Free Republic

There are times I would like to make the effort of throwing dinner for friends or family and cook everything from scratch. But the labor of love just takes so long. In spite of all the inspiration from Rachael Ray, the 30-minute meal is actually more myth than fact. Thawing your food alone may take almost an hour. Then there’s the diligence of slow cooking the meat to your desired tenderness. Not to mention the many times you will have to change pots and pans, as the vegetables, which cook faster, have to be cooked much later than the meat—you...

What if everything you know is fake? That is a premise that was repeatedly explored by author Philip K. Dick in his science fiction novels. Some of his stories have been made into popular films such as “Total Recall,” where a blue collar worker in the far future doesn’t know whether he is really a secret agent or just pretending to be one as part of an implanted memory. In Dick’s novel “Time Out of Joint,” protagonist Ragle Gumm gets confirmation that something is terribly wrong with the world around him when he attempts to buy a beer at an...

Searching old newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes, and I have tried to use them many times to shed light on current events - or to inform readers about how the past is prologue to our very interesting present-day quandaries. Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign. Though by no means definitive, it provides an interesting insight, at least, into how Chicago politics intersected with the black power movement and Middle Eastern money at...