Since we were near Sauk City, Wisconsin the Saturday before last, I thought it might be fun to look for the original Culver's Frozen Custard & ButterBurgers Restaurant opened by George Culver and his family in 1984.

The Colbert Report should be especially good this week, with Stephen Colbert on location in Iraq, a trip whose exact date and destination had been kept secret until Friday, leading many to ask (and search for), "Where and when is Stephen Colbert going to the Persian Gulf?"

His first guest in Baghdad is Gen. Ray Odierno who, under videotaped orders from President Barack Obama, shaves Colbert's head.

I heard this story in the wee hours this morning via ABC's World News Now. Apparently it also aired on yesterday's Good Morning America and World News with Charles Gibson:

Orlando Magic helps mute boy find his voice

Somewhat like the childhood game of Musical Chairs, there's a point in the popularity arc of any cliché when it becomes so tiresome that anyone who continues to use it exposes himself as an insecure poser fabricating fake savvy.

The expression "going forward" reached that point last year, if not the year before that.

Meet the very first camcorder we have ever owned. It's the Flip Ultra HD, which arrived on the market at the end of April. It also comes in white.

So far, after playing with it for a couple of days, I am very happy with this little gizmo. Operating it could not be simpler. You push the big red "easy button" to record, and push it again to stop. Four navigation buttons around it allow you to flip through your recorded clips, with two more buttons for deleting and approving things. That's it. Amy loves the complete lack of technical adjustments.

Eau Claire, Wisconsin's own Bon Iver is featured this month as one of Amazon.com's June 50 Albums for $5 picks.

You can grab the wildly popular For Emma, Forever Ago for just five bucks.

No, it's not simply now that people are after. We want totality. What we want is a dashboard or control panel or start page that allows us to monitor our entire personal universe second-by-second.

Instead of taking one call at a time, or receiving the latest interjections from 20 or 30 people in a chat room, we can now follow 600 or 2,000 on Twitter. We can mix Washington political insiders with Chicago foodies, California musicians, and Australian blogging experts — all the latest information.

However, as with fat and salt, what we want is not always what is best for us.

In late June and early July of 2003, we vacationed in the South Carolina Lowcountry, staying in Beaufort and visiting Charleston, as well as Savannah, Georgia.

One of the meals we ate on the trip that we have made many times since is Frogmore Stew, which is not a typical stew at all but instead a type of seafood boil, also known as Beaufort Stew, a Beaufort boil, a Lowcountry boil, or a tidewater boil, according to Wikipedia.

The French Open (or do you say Roland Garros?) begins today on ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel, channels 29 and 113 respectively on Time Warner Cable in southeastern Wisconsin.

TennisChannel.com also offers live matches online (free registration required) and a handy TV broadcast schedule.

Last night on MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann showed Erich "Mancow" Muller being waterboarded in Chicago for his radio show:

"Absolutely torture," he says. "That's drowning," he says. If he were being interrogated in that way, he added later, "I would confess to anything." Mr. Muller lasted six seconds.

The pages all look exactly like the poorly-produced urban legends, political attacks, and religious tracts that well-meaning relatives and acquaintances frequently forward to a long list of email recipients. That presidential intelligence briefings would display the same level of sophistication is downright chilling.

Nearly all of the content is centered. Fonts are changed at random. Capitals are overused. Green captions are superimposed on light green backgrounds. Spatial boundaries are violated. Lowercase descenders overlap into graphics. Each slide shows another abomination unto all known graphic design principles.

CNN's Christine Roman is clearly a Vayniac, and Ali Velshi seems to be won over during the segment. Can you make $70,000 a year talking about The Smurfs? I don't know — but Gary Vaynerchuck seems to be doing fairly well talking about wine and now social media.

His forthcoming book, available for pre-order at Amazon.com, is called Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion.

At any rate, it's certainly a performance that grabs you by the collar and makes you take notice. I was reminded of Electric Light Orchestra at their best — which would be Eldorado. I also thought about Bruce Springsteen epics such as "Jungleland."

Amy found the singer to be "a cutie."

The following was on my desktop when I woke up this morning:

hey mark....

edwardo here....

i was watching cubs game wednesday night and brendan showed up on my screen....

so i took a snapshot of it, thinking i could come up with some sort of photoslop caption for it.....

Several notable items flowing through Twitter this morning.

A gigantic revolt has broken out in the Twittersphere.

It began yesterday afternoon with a post on the Twitter Blog, entitled "Small Settings Update."

In any case, it's a colossal blunder.

Like a sturdy heirloom piece of Shaker furniture, Neil Young: Heart of Gold is a simple, functional, and timeless piece of work from both Young and Jonathan Demme.

However, the persona depicted is only one aspect of a vastly more complex artist. Young may not be in a casket here, but he's certainly on his best behavior and all dressed up to receive the respects of friends and acquaintances. There is no hint, for example, of the irrepressible, irreverent prophet who wrote "Rockin' In The Free World." I would need at least a little of that Neil Young — and some fretboard close-ups — to really love this movie.

Dear Abby, how does one gracefully dissuade one's neighbors from drying laundry over the fence? Or is this their universally accepted prerogative?

Oh, well. I suppose we'll just smile, silently willing our junies to grow, grow, grow!

National Public Radio's All Things Considered is airing a series called "Advertising In The Downturn," and last night Amy heard their segment on Google ads.

The story, by Laura Sydell, examines how small businesses are using the powerful analysis tools of Google Adwords to target and test individual keywords and combinations of words for their performance in attracting customers to a specific product in a particular locale.

As one retailer's marketing man observes, "It's the new yellow pages."

With warmer weather comes our desire to grill — but the notion of grilling usually conjures up images of fatty pork, heavy beef or troublesome chicken. We would like to cook outdoors, but we also want to eat less meat and more vegetables, and a weeknight dinner for the two of us has to be fast and easy.

Then we remember our stainless steel skewers — flat ones, to prevent the food from spinning.