces have marched to the walls of Vien… Read full post »

For those younger than 35 or 40 years old, it is hard to imagine just how influential Walter Cronkite was.  He ruled the airwaves every evening for 30 minutes, when he told families all over the nation "the way it is."  There was no CNN, MSNBC, or FoxNews.  The Internet existed… Read full post »

In 1986 I made my first trip to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.  Like most first time visitors, my destination was the resort city of Cancun, with its white beaches, crystal clear turquoise waters, and thriving night life.  While there, I rented a car for a day and drove down the coast to/… Read full post »

The Apostle Islands are a chain of 22 islands located off the Lake Superior shore of Northern Wisconsin.  They were so named by French missionary voyageurs who first noticed them in the late seventeenth century.  In 1970, the federal government completed the purchase of 21 of the islands, a… Read full post »

In the mid-1870’s, the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad completed a new rail link between Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul.  The track ran in a fairly straight line for 400 miles, and it took 400 minutes to complete the journey, earning this route the nickname of the &ldqu… Read full post »

Last weekend, I took a ride along the Illinois & Michigan Canal.  It has been 75 years since the I&M Canal was last used for commerce, but it still exists in various states of repair.  For most of its course, the old tow path, once the domain of/… Read full post »

This is the fourth and final post about my 1993 trip to Cambodia.  Earlier posts dealt with daily street scenes in Phnom Penh, visible reminders of the war years, and a trip into the Cambodian countryside.

The primary reason I went to Cambodia in 1993 was to attend the wedding of… Read full post »

Question 

What do the following companies have in common:  JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One Financial, and KeyCorp?

Answer

1. All of these banks have received billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
2. All of these banks have laid off hundreds, or thousands, of their employee
… Read full post »

                         From far yon co… Read full post »

A small article appearing in today's papers restores in me a small modicum of hope for the future of humanity.  From today's news wires:

A Russian court ruled against Josef Stalin's grandson Tuesday in a libel suit over a newspaper article that said the Soviet dictator sent thousands of people t… Read full post »

In early 1992, a good friend of mine accepted an offer to teach English in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  While there, he met and fell in love with a young Cambodian woman, and the two of them married in March, 1993.  I was honored to be invited to the wedding, and serve/… Read full post »

For Major Dale R. Buis, July 8 started out like any other summer day.  As usual, he missed his family, and he wondered what his small son Kurt would be doing today.  He thought about the Nebraska prairie, and how different that was from where he lived now, a/… Read full post »

Since my job went away:

• I spent about half as much as I otherwise would have spent this past Christmas.
• I have gone from eating out 2 or 3 times a week to eating out about once every other week.
• I occasionally order takeout from my favorite restaurant instead
… Read full post »

This week marks the anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall.  The story is familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1940’s through the 1960’s.  In the wee hours of the morning of August 13, 1961, East German security forces sealed off the border, hoping to stem the tide… Read full post »

(Scroll down for photos.)

When the state of Texas won its precarious independence from Mexico in 1836, it was immediately confronted with a hostile, revanchist state on its southern border, just waiting to reverse the outcome of the Battle of San Jacinto.  Unfortunately for the Te… Read full post »