Day 76: Miller Lite – Everything You’ve Always Wanted In An Article… And Less

originally published March 16, 2012 I have not yet written an article on one of my favorite topics: great beer. Today I will unfortunately not be breaking that streak. My topic du jour is Miller Lite. I’ve only had one Miller Lite in my thirty-seven years, and I vaguely remember it being only marginally different […]

Day 66: The Big Six On Sixty-Six (Which Falls On The Sixth)

originally published March 6, 2012 In honor of the big six-six (Ms. Wiki must be an avid reader of this site – and really, why wouldn’t she be?), today’s hammer has thwacked the anvil of the Big Six. The Big Six refers to a number of things. Hopefully one or two of these will have […]

Day 59: The A-Z List Of Defunct Sports Franchises

originally published February 28, 2012 A – Philadelphia Athletics (1860-1876) – This team, which bears no relation to today’s Oakland team, finished with a record of .500 or greater for all but its final year in the National League. In 1876 they were horrible, and at one point refused to head out west for a […]

Day 57: A Trip Down The Strip

originally published February 26, 2012 One thing that makes a great city great is its Street. Every magnificent metropolis seems to have one street that defines its culture, broadcasts to the world where the city is at, and where the rest of us will someday be. New York has Broadway, Los Angeles has Sunset Strip, […]

Day 49: Off-Key – Why I’ll Never Be A City’s Pride

originally published February 18, 2012 The Key to the City. It sounds so glamorous. What does it open? Everything in the city? Is it a magic key? To the city’s vending machines? An unending supply of Twix and Fresca? I’ll probably never be awarded the key to any city, but the arbitrary honor remains a […]

Day 33: Milly Witkop Named Her Son ‘Fermin’, Yet She’s Actually Kind Of Cool

originally published February 2, 2012 To quote Wikipedia, that fair maiden who imbues me with a zesty yolk of seemingly meaningless information every day, Milly Witkop was “a Ukranian-born Jewish anarcho-syndicalist.” So why should we care? In her lifetime, Milly was not only the reigning queen of Wrong-Place-Wrong-Time, she was also a pretty sharp rebellious […]

Day 18: The Man. The Myth. The Polypropylene Stacking Chair.

originally published January 18, 2012 This week, Americans took a day to commemorate one of the 20th century’s greatest humans. A man with a Dream. This is the story of another man, one who had a very different but arguably equally influential dream. The dream of a chair. Robin Day grew up in Buckinghamshire, England, […]

Day 13: The Five Points – Not The Ideal 19th Century Tourist Destination

originally published January 13, 2012 For anyone who has not watched Martin Scorcese’s epic 2002 film, The Gangs of New York, the gist is essentially that there were gangs. In New York. The focus is on a neighborhood known as the Five Points in central Manhattan, a slum filled with poverty-stricken immigrants, which came to […]

Day 9: Don’t Mess With The USS Unadilla

originally published January 9, 2012 In April of 1861, as the Civil War became a reality, the US Navy came to the realization that they would probably need to kill a lot of people in the very near future. For that reason, they went into rapid production on 23 new gunboats, all of which were […]

Day 7: WCBS-FM, New York City’s Oldies-Folks Home

originally published January 7, 2012 Bringing you the Stax of Wax from way back in the Pax(t), I present today’s topic: New York City’s WCBS-FM, 101.1 on your dial, provided your dial is located in New York City. I have clicked through numerous radio stations on Wikipedia in search of writing material, and this is […]