Happy Birthday Steven Soderbergh
Born on January 14, 1963, in Atlanta, Steven Soderbergh found filmmaking in his teens. His Hollywood apprenticeship included work as a cue card holder and a director of concert films. In […]
Author: rkcunningham
Posts by rkcunningham
Curly Seckler RIP
During the holiday break, we received the sad news that bluegrass pioneer Curly Seckler had passed away at the age of 98. “The greatest tenor singer of all time,” said Marty […]
Happy National Spaghetti Day
“There’s a reason that this genre film never worked. It must be ethnic to the core—you must smell the spaghetti. That’s what brought the magic to the novel—it was written […]
Oh, gnarly tree: A holiday tale
I am fortunately immune to nostalgia about past celebrations of the yule, with one exception: the Christmas tree. Not a tree in the abstract, but the Christmas tree I grew up with, a […]
Initial impressions
A vestigial organ of our personal identities, the middle initial causes particular problems in publishing. Every author must ask: do I use it? Or do I go casual, i.e., publish a book […]
200 Years of Illinois: Making way for Fermilab
It came from the future: Tevatron. The villain in the new Michael Bay feature? Actually, the world’s largest particle accelerator once it opened in 1983. But to get there, the giant […]
Happy Birthday Frank Sinatra
One hundred-and-one years ago, Francis Albert Sinatra entered the world in Hoboken, New Jersey. He proceeded to live one of the more completely lived lives this side of Casanova. Though foiled […]
The Halifax Explosion of 1917
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, one of the worst maritime disasters in Canadian history. Two thousand people died and 9,000 were hurt when the SS Mont-Blanc, full of […]
Flammulina velutipes, the space shuttle mushroom
Flammulina velutipes (Curtis) Singer Edible, but tough. Despite appearances, the commercially produced “enoki” mushroom found in many grocery stores is a cultivated form of this mushroom. One of the best-known […]
University Press Week: #ReadUP, the books that made a man/woman out of Mac
Back before the Internet or Oprah, people relied on comic books and pulp magazines for self-improvement. Charles Atlas challenged generations of boys and girls to get buff and deal with […]
University Press Week: Beware the exclamation point, authors!
Question: Is it possible to be taken seriously as a scholarly writer if you use exclamation points? Less snooty than the semicolon, less trendy than the hashmark, the exclamation point […]
200 Years of Illinois: The half-eaten bison sandwich of Richard M. Nixon
September 22 is an auspicious date in Illinois history. As this post recounts, boxing history took place on the date. Willie Nelson took time out from his 1985 to team […]