Food can affect people in many, many different ways

Hip hop Christmas carols soaked the air as I stood in the check-out at Cub Foods. The woman in front of me shifted her toddler to her left hip and smiled as I tossed a Snickers bar in my cart.

My husband, Peter, and I are returning from Spain by boat. The whole idea started when Peter read a book about the sinking of the Lusitania.

To me, it was a thunderclap. Years ago, when I was in Congress, we were in the midst of a tense, contentious debate. Members had gotten irritated, levying charges back and forth, and tempers were rising. It was starting to look like we might just go off the rails. Then one member stood up, a…

Earlier this year, border agents made the country’s largest fentanyl bust in history, seizing 254 pounds of fentanyl and 395 pounds of methamphetamine (meth) at a routine border check. The drugs were stashed in a tractor-trailer driven by a twenty-six year old Mexican man. The fentanyl alone…

The news was filled in late September with highlights of various “climate strikes” held across the globe. Between Sept. 20 and 27th, in 4,500 locations in 150 countries over 4 million people participated in demonstrations demanding immediate and significant action be taken to slow global warming.

I lost a feather the other day and I understand this does not qualify as news.

So, you are sitting down at the Thanksgiving table, into your second helping of potatoes and pumpkin pie and all of a sudden, the conversation turns towards today’s political climate. If you don’t want to partake in the conversation and steer the conversation towards something else, here are…

A Happy Thanksgiving to you. I hope you get to enjoy the company of friends and family over a meal and drama free conversation.

Representative democracy is based on a simple premise. It’s that ordinary citizens can make satisfactory judgments on complex public policy and political issues — or at least grasp them well enough to decide who should be dealing with them.

I bet most of the people, who will be reading this review, are going to see Frozen II because either one of their kids or grandkids are going to want to see it. That is not just wild speculation on my part but based on the opening weekend box office numbers where Frozen II raked in almost on…

“I like the edge season!” my husband, Peter, said, as we watched the moon rise over the mountains and felt a chill breeze rise with it. As far as I know, Peter invented this expression. He might have meant the “season’s end,” but I like the idea of the “season’s edge” better.

My parents were generous in all things – except this. Everyone who sat at our Thanksgiving table had the last name "Holmgren."

This past weekend, my teenage son and I got to spend the day together because my wife and daughter were out of town for a family member’s baby shower. As is my custom on Saturdays I go to the movies. I had visions of seeing Ford V Ferrari, the new Christian Bale and Matt Damon historical rac…

In 2010, financial services giant American Express launched a promotion aimed at small business vitality along Main Streets, U.S.A.

South Dakota has a rising methamphetamine problem and Gov. Kristi Noem announced Monday an anti-meth campaign with the slogan, “Meth, We’re on It.”

Winter has arrived and we are all heating our homes once again.

One day, I was doing what a lot of people do: Surf the internet for random stuff. And the first question that popped into my mind, was how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll? That got my mind going down the road of trying to find the answers to useless trivia peop…

For those whose remember spending hours in classrooms working on the flourish of your letter “l” and getting the curve of the lower case “g” just right, a trend in recent legislation may make your efforts relevant once again.

My husband, Peter, and I are spending a month in Spain and we have left our worries behind. As a result, we have had to come up with new, temporary worries to occupy us until we get back home.

Doctor Sleep is the sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s powerful and haunting movie The Shining (1980). If you didn’t know both of these movies are based on books of the same name from the horror and paranormal writing legend Stephen King. This sequel centers on Danny Torrance, played by Ewan McGreg…

One of the not-so-small gifts of living in a representative democracy is that you can’t accomplish things alone. Whether you’re trying to get a stop sign put up on a dangerous corner or to change US policy on greenhouse gas emissions, you have to reach out to others. And learning how to pers…

Our veterans have served with honor and integrity to protect our nation’s values at home and across the globe. They serve with no guarantees of accolades, grand achievements, or even a guarantee that they will return home safely. They are aware of all the risks, but they serve our country anyway.

The signs might have been there before then, but, my starting point came when she was around nine months old.

Well, Halloween and fall are over, Christmas and winter are coming up soon. Oh, and there’s that slight detour for Thanksgiving to deal with as well.

My husband, Peter, and I have settled into the little house we are calling home for a month in southern Spain. The house is old and quirky—but I’ve come to believe that all homes are quirky in their own way.

Wisconsin’s tradition of government transparency rests on the state’s open records and open meetings laws. They declare that nearly every government document is open to public inspection, and nearly every meeting of groups formed to do governmental work must be open to the public.

Entrepreneurship is a tangled road filled with barriers as college student Jayson Gonzalez recently discovered. In a classic Little Guy versus Big Corporation, Gonzalez found himself crossways with the donut-maker, Krispy Kreme.

In one of my last movie reviews, I talked about the current state of the film industry where the movie studios love to use properties that audiences are familiar with. What I didn’t talk about is that many times when a movie studio takes a familiar property, they want to reintroduce it to ne…

The original film The Current War was released in 2017 to not a lot of fanfare at several film festivals. Many critics said that Michael Mitnick’s screenplay was a little too meandering. Its release was also in doubt because its distributor, the Weinstein Company, imploded due to the sexual …

When you think of the Charlie Brown comic strip, how many people would say Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown as he’s ready to kick it, is at the top of their list?

I was recalling some of the Halloweens of my youth and remembered an incident that occurred in the fall and scared the Dickens out of me. I’m not sure what category this falls into: horror, comedy or adolescent stupidity, but here is my tale of the night my friends and I knocked on the door …

First, I noticed the owl.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I love lists.

My parents live in a cabin deep in the north woods. I know this sounds like the start of a fairytale. Sometimes it seems a bit like one.

“I ask how and why this decision was reached,” Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said in the Senate recently. He was calling for an investigation into President Trump’s decision to pull US forces out of Syria. “Are we so weak and so inept diplomatically that Turkey forced the hand of the United States o…

As nursery rhymes go, Old MacDonald Had a Farm is one of the newer ones, going back to around 1917. The opening lines put agriculture in perspective back in the day, “Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O; And on his farm he had a cow, E-I-E-I-O . . . .” Fast forward to today and numbers show …

Zombieland: Double Tap is a poster child for what is wrong with the way that modern movie studios green light movies. The original Zombieland came out in 2009 and found success at the box office taking in about three times as much as it cost. These were not blockbuster type numbers but still…

Friends and family have known me for a long time have seen my love of sports and usually shake their head in disbelief about it, like for example, when I can name the last 25 to 30 Super Bowl Champions going backward.

I just returned from a trip to Disney World with part of my wife’s family. We spent a week in hot and humid Florida enjoying one another’s company and four of the parks. There were long days of walking, meeting characters, riding the rides, and enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells. Though…