On the plans, it’s called the “Twenty-four Hundred Series Four Bedroom Trilevel”, built on Lot 10, Block 7 of the Town and Country Subdivision. It was completed in the summer of 1958.

My parents bought it in September 1968, just as I was starting first grade. A nice big corner lot, and lots of room for a family with five kids. A creek ran between the boulevards on the east side of the yard. The neighborhood was filled with kids our age. The grade school was a long block away, with woods behind it to explore.

There are only two things I know for sure about this picture.  According to the calendar on the wall, it was taken in December of 1957.  And I found it in the collection of Kodachrome slides that I scanned after my Aunt died a few years ago.

I have one educated guess – it was taken during a hunting trip in northern (?) Wisconsin, presumably by my uncle who died more than 25 years ago.

A few years ago my brothers and I started keeping lists of all the books we read during the year and sharing them with each other at year’s end.

Since I’m unlikely to start and finish a book before midnight, here’s this year’s list:

Is it possible this election result is exactly what we need to get past some of the divisiveness in our politics?

Work with me here. As things stand right now, it appears we’ll have a President Biden/Harris, with a Republican Senate and a narrower margin in the Democratic House (and a hopefully reliable Supreme Court).

Here is the opening sentence of a story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Wednesday. (The paper is owned by and the story is sourced from USA Today, but still…)

Bucks forward Kyle Korver discussed the backstory and emotional locker room prior to his team’s decision to boycott a playoff game in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting in Milwaukee in late August. [emphasis added]

Better Off Dead was released 35 years ago tomorrow, on August 23rd, 1985.

I love this movie so much! It has everything — John Cusack before he became annoying, Diane Franklin at peak cuteness, a psychotic paper boy, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong, an antagonist named Stalin, Asian drag-racing brothers who talk like Howard Cosell, a claymation hamburger performing Van Halen, an appearance by Barney Rubble, homages to Rocky, Harold & Maude, The Graduate, and several other films that I’ve probably missed.

This headline story on CNN.com is not labeled as “analysis.” It appears to be a “news” story. Here are the opening paragraphs, with emphasis added.

President Donald Trump on Friday made an impassioned appeal to his base while in the shadow of Mount Rushmore instead of striking a unifying tone, railing against what he called a “merciless campaign” by his political foes to erase history by removing monuments some say are symbols of racial oppression.

The following is a quote from 1984 by George Orwell:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

From an editorial in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. Emphasis added.

The latest data from a monthly survey of small businesses comes as a jarring reminder of what life was like back in the halcyon days of … March. On Thursday the National Federation of Independent Business will release last month’s polling of 627 of its members. A majority of the responses, the NFIB says, arrived before the coronavirus clampdown.

Tomorrow marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge.

In October of 2015 two of my brothers and I traveled through parts of Europe retracing WWI and WWII battlefields, including two nights in the Bastogne area. The following are some pictures from what we saw in that part of the trip.