In Bloom Magazine, Every Burger is Juicy

I always pick up the new copy of Bloom magazine.  It’s a brightly-colored, slickly-produced, and in many ways quite well-done give-away magazine about Bloomington, Indiana, focusing on arts, entertainment, food, and so on.  It sometimes contains interesting long-form journalism about the town and its history of a kind you wouldn’t find elsewhere — for example, [...]

Ann Arbor man punched during literary argument

Too awesome! Ann Arbor man punched during literary argument Posted: Mon, Mar 19, 2012 : 3:24 p.m. A 34-year-old Ann Arbor man was sent to the hospital with a head injury after another man punched him on Saturday during a literary argument, according to police. Ann Arbor police Lt. Renee Bush said the man went [...]

Nick Cave Soundsuits @ Cincinnati Museum of Art

We made a little Spring Break visit to Cincinnati this week, and one highlight was the show of Nick Cave “soundsuits” at the Cincinnati Museum of Art.  This is not the Australian musician Nick Cave of the Bad Seeds but the African-American, Missouri-born artist.  (At first I thought, geez, if you have the same name [...]

*Cedar Rapids,* Eliot Coleman, and the Midwestern greenhouse dream

[image: http://www.urbanfarmonline.com/urban-gardening/backyard-gardening/small-scale-greenhouse.aspx] We watched the El Helms movie Cedar Rapids: Ed Helms is Tim Lippe, a modest, upstanding, nerdy small-town Iowa insurance salesman who is sent to a conference in the glittering fleshpots of Cedar Rapids, IA, which functions (often wittily) in the movie as a very tame/toned-down version of Las Vegas in The Hangover.  [...]

Brilliance/ Craziness of the St Louis City Museum

We had a great visit with friends to St Louis this weekend.  The zoo was fantastic… the Botanical Gardens amazing: we especially enjoyed a temporary exhibit up at the moment on “Extreeme Tree-houses” — at least a dozen “tree houses” made by artists, these not up in trees but around the bases.  All enchanting/engaging in [...]

100 Acres, Goose the Market

Indianapolis has always seemed like a surprisingly unexciting city for its size (pushing a million), even if I’m glad we live an hour away from the airport and a big-city mall, Trader Joe’s, etc.  (We’re sort of sick of the Children’s Museum, but it is very good.)  But lately the city has seemed to be [...]

Midwestern Smurfers

Always good to see the excellent P.R. for Indiana in the NYT: With Cars as Meth Labs, Evidence Litters Roads ELKHART, Ind. — The toxic garbage, often in clumps, blends in easily with the more mundane litter along rural roads and highways here: used plastic water bottles, old tubing, dirty gloves, empty packs of medicine. [...]

Exotic Feline Rescue Center

We finally visited the Exotic Feline Rescue Center after 8 years in Southern Indiana, an excellent post-Thanksgiving day trip. It’s a couple miles off 46 East on the way to Terre Haute.  The entrance has a vague resemblance to an autobody parts store or some such.  You pay your entrance fee, and one of the [...]

Creepy Farmers’ Market Simulacrum

Sarah snapped these pics of this extremely creepy Farmers Market simulacrum on display in the entrance to the Kroger’s near us. “Hey, people seem to really like these ‘farmers’ markets.’  Let’s arrange our sterile fruits and veggies imported from South America, Australia, etc and present it all as the produce raised by a disturbing robot/Cylon [...]

Football with Headscarves

Love this photo from an article about public charter schools in Minneapolis: We’ve applied to a new charter school in town for Celie and Iris next year (not that we’re sure we’d send them if they got in, yet).  I doubt it will be full of Somali or Hmong immigrants, however.