I never pondered why my family of origin and everyone they surrounded themselves with were so preoccupied with food; it just was a fact of life. Now, having read a book titled “Why Italians Love to Talk About Food,” I finally understand that “Italy is food and food is Italy, literally emotionally, historically and symbolically.”
Scott Brown is the new American idol. The more America sees him, the more they like him. There's even talk of putting him on the national ticket in 2012. I hope he's enjoying it. His long-term political future remains to be seen, but here's a short-term prediction: He'll never be as popular as he is right now.
Out of billions of Yahoo! searches, Valentine’s Day searches have been in the top 450 for more than a week.
As the years have progressed, the number - and wackiness - of the prop bets has progressed exponentially.
President Barack Obama should have approached health care reform as a long-term project. He should have prioritized the major issues and then worked on them one step at a time. It may have taken him three or four years to get all the pieces passed through Congress, but he would have eventually completed his goal of reforming the system.
Kevin Haas reaches into the grab bag every so often when we’d rather just repeat news, instead of research it ourselves. Here’s what we’ve been following this week.
The American Institute of Food Distribution claims that Super Bowl Sunday is second only to Thanksgiving in terms of food consumption.
On Tuesday morning I cursed Punxsutawney's legendary low-grade land beaver after he saw his shadow and signified six more weeks of winter.
Apple has officially introduced the iPad, its new tablet computer — which, beyond being the latest cool-looking electronic device that I can’t afford, has another, much more important designation: It might just save newspapers.
For most of my life I have been on a quest to find a hair product that would give my hair more volume. The women in my family have fine hair, but a lot of it. Well, unfortunately, it has never been fine with me.
If I lived in Frank Capra's Bedford Falls, I'd be thinking about taking my money out of Old Man Potter's bank and putting it into the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan. Instead, I'm thinking about taking my money out of Bank of America and putting it into a local bank that's more likely to put it to work in my community.
Many children have difficulty taking ownership of their mistakes. Children commonly deny wrongdoing or blame a sibling, which I refer to as The Blame Game.
“I didn’t do it,” “It’s his fault, he made me do it,” or “It wasn’t my fault, he pushed me first” are fairly typical responses from young children. Sometimes a little fib requires an explanation, and then a child finds himself in the position of weaving a story around what becomes a grand lie.
“Dad, could that happen here?” my 9-year-old daughter asked while we sat on the couch and watched the telethon Friday night raising money for Haiti earthquake relief efforts.
“Could that many people die here of an earthquake?”
“Why don’t they have enough doctors there?”
“Why don’t they have homes to go to?”
About a week ago, my 6-year old lost his first tooth. He didn't really lose it. I pulled it after I grew tired of watching it wiggle around in his mouth. Its next-gum neighbor began wobbling around few hours after the first deposit was made by the Tooth Fairy. So the next afternoon, I tried unsuccessfully to pull the second tooth, until... .
Barack Obama got lucky.
Unlike 1994, the fire alarm went off before the Democrats’ house burned down.
Obama is lucky because he got this message in one senatorial race, not in a rehashed Republican Revolution. In 1994, Clinton didn’t have any warning of what might be on the horizon. Obama has seen the storm clouds brewing. That’s why his State of the Union address last night took on a very different tone.
This seedy tale of ballot-stuffing would make former members of the Nixon administration proud. In recognition of Jan. 23 as National Pie Day, one business in DuPage County surveyed its employees about their favorite pies. Some staff members bragged about voting multiple times. Hearing this was appalling. “Hey, that’s Chicago politics,” one employee said.
Martin Luther King Jr. never met Andre Bauer. But King left a description that fits Bauer -- South Carolina's lieutenant governor who is running for governor -- very well. "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity," King said.
Today’s students aren’t just spending a couple of hours with their technology. According to the study, they’re spending more and more time online and on the phone each year, and statistics seem to be showing that their grades are suffering from that increased activity.
