The year was 1975. The country, still a fresh-faced youth barely 200 years old, was experiencing perhaps its proudest moment in history — the Watergate scandal. Everyone’s favorite lady-in-a-dress-touching-letters game show, “Wheel of Fortune,” premiered on NBC and, according to Wikipedia, my new favorite Great Lakes region orchestra, the Chippewa Read More…
There were so many better things to do on Sunday night than watch the Emmys. I had homework, there was a Choco Taco in the freezer ready to be devoured and it was high time I showed the spider making its home in my room who was boss. I live Read More…
As with courting a new relationship or selecting your first prostitute, watching a new television show can be a delicate and tricky business. There’s hopefully less chance of contracting the clap (unless you’re watching “Jersey Shore”), but the risk remains the same. Television is one duplicitous temptress and, come every Read More…
It’s all Clarissa Darling’s fault. Remember her? That svelte, sunny blonde with the leggings who was supposed to “explain it all” Saturday nights on Nick? Yeah, that one. That lying, deceitful wench. She explained nothing. Why was there a boy climbing into her window every day? Why was that theme Read More…
To personify a nation’s cuisine, Danish food is incredibly humble. Criticized as the leftover scraps of a nation’s exports manufactured for the palette of a baby, the foundation of Danish cuisine rests on secondary meat products and pre-refrigeration preservation techniques, and has an extremely brief spice spectrum. The major flavors Read More…
I spent my last week before leaving the U.S. at my parents’ homes. Nestled between the harried months preceding graduation and the summer abroad that lay ahead, that week was lost to the domestic doldrums. The great organ that was undergraduate life had just let go its death belch, and Read More…
There is no finer form of transportation than the train. Forgetting bacterial reports on BART and the stench of commuters on the subway, traveling across a country by train is a luxury that can’t be imitated. There is an elegance, an easy straightforwardness, as well as an incredible perspective afforded Read More…
I’m not exactly sure how to introduce Goodiepal. He has been cropping up in various incarnations and wigs in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, England, Scotland and the United States, holding lectures at universities and releasing a handful of LPs in the early 2000s. Without having received any formal academic qualifications Read More…
My feeble yet ongoing attempts to learn Danish have been retarded by, as far as I can tell, two basic character flaws: poor hearing and excessive reliance on non-verbal cues. Perhaps it’s an attempt to save money by foregoing things like Q-tips, or deep cochlear damage thanks to that one Read More…
Recently I was scanning through an Old World geography book, a lap-sized cardboard thing published for children in the early 1990s. The world was split not into continents or nations but mid-sized regions, apparently dependent on the richness of their tourist iconography. Each giant illustrated map was a combination of Read More…
