Blowing & Drifting

Growing up in Houghton-Hancock, we kids talked a lot about the mythical “circus train crash,” in which a circus vehicle lost control and crashed into the canal, drowning – in various tellings – several people and a bunch of animals. The real story is pretty horrific: 3 Killed in Wreck Three men were killed early [...]

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Browsing the shelves of the DVD collection at the Carleton library the other day, I happened across the DVD boxes for Mesrine, a two-part French film that was blurbed as being a “French Goodfellas” and a “French Godfather.” I like those kinds of movies, so I checked Mesrine out even though I’d never heard of it before [...]

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Yesterday I sat for the final exam for the “Jazz History” course I’ve been taking this term, a course taught by Steve Kelly, who is about to retire after a long, distinguished career at Carleton. I took the course because I wanted to learn more about the history of jazz, a musical style that I [...]

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Getting dressed for skiing tonight, I accidentally tore the cuff off my favorite pair of ”baselayer bottoms,” Old Red. (Yes, I called them that – but only in my head.) Old Red was real “long underwear.” I got them in 1994, when my parents, in what must have been a huge splurge, gave them to me as [...]

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Living with Vivi, part zillion: I’m sitting on the floor in the upstairs hallway outside the girls’ bathroom, monitoring the proceedings in the bathtub and folding the day’s laundry. I have unmatched socks draped over both legs and folded clothes all around me, not to mention an unfolded shirt in my hands. Vivi climbs out [...]

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The midterm elections, returns for which I’m watching as I write, are supposed to be a nation-wide rebuke of “progressive” (I prefer “liberal”) ideas, to be the death knell for the Obama Era, to be the (re)ascence of the supercharged Right, et cetera et cetera. While I have a dim view of the Tea Party [...]

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One item on the long list of great things about working at Carleton is that I can attend the weekly presentations offered by the College’s Perlman Center for Teaching and Learning (which is, perversely, called the “LTC”). Today’s presentation , conducted by a geology prof, a psych prof, and a student, was great: Digital Nation: Electronic [...]

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Having lived my entire life above the 41st parallel (the latitude of Chicago) and much of it at 46° and 47° N (the latitudes of Ironwood and Hancock, Michigan), I was fascinated by this admittedly speculative Wall Street Journal article on the “New North”. According to the piece, the northerly regions of North America (Alaska [...]

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Today the family twice ventured downtown to attend a fraction of the million or so events that constitute Northfield’s biggest festival, the Defeat of Jesse James Days. As I wrote last year, DJJD is a huge celebration centering on the town’s counterattack and defeat of Jesse James and his gang when they tried to rob the [...]

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If mining made the Upper Peninsula great in the period up to about World War II, it’s logging that – along with, arguably, tourism – that is keeping the place viable. My late grandfather spent his whole life handling logs, either skidding them out of the woods with horses or driving log trucks from the [...]

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While up in Hancock earlier this week, I passed by the house where I lived from 1988-1991, at the corner of two steep uphill streets. It is, I think, a nice little house – though the current owners could be taking better care of it. Apart from the view to the south (a view I [...]

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By predilection and by training, I love calculating “as far as” spans between two dates. It can be cheap history, but can also be useful to see how closely in time two events occurred, especially when one of those events seems “closer” to the present day. Personal information is great for this: Julia is about [...]

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Julia is totally enamored of the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, a Minnesota writer who turned her experiences as a young girl in the 1890s and 1900s into a long series of novels published in the 1940s and 1950s. They’re good books, full of very tame mischief and exciting-for-a-kid adventures and just enough period [...]

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Julia’s fascination with the Magic Tree House books has reminded me of treehouses I have known. Growing up, lots of my friends had tree houses that ranged, in later elementary school, from a wooden pallet temporarily nailed to some low pine-tree branches to, in early elementary school, an elaborate room permanently fixed high in a [...]

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