Hockey’s Windy City Renaissance

Recently I started writing for a sports site called The Love of Sports, which is dedicated more to celebrating the positive things about sports instead of obsessing over the negativity that is so prominent in sports these days.

My first published piece is up; it’s called Hockey’s Windy City Renaissance. It’s about all the ways that the new owner Rocky Wirtz has been a wonderful thing for all Blackhawks fans.

The site is pretty entertaining, with Top 10 lists, and some good writers providing content. Like, you know, me. Only better.

So please click over to that site, and to my content, I’d appreciate it!

UPDATE:  I posted the original (longer) piece on my site as “The Chicago Blackhawks are Back, and So Are Their Fans”.

Zen and the Art of Personal Relationships

(NOTE: Recently I updated my “Notable Page” with this item, and I thought it good for a blog post, too, after I found the afterword (and the entire book) published online.)

The Biker Read Hegel – Eddie Dean, online.wsj.com, 09-08-2008 – A review of Zen and Now, by Mark Richardson, about the true story behind Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, the bestselling philosophy book of the 1970s, which I bought in college and read twice before I understood it.

Underlying the plot and ideas of the book is a constant level of desperate melancholy and sadness, brought to life by the relationship between Pirsig and his (then) 11 year old son Chris. The reader was never sure how much of this was real, and how much was fictionalized for dramatic effect. Unfortunately, it was true, and things got worse for the family after the book was published.

A tenth-anniversary version of “Zen” includes an afterword by the author explaining what happened, and how he learned to deal with. It’s a must-read for fans of the book.

P.J. O’Rourke Commencement Speech

One of my favorite authors, both funny and wise, at his irreverent best: Fairness, idealism and other atrocities.

A favorite part (among many):

Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I’ve got a 10-year-old at home. She’s always saying, “That’s not fair.” When she says this, I say, “Honey, you’re cute. That’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. That’s not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.”

Or, as I like to paraphrase it: kwitcherbitchin’.

There’s one book of his that absolutely blew me away on nearly every page: “All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty”. It’s many things at once: a travel book, a hilarious book, and it’s full of wicked insights about the harsh realities of the world that newspapers and “news” magazines tend to gloss over. Highly, highly recommended.

An Ode to Toast

Seriously

One of the marks of good writing — for me at least — is the ability to take a fairly mundane subject, and give it a treatment that draws the reader in, via clever use of tone, or lyrical use of language, or some other method.

You know, like James Lileks does nearly every damn day of his life.

So this morning I was on the website of the Chicago Tribune, and saw this link: Why toast matters.

First thought: “hmm, that sounds pretty stupid”.