strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: April 2013
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View of the marching fishes. Wednesday, April 24, 2013. Route 66 V: The under-written conclusion! I’m just about ready to wrap up this whole Route 66 thing, not because I’m running out of stories, but because as we progressed further north, and I became more and more anxious about getting to Chicago in time to pick up my house keys, we ventured outside of the car less and less. Am I the only one that find this creepy? How does one keep alligators alive in Oklahoma for most of the year? I have to put a di...
strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: The long ride home
http://strasmark.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-long-ride-home.html
View of the marching fishes. Wednesday, August 06, 2014. The long ride home. Per Travis’s comment on my previous post, and stealing an idea from a Facebook friend, I present you, my loyal readers (sic) with a photo-essay. The conceit is to take a photo at ten-minute intervals during a bike ride. I selected the ride home from Amynah’s work/Sana’s pre-school, as I do it all the time and was not, today at least, carrying Inara. Photo Three: This is the portion of the Green Line that runs down Lake Street...
strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: May 2013
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View of the marching fishes. Tuesday, May 28, 2013. Egrets, I saw a few. I'm not even sure she's looking through the right end. Sana is at the age where she’s asking questions about the world around her. Some of them are even driven by genuine curiosity, as opposed to fuelling her apparently incessant need to Talk All Of The Time. In any case, Sana's curiosity almost immediately exceeded my extremely limited store of ornithological knowledge. So, I dutifully dug out my binoculars, downloaded the Audu...
strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: July 2013
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View of the marching fishes. Tuesday, July 30, 2013. Still writing, sort of. An article I wrote while still living in France has been published in. S August/September issue, which I understand to be on newsstands now (also available on whatever i-Things you might be reading on these days). The short form is that Canada ends up "invading" El Salvador in support of a fascist dictator. It does not go well for his people. Sunday, July 21, 2013. Any party we throw for her, but surely she deserves some. Initia...
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View of the marching fishes: June 2014
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View of the marching fishes. Saturday, June 28, 2014. Not even the Venus Flytraps are cool? All of which is a shame, because I now live in a new city that I love, and have a whole new genre of mishap about which to write, namely parenting-related ones. So: a day with Inara, no plans, no routine to fall back on. On a whim, I decided to bike to the Garfield Park Conservatory, which the Internet tells me is one of the jewels of the Chicago Parks system (which is saying something). Accordingly, I took a quic...
strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: November 2013
http://strasmark.blogspot.com/2013_11_01_archive.html
View of the marching fishes. Monday, November 04, 2013. To the last trick or treater of the night. To the last Trick or Treater of the Night,. But I plodded to the door, the phantom and fairy in their bath chattering at their mother. I open the door, candies in hand… but the “Happy Hallowe’en” died on my lips. For that, I apologize. Or a banker dressed as a neck tattoo guy? But lets be honest: your child does not have teeth. Unless you were planning on using your blender to make a Snickers-slurry and...
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View of the marching fishes: October 2013
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View of the marching fishes. Thursday, October 10, 2013. Al Capone and me. As part of a project to get me out of the house, keep my writing muscles in shape while waiting for the government shutdown to end and my green card to be processed, and to better acquaint myself with my corner of Chicago, I've offered my services to Logansquarist. Anyway, it's a history column, which presents some difficulties in that I know nothing of Chicago's history other than 1) mobsters and 2) fire. Another thing I am (spor...
strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: Professional writing
http://strasmark.blogspot.com/2014/04/professional-writing.html
View of the marching fishes. Wednesday, April 02, 2014. Hey, I don't often write here about what I write elsewhere, but here is something I wrote, published elsewhere. That elsewhere is the-toast.net, which is one of the more reliably funny sites on the Internet, and I am delighted to have made their cut. It isn't often I get to take my preoccupations of history, over-thinking pop-culture, higher education and France and make a big joke out of it all, but I think I managed. View my complete profile.
strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: Really Inara? Not even the Venus Flytraps are cool?
http://strasmark.blogspot.com/2014/06/really-inara-not-even-venus-flytraps.html
View of the marching fishes. Saturday, June 28, 2014. Not even the Venus Flytraps are cool? All of which is a shame, because I now live in a new city that I love, and have a whole new genre of mishap about which to write, namely parenting-related ones. So: a day with Inara, no plans, no routine to fall back on. On a whim, I decided to bike to the Garfield Park Conservatory, which the Internet tells me is one of the jewels of the Chicago Parks system (which is saying something). Accordingly, I took a quic...
strasmark.blogspot.com
View of the marching fishes: Apparently, I REALLY liked Frozen.
http://strasmark.blogspot.com/2014/01/apparently-i-really-liked-frozen.html
View of the marching fishes. Thursday, January 16, 2014. Apparently, I REALLY liked Frozen. The headline question of Akash Nickolas’s Atlantic article on the storytelling innovations of Disney’s “Frozen” was “Did Prince Charmingreally need to be reinvented? So, in that sense, Nickolas is correct that the entertainments of girls are subject to a critical rigour that boys are not. But is Prince Hans of Frozen a reaction to that criticism? The examples go on: in the story, Cinderella rejected her suitor thr...
