Rodeo Dust

The gate clangs open and the steer springs out into the ring. He’s brown or black with white on his butt. The cowboys are right behind the steer, the rope slices through the air with a whoosh, the horses throw dust up in the ring. The steer races to the opposite side of the ring, …


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Fargo

Fargo is flat, really, really flat. It’s a grid city with wide avenues that are seemingly all under construction. There are neat little houses with neat little yards, but more than that, there are cookie cutter developments, row after row after row of beige homes that all look exactly the same, with drying lawns out …


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Road Trip Tee Vee

Do people keep telling you that video is the “new thing for your blog!”? Yeah, they keep telling us that too. I have personally been terrified to head down that path, fearing that I will be lured in to a false sense of confidence about the ease of producing decent short video and then, I …


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The Magnificent Mile

Last night, in the dense humidity, I strolled the Magnificent Mile with a friend. There are some cool things about the promenade — the wacky giant sculpture of the couple in American Gothic, the splendid, almost Venetian water tower, the flower beds, and, of course, the never ending display of humans. The strapping lad in …


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Our Chicago Digs

Given that we’ve just spent six nights camping, folding tents and stuffing sleeping bags and stumbling off to less than immaculate shared facilities every morning, we’d be pretty easy to impress with accommodations. A narrow bed with more than a half an inch of padding would have done me nicely, and a bathroom that maybe …


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