Eric Scheske

Gardening Update What's a gardening nerd to do? I plant a lot of sweet peppers. It's the only food that almost everyone in my family enjoys, plus they thrive in self-watering containers. Because I have an army of both (family members and self-watering containers), I had

A Random Passage "We lose ourselves in crowds, yet a terrible fear of anonymity haunts many Americans: we want to be known, remembered, thought of, and except in the tawdriest sense this is only possible in small communities and networks of families. Those cut off from such possibilities are

I've been going to the Chicago Weather Center Blog [http://blog.chicagoweathercenter.com/page/2/] more in order to get long-term weather predictions. It hasn't provided any lately, but it did post these two pictures of the same stretch of land in the Chicago area. Can

A husband takes his wife to a disco. There's a guy on the dance floor. living it large, break dancing, moon walking, back flips, the works. The wife turns to her husband and says, "See that guy? 25 years ago he proposed to me and I turned

BYCU You want to get the best deals at the grocery store? Be different. Here's an excerpt from an article about "data mining" [http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm] that shows how men with small children are manipulated cruelly:

A New Jersey man who was released last week after 15 years in prison for robbing a shoe store was arrested the next day for robbing the exact same store. He learned a valuable lesson. Next time, steal both shoes at the same time.

In a speech, Pope Francis criticized the Mafia and urged its members to repent. Which is why now every morning the Pope makes his assistant start the Popemobile.

H.I.F. From Reddit's "Today I Learned" sub-Reddit: "TIL that German used to be the second most widely spoken language in the US, before it was forcibly repressed during WWI. Many local governments, schools and newspapers would operate in German." And not only

I've never read Joseph Conrad. I consider it one of my greatest intellectual shames (and there are many). Theodore Dalrymple recently reminded (as Joseph Epstein and H.L. Mencken often do) that I need to start reading him soon [http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_1_joseph-conrad.html]

Three elephants escaped from a circus in suburban St. Louis on Saturday, and before they were captured they damaged two vehicles, injuring over 50 clowns.