I’m currently engrossed in David Michaelis’ Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. I’ve rarely been so caught up in a nonfiction book, for reasons I’ll explain when I’m ready to write my review (which I expect will be a long one).

But one thing that grabbed my interest was all the places where Schulz’s and my paths crossed (disregarding the small matter of a few decades’ time). I lived for a while with my aunt in St. Paul, only a couple miles southeast of the corner of Snelling and Selby, where Schulz’s father, Carl, ran a barber shop for most of his life. I used to jog around Highland Park, where Schulz himself liked to play golf.

But the crossings weren’t only in St. Paul.

I worked several years in Minneapolis in the shipping and mailing department (known for some reason as the Service Section) of the headquarters of the American Lutheran Church, an organization which no longer exists (like its building, which was demolished a few years back to make way for the new city jail).

Just kittycorner across Fourth Street from our building was Art Instruction Schools (the people behind the “Can you draw me?” magazine ads). Schulz worked there for a number of years, before and after his service in World War II and up to the time when he became an established cartoonist.

Michaelis reports that he “fell in love” (from afar; he was desperately shy) with several pretty girls who worked at the school. One became the inspiration for Charlie Brown’s “little red-haired girl.” Another was the sister of the woman he eventually married.

Art Instruction Schools and pretty girls. That brings back a memory…. Continue reading Princess →

Author Larry Winget says people, generally speaking of course and not at all applicable to readers of BwB, are idiots.

Parents don’t talk to their kids or discipline their kids; give them everything they want and then wonder why their kids are a mess.

People barely do any work while they are on the job, then can’t figure out why they got laid off when times got tough for their employer.

People spend more money than they earn then seem to be surprised that the people who loaned them the money actually want to be repaid.

The majority of people can’t read and don’t read.

Winget has written a book about these problems, and I suppose hopes some of us will either skim it for knuggets or have someone who cares read it to them. Perhaps ripping out pages and stapling to them to foreheads would work for some too.

John V. Martorano, who confessed to killing for the mob as a plea bargin, has reportedly sold his story to a Hollywood producer. Some of the good guys who worked against him aren’t too happy about it, and lawman is trying to pass a state law against criminals profiting from their no-doubt-dramatic stories.

Was wild turkey the main meat at the first Thanksgiving (which btw would giving thanks to the Lord God Almighty for preserving their lives in a hostile wilderness)? Penny Colman, author of Thanksgiving: The True Story, says they ate copious amounts of seafood. “The only firsthand report mentions deer and many fowl. The fowl could have been ducks, geese, ruffed grouse, bobwhites, heath hens and passenger pigeons.”

And what about that “first” part? Did the pilgrims celebrate the first Thanksgiving in the New World? “(On) May 29, 1541, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s expedition, to Palo Duro Canyon, celebrated a Thanksgiving Mass to mark finding food and shelter after a harrowing journey,” she said. There was a similar thanksgiving mass conducted Sept. 8, 1565, in St. Augustine, Florida, as I recall. But did the Spanish go on to found this country? I don’t think so.

(Here’s a pretentious Thanksgiving post designed to change our blog personality rating.)

Regardless what you believe about the American Puritans who helped lead the way to making this country the worst narcissistic cesspool of jingoistic bubbas the world has ever known, I think we can all agree that the Puritans of early America were whack-jobs. I quote the truth for you as written by Vernon L. Parrington, A.M., Professor of English in the University of Washington, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (which is about a century old now, so read in awe):

No other phase of Anglo-Saxon civilization seems so singularly remote from every-day reality, so little leavened by natural human impulses and promptings. Certain generations of Englishmen, seemingly for no sufficient reason, yielded their intellects to a rigid system of dogmatic theology, and surrendered their freedom to the letter of the Hebrew Scriptures; and in endeavouring to conform their institutions as well as their daily actions to self-imposed authorities, they produced a social order that fills with amazement other generations of Englishmen who have broken with that order. Strange, perverted, scarce intelligible beings those old Puritans seem to us—mere crabbed theologians disputing endlessly over Calvinistic dogma, or chilling the marrow of honest men and women with their tales of hell-fire.

Coincidentally, I read this during a time when I feel a stronger ache of the pain in that leavening of natural impulses, and Parrington appears to know nothing of my struggle.

What would you say if a student told you they were analyzing “episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’ and listening to Eminem” for a Rhetoric class? Perhaps suggest one of the Great Books.