When the presidential election ended in November, I think the majority of people in the United States heaved a titanic sigh for at least one reason: political advertising would be over. True, yes. But not for long.
 
I’ve launched attacks in the past on this column about how horrific, misleading and downright false far too many political ads are. Downright lies proliferate. Innuendos abound. Most ads aren’t designed to inform, but instead break the opposing candidate down, and make you – the target of the ads – feel the person being attacked is a jerk, loser, thief, criminal, dangerous.
 
As the ads wear you down, even the most vigilant of us start to wonder if there is a nugget of truth in all the lies. In this way they get you. Your defenses lag. Your antenna to sift through garbage turns itself off. Then, whammo, you find yourself hating someone.
 
The thing I remember most deeply from the day after the presidential election is how I felt bad. The relentless nature of the attacks from both candidates (and, of course, this is not limited to presidential elections) – because they are designed to make you feel bad things about the other candidate – make you feel bad yourself. You feel bad about your country.  You feel bad about the direction we are taking. This leads to some of the malaise many people feel in the U.S. about the political process, our politicians, our expectations, and the general sense that no one is doing anything good.
 
There is a lot of good being done by a lot of people in this country. That occurs at the local, state and national levels, and includes businesses, politicians, bureaucrats, community leaders, scientist, engineers, people of faith. We don’t hear about that much though because the ads dominate our senses.
 
Follow the money. Those who have it inject their bucks into various campaigns. Follow the money and you follow the hate and lies.
 
Which in a roundabout way gets me back to today in Wisconsin where we have a state Supreme Court race being contested.
 
The INSTANT ads started being run (maybe six weeks ago?), they were negative. If you know nothing of the two candidates (probably true of 95 percent of the Wisconsin electorate), you would think both of the candidates were evil personified, letting rapists and killers back onto the streets with nary a thought as to the consequences.
 
That’s not case, as I’ve had the opportunity to see and hear both candidates speak in-person to the Milwaukee Rotary and Milwaukee Press Club. Both care about the state, care about the judiciary and respect what being a judge is all about – enforcing the law to the best of their abilities. You’ll find places you could quibble with either one. You may disagree with their perspective on an issue or align yourself politically with one or the other. That’s fair. Choose to vote on those merits.
 
DON’T choose to vote based on the ads assaulting you. Recently, seven ads in a row came up on the TV for one or the other candidate, before one for a plumber finally ended the string. Sigh.
 
We all will continue to be overwhelmed in this way. That makes it tremendously important to do your own research, read, verify, think. It’s hard. Informed voting isn’t easy. In some ways, in today’s world, it’s actually extremely complicated because we are all being manipulated in multiple directions.
 
There is no perfect solution to this dilemma. The most solid path forward individually for voters is stay informed rather than relying on ads as a source.  Good luck. 

​How do you regenerate content? How can you juice your creativity?
 
In our current culture, coming up with content to entertain audiences is a big deal. Think how much you consume: movies, podcasts, columns, videos, YouTube, television shows, all that stuff streaming on those multiple services – Apple, Netflix, Hulu, Brit Box, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Peacock just to name a few that I can come up with off the top of my head. I presume there are many more.
 
They all must come up with angles, and put together shows that get people to watch and listen. It is hard. How do they differentiate?

As a writer, I face this challenge every week, the creative challenge. What is something worth writing about? Did something funny happen to me in the past few weeks that I can riff off? Is there a complex issue that has jumped into my consciousness that I can use as a platform to make a deeper point?
 
Creativity rises in different ways for different people. Capturing that impulse in a tangible format is a challenge, as is presenting it in such a way that people want to watch, hear, read what you have to say.
 
We are assaulted by entertainment choices, which means it is far too easy to turn someone off. Don’t like the opening sentence of my column? Click to the next story. Bored after the first ten minutes of a movie? Stream another one. Podcast making you snore? Wake up to someone else who charges your batteries.
 
My wife and I have left much of U.S.-based television series in the dust. The slam bang, quick cut, using violence and guns and car chases and crashes to overcome the lagging of plots. Watch U.S. television shows with the sound off one evening when you have a few spare moments and you might be stunned with how frequently scenes cut from one to the next, and how violence, guns and crashes are used to take up creative space. It does make you wonder about how violent our culture is.
 
But, away from that musing, and back to the creative challenge. Spicing up tired plots (if you watch a regular television series, think about the ones that keep you coming back because they have something fresh occur that keeps you engaged) is crucial to your attention span. Yes, we are drawn to certain characters, want the bad guys to get blown up, but we also need something to get us outside the box.

That is the creative challenge. Given all the songs and genres for songs, I sometimes find it hard to believe that anyone ever delivers something new. But they do. The artists that cut through to your heart and soul, getting you to repeat their lyrics (so catchy), and hum along while you air guitar it, are the ones you listen to.
 
Regenerating content takes time, thought, revisions, letting loose of preconceived notions and being willing to take yourself down a path previously unexplored. Entertainment products face this creative challenge, but it is also present in businesses and other parts of our lives, even freshening up our relationships with new things.
 
Take a walk somewhere to experience a dramatic view. Drive a different route to work (try it). Read an author recommended by a friend. Watch a movie outside your comfort zone. Put your belt on the opposite way you normally do. Now sit down and create.

​Most of us live mundanely. We go through routines. We repeat behaviors. Sometimes we get out of our ruts and travel and take on some new activity. But, if there’s someone watching from afar or capturing us on video, one could argue we live a boring life.

I’m not saying that’s bad or wrong. Just the way it often is.
 
The people who run social media sites get this. Because they mine our boringness, knowing we want to shake things up or get some novelty, so they send clips, images, messages that target our habits.
 
I’ll focus on Facebook, because they are the most egregious from what I can tell, but I’m sure this applies to Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, you name it. They track you. They follow what you access. Then they attack.
 
I stay away from clicking things on that don’t come from friends on Facebook. Sometimes though (in my boredom), I click on something that looks intriguing. Oooooooops!
 
For the next 27 days, probably longer, I start getting similar things sent to me. They have those 15-second videos that show people doing goofy things. I made the mistake of watching a few (one leads to another, which leads to another). WRONG.
 
Of course, more 15-second videos of people demonstrating idiotic behavior rained down on me. I blocked them. I hid them. Nothing seemed to help.
 
Facebook knows when you are bored, and they know how to feed off your boredom addiction. Their AI senses your doldrums, waiting, waiting to pounce and overwhelm you with useless images.
 
One of the ways you know you’re bored is when you begin watching knot-tying videos. These are clips demonstrating how to tie different knots – the figure eight, the clove hitch, the water knot, the fisherman’s knot.  You know what I mean.
 
You have nothing else to do, and you see these hands meticulously wrapping the twine around and around, up and over, under, then cinched. Holy cow, maybe I can do that.
 
Then they have you. Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/Instagram captured you. And here it comes: more and more knot-tying 15 second videos coming your way, enough to saturate your senses for years and years.
 
What gets me is how quickly crap starts to come your way and accumulate on your feed. Similar stuff to what you just accessed can arrive on your screen within seconds. And, it doesn’t seem to stop. Keeps coming and coming.
 
My advice, of course, is never click on something unless you really care. If it’s a true hobby and something you obsess about, by all means go for it.
 
If not, let it go. Don’t let AI and the social media maggots suck you in. Once they get their hooks in you, you’ll be inundated.
 
I do my best to delete, block, or hide posts coming my way that I have no further interest in, but they seem to propagate like mushrooms in the forest after a spring rain -- keep popping up.
 
As an old school-type person, I probably fall into the category of people who don’t logically figure out better ways to eliminate unwanted electronic information coming my way. I’m getting better, still figuring it out, and once in awhile there’s that nirvana moment, where you go, “AHA, now I know how to stop you.” You feel successful when that happens. Maybe that’s the learning curve – learning how to cut the crap out and eliminate boredom.

​Last year was a bad one for my intuition. I’m a person who relies a lot on hunches, educated thoughts that should play out a certain way, events that logically should come together to cause an outcome. This approach adds up to intuition.
 
I rely on intuition. It serves me well. Quite clearly, trusting my instincts in many situations is a critical positive for me to function successfully on multiple fronts.

You may shrug at this. “Who cares? Intuition is a joke.” I get it. You may want the facts and data about every issue you face in your personal, professional or social life.
 
Facts give you background. They are important. But they also only provide the framework as to what happens next. You still have to coalesce additional variables in your head, look forward, perhaps make an assumption or two on trends or human behavior to effectively project sporting events, political outcomes or what’s the best destination for the next vacation for you and your loved one(s).
 
Over the years, I’ve honed my intuition abilities, parlaying them into a skill for predicting drive times for car trips, the weather and sporting outcomes. Just after the turn of the century, I remember a drive I took from eastern Nebraska (Columbus) to the far western region (Scottsbluff) and saying to myself, “hmm, that should be about six hours and five minutes to get there?” (about what I remember from my memory banks) and getting there within five minutes of my intuitive prediction. Thought to myself, “wow,” afterwards.
 
It morphed from there. I got into consistently and effectively using my gut to state how long a trip would take and being very close most of the time.
 
This skill/talent, if we want to call it that, for having a feel for something, was also applied to sports. Rather than choosing the best teams, I used intuition, feel and chemistry to pick winners in discussions with friends, and found myself more often than not getting it right. The caveat is I stuck to teams, sports and players where I had greater knowledge. It was fun.
 
Weather also fell into this realm. Having a sense when the weather would change, due to the wind currents, is something I refined over the years, particularly from my bicycle trip across North America in 1982. Stay outside, feel the humidity, gauge the wind currents and you can do well predicting what’s next.

Which is why 2024 was weird for me. My intuition was off. NFL predictions were bad. My college – the University of Illinois – kept playing against my intuition on the basketball court as again and again I got games wrong that I “felt” accurate about.
 
I messed up predicting snowstorms and thunderstorms, intuition failing miserably. Hard to say what was off. And, I’m not sure what my point is.

Other than sometimes we have bad years. Things go wrong. They don’t turn out the way you think they will. Your intuition stinks. But, you slog on, hoping that your thinking, guessing, feeling, predicting improve and you get back in the rhythm.

​Recent studies show that kids giving up their phones while in school is a good thing. Really? That is so dang surprising!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Sarcasm aside, I’m not sure where I read about the study, but I seem to remember they said that turning the phones off and handing them to the teachers or placing them in a container before class were two options. In some schools, it might have been by choice that they released their technology lifeline, if I remember correctly.
 
Whether by choice or mandated, it’s been DISCOVERED that the kids seem to learn more without their phone connection. Focus is up. Creativity rises. Engagement increases.

It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Why didn’t this happen sooner? And, why doesn’t every school apply this principle (FYI, for the sake of humor I just used my phone to determine whether to use “principle” or “principal” in this sentence; I was 98 percent sure, but just wanted to be grammatically correct)?
 
When you don’t have the phone, it eliminates some (not all) distractions. That doesn’t mean students won’t look at someone they are attracted to. It doesn’t mean they won’t marvel at the snowstorm billowing outside and hoping classes will be cancelled so they can go home and head to the local hill for some sledding. It doesn’t mean students won’t look outside on a nice spring day and see the birds whizzing by, the trees budding and grass growing greener and want to running around playing tag or some other warm day inspired activity.
 
No, kids will be kids, whether they are 11- or 17-years-old. They will find ways to not pay attention. Sometimes even choose to disrupt the class because they can. Some will just plain be jerks.
 
Eliminating phones in the classroom is a big step in a positive direction. It also sets a tone: there is a right time and wrong time to be on the phone. “Right now you need to think on your own, work with your classmates, interact, listen to each other, and figure out a solution to the problem I just posted,” the teacher says.
 
Real life will have those mandated interactions in their future. Much is loaded, saved and available on our phones, but the individual must still figure out what to do with it. So many answers to so many of our questions. That is all well and good, and not about to go away any time soon.

So, what’s the challenge for educators? What’s the challenge in the classroom?
 
Quite frankly, it’s to learn all those other skills that bode well for a student’s future. They must learn how to think critically, how to discern truth from fiction, how to determine the facts of a situation and come up with workable options to solve problems. And do this by bouncing ideas off others, arguing, debating, listening, choosing.
 
One of the cell carriers currently advertises putting your phone away for one hour, one day, one week. I like it. It also sends a strong message to step away and get back into real life.
 
If more schools and other influencers begin to hold solid sway over our massive cell phone use, there is hope us human creatures will improve our relations with each other. Keep pushing.

​If you are like me, you probably have some nostalgia for certain clothing items. For whatever reason, you attach emotional significance to a jacket, pair of shoes, shorts, sweatshirt, hat, whatever. You don’t want to let go.
 
There’s an element of hoarding in all of us. You squirrel away your kids’ clothes in the hope that if grandchildren arrive you can hand over tiny sweaters and caps to be worn once or twice by that next generation.
 
Perhaps you save books, because you feel at some point in your life you’re going to reread them. You want to see if the plot and characters remain relevant 27 years later.
 
One item, for me, that I love is my Adidas winter jacket. The base color is black and it has those Adidas stripes (green) on the shoulders. It’s got a hood. The outside is your basic winterproof material and the inside is sweatshirt-lined. It’s warm, comfortable and serves its purpose.
 
It’s also a piece of my wardrobe that I want to keep indefinitely. I’m not completely sure why.
 
I purchased the jacket around the turn of the century, so it’s 25-or-more-years-old. Due to its age, I have a bit of desire to see how long I can hang onto it. It hasn’t fallen apart, so it should keep serving me.
 
Recently, I was faced with a dilemma. The zipper broke. What to do?
 
I discussed this with my wife, going over the pros and cons of getting rid of the jacket. It was old enough where in good conscious I could see purchasing a new winter jacket. But, at the same time, I was attached to it because I’d had it for so long and it truly was a perfect fitting piece of apparel. I also liked the colors, the stripes and that it came from a period of time when we lived in Columbus, NE. Not sure why that made any difference to me, but for some odd reason I attached good memories to that. That can be a big reason we don’t want to give things up.
 
After batting the broken zipper decision around with my wife, I came down on the side of getting the zipper replaced. Let’s do it.
 
She took it to our local cleaners, where they farm out those types of simple repairs. Two weeks later, I got the jacket back, and we were $100 poorer.
 
When I heard the cost, I was stunned. “We could have gotten a new jacket,” I said with extreme irritation. I had figured fixing the zipper would cost about 40 bucks. That I could deal with. The $100 price tag made me think deeply about the possession. What is it worth?
 
We keep or discard things in our lives after doing those mental machinations. Despite an inherent longing for an article of clothing, at some point in time you’re going to give it to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, or throw it in trash. It’s worn out, beat up, no longer fits, or you don’t care anymore.
 
Cleaning out our closets releases memories and cleanses the soul a bit. We retain emotional attachments for many items we wear, but sometimes you have to say goodbye. That’s the last zipper I’m going to buy for my winter Adidas jacket, you can bet on that.

​What do you pay attention to? What do you ignore? What do you no longer care about that you used to find intriguing? All good questions.
 
They came to me recently when I realized how my sports viewing habits changed over the past 10-15 years. The seeds were planted and watered way earlier than that, probably during the early years of baseball free agency in the early-1980s.
 
At that time, I still knew the lineups of many major league teams. I could tell you who the all-stars were. I grew up as a New York Yankee fan, endured many bad seasons and then they’d come back to the top of the league and I was invigorated to pay close attention, watching several playoff and World Series contests that charged me up.
 
That joy (and caring) went away slowly as free agency made it more difficult to root for the players (who are what we invest ourselves in as fans). When I stopped connecting with them either because the Yanks were paying monumental bucks to bring in free agents or they were losing players for the same reason, that was when my level of disinterest accelerated. You didn’t know the names of the players on the rosters anymore. Why care?
 
 I remember analyzing this in my head those 40-some-odd years ago. Pre-free agency, the MLB roster of 25 players would typically be 20 or 21 from the year before. After free agency, that number started to drop and you might only know 17 the next year or 15, or 13. It was harder to recognize the names and get to know the players because they shifted so quickly.
 
That process, in general in professional sports, has only accelerated since then. And, now, it has become ubiquitous in Division I college sports, particularly football and basketball.
 
The NIL (name, image, likeness) system in college sports is a good and fair thing to me, but a result has been college free agency for athletes. They go to another program to get more money, and you no longer follow the roster of your favorite team as closely.
 
Another factor weakening my support as a fan at the college level is the additional year of eligibility. Many players now stay for a fifth year and transfer out of their long-term program to a better NIL deal with another school for their last year. You lose your connection to the athletes you wedded yourself to.
 
These variables hurt the fan and the sport. It’s hard to root for a player if they don’t stay at your school for very long. In they leave after one year (increasingly common), you’ll quickly forget they ever went to your school.

This is sad and has changed my sports viewing and cheering habits dramatically. I just plain don’t watch nearly as much sports as I did 15 years ago. I was a college basketball junkie for 30 years, easily. Now, if I watch one or two full games a week, that would be unusual.
 
As humans, we focus on what we like. We root for teams and players because of local ties or the types of players/teams that stand out to us in some way. They’re fun. They compete loose and fast. They have some pudgy, slow left-handed guy who can’t miss a three-point shot or masters a shovel pass threaded to his teammates repeatably for layups and you go, “YEAH! DO IT, BIG MAN!”
 
All that has changed. We aren’t going back. I’m hoping for some sanity in the accelerating transition of players at the collegiate level. I’m hopeful we are in a small period where everyone is figuring out how to adjust, then things will settle down and I can become more of a fan again.

​Do we lose a sense of wonder with the world as we age? I’m not sure. I think I can go either way on that question depending on how you choose to look at life.
This week got me pondering: Tuesday, I went to the supermarket. It was cold, the wind blowing. A woman had her young son (probably a year-and-a-half old in my guesstimate) in the cart, getting ready to open the rear door to her SUV.
 
She hit the “open” button on her key fob, and you heard the telltale latch release and then the backdoor pop and start to rise. Suddenly, the child released a loud spontaneous mirthful howl, his eyes lighting up and pointing with his finger at the door raising itself seemingly by magic. He stared, his eyes sparkling. I couldn’t stop laughing.
“Wouldn’t it be great to have that sense of wonder with the world?,” I asked the mother. She smiled and nodded.
I headed off to my car, smiling myself, a look that didn’t leave my face for the five minute drive home. The child’s reaction got me headed down the “what if” path.
 
What if we all continued to view the world through the years of a young child as we passed through older stages of life? Would we be happier? Would the world be a better place? Would our creativity surge?
 
The cliché is to not become childish, but remain childlike. See the world through the lens of a youngster, staying fresh, learning, absorbing, being open to all those possibilities.

We wall off (most of us) as the years add up, going into our cocoons, hibernating, sticking to routines that have proven acceptable, foods we like, vacation sites we know we’ll enjoy, friends who are tried and true. All that is good.
 
It’s also good to open your childlike eyes and see what’s new, what you can explore that might activate your senses. Smells, sites, tastes are all critical to how we experience our daily existence. I think the case of this child “seeing” something unique/unusual in the rear door popping open was a case of him seeing something unexpected. Maybe he’d seen it before, we’ll never know. But, because it was odd or new and even if he remembered it, the action provided him with a charge that he belted out to the world.
 
We’re probably not going to do that as adults. But we can bring a more receptive mentality to our daily lives in how we perceive events, other humans, animals (there’s a huge category), countries, scenery, technology.
 
One of my all-time favorite scenes in a movie is when Will Ferrell as Buddy in the movie “Elf” guzzles a two-liter jug of Coca Cola, then burps for 23 seconds, his eyes lighting up, as he says, “DID YOU HEAR THAT?” Oh, yah, we did. Buddy’s wonder with the burp made the scene hysterical
 
I love the word “spellbound.” That’s the word I applied to the child in this story. Something ignited him. He was mesmerized, spellbound.
 
Keep chirping happily. Keep your mirth alive. Stay spellbound. See the humor. Pop that car door. Watch the magic. 

​In another small stroke of genius by our fitness facility, they asked members to scribble their thoughts on a large sheet of paper on the wall describing: “What are you looking forward to in 2025?” Here you go:

• Being grateful.
• Starting a new career.
• Getting married.
• Body pump release 3! Yes!
• Biking.
• Jesus.
• Getting in shape.
• Finding something to look forward to.
• The weekend.
• Better body.
• Healing my knee.
• Making 6-figures.
• Next pro fight 2-1-1.
• Graduating nursing school.
• Becoming a father.
• Doing my 5K.
• A skiing trip with my kids.
• Refereeing lots of basketball.
• My next beer.
• Disney cruise with the family.
• Peacefulness.
• Building more muscle at the WAC (Wisconsin Athletic Club).
• Getting married to Zack.
• Spring break.
• February Florida vacation.
• Half Iron Man 6/25.
• Not doing planks.
• Traveling the world with my beautiful wife.
• Graduating MU (Marquette University) 2025.
• Reading 5-6 books a month.
• Best friend’s wedding.
• Reaching college weight.
• Another year with Bianca.
• Prioritizing and loving myself more.
• A new sense of freedom.
• Better grammar and punctuation (aiming and arrow > towards some bad punctuation on the sheet of paper on the wall).
• A better year for my son.
• To creating a webtoon comic about cage fighters. Check out updates @taskytiger.
• Next Harley ride!!!
• Outdoor.
• A better year!
• Being happy being alone. Loving myself.
• Losing 30 more pounds.
• Opening my own business.
• Having better mental health and to let go of toxic moments in the past.
• Enjoy the small things (smiley face).
• Losing weight. Feeling fit.
• Sailing on the “Icon of the Seas” February 2025.
• Snowboarding more often.
• Traveling and getting jacked.
• Swimming and running. Lila.
• Skateboarding.
• Pickles.
• Staying out of jail for the whole year.
• Spring break.
• Enjoy the small things.
• Traveling.

What are you looking forward to?

​Scamming never ends, does it? You think people would learn not to click on misleading, crazy introductions or statements that come through email (or increasingly) text messaging (and who knows where else?).
 
Scamming people goes back a long way. The phone is still a major avenue where some anonymous individual attempts to suck your savings account dry.
 
But it you can go back in history to the snake oil salesman at the traveling carnival. Selling you crap that doesn’t work. Getting you to believe something that’s not true or possible.
 
I’ve come close at times to following up on something that is well written and appears real, but held back each time and sent the inviting message to someone else to get their opinion. Invariably, we have agreed, the special offer was BS. Delete it. Ignore it.

Not everyone does. That’s why the scammers stay after you.
 
There’s someone I know and respect who took it in the shorts. They chose to follow through on some sites that preyed on the elderly and he dove right in. He believed the junk. He swallowed the package of lies whole. His bank account took a hit. It was very sad to see.
 
If you live in a modern economy, you know what many of the scams look like. If you’re vigilant, you block or delete. Still, they keep coming, keep thinking you’ll get soft and bow to their pressure.

The attempts are multi-pronged. They try to break you down in many ways. They grab you with the headline. They mislead you with the greeting.
 
For the sake of humor and enlightenment, here are a few I’ve captured for the reader to file away with knowledge that you can’t trust what comes next. You know it’s spam and a scam when it starts out with:
 
“Hello.”
 
“Good Day.” Must be from Australia. Who do you know there?
 
“My Dearest.” No one talks like that.
 
“Now’s the time.” For what?
 
“Hi.” Self-evident.
 
“Please. May I talk with you?”  No.
 
“Your account.” Hey, dude, you know nothing about my account.
 
“My greetings.” Huh?
 
“Your order is ready.” No it’s not, I haven’t ordered anything from you.
 
“Don’t let bad credit.” I won’t.
 
“Unshackle yourself.” I’m not in jail.
 
“Empower your finances.” They’re already empowered.

"Your account has been." No it hasn't.

​"Having trouble." Nope.
 
Feel free to add your own. Stay vigilant. Keep your hand on your wallet.