What Writers Can Learn From Angry Birds

You are about to witness one of the most wretched and desperate posts in the history of the blogosphere. Having indulged some 10,000 hours of the last month to sling-shotting cartoon birds at cartoon pigs, I will attempt to explain why this is really helping me become a better author, if not a better parent. [...]

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QNABS: Who's your favorite Viking?

Question nobody asks but should: Who’s your favorite Viking? Let me start by saying that I never hated Brett Favre as a Packer. I recognized his superb quarterbacking skills then, and relished in his occasional meltdown. Now it’s the opposite, but I’m not one of those crazy Vikings fans (cough-my brother Ken-cough) who wished upon [...]

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In Flew Enza

It’s been nearly a fortnight since my last non-trivial post, and a lot has happened since then. For example, I’ve been to Michigan and got horribly sick. I’m not implying those are similar or connected, mind you. But in Michigan I watched an endless, gut-wrenching tie-breaker baseball game between the Twins and Tigers on TV [...]

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A Couple of Ball Games

My hometown is having a pretty big 24 hours in sports between tonight and tomorrow. First of all there’s Monday Night Football tonight. It’s always a big deal to host a Monday Night game, but tonight is like the biggest Monday Night Football game EVAR (as the kids on the Internet spell and capitalize it) [...]

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Bookcase, Loft, and Kubel

Weather has suddenly gotten springy in Minneapolis, and my wife and I couldn’t have picked a better afternoon to go to the western suburb of Wayzata for a reading/signing, dinner, a walk along the lake, ice cream, and then meeting the book club back at the book store. I was glad that the weather warmed [...]

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Play Ball!

I just found this on YouTube to celebrate opening day for Major League Baseball (I choose to ignore the one game that was played yesterday since it involves teams I don’t care about — got that, Josh?) Lots to love in this little clip. First of all, there’s the score. I guess that’s what happens [...]

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Steel vs. Cactus: The Author Picks One

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl, which is, I believe, the biggest day in American sports. Football is the most popular sport, and it’s the only sport with a one-game championship tilt instead of a multiple-game series. Throw in some million dollar ads and a mid-game rock concert, and it’s hard to not get caught up [...]

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Play Ball!

I was going to post something celebratory about MLB opening day, but it’s hard to get in the spirit of things when there’s several inches of snow on the ground and a bunch of guys I’ve never heard of calling themselves “Twins” — and harder yet when my favorite Twin is wearing the wrong uniform. [...]

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