Jim Bartlett
December 29, 2016
Here’s something that’s not a news flash: we have lost a lot of famous people in 2016. It seems like there have been more losses in 2016 than ever before, although a scientist crunched some numbers and concluded that 2016 may not be so unusual. What’s different about this year is the power of social […]
December 15, 2016
The weather forecast for the Packers/Bears game on Sunday says that the high temperature might be one below. That would make it one of the coldest Packer games in history, up there with the famous Ice Bowl in 1967, when the game-time temperature in Green Bay was 13 below, or the game in 1993 that […]
November 30, 2016
There’s been a major brouhaha the last few years over the phrase “Happy Holidays.” Some people consider the phrase fightin’ words, claiming people should say “Merry Christmas.” On the other hand, you may have seen the meme that notes how the world’s seven major religions celebrate 29 different holidays between November 1st and January 15th, […]
November 17, 2016
On Thanksgiving Day 1981, I was a little baby disc jockey at KDTH in Dubuque, Iowa. My show was nearly over when a listener called to ask why I hadn’t played any Thanksgiving songs yet that morning. It was not a playful query. The tone of her voice indicated that her gorge had been rising […]
November 3, 2016
A few years ago, I went into the archives and looked at some of the morning-after Election Day editions of the Wisconsin State Journal. Here’s some of what I found: On Wednesday, November 8, 1972, the State Journal punned, “Nixon Makes It, Perfectly Clear: McG Yields in Landslide for President.” Inside, the sports page headlined the selection […]
October 20, 2016
I have been fairly fortunate in that there’s not much left on my rock concert bucket list. A full Bruce Springsteen show is about the last of it—having seen him during John Kerry’s Madison presidential campaign rally in 2004, only a few feet from the stage, was merely an appetizer. I’d still like to see […]
October 4, 2016
As you read this, I am on a business trip for one of my other jobs, a trip that requires me to fly. I don’t particularly like to fly, but it has nothing to do with going 500 miles an hour while sealed in a tube six miles above the ground. It’s the hurry-up-and-wait aspect […]
September 2, 2016
In an earlier blog post, I wrote about Robert E. Gard’s book The Romance of Wisconsin Place Names, originally published in 1968 but now available in a new edition. Here are some more origin stories about the places where we live and work. William McFarland was a railroad man who mapped out the village in […]
In 1968, author and historian Robert Gard published The Romance of Wisconsin Place Names, the result of several years of research. He went back to old records and old-timers to find the reasons why places in Wisconsin, large and small, famous and forgotten, have the names they do. The book has been reissued with a […]
August 25, 2016
A while back a friend tagged me on Facebook to participate in one of those name-your-favorite-things memes. This one was mostly musical, and here are some of my answers. Favorite Beatles song: “In My Life”Favorite Rolling Stones song: “Brown Sugar”Favorite Doors song: “Riders on the Storm”Favorite Bob Dylan song: either “Hurricane” or “Positively Fourth Street”Favorite […]