We’ll miss you and your absurdist theatrics. Your avant-garde politicking. Your gubernatorial grandstanding. And perhaps most of all, your wonderful nickname. (Blago means “treasure” in Serbian.) And that hair… oh, the hair!!

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This story aims to get to the bottom of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s use of poetry in his press conferences and interviews. For a contemporary American politician, this is indeed rare and even a bit odd. But I venture to say it makes perfect sense, especially considering the governor’s Serbian heritage. The love of poetry, [...]

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Last week I had the dubious honor of becoming an undesirable statistic. I joined the growing ranks of the laid off. The involuntarily idled. The distressed downsized. And every day I hear of someone else who’s been laid off; a friend, a colleague, a friend of a friend, etc. At least in my relatively brief [...]

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It’s been a loooong, cold snowy weekend. You’ve been trapped indoors itching to get out among your fellow humans. Looking for something, anything, to do other than watching your hundredth DVD or playing the hundredth game of Wii bowling. Well, here’s your chance. Come on out tomorrow night to the Bertram Woods Branch of the [...]

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Hope your year’s off to a better start than mine.

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Here’s a piece I wrote for Northern Ohio Live magazine a few years ago. Very a propos for today: A (Belated) Christmas Story By: Milenko Budimir Watch CNN the morning of January 7th and you’ll most likely see a 10-second segment depicting the inside of a splendidly iconed Orthodox church somewhere in Russia, filled with [...]

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Today, January 6th, is Christmas Eve for Orthodox Christians celebrating Christmas on January 7th. For Serbs, this day is called “Badnji Dan” or the day of the badnjak. The day is filled with a lot of interesting customs and traditions coated with a thin veneer of Christian theological explanation, but which really have their roots [...]

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2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the infamous Cuyahoga River fire. The PD does a nice job of recounting the river’s twisted history including its amazing turnaround. Check out the article here. The photo is actually of an earlier fire in 1952. The ’69 fire wasn’t as dramatic but it certainly was the catalyst for [...]

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