todd.smith's blog

The first album my wife Sarah ever bought me was Thickfreakness by the bombastic guitar-and-drum duo The Black Keys. It was a small, yet profound gesture. Sarah is rather shy in nature and doesn’t like going places alone. Read more »

My wife and I went to church last Sunday and we were both pleasantly surprised that neither one of us caught on fire when we entered the sacred building. I have to admit that I had my doubts. I thought the church would have some sort of metal detector like thingy for lapsed Catholics inside the front door that I’d set off with my mere presence. But I made it past the threshold without incident. It probably helped that I shoved my un-baptized son Murphy through the doors first to test the church’s religious slacker detector devise. What can I say? I’m an opportunist. Read more »

If there was a movie based on your life which modern actor would play you? Obviously, the first question you have to ask yourself is which current actor physically looks like you. This can be really fun. You compare your attributes – your face, height, weight, hair (or lack thereof) – to all of the famous folks you see up on the big screen. But it also can be really terrifying. When you play “Who’d Play You?” with your friends or family, they’ll take in your physical appearance while you’re standing right in front of them. Read more »

By now, everyone, including me, knows that Pizzeria Lola makes one of the best pizzas in the Twin Cities. On a recent visit, my wife Sarah ate a fantastic pizza topped with sliced asparagus and prosciutto. Sarah didn’t talk for over ten minutes. She just sat there and noshed on her glorious pie, ignoring me and our son Murphy. The pizza was so good and consumed her every sense that I’m pretty sure Sarah was trying to create some imaginary alone time with her beloved meal. Read more »

On March 9, Minnesota Timberwolves superstar Ricky Rubio suffered a torn ACL that dramatically ended his promising rookie season. Well, at least Rubio got injured during a game (he was trying to guard Kobe Bryant in crunch time) and not, say, sneezing like Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs once did. Think I’m kidding? Sosa pulled his back ha-ha-ha-chu-ing.

Here’s a quick look at some of the other lamest sports injuries on record. Read more »

Last week, I decided to see as many of the Oscar-nominated best pictures that I could. The AMC Best Picture Showcase gave me an awesome opportunity to accomplish this goal. Read more »

So, I was walking through the Mall of America with my nieces, Addie, 6, and Olivia, 9. We were on a nice little uncle-niece date to the American Girl store. A few weeks prior, I had off-handedly promised Addie and Olivia that I’d someday take them to their favorite store. I had previously taken “the boys,” my son Murphy, 7, and his cousin Elliot, 12, to a LEGO Festival. When I treated the boys to a night out on the town filled with LEGOs and all purpose tomfoolery, Olivia and Addie threw a little bit of a good natured stink. Read more »

For as long as I can remember, Craig Finn has been shouting over the music. As the front man for the Minneapolis-based band Lifter Puller, a beloved alt-indie punk group, Finn blew out his vocal cords in basements and booze-soaked bars all over the Twin Cities. Read more »

Twitter wouldn’t be denied. Oh, believe me. I tried avoiding the tweeting temptress for as long as I could. Where Facebook is more like a steady boyfriend, Twitter is the harlequin of online social networking. It is an electronic wild frontier, a place where literally anyone (300 million users send out 1.6 billion search queries per day!) is free to dissect the minutia of their day-to-day lives, craft quirky 140-character observations and blast them out into the ether with zero restrictions. Read more »

The band Loverboy was right about one thing: everyone truly is just working for the weekend. Those two sweet days off at the end of our weekly grind are all that we have left. Sometimes we use the weekend to relax, and other times we use it get things done.

If you took a moment, though, and added up everything that you accomplished over a single weekend I beat you’d have quite a story. I took a moment to write down all the conversations I had, observations I captured, and events I attended from this past weekend. Here is recap of my buffoonery. Read more »