Carlson

By: John Carlson— As the chunky, semi-professional food writer once known in these parts as the Chowhound, I was going to feature a hard-hitting investigative piece about two national sandwich phenomena as the topic of this week’s column. So, Nancy and I drove to Popeye’s on Anderson’s south side to try that eatery’s much-ballyhooed fried-chicken sandwich. This sandwich has been the darling of my fellow food writers of late. It’s even been lauded in no less august a publication than The New Yorker, on-line anyway. Naturally, I wondered why. But there, taped to a window as we pulled into the…

By: John Carlson— If you don’t think big-water fishing requires a strong stomach, you’ve never stared into a recycled potato-salad container full of chopped up squid parts, the whole mess topped by a doleful, accusatory squid eye resting like a cherry on a sundae. That’s a sight to make a non-angler like yours truly want to throw up, or at least throw up his hands and tell the squid, “Hey! Don’t look at me, fella! I didn’t do it!” My son, on the other hand, is an angler. Exactly how this happened escapes me. His sister Katie’s interests tend toward…

By: John Carlson— Hearing that Peter Fonda died recently made me think of the movie “Easy Rider,” which made me think of motorcycles, which made me think of the Harley-Davidson parked out in my garage. I can’t say it was “Easy Rider” that made me want to ride motorcycles. It was a mighty Honda 50 that made me want to do that. I’m being facetious, of course. The classic Honda 50 was about as wimpy as motorcycles come. Still, one magical Saturday when our family was spending the weekend up on Kelley’s Island in Lake Erie, my Dad rented one….

By: John Carlson— Cars these days. Go figure… That’s how I used to react to all the hype over self-driving cars. As a longtime motorist who fully enjoys being behind the wheel, I found the very idea of self-driving cars loathsome. Young, up-and-coming drivers? My sense was they would hate self-driving cars more than anyone. After all, when I was just getting my license I couldn’t wait to be the guy in charge, burning rubber, doing doughnuts and skidding in and out of high-speed turns. This was even though in my old ’64 Corvair, ninety-nine percent of my driving was…

By: John Carlson— They say you can learn to do about anything these days by consulting a YouTube video, and it’s true. How to build a birdhouse. How to tune your lawn tractor. How to extract a naked guy who’s stuck in your bathtub. Yeah, that’s one, too. Not that Nancy and I have any experience with this, you understand. But it actually worked for a couple we know by the name of, um, Bubba and Booboo. You see, it seemed Bubba was a guy whose whole life had been spent effortlessly bounding in and out of bathtubs. Then suddenly…

By: John Carlson— It was writer Thomas Wolfe who coined the phrase, “You can’t go home again,” and maybe he was right. But as a recent mini-vacation reaffirmed for Nancy and me, trying to recapture good feelings from favorite days past is a worthy endeavor in itself. The two of us drove north into Michigan to the town of Onaway. It’s a quiet little burg near a beautiful body of water called Black Lake. I’ve probably spent week-long vacations up there at least fifteen times in the course of my life, beginning when I was a boy. For me, the…

By: John Carlson— Holy flippin’ moly! That was all I could think the other day when I stumbled upon my iPhone’s trove of emojis. To preface this, I should note that I am not someone who is “with it” on modern technical advances such as light bulbs, channel changers or using those things that have come to be known as “devices.” Like, not long ago I wrote a post complaining about trying to use my iPhone’s camera to photograph a couple butterflies out back, but the insolent little jerks kept disrespecting me, flying away every time I crept near. So…

By: John Carlson— From the moment we began watching him, Nancy and I saw this fellow as nothing less than the Rudolph Nureyev of excavator operators. It was a few years back in the Village, where a block of businesses had been razed to make room for a huge new apartment complex. The two of us would grab our morning coffee across the street at The Cup and drink it outside, marveling as he put his excavator through its paces, loading construction-site detritus into the dump trucks that hauled it away. As befits a ballet superstar like Nureyev, the operator…

By: John Carlson— The most enticing Jell-O dish I have ever seen was on the cover of a little cookbook called “Thinking Outside the Box,” given to me by the delightful Julie Kappel Maugherman. Pictured was a platter topped with an exquisitely molded crimson Jell-O. Suspended in the middle of that Jell-O was a White Castle slider. That’s right, a little hamburger. Inside the Jell-O. This was a molded mound of Jell-O that could make the heart of any White Castle addict go pitter-patter. But while the cookbook included recipes for yummy dishes like Slider Strata, White Castle Soufflé and my…