The Wake

“Well I just think that it is so shocking that after all this time we thought we’d seen it all with Marilyn Monroe, and… here we go,” says Lara Spencer on CBS’s The Early Show.

The Marilyn Monroe sex tape has finally surfaced, thank God. The media was almost running out of living celebrity faux news fodder.

It is still a mystery why Spencer thinks this “news” is “so shocking.” In her lifetime Monroe made a name for herself as one of the most sensual and seductive stars on the planet, in addition to having rumored affairs with a number of …

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Schlitz is Back!

Milwaukee beers get a bad rap, but heck don’t most of the Ameircan mega-brews. Schlitz was once at the heart of Milwaukee’s brewing powerhouse. But don’t be worried, there’s plenty of brews still being brewed in my hometown and a lot of them aren’t half bad.

The “Beer that Made Milwaukee Famous” is back and I just happened to have seen a few sightings and tasted the original recipe not to long ago. No, they’re not returning to the 1849 recipe, which would …

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U.S. Senate candidate Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer

While most Minnesotans have stuck comedian Al Franken in their minds as the next Minnesota DFL Senate candidate, St. Thomas peace studies professor Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is still vying for the party’s upcoming June nomination. Despite barely being mentioned in the local media, Nelson-Pallmeyer surpassed Mike Ceresi in the race and is slowly but surely winning over the most liberal sectors of the DFL. After looking into his campaign, I found out that Nelson-Pallmeyer is a more progressive, less elite …

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The biggest key to winning an election is projecting a public image. It surpasses where candidates stand on the issues, how they work with others, what their personalities are like, and just about every other necessary factor needed to run a successful campaign. Remember when then-Minnesota Attorney General and 2006 DFL gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch called a reporter a “Republican whore” one week before the election? Hatch’s loss to Gov. Pawlenty shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise to in retrospect. The sad thing is, Hatch made best election performance by a DFL …

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A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and how his name and reputation in the Black Community was being undermined and exploited by a media circus centered on a few YouTube clips of him criticizing the U.S. government. Now that the circus is over and labeled as old news, it might be an opportune time to present Rev. Wright in his own words, words that were certainly suppressed in the coverage of his past sermons. What follows is a letter to the editor intended for, …

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For the few weeks before the looped YouTube videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright shifted half of the Democratic Presidential coverage to racial matters (the other half of the coverage being focused on the sinking economy), the topic of the talk was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The trade agreement, which was put into law by President Clinton in 1993, restricts obstacles that corporations used to face when they moved their goods between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. It essentially made free trade easier, prompting many U.S. corporations like General Electric to relocate across the border …

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It’s best to begin this post by noting that 81 percent of the United States believe this country is headed toward a bleak future. Only a third of people believe that the next generation will be better off than the current generation. Fewer than half of parents — 46 percent — expect their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they themselves do. The other day, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose job requires a basic sixth grade knowledge of stubbornness, finally acknowledged the possibility of a recession.

And it looks like some …

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Two of my professors here at school are surely to be some of the most memorable you could ever hope for.

One teaches my International Marketing course. He spends most of the time in class telling stories of his foreign excursions, which serve to illustrate his points. He’s been all across the world and knows a great deal about the nature of foreign relations. One Particular story of note involved his attempt to broker a deal with some businessmen in Nigeria. He explained that the only way to accomplish such a thing was to arrive with a brief case full …

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I attended a club night north of London last night (Watford area to be exact). It’s a good 50 minutes outside of the city. I took the bakerloo to then end of its line, and was picked up from there in a car for the remaining 20 minute drive. We stopped by a house out in the London burbs. The kids there were watching Superbad, and we’re qute intrigued to meet someone who had actually owned a fake id. We took off from there and hit the main drag of clubs on Watford High Street. The evenings events reminded me …

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Because I’m not that interested in writing today here is a history of why beer is great today and where it came from the New York Times.

Beer used to be easy: You were a Bud guy or Miller guy, maybe even a Schlitz or Ballantine guy. Not that it mattered much, since they tasted virtually the same.

But the days when American beer was all suds are long gone. In a great example of grass-roots renaissance, the American industry has been completely reborn in the last 30 years with the rise of craft beers. A trip to the deli can …

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Illustration by Lucy Michell

Most college students have difficulty trying to balance their checkbooks. The students in Professors Sean and Meg Emery’s class do a bit more than that. They balance themselves on chairs, ropes, and even a trapeze. One student juggles while a partner sits on his shoulders. Another practices forward rolls and leaps on a mat. Yet another student opens a fan fast as lightning with a flick of his wrist. One student dangles her body on the trapeze. This is Circus Performance …

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Illustration by Anders Carlson

Engineering students are trading in their graphing calculators for cordless drills and bandanas. Engineers Without Borders is a nonprofit organization that constructs engineering solutions to humanitarian dilemmas in the developing world. Spearheaded in 2000 by charismatic leader Dr. Bernard Amadei and $14,000, EWB has grown to include over 250 professional and student chapters, including a University of Minnesota chapter that recently completed a project in Ghana.

The roads in the rural Ghanian village of Amponasah Akroase are unpaved and lined with …

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Big Star - #1 Record

The debut LP of the Memphis Tennessee power-poppers Big Star could be one of the greatest records you’ve never heard. In fact, this beautiful album review could easily be filled with paragraph after paragraph of the numerous artists and rock and roll outfits that have been shaped and influenced by the record’s prose. Teenage Fanclub, Elliott Smith and the Replacements are just a few of the more recognizable followers of Big Star’s genius. Released in 1972, Big Star’s …

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Photo by Dante Busquets-Anzenberger

Most of the facts in this article are true.

As you’re all aware, Beijing is hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics. They’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this thing, they’ve built some cool buildings, and they’re trying to generally spruce up the city in anticipation of the international spotlight that they’ll receive. They’ve been working diligently on this thing for years, putting far more into it than the Greeks did when they half-assed it back in 2004. They know that …

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