Download "Santa Came Too Soon"
"Old Man River & Me," written with Mark Knudsen.
Daily tracking & ranking of baseball’s top players since 1995. Showing which players most help their teams win the most games based on box score statistics.
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Even with solutions promising the eventual end of a scourge, it will take effort to truly eradicate what ails us.
Share Article → Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have continually asked, “When will this end?” The answer, frustratingly, keeps getting pushed further into the future. We may be asking the wrong question.
Share Article → Somehow, strangely, the CDC's warnings of Thanksgiving gatherings causing illness and death from COVID-19 do not go far enough. The messaging needs to be scarier. We need to bring Hitler in.
Share Article → How would Donald Trump react if he were the lead runner forced out in a fielder’s choice, I wondered. Badly, I concluded. I can’t even escape from the drama of Trump while watching the World Series. Last night, Cody Bellinger of the Dodgers hit into a fielder’s choice and suddenly, my mind was spun toward Trump’s idiocy, his selfishness, his nonsensicalness and how those factors make him such an unnecessary and unnecessarily negative disruptive force in our lives.
Share Article → In five years of creating visual enticements to recruit volunteers to serve ice cream for a fundraiser, you’d think you’d run out of dairy-related puns. But here’s the scoop: You just keep churning them out. You cannot be cowed. You milk it for all it’s worth. You keep calm and dairy on. Creating these graphics was not something I envisioned myself doing when I took on the role of coordinating high school students and their parents to volunteer at the Iowa State Fair to staff the Dairy Barn, serving ice cream and shakes to fairgoers. Here's a look at a selection of my favorite illustations/posters, plus one short film.
Share Article → How I found contentment in a poet’s irritating pretentiousness.
Share Article → In 2018, I released this novelty Christmas song that Dr. Demento played on his national, long-running comedy music show. It was also played by a couple of radio stations in Iowa—including one in which I performed the song live. And it aired on a few other internet comedy music shows around the country. There are songs and stories about the troubles arising from Santa Claus arriving too late for Christmas or having to cancel Christmas altogether (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Year Without a Santa Claus,” “Christmas Don’t Be Late”) but few or none that tell of the problems associated with Santa arriving too early. This song attempts to address that shortcoming.
Share Article → Audio of old radio public radio shows has recently been posted, allowing Susan and me to hear ourselves on Michael Feldman's "Whad'ya Know?" national public radio show during our honeymoon, just a week and a day after our 1990 wedding.
Share Article → Can a "painting" of a beloved childhood home created with the simple tap on an iPhone really be considered art?
Dad never seemed to know how to be pessimistic in the face of keeping a farm machine dealership in business during the farm crises of the 70s and 80s or in the face of a cancer diagnosis in May. He died July 24. My eulogy for Dad: Chuck Plank, 1937-2013