​I sent an email to a friend last week, asking him whether he had seen “Atomic Blonde.”

“What is it? A beer?,” he asked.
 
I stifled a chuckle getting his reply. It reminded me of my dad. When asked who Oprah was about 25 years ago, he went, “Who’s Oprah?”  Seriously. Dad was an engineer, a plant manager, followed sports, played some golf, volunteered at the YMCA and Boys and Girls Club of Topeka, but he didn’t watch daytime TV or read “People” magazine. He’d never heard of Oprah.
 
That’s not saying everyone should know what “Atomic Blonde” is. Most people probably haven’t heard of it. And for all I know, my friend might have been messing with me when he asked if it was a beer. It certainly sounds like one.
 
His email response though got me thinking about popular culture (“Atomic Blonde” is a movie, BTW, from 2017; it’s not too outdated). Some things we pay attention to, and some things we don’t. That feeds into our personal data bank.
 
The movie stars Charlize Theron. She’s an undercover agent sent to Berlin to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents.
 
Set against the backdrop of the Berlin wall crashing, there’s a historical retrospective feel to the flick. It has great period music, intense fight scenes and lots of intrigue.
 
It made 100 million in U.S. dollars at the box office, so it had visibility, but if you asked 100 people today what they thought of it or whether they even remembered it coming out, I wonder if you’d get 25 who even knew it was a movie.
 
Movie buffs would remember it. The rest of us would either yawn, roll our eyes, get a quizzical look on our face or perhaps look you intently in the eye to get more information if asked about movie. Our personal cultural knowledge gets more and more segmented with each passing year. Finding commonality becomes more difficult.

That’s central to our times. We seem more predisposed in 2019 to find what we don’t have in common with each other rather than looking for shared experiences -- things we do together to build bonds of friendship.
 
This past weekend, I took a 25-mile bicycle trip around Lake Mills, WI. Two other friends joined me. For those of you who know me, I biked 3,800+ miles across North America in 1982, and bike commuted almost daily while living in the Washington, D.C. area for 13 years.
 
Ironically, the trip this past weekend is the longest I’ve biked in 25+ years, despite my long love of bicycling. Nine hundred people embarked on the trip. No one was on their cell phones. As riders caught up to you, they chatted, then rode on. Several had the Wisconsin Badgers football game on, and that generated conversation. If you’d asked about “Atomic Blonde,” you probably would have gotten a weird look.
 
People were there for the shared experience. I got to spend time with the two friends, catching up, learning more about their lives, grabbing a few beers and listening to some polka music afterwards.
 
We’ll remember the trip years from now. We won’t need to think about whether it was a beer or a movie. We’ll treasure the experience and shared memories.

​Sometimes I think we should permanently fly the American flag at half mast given all the mass shootings that result in senseless deaths. It’s a sad thing to say.
 
Twenty years ago I started this column. The first one addressed a mass shooting in Arkansas or Kentucky, if I remember correctly. A youth got guns out of his grandparents’ home and went on a shooting spree.
 
In the ensuing 20 years, the frequency and number of people killed in mass shootings in the United States has grown. We are a violent culture. We settled this country violently. And to this day, we too frequently have people who act out violently, for whatever reason.
 
Beyond the shooters who are seriously psychologically and mentally disturbed, I believe there are two significant factors affecting certain individuals that causes them to go off in frustration and craziness: 1) Over-population, and 2) anxiety based on our overly complicated society that causes their rage to boil over. Many people can’t cope. Some take out their anger (or pettiness) with guns.
 
The current U.S. population is 320+ million, with more and more individuals being crammed into urban and suburban areas. Traffic, waiting in lines, unnecessary crowds can all cause unease in people, nervousness, a desire to get away to an area where they aren’t so bothered by modern day life.

As my older brother often says, “Too many rats in the maze. What happens? They start to gnaw on each other.” It’s a very apt description for how some individuals go off with a gun. They lose it. They want to gnaw on someone else.
 
Beyond our ever-growing population which requires people to adjust their mindsets and learn how to deal with rubbing elbows more frequently with people they may not know, the other variable is the complexity of modern life in general. If you think, for example, how much paperwork we all have to process in a given day, week, month or year, it’s mindboggling.
 
Taxes. Insurance forms. Getting your driver’s license renewed. Ordering a prescription online. Applying for jobs through the internet. Many of these functions have become impersonal over the years, so if you need help you can’t get it face-to-face.

Instead, you go through a series of numbers to push on your phone, waiting and waiting to get a customer service representative who may or may not be able to help you. Your frustrations grow as these incidents increase. It takes a healthy mentality to be able to roll with these punches, and not everyone has one.
 
The frustrations spill over. Better coping mechanisms become a societal need.
 
It would be nice to say there is some easy solution to help people calm down and heal their minds a bit. I’ve found a few that work for me. Walking the dogs in the woods is an excellent mind settler. Reading a good novel takes your worries away and engages you so that your worries are set aside. Exercising, telling a joke, meditating, making a good meal, praying, or just plain having a good conversation with a friend you care about are all excellent ways to release some of those pent-up tensions.

I don’t have a copyright on relaxing, that’s for sure. But if you work at it, you can take steps to ease our mind. We’d be better off if more people took those types of moments to heal their minds in a healthy way instead of exploding in rage.

​We need new sports to watch on TV. There are several reasons for this.
 
Football, for example, has gotten so violent that pro teams must lose 3-4 players every single game based on random observations. If they keep that up, who’s going to be left to play? Fewer youngsters are taking up football, which in the long run means fewer fans. If you watch major college football on television, there are huge numbers of empty seats in almost every stadium except for teams in the top 25 national ranking.

Those aren’t the only reasons the sport is slowly declining in interest. The games take way too long with the number of replays. Those delays also interrupt the flow of the game, making it less fun to watch.

Baseball has some of those same slowdown issues. It’s not a sport based on the clock, and you watch baseball to relax and enjoy the pace; at the same time, you want the game to finish before you fall asleep at night. As pitchers take longer to throw the ball and batters step in and out of the box to adjust gloves after every pitch, and as managers make needless relief pitching changes that take ten minutes to implement, you start to see people exit their seats. At home, you just turn the TV off and go to bed. Yawn.
 
Taste in sports and entertainment change over time. We’re in one of those historical periods where technology affects viewing behavior in terms of direct impact on games (video review of officials decisions) and in terms of fan behavior (staring at their phones and playing games or being distracted by something online rather than attending a live sporting event or watching it closely on the tube).
 
Attention spans shrink. Fan support lags. We just don’t care. What sports might create fan enthusiasm?
 
I think flag football and ultimate frisbee are two under-sung sports that have potential. Both have quick activity and allow those in attendance or watching on the screen to identify with the participants. It’s nice to see faces, for example, rather than looking at huge hulking bodies covered in equipment with faces obscured by helmets, so the only way you can identify players is by the name on the back of the jersey.
 
Imagine a pro flag football league with seven players on the team. The field would be wide open. Allow every player except the center to be eligible to catch the ball. No protective gear allowed. You’d have a wide open, exciting game that people could relate to because you wouldn’t need to be a hulking behemoth to compete. The normal-sized Joe or Jane could actually play.
 
Same thing for ultimate frisbee. Non-stop action. You don’t need to be big or bulky to compete. In fact, that would be an impediment. Regular-sized human beings in good shape with powerful lung capacity and hand-to-eye coordination would rule the field. Because more people could relate to the players, you’d likely have wider fan support.
 
Society has an almost insatiable appetite for sports. But some sports wane while others are on the rise. No one can fully predict the future, but there are a lot of bad trends facing some of the major pro sports. Maybe it’s time organizers thought about flag football or ultimate frisbee as next gen.

​Personal Transportation Devices (PTD) fascinate me. Cars, bicycles, scooters, golf carts, our legs. Humans in our mobile modern messy world choose to get around in many ways. And those ways continue to evolve as cities grow more crowded, streets congested and ease of movement shrinking.
 
Electric scooters are a big thing these days. Commuters, millennials, vacationers and others hop on in the inner core of cities to get around quickly and efficiently. It’s that “final step” PTD that gets you from mass transportation to your final destination in areas where parking is unavailable, too expensive or traffic is constantly blocked. Problems need to be ironed out on a couple of fronts, but the scooters hold promise in reducing car and traffic flow, something most people can relate to.
 
On the golf course, it’s a different story. Your PTD is your feet if you walk the course, or a two-person cart if you choose to ride. Until now.
 
Last weekend, as I was biking outside Hartland, WI, I came across a local golf course at the top of a hill. It wound through a neighborhood, and as I pedalled around one curve, I saw a golf cart and a one-person scooter heading down the cart path to cross the road.
 
The scooter moved more quickly. The golf clubs sat in front of the driver. He shot across the road and into the woods towards the next hole.

I turned around on my bike and caught up with two women in the cart and asked about the PTD. “Did your club just get that one-person scooter? Is it electric? What’s been the feedback?”
 
I’d heard about these scooters before, but never seen one in action, and the responsiveness as I watched the driver head across the street was quite impressive.
 
It seems the course had ordered four of the PTDs to try out, and responses had been overwhelmingly positive so far from those who’d used them. “Easy to handle. Well balanced. Good acceleration.”
 
Pretty cool stuff and I like the idea for speeding up play on the golf course, so each player can head individually to their ball and take their shot rather than crisscrossing holes back and forth to each of your partner’s balls in a two-person cart. But,…..
 
I thought a bit more about it, particularly that golf is an individual AND a social game. We play to hang out with our friends, enjoy nature, and share time. Going to a one-person scooter defeats some of that purpose.
 
The more I thought about it, the more my ambivalence rose. I get it if you play by yourself and want to speed around the course and get home for chicken pot pie. By all means, grab the scooter and take off.
 
But if it’s your regular four-person Saturday morning tee time, and you’re jazzing your opponents and want to tell your best jokes to your riding partner, the one-person PTD ain’t gonna cut it. You need to take that dinosaur two-person cart or use your legs as your PTD.

You have to figure the one-person golf scooter will carve out a niche, like many other PTDs in the years ahead. Sometimes you innovate and sometimes you stay with the tried and true.

​One thing I’ve learned over the years is that mustard makes an excellent marinade. Not everyone agrees with this. But, even for the detractors, if you sneak it in and baste your meat with that special yellow sauce without them seeing you, the results shine.
 
“What did you think of the meat, Stella?
 
“It was delectable. What did you put on it?”
 
“Ha, a chef never tells.” Indeed.
 
The first time I had a steak slathered in straight yellow mustard was 25 years ago when we lived in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Our neighbors had us over for a barbecue. The husband was from a northern European country and he had his own ideas about barbecuing steaks, which included spreading yellow mustard over the meat.

“Yuck,” I thought. But willing to gave it a try, when I took a bite, the taste was delicious. Somehow the mustard taste did not even slightly overwhelm the taste of the meat, instead enhancing it, like a good red wine. From that point, I was sold on the mustard marinade merits.
 
We don’t eat steak often. But when we do, it gets the yellow basting, along with other special spices I’ve learned about over the years. I brush it on, covering the entire ribeye, including the sides. Let it sit for 10-30 minutes so it seeps into the meat.
 
Over the years, I’ve alternated what type of mustard to use and this keeps the taste of the meat hopping. The old standby is your basic yellow mustard you put on ballpark franks. Squirt it on, spread it around.
 
Recently, after emptying the container, I chose to go a different route. At work, someone won several containers of a local mustard, kind of a spicy mustard. “Hmmm, better give this a try.” It too was a success, garnering praise.
 
In Wisconsin, though I’m not sure where this place is because I don’t remember where I read about it, there is a “Mustard Store.” That’s right. All they sell is mustard.

There’s mustard from Sweden, Germany, Austria and Brazil. Specially spiced mustard from Belgium, South Africa and Australia.

And, of course, multiple versions from all over Wisconsin, celebrating it’s German and Polish roots. Some are spicy. Some contain wild mixtures of other ingredients. Who the heck knows what goes into them, but I WANT TO VISIT THAT STORE and bring home samples.

I don’t know when I’ll get there because first I have to figure out where it is. Google will help me. Then I need to get motivated and take a trip there, which will probably require some other reason to visit the community and check out the local sights and wares.
 
Some day this will happen. Until then, I have two mustard varieties in the frig to finish off. They serve us well.
 
Recently, a sweet honey mustard has risen to the top of my marinade list. No one knows but me. I drizzle it on, grill the steak, and the positive comments come in.
 
“This is so good. What did you do different this time?”
 
It’s mustard, folks. But you don’t need to let on that you keep experimenting, trying something new, looking to perfect your marinade for that marvelous grilling mix.