Condomania

Thirty pounds dropped and twenty left to drop. How did I get so fat? From not smoking? From eating mountains of ice cream? From being lazy?   Downtown Kansas City. Photo courtesy Jesper Rautell Balle. All of the above, but with the help of my health coach, a retired physician and friend of half-a-century, at least I seem to have broken my addiction to vast amounts of food. I’m off to travel by Amtrak May 2 – 16, where my sister will pick me up at the once-fabulous Union Station in Kansas City, now filled with few travelers and too much…

Who lives in a ramshackle shack at the bottom of a California canyon? Not me. I dwell high-in-the-sky in a Wisconsin condo. The participants in this book review for you, depending on their heritage, live at the bottom of canyons, with the “luckier” ones living high above in red-roofed mansions filled with expensive stuff. Long ago, I lived in a tri-level in the Milwaukee suburbs. It was there, in my splendid kitchen of avocado and gold, that my cleaning lady said (while reaching for rags to polish my home), “Your rags are better than my clothes.” Her name was Fannie…

Once upon a time there was a Prince named William. Though his birth was celebrated by his parents, Diana & Charles, he was doomed from the start to have a bald spot, handed down through the ages, courtesy of the Royal Males who also had them. But hold it old chap. It seems the problem is rooted in the female, and is known as the “curse of the Windsors.” I mean, in a fairy tale spun from gold, glitter isn’t always to be desired, particularly if it shines in a spotlight when the world is watching. As he grew to…

Thank you for your comments, Noodle. Am I to guess if that’s you reading a book? April Fools Day has come and gone, but go to thirdcoastdigest.com and read all about All Fools Day and how I got snookered in Iowa in the long ago. I mean the photograph of my brother cross-bred with a sheep is worth the click, isn’t it? If you’re curious about who is the newest “narrator” of the Pfister blog, pay a visit to the neat clean site. The panel met on March 31 to view videos of the finalists, and then, in a civil…

There it is bouncing off my northeast facing balcony…The Sun. It is spring up here on floor 17 and I’ve moved one pot of future flowers outside where they sit on a long gray bench From Design Within Reach. In the winter it supports multiple pots on the other side of the glass patio expanse. I’m here to tell you that succulents of the potted kind stand at least a chance of surviving in Milwaukee’s gray gray winters if they are nurtured inside. So far though, I don’t see a hint of blooms on my moth orchids, one of which…

Chubby, chunky, corn-fed, corpulent, as was “Obesus,” a character in Greek comedy, oft given to hearing the catcalls from audience members. Obesus was round, firm and fully packed, like I was shortly before a friend of fifty years, a retired general practitioner, and my Health Coach sold me on “wellness.” He told me in no uncertain terms to slim down and he had the plan to help me, though Lord knows I’ve yo-yo dieted, and yes, once shed thirty on the Oprah diet. But that was then and Oprah has been up and down multiple times. I kept it off…

It seems we’re not getting cooperation from Madison, or at the federal level either. Ah, Newt Gingrich, there he stood waving his finger while he addressed Iowa folks, whipping them into a froth long before the 2012 caucus begins. His theme seemed to be “morals,” and how America needs to get back to them. Newt didn’t mention his three wives, or is it four? He wants us all to bring back the idea of “Our Creator,” and he’s all for wedding Church (his brand of course) and State. This brought cheers from the uber-right crowd. I don’t know if I…

Noodle, my mystery commenter, asked recently “how my battle of the bulge,” was going. To you Noodle, I say, okay, with 20lbs. down and at least 20 more to go, but compared to Halle Berry, I’m still a battleship rolling onward. Are you thin, Noodle? I’m just asking.   T.C. Boyle. Photo courtesy Amrei-Marie. I broke out of this condo life and visited Boswell Bookshop on Downer to listen to T.C. Boyle talk about writing and how he got from there to here. Milwaukee was his second stop on his current book tour, the first being Manhattan and the next…

In keeping with our Big Blizzard, I read Snow (while wrapped in a white down robe), Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Prize winner. It illuminates fundamentalist Islam, and how Turkey can deal with it, and further, how artists can deal with it. The author lives in Istanbul, so he should know. He wrote about his city in a novel aptly titled Istanbul. The questions in Snow are particularly apt at this moment in history, a moment when most of us watched the events in Cairo and elsewhere unfold. “The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver.…

  Photo by Carl Van Vechten (1947). Now that Valentine’s Day has come and gone, a Republican representative from New York, can note that perhaps it wasn’t such a hot idea to troll for action other than action from the wife (his wife, not his best friend’s wife). There is something positively hilarious about him sending forth photographs of his buff-ness, but there he stands, abs at attention, looking for love in all the wrong places. He lost his job over the scandal, but hey, another New Yawker, E. Spitzer fooled around and parlayed his infamous self into a talk…