A Christmas tradition with Italian roots

[It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve been on a roll this month with my observations on jazz man Vince Guaraldi and the Peanuts franchise. My last blog on the subject made it to the San Francisco Chronicle.  This week the Chicago suburb newspaper Daily Herald printed my...

Salvatore Who?

Salvatore Guaragna, Master of Melodies He had more songs on radio’s Your Hit Parade than Irving Berlin (42 vs. 33).  During his long career he wrote 500 songs, scored 300 movies, and even scored 100 of the animated Looney Tunes we watched as kids.  He won...

When You Think About It…

Marconi pioneered wi-fi December was a lucky month for inventor Guglielmo Marconi.  On 12 December 1901 he proved that wireless transmission—what we call Wi-Fi today—was possible across long distances.  What’s more, he demonstrated that despite the curvature...

The Fine African Hand

There are only two feature films that reflect negatively on Somalis: Black Hawk Down and Captain Phillips.  The former deals with the U.S. involvement in a Somalia civil war (1992), the latter about Somali pirates hijacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in...

“CHRISTMAS TIME/IS HERE…”

It happened just last week: A few days before Thanksgiving, I was in a department store, looking for some early Christmas gift items, when I suddenly thought: “It doesn’t feel like Christmas yet.” And it didn’t. Temperatures in Chicago were...