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MY SUN DAY NEWS

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News & Features Columnists Editorials Hang Your Hat Obituaries My Huntley News

April 10, 2014

Chris La Pelusa

The family circus

My career in show business began and ended in the mid-80s when my father installed new soffits on our house and repainted any of the exterior wood with a new coat.

A big bag of tricks with little treats

I dread the day all year long. In the weeks before, my anxiety grows. In the days before, I start bargaining with God (if You get me out of this one, I’ll…).

From Rags to witches

There’s something about this time of year that I find it hard to tell the truth … at least in my writing. For me, fall produces creativity. Maybe because it’s a romantic time of year and so much fiction (no matter genre) is the romanticizing of something or maybe because I write in a near-horror genre and with fall comes Halloween, dark skies, and empty trees.

Sun Day celebrates 100 edition milestone

When you break a news¬paper down to its most basic level, it’s one thing: an hourglass. Let me explain. A newspaper gathers independent information, call them granules of information, from a wide area, condenses them, and feeds that information back out to that same area, where it disperses. Turn the hourglass over, and the action repeats.

If you see a zombie walking through the neighborhood, don’t worry, he’s just looking for his things

It’s amazing to me how a little filth is the thin line between average Joe (me before The Great Compost Experiment of the Summer of 2013) and warlord of the garden (me after The Great Compost Experiment of the Summer of 2013).

Sooner or later, we all jump the shark

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the TV show term “jump the shark.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it’s the moment a TV series slides into the absolute absurd, that point of no return that tells viewers “It’s all downhill from here, folks.”

My lawn, a field of dreams

I’m not a baseball fan, but even I like the look of Wrigley Field’s striped or checkerboard grass. Neat, clean, dramatic: the perfect stage for a real show.

Recycled vanity makes for fresh embarrassment

It’s come to my attention that if you’re going to embarrass yourself, it’s going to be in front of your neighbors.

Attack of the worms!

My wife and I are big-time recyclers and proud of it. If it can be recycled, we recycle it. And if it can’t be recycled, we oftentimes find a way to repurpose it, especially clothes where repurposing is called refashioning.

Sun Day and HCR make waves together

Usually when someone makes waves, it’s not a good thing. People enjoy the status quo. What’s that saying? Don’t rock the boat?

Hat trauma

Fellas, if you’re ever on your way out the house and your wife says you look cute, go change immediately.

Blue (and red) light special

Blue (and red) light special

To T.R.’s hair, eat your heart out / Student outgrows teacher

It’s said that students, or some, surpass their teachers. Although the idea is flattering, I’m not sure how this is possible. Granted, the teacher may give up one day on his/her development or a teacher may have a prodigy student destined for pure greatness, but people are constantly learning, constantly growing, and, by and large, teachers are older than their students.

A happy holiday wish and important Sun Day updates

Tomorrow, December 21, is a big day. First, it’s the winter solstice and, therefore, the shortest day of the year, which is a big deal for the vampire I am. I love the dark (and almost hate the sun). Second, it’s my wife’s birthday! Third, and this one may trump 1 and 2, according to the Mayan Calendar, it may be the end of the world. (Doomsday? Darkness? Yes, the jokes abound about my wife’s birthday being the darkest day of the year and possibly the end of the world to boot!)

If you don’t know what time it is, guess

For somebody who is supposed to be in the prime of his life, moving and shaking, on top of this changing world, it appears I’m brutally behind the times.

No skeletons. Only gargoyles, chimps, and tacky turtles, Part II

Old and deadly. If you look closely, the bottle is unopened and about a half-finger of pure, concentrated poison sits at the bottom. By now the whiskey is probably nuclear.

No skeletons. Only gargoyles, chimps, and tacky turtles, Part I

I am exactly the person that will peer through the keyhole, open the box (save for coffins), brush aside the curtain, and eavesdrop. And I admit this without shame. The entire world of journalism (and even bigger world of writing) is built on peeking through the cracks. Where do you think our material comes from? Google? Well, maybe some get it from Google but the great journalists and writers out there are masters at decoding interaction, which is the key to inspiration and the formula for any Pulitzer prize-winning journalism piece or any classic novel. If Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle isn’t a peek through the keyhole, then I don’t know what is.

You laugh because you don’t know me

It’s very common for humans to characterize the people we know, especially our family members. Oh, he’s the serious one. Oh, she’s the pretty one. He’s the smart one. He’s the athletic one. I swear, she’s the only one in this family with any grace at all. Sound familiar?

Good to the last drop … not always

I recently performed my first magic trick by brewing coffee into thin air. Despite its obvious success (not a drop in the mug!), it was not accepted with great applause by my wife. Her patience with me was like a magic trick itself: now you see it, now you don’t.

Sun Day Refresher Course 101

Due to a placement test for college, I was remanded to taking a refresher course in mathematics before continuing into standard college level math. It was no secret that I was a poor math student, partly because I found math boring, partly because my brain doesn’t seem to process numbers like most people’s, and partly because I couldn’t see how anything beyond basic math skills was necessary for “real life.”

I love my wife, I really do, but sometimes…

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were enjoying a fine summer evening on the porch of our new house (light breeze in the air, streetlights just coming on, a little red left in the western sky, neighborhood quiet and content), when my wife said, “Your columns haven’t been so great lately.”

Sein-language at Walmart

Seinfeld was a show about nothing. But what made it so successful is that “nothing” really is “something.” Moreover, I think everyone has, at times in their lives, experienced a “Seinfeldian” moment, where a trip to the grocery store turns into an epic, daylong fiasco of little slips and mishaps that would be nothing on their own but turn into quite something to talk about and remember forever and yada-yada-yada.

Me, a sledgehammer, a knife, and a couch. The saga ends

I think most people at some points in their lives have experienced reoccurring nightmares or at least reoccurring dreams. And whether they’re nightmares or dreams, they’re usually not pleasant. When I was 16, for three nights in a row I dreamt I walked into an old, Victorian style room that was located somewhere in Europe and sometime in the 1770s. It had a real Dickens feel to it, and like Marely’s ghost, a floating head would appear and chase me around the room.

A rant on why I switched to AT&T, the lesser of two…

I am positive that if you had to contact the customer service departments of major corporations on a regular basis, you’d go insane real quick.

Vision tests, written exams, fees: sounds like a birthday to me

I recently celebrated my birthday. And by celebrated, I mean I spent the bulk of the morning at the DMV. Not a bad place for birthdays if you like that grayish, semi-depressive atmosphere (wait a minute, that’s exactly like birthdays). The DMV is like The Bad News waiting room.

When going weekly, there’s nothing spare about change

Consistency is good and dependable. Ask any farmer who’s having a bad year, and he’ll tell you consistency is king. But we do love spontaneity…just in doses, of course, because too much spontaneity can quickly turn into its evil doppelganger, Chaos. Tornados are spontaneous, for example, but we don’t like them very much, especially the aforementioned farmer. It can almost be said that people prefer “planned spontaneity.”