Food is getting mighty expensive. It's causing tremendous woe in the poorest parts of the globe, and many in the U.S. are having their struggles, too.

In any event, I looked into some of the reasons for the rising costs -- and what one clever fellow and his wife did to cope.

You can read about it here.

Arthur Brooks is on to something.

After studying 35 years of data on happiness, he made some fascinating finds. He reported them in a book called "Gross National Happiness."

What did he find? Well, folks who hold traditional views and who lead traditional lives are happy. Those who hold "progressive" views are less happy. In fact, conservative folks are twice as happy as those on the political left.
 
Happily, you can read about it here.

What do presidential politics and dodgeball have to do with each other? Plenty, these days.

In recent years, Dodgeball has been banned at public schools across America -- bad for self-esteem, apparently. Well, we now add tag and many other kids' games to the list.

Red rover, red rover, they're turning our kids into softies over and over...

In any event, you can get more background on the intersection of politics and dodgeball here.

I'm writing a book about growing up in the early 70s -- am sitting in an Irish pub right now trying to work on a chapter though am struggling -- and one of the chapters will focus on our old stereo console. Ours sat in our dining room and looked very much like the one above.

Virtually every suburban home had one. They sucked a lot of electricity, as they ran on old tubes that burned out now and then, prompting a visit to Daniel's Hardware for a replacement. The old tube technology took up a lot of space, which is why stereos then were made to look like a big piece of furniture.

Ours played a big role in our family. My mother flipped on the Sinatra radio station and whistled to the tunes as she did the dishes after dinner (mothers came in two varieties then, whistlers and hummers, and my mother was a whistler... because her father was... and, in fact, I'm something of a whistler as a result).

Sunday nights after dinner my father would put on his John Philip Sousa albums and march around the house, all of us behind him laughing hysterically.

Thus... the old console holds a bit of power over me. I wrote a column about it a year back and got a surprising amount of mail. You can read it here.

I stumbled upon some interesting quotes on taxes on the IRS web site. Thankfully, the IRS has a bit of a sense of humor -- one that is much needed this week, the worst of the year, when I get to write out a big fat check to our government.

In any event, read the column on tax quotes here.

I stumbled upon this photo, in government archives, while looking for ideas for a book cover for a collection of columns I'm finally going to gather into a book.

This photo was taken during the Prohibition era, an amazing time in American history. From 1920 to 1933, America, thanks to a Constitutional amendment, no easy feat, went dry. That, of course, led to massive organized crime and enriched the Kennedy family -- old man Kennedy made much of his dough selling illegal booze -- and you can read about the basics at Wikipedia.

As interesting as Prohibition was and is, what interests me more is this photo -- the indignation, the moral superiority, the unwavering confidence that, by using the might of the federal government to limit our behaviors, these ladies KNOW they are doing what is best for the rest of us... because they know better than we do what is right and good.

Look and sound familiar? We could easily replace the words in their sign to apply to global warming or a host of other issues that, we're told, can only be resolved by expanding our government all the more and forcing people to "sacrifice" for the good of whatever it is the do-gooders are demanding that we do.
 
In any event, I don't know why the ladies above are so against alcohol and threatening to withhold their lips to any fellow who imbibes. From the looks of some of them, I don't know many fellows who'd want to pursue them sober.

Ah, yes, the tax season. One of the most miserable times of the year -- particularly if you are self-employed and you see, penny by excruciating penny, how incredibly high our taxes really are.

I'm pretty miserable about now, because I'm always behind on the incredible task of organizing all my receipts and records, so I can send the tally to my accountant, so he can tell me I owe WAY MORE THAN I THOUGHT I WOULD!

It's amazing to me that a country founded on freedom and independence has a tax system 50 times more onerous than the simplified flat-tax systems in former Communist countries, including Russia, but it is so as you can read here.

In any event, see more details on our ridiculous tax-preparation woes right here. And, please, if you're in my neighborhood, please swing by with some bourbon.

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Ah, yes, the old Catholic elementary schools of my "yut."

St. Valentine's church and school are above. This picture shows the typical setup that thousands of kids experienced back in the 1960's and 1970's. St. Valentine's parish is located four or five miles away from my old school and church, St. Germaine, but I couldn't find a picture of St. Germaine to display.

In any event, I wrote about my old school because it, like many Catholic schools, is struggling to maintain enrollment. If I remember correctly, we had two classes per grade when I was a kid at 30 to 40 kids per class -- a max of 640 runts giving the sisters migraines. This past year, the school was down to 86 kids.

Makes me sad because, I know now, the experience I had in that orderly universe, is one I wish every kid could have. The sisters beat common sense, solid values and knowledge about math, science and English into our noggins every day from grade one through eight.

You can learn more about Catholic school trends at the National Catholic Educational Association (ncea.org). And of course you can read about my experiences at St. Germaine Catholic School here.

The school's only hope is to merge with another. Hopefully that will be enough to sustain it a good long while... but the long term isn't looking good for a place that did so much good for so many kids over the years.

This photo below is of my dear sweet mother -- her high school graduation photo, I believe. I stumbled upon it while looking through the old photo box my parents keep in their hall closet...



I'm giving a humor speech about growing up in the 1970s, you see, and I needed some images from that time. And so a few weeks ago I was lucky to stop by the house and dug through the photos with my mother, a great bit of fun and nostalgia and even sadness... to see all this time passing and all of us moving along through life way too quickly.

This photo below is of my father when he graduated high school. I asked my mother why the black-and-white shot had red coloring under his nose. She laughed and told me that while he was away in the Army, she kissed the photo all the time. Her lipstick is what caused the red coloring (see below).

In any event, the old photo box was the subject of my column this week. Getting a bit of e-mail on it... so if you've got a moment, check out the column here. And for goodness sakes, get over to your mom and dad's and start digging through those photos.



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The poor Easter Bunny is making some folks uneasy.

Some mall managers, school superintendents and government leaders have decided the furry fellow is a little too religious, and is therefore offensive to some.

They're changing his name from "Easter Bunny" to "Spring Bunny" and all kinds of less-offensive names.

But is the Easter Bunny a religious symbol? What is his origin? Will he survive? The answers can be found here!

In any event, Happy Easter!

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