Again this week I ask that you take a few minutes and read about my little friends in Haiti. Your sponsorship, just a few dollars a day, makes a huge difference in their lives. Just over a dollar a day meets either their medical or educational needs each day. That donut you got at the coffee shop can be turned into a changed life. Not a bad way to think about it at all.
Bylove has a heart for God. When asked his favorite activity he will tell you it’s playing, singing and dancing for God. Bylove is one to encourage other kids and he will be the first to help out when needed. Bylove wants to be an engineer when he grows up and he likes studying French. You will most often find Bylove on the playground and playing soccer or basketball. Bylove’s prayer request is that he will be able to finish school.
It is my hope that one of you will find your heart touched by this child and take up a bit of Christ’s work by sponsoring them for an extended period. My wife and I are sponsoring a pair of sisters and I look at it this way – I only gave up a fast-food dinner each day to change the life of a child. Healing Haiti will do the right things for these children and I have full confidence in their work. I am not affiliated with them, they don’t endorse this blog, nothing like that at all. I just love kids (can’t be Santa and not love children) and know that Grace Village is the difference between life and death for many of these children. Please open your heart and prayerfully reflect on the opportunity God’s giving us to sponsor these children. Some of them have come out of slavery and have some of the toughest lives you could imagine prior to Grace Village.
After sucker-punching you all with my crock-pot chicken recipe, and failing in my duties to secure a Famous Dave’s Recipe from his latest – Famous Dave’s Barbecue Party Cookbook – I had to do something special to make up for all of my shameful behavior.
Today, and with great pride, I present my own recipe for ribs.
The secret to great ribs is to ignore my first 25 years of cooking them and check in during the most recent 5 years. Yes, I destroyed many racks of ribs by being pig-headed and not preparing them far enough in advance. No matter what anyone says to the contrary, you have to slow cook them before they go on to the grill if you aren’t going to smoke them. I have the option of a grill or a smoker with my Bubba Keg. Many of you don’t. So today’s recipe starts out in the oven and moves to the grill for finishing. Oh, yeah – lots of pictures to entice you as well. Continue reading →
This week we I was planning on heading into dark territory. But you can relax – the opus of darkness is still in progress and I want to get it just right before rolling it out.
In the meantime, I will be doing some lighter posts. Including a rib recipe for my friend and commenter Danny. That will be tomorrow or Friday.
This video is one of my favorite voice-over projects. It was hashed together in just a few days this week and promotes the U-14 soccer team from Haitian Initiative. That’s a bunch of kids from Cite Soleil in Haiti. The video tells the story quite well.
My friend Michael Stoebnerdid the original video and I offered to narrate it for him. I watched the video a few times and then wrote a script. Michael provided some information from a press release, I modified the script a bit, and then he took my narration tracks and moved the images around so that things flowed better. We make, in my opinion, a pretty good team.
This week we’re going to do some heavy topics. Today’s is depression. It is a subject I know an awful lot about from personal experience. I am not depressed. But several people I love dearly have this disease and – well, it impacts me as well because I love them more than you can imagine. Second hand depression is rather like second hand smoke – being around it impacts your life as well.
Kevin covers it in 12 minutes. 12 of the best minutes you’ll spend this week, next week, or possibly ever, in terms of learning about a fatal illness. Please watch the video and then we’ll talk about it below the jump.
I’m sure that the title alone stopped some of you in your tracks – what’s he doing hanging out in saloons? Listening to music and enjoying chicken wings. Going to church and music are not mutually exclusive. I review bands for the same reason I review restaurants – it’s out of my comfort zone and makes me a better writer…
I love the blues. I have loved the blues since my brother Patrick introduced me to them in the early 1980’s at a Minneapolis bar known as The Union. Great place for a college kid – bouncers that made me look like a wimp, cold pitchers of beer, lots of girls to look at (shy – no touch) and some of the best bands I’ve ever heard. The Union has been gone for a long time, but the blues live on in Minnesota.
Friday night I was witness to the best set I’ve had the honor to gawk at – Laurie Morvan and her band.
I knew she’d be great when I went to Wilebski’s web site earlier in the week to scope out the bands and saw her listed there as this week’s act. One click to her website and I was intrigued – this woman had the most amazing arms I’d seen outside of body building – nothing but steel. You don’t often see anyone in the entertainment industry with the guts to show arms like that to the public – Madonna is the exception, and she’s got other issues.
But, I digress. One pass through the videos on the site and I practically ran to wake up my wife and tell her we had a date for Friday at six. This was shaping up to be an event and a half.
Wilebski’s has been around a long time, and a few years ago they were located in a rather seedy neighborhood in Saint Paul – Frogtown. Yup, same place the fire engine art came from last week. Welebski’s had the misfortune to be upstairs from another bar and they had to operate somewhat jointly. The problem was that the bar downstairs had more gunfire and fights than a combination NRA pistol match and MMA training gym. The police just dispatched units there every fifteen minutes to make sure they didn’t miss any of the fun.
After more than a few years of that chaos the Saint Paul City Council shut down the location. Wilebski’s was out of a home. I didn’t know if I should feel sad or overjoyed – I never had the guts to go there due to the danger below, but if they had to move it would only be a move up on the safety scale.
The new location on Rice Street near Larpenteur in Saint Paul, is a gas. The cover charge was a paltry $8.00 per person. I’d pay triple that to see this band. Wilebski’s is graced with a huge dance floor, upper levels with excellent sight lines to the stage and a free taco bar if you get there early enough. Drinks are inexpensive from what I saw, and the bar tenders weren’t exactly skimping on the pours. I can only vouch for the Baptist Martini (Diet Coke with Lime twist) and the Sprite.
Bar food is bar food – until you get to the wings at Wilebski’s . We’ve sampled them on two different occasions and both times came away impressed. I know it’s probably a prepared product they just fry up, but they were perfectly cooked and had lots of flavor without making you wish for a merciful death. The seasoned French fries are pretty good as well. My wife had the burger and it was an 8. It would have been a ten but somehow when you order a California burger you don’t expect cheese – this had a monster load of the stuff. To me that would be a plus – I descend from cheese eating surrender monkeys. My wife, on the other hand, despises cheese and can barely stand living so close to Wisconsin.
So, at six sharp the band takes the stage. And for three of the next four hours they crank it hard. Lots of bands seem to specialize in annoying patter between the songs. The drummer and the keyboardist have their running jokes, the bass player can’t get any respect, etc. Not with Laurie Morvan. She kept the yip-yap to a minimum and played that guitar.
My wife and I were blown away. This band not only covers the classics, but they write their own material. They don’t just play, they play their own stuff. In addition, it’s good. It’s so good that I went to the table and bought every CD they’d dragged along to sell.
Three hours of kicking it hard out of four. I’ve never seen a band do that before. She plays a wireless guitar – and the video shows you why: she’s constantly in motion. Dancing, mugging, bopping, name it and she does it to move around the stage. The woman had to be exhausted at the end of the night.
On the Epic Band scale of 1-10 I’d have to give them a 10. The only person I’ve ever seen play as intimate and open a set is Al Stewart, and he’s about 180 our from Laurie for style on stage. Both are great performers – Al is low key and Laurie is totally in your face.
When I got home, I went to the website for her band and looked for the next time I’d be able to see them. Sadly, it’s going to be a while, she’s not back in the area for the foreseeable future. That’s a shame – she could become a habit real fast.
I’ll write more about Wilebski’s down the road, but I’d like to finish out with a plug for their Friday night stuff. It’s a usually a great blues act followed at 10:00 by old school R&B – three guys doing the DJ thing with the dance music you knew in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s. It’s an interesting social phenomenon – the mixed crowd of mostly white people troop out when the blues end and a mostly black crowd troops in for the dance music. Me? I love them both and stay as long as my tired eyes can stay open. I’m the bearded bald guy singing along to Rick JamesSuperfreak in the upper balcony. Swing on up and say hello if you catch me there some night.
