Category: entertainment

  • bottled!

    Bottling the beer went off without a hitch – without a single hitch! That never happened before! I usually break the siphon, or spill a whole bunch of beer, or run out of bottle caps … something always goes wrong. Except this time. I shouldn’t feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,… Read.

  • bottles

    Bottle washing, the down side of bottling your own beer. What you see in the photo is actually bottle soaking. I soak the bottles I’m going to put my beer in for about a half-hour in a sink filled with water that has a dab of bleach in it, to kill off any little beasties… Read.

  • wrong wrong WRONG

    You are looking at one of the most colossal failures to come from my work shop in recent memory, or even long-term memory. I can’t remember the last time I did something this mind-bogglingly stupid. Every time I look at it, I want to drink myself into oblivion. Okay, not oblivion, just until it’s funny.… Read.

  • that was the day that was

    On this misty, crappy, cold day we declined to make the usual weekly circuit of the farmer’s market, so instead My Darling B offered to take me to Plaka Taverna for brunch. Plaka used to be Cleveland’s Diner, one of our favorite places to get breakfast on a Sunday, and they still serve what they… Read.

  • WFF final day

    Our first film of the day was a short documentary, Growing In Knowing: The Gateway to Midvale Garden. Scrap metal artist Erika Koivunen gets the kids of the Midvale Elementary School to bring her boxes of scrap metal, and she shows them how she makes a garden gateway out of it. I would have given… Read.

  • WFF day four

    They gave us ballots we could use to rate each film we saw, 1 being the worst and 5 being the best ratings we could give. I gave films a three if I thought they were merely average, four if I would have recommended them, two if I would not have recommended them. I saved… Read.

  • WFF day three

    Last Train Home told the incredible story of migrant workers in China who have left their farming communities to find jobs making exportable products in urban factories. Every year, 130 million of them travel home to visit their families and celebrate the Chinese new year. The scenes of thousands of travelers stampeding through the gates… Read.

  • WFF day two

    The Topp Twins was a fun, heartwarming documentary about a couple of farm girls from New Zealand who grew up to become pop-folk singers, talented actors and comedians, successful fighters for civil rights and powerful activists for the country’s anti-nuclear fight. They threw in a generous helping of loving warmth from the bosom of the… Read.

  • WFF day one

    Last night was the first night (but not, for some reason, the “opening night”) of the Wisconsin Film Festival. We had tickets to see Fathers and Guns and OSS 117: Lost In Rio, a pair of comedies. I don’t see how you can go wrong starting off with a laugh. Fathers and Guns was sort… Read.

  • Up In The Air

    I keep thinking about Up In The Air, the George Clooney movie we watched last night, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: The Ending Sucked. It didn’t suck because I didn’t like it, although I didn’t. But I can put up with an ending I don’t like if it makes sense. This… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend