Thursday, 11/12

I think I’m ready to go.

Over the past year or so I've written in here about how I’d been stunned by the fact that it’s been (now) over a decade since I last updated the “107 Things To Love About Marquette County” list. At that time, I mentioned that it needed to get updated because of the fact that a lot of people, businesses, and activities mentioned in it are no longer around. I also asked if YOU guys had any suggestions for items and/or pictures to be included.

Well, I did two things during my holiday yesterday. I shot an episode of “High School Bowl”, and I started to gather everything I'll need for version number four of the list.

Yup. It's finally happening.

As I look at what’s going into it now, it’s actually gonna be longer than 107 things, but this is one of those lists that I really don’t feel comfortable in trying to winnow down. I mean the 107 is an arbitrary (although chosen for an obvious reason) number and I really don’t want to leave off something that’s deserving just to get down to that 107. So if it ends up being 112 or 116 things to love about Marquette County. . .well, so be it. Just consider the extra 5 or 9 items bonus items that come free of charge, much like the extra set of Ginsu steak knives you get if you call in the next 10 minutes.

And you don’t even have to pay the extra shipping & handling!

I'll be starting it on Monday, as tomorrow we're heading into Opening Day Weekend here in Michigan and, well, I have a tradition that pre-dates even the “107 Things” list. But once we get going, it should take us through Thanksgiving, by which time we'll probably be as sick of the list as you will be the leftover turkey you'll accumulate right after that.

Well, maybe not quite that much, but I'm guessing it might be in the neighborhood.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)

Tuesday, 11/10

Maybe one of these years I'll no longer have to write things like my TV piece last night.

Every couple of years we have something happen here in Marquette. Every couple of years we have someone do something they shouldn't, and pay a heavy price for it. It happened again last Thursday. And despite everything we do to try & stop it, it keeps happening.

And I wish I had the magical ability to make it stop. But I don't.

Instead, I talk about it and try to make people aware of the situation. After it occurred Thursday, I talked about it on the air. And since I have a platform that most people don't have—a weekly TV essay—I talked about it last night, as well. Do I think my incessant discussion of the topic will help?

I have no idea. But maybe if enough people talk about it, someone, sometime in the future, might remember what we've been talking about, and think about it before they do the thing that happens in Marquette every couple of years.

Here's what I'm talking about--

                                                                ****

Because tomorrow's a corporate holiday and I won't be here, there won't be a new one of these. There will be Thursday, though, with the new of a long-awaited project I may finally—finally--be ready to tackle.

We'll discuss it Thursday!

(jim@wmqt.com)

Monday, 11/9

That really can't be the answer, can it?

I was having a discussion with students last week (the same day I wrote about my cornbread addiction, in fact) while waiting for the cameras to roll on “High School Bowl”. I don't know how we got on the subject, but one of them asked me what my favorite food is, and even I was shocked when I, without thinking, blurted out “chocolate”.

Hmm. That can't be right, can it? Or is it? After all, Loraine and I took a little road trip Saturday to Escanaba to buy chocolate at Aldi. So, uhm...maybe it IS right.

Drat. For the second blog in a row, so much for me saying “I try to eat only healthy foods”. I really AM a walking oxymoron, aren't I?

Now, I like chocolate. As you're well aware, I REALLY like chocolate. But is chocolate my favorite food? Should chocolate even be anyone's favorite food? What made me blurt out that answer before even considering any other food?

Sometimes, the mind boggles.

For the record, I like lots of other foods. In fact, there are very few foods (bananas, peppers, onions, and Brussels sprouts, I'm looking at you) that I don't like. So why would I reflexively say “chocolate” instead of anything from chicken to broccoli to blueberries? Why would say I “chocolate” instead of something that's, you know, actually good for you?

Is that a hole into which I really don't want to climb?

I know dark chocolate, especially in moderate amounts, is good for you. But to have it be my favorite food? The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if my psyche was on to something. I spent a few seconds thinking about the food I eat, and I was...well, not shocked, but a bit surprised that the only thing I eat on a daily basis is, indeed chocolate. I don't eat copious amounts of it every day, but I do indeed have some of that particular food each and every day.

So maybe my psyche wasn't quite as far off as I thought.

Aside from being surprised, I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing with that information. I think I may need a little while to process it, and decide whether or not I should be embarrassed, proud, or worried by the statement I made in front of those students. You know the old saying about how kids say the darnedest things?

Maybe they should switch out “kids” for “adults”, especially when asked about your favorite foods.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)

Friday, 11/6

For me, at least I know the reason why.

My “Weird Fact of the Day” yesterday mentioned how Americans eat more during Autumn than any other season. I'm not surprised; after all, Thanksgiving and the Christmas season fall in there, and we're also probably eating stuff we shouldn't in order to ward off any approaching Seasonal Affliction Disorder from which we may suffer.

And then there are also the foods that may only see during the fall.

If you've been reading these over the years you may have picked up on the fact that, for the most part, I try to eat well. I try to avoid fast foods, overly processed foods, and foods that aren't really “foods”, foods that are just made up of chemicals and additives and shaped to look like “food”. Even the “bad' things I eat, like chocolate, are the “good” versions of the food.

So I try my best.

It may not, however, come as a surprise that I have a food that's a guilty pleasure. It's a food that I don't believe I've ever seen in a 'good” versions, and while I don't eat it a lot I do savor the times when I break down and ingest it. And that guilty pleasure is?

Cornbread.

Yup; I know I don't seem like a cornbread-loving kind of person, but I am. I know it's not good for me; it's basically a grain with all the good stuff removed combined with sugar and a bunch of fatty oils, but there's just something about it that I can't resist. So when I noticed that two Marquette grocery stores started selling freshly-made cornbread, I couldn't resist, even though it means eating 1,500 calories of gunk that could instead be used for healthy whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.

But it's cornbread...and there's something about cornbread that I just can't resist.

I did something else I probably shouldn't have, and that's read the ingredients list they stuck on the back of the container. I noticed that instead of sugar the store uses high fructose corn syrup, which is something I try to avoid at all costs. So for a few months, I had to live without cornbread.

It was hard.

Then a few weeks ago we were at another grocery store, and I noticed they had a slab of cornbread for sale. They make theirs with sugar, which obviously meant that I had to buy it and try it out, just to see if it was any different than the cornbread I'd previously been eating. A larger than usual (gulp) one pound container of calories later I was totally satisfied, not only by the cornbread but by the fact that it had sugar in it. Sure, I had just eaten around 2,000 calories, but at least those calories didn't include high fructose corn syrup.

Yes, I know I need help. What's your point?

Thankfully, I don't eat cornbread all that often. If I ate it every time I felt like it, I have the feeling I'd be adding another 20 or 30 pounds to my 160-pound frame. Besides, can you imagine what all that processed grain and fully saturated fat would do to a body not used to it? I shudder to think. However, I am human, and I do have the occasional temptation. So if you ever run into me in a grocery store and you happen to see one of those one-pound bricks of cornbread in my cart, realize it's not part of my everyday diet.

It's just a guilty pleasure.

Speaking of which, I'm doing something this weekend that might, by some, be considered taking a guilty pleasure to extremes. Details Monday.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)

Thursday, 11/5

I may have found the second greatest opening paragraph in news writing history.

Nothing catches my eye like a good opening line or a great opening paragraph, especially in a news story. Fiction, essay, and feature writers get to do it all the time, but in the world of news writing, which tends to be dry and factual, you don't get to see it often. It's only when a bizarre set of circumstances come together that you get to string together words like this, something I saw 13 years ago, and something I still consider to be the greatest opening line in a news story ever--

“A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper’.

I mean, it has everything you need—it's factual, it tells a story, and it's so absurd that it can't have happened. Yet, it did. In the 13 years since I've seen it I've thought of it often, especially when trying to come up with opening lines for these things. I never thought I'd come across another quite as bizarre, until I was perusing election results yesterday and somehow clicked into another story that led with this--

“Three Indiana judges have been suspended after a failed attempt to visit a strip club led to a drunken brawl outside an Indianapolis White Castle that ended with two of the judges being shot.”

I mean, I know Indiana can be a strange place, but THAT strange? Why did the judges—in this case, two male and one female—want to go to a strip club? Was there a reason they couldn't get in? Why did they end up drunk at a White Castle? And why did two of them get shot there?

I mean, that one line is filled with sooooo many questions that you HAVE to read the story, right?

Right?

I can just imagine the reaction of the reporter assigned to the story, thinking it was just another hum-drum piece that said reporter could probably do in their sleep. Luckily for them, it wasn’t. And luckily for us, that person had the wisdom, the foresight, and the, well, uncommon mind to put all the details of the story together in such a way that makes the rest of us riveted with just 33 words.

I hope—nay , I aspire—to write something that good some day. I know I'll probably never get the chance, but a boy can dream, can't he?

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)

Wednesday, 11/4

Because I a) stayed up too late last night watching election results and 2) have to go shoot a TV show in a few minutes, I'm going to leave you with something you haven't seen in a decade or so.

So that almost makes it new, right?

8-)

Something REALLY new tomorrow!

(jim@wmqt.com)

******

(as originally posted 11/4/15)

They're on their way there. See? It isn't that hard.

I know I've probably railed about the misuse of the different forms of “there” in the past, so forgive me if I'm babbling babbles that I've already babbled. But there was a meme going around on Facebook this morning in which someone posted that people join an organization because, and this is taken verbatim from the post, “there to stupid to do anything else”.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have the very latest definition of the word “irony” right there.

I'm starting to wonder if this whole “there/their/they're” problem is the latest version of the “chicken & the egg” quandary. Are people just grammatically stupid overall, and we notice it more these days because they post everything they write on the internet? Or has technology—the internet and spell-check—made people stupider, so much so that they don't actually know which “their” to use here and there?

Some days, I just don't know.

Now, I make a lot of grammatical & spelling errors when I write, as those of you who read this are no doubt aware. I rely too much on spell-check, and each and every one of these could probably use an extra round of proofreading, the time for which is, unfortunately, limited. So I'm not claiming to live in a glass house. I'm not claiming to be a perfect writer myself. But if I were to post something accusing someone else of being stupid?

I'd make sure I wasn't an idiot myself. But then, that's just me.

I'll shut up about this now, if for no other reason than I have to go hang out with people who, I'm guessing, actually DO know which “there” to use, four teams of some of the brightest young people on the planet, who will be taking part in another action packed edition of “High School Bowl”. It starts shooting in about an hour, in fact, assuming they make it there.

Just not their. Or they're.

(jim@wmqt.com)

Tuesday, 11/3

I hope I wasn't being too idealistic.

Welcome to mid-term election day, a day when (from all appearances) big changes are on tap. Any time there's a consequential election it seems like the county holds it collective breath, and this one is no different. So I took the opportunity to use my TV piece last night to share a dream I have, a dream that—and I hope I'm not being too naive here—that we can all live together when it's over.

Of course, I'm the same person who asks for my own spaceship every Christmas, so I do have some experience in pipe dreams.

I posted the video to social video last night, along with a slightly changed line from John Lennon's “Imagine”. The first few people who responded thought I was indeed crazy for saying what I said, but as the evening wore on it appeared that there are a LOT of people out there who are tired of the political divide among us, and who yearn for a little civility in our civil discourse. Of course, we have about as much of a chance of that as I do of getting my own spaceship, but a boy can dream, right?

No matter how things turn out tonight—whether your side wins or loses—I hope that, beginning tomorrow, as can all live together. After all, if there's anything the past decade has shown us, is that we're really good at living apart.

And I really hope that that changes soon.

The TV piece in question?

(jim@wmqt.com)