I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, first I got to tell you’s that last Saturday, the Shepherd’s “Stein & Dine Beer, Cheese, and Sausage Festival” over by the State Fair’s Wisconsin...

 I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, I hear another Earth Day has come and gone for another year. To tell the truth, I didn’t do a lot of celebrating and really don’t expect to in the future...

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, maybe I’ve been watching too much college basketball on the TV lately, but there’ll be no essay for you’s this week ’cause I’ve decided to suspend...

 I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, I’ve been pissing away a lot of time lately trying to figure the answer to what you could call a biological question; although, some might consider...

 I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, hope you had a safe and uneventful St. focking Patty’s Day-long bender. Yeah, St. Patrick’s Day? It’s more like St. Patrick’s month-and-a-focking-half...

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? Listen, I heard the job rate is on the upswing of late, but for the young people, and me, not so much; so I think it best we commence with a little show business...

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, right now I’m all confused with trying to figure out and remember if our month of March this year has come in like a lion or a goddamn lamb, what the...

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, just got the news that the sixteenth Pope Benedict is hanging up his mighty mitre ’cause at the age of 85, he just doesn’t have the gas to muster and...

If senior citizens wanted to serve as footrests, or stand in corporate lobbies as experimental artwork, I’d be the first one to put my feet up, admire the view and applaud their work. But the reality is far more insidious, and the time to respect our elders has passed....

Between DVRs, DVDs and daily ODs on cough syrup, today’s kids can pretty much raise themselves. Of course, you won’t find advice like that from the American Academy of Pediatrics, an anti-adult organization firmly in the pocket of Big Baby. Instead of heeding their cries for turning America into a child-welfare state, we need some straight talk to combat the curveballs thrown by those ...

 Tasting Triumph: A beautiful spring day did not deter more than 1,500 hungry and thirsty visitors from attending the Shepherd Express’ first Stein and Dine Beer, Cheese, and Sausage Festival. Guests sipped and...

 Think Spring: Guests received a rare glimpse of spring at Samara Garden and Home’s indoor garden party. Visitors mingled under arbors and trellises, eying and buying exquisite, handmade garden art and antique...

 Musical Aid: Milwaukee’s top musicians joined the cause at Turner Hall to support and raise funds for Josh Tovar, their musical brother saddled with medical bills. Backed by his band, Chasin’ Mason, singers cloned...

 Tune In: The fun first anniversary celebration of Riverwest Radio at the Polish Falcon Hall included music by Paul Cebar and Mike Fredrickson and delicious potluck, highlighted by a home-baked cake by the organization’s...

 Glam Galore: The Milwaukee Ballet’s “GlamROCK! The Ball 2013” was an over-the-top, first-rate blowout. IG Designs’ Eli McKinney and Kirk Kohlbeck transformed the Pfister Hotel’s ballroom into a swanky nightclub....

 Comedy Contrasts: Theatre Gigante opened its 25th season with a darkly funny Hungarian play, Dust, by György Spiró, at the Kenilworth Studio 508. By contrast, Carte Blanche Studios presented a giggler/slapstickish recreation...

Stay Tuned: After the success of the first 88Nine Radio Milwaukee Soundbites fundraiser last year, this year’s attendance soared to 340 at a recent sellout at the Iron Horse Hotel. The crowd was treated to unsurpassed gourmet delights from 13 of Milwaukee’s top restaurants...

 Making History: The Public Policy Forum celebrated its first hundred years at the Wisconsin Club with an impressive collection of political operatives, elected officials and legal eagles. Forum President Rob Henken...

 In March, twin sisters Louise and Martine Fokkens, 70, announced their joint retirement after more than 50 years each on the job—as Amsterdam prostitutes. (In February, the minimum age for prostitutes in the Netherlands was...

 To counter the now-well-publicized culture of rape in India, three engineers in Chennai recently said that they are about to market women's anti-rape lingerie, which will provide both a stun gun-sized blast of electricity against...

 In some jurisdictions, a driver can be presumed impaired with a blood alcohol reading as low as .07 (and suggestively impaired at a reading below that), but according to a WMAQ-TV investigation in February...

 Wait…what? A startup company in Austin, Texas, also serving San Francisco, promises to take its customers' incoming U.S. mail three times a week, photograph it and deliver it back to the customers...

 In March, Microsoft was fined 561 million euros (about $725 million) by the European Commission after, apparently, a programmer carelessly left out just one line of code in Microsoft's Service Pack 1 of the European...

 One of the many decisions greeting Pope Francis, as salon.com pointed out, is whether to officially recognize a Patron Saint of Handgunners—as urged by a U.S. organization of activists for more than 20 years. According to...

  Leaders of the ice-fishing community, aiming for official Olympics recognition as a sport, have begun the process by asking the World Anti-Doping Agency to randomly test its "athletes" for performance-enhancing drugs...

 One of Britain's most famous "madams" announced in January that she was coming out of retirement to set up a brothel exclusively catering to disabled people and the terminally ill. An ordinary brothel would be...

 KT Rusch is a longtime student and board member at the T'ai Chi Ch'uan Center of...

 In his 2013 State of the City address, Mayor Tom Barrett recognized three individuals “whose energy and commitment are producing real results. They deserve our attention and thanks.” Two of the three were Angela...

 Since her departure from her treasured roots in Shorewood, Amelia Vorpahl has traveled the world and returned to the States to become a valuable part of a noble ecological cause. Vorpahl now manages communications...

Jeri Bonavia is the executive director of WAVE Educational Fund, a statewide, grassroots organization dedicated to preventing gun violence...

 Cooperative Performance Milwaukee (CPM) is a new type of arts organization. Utilizing a traditional co-op model, its endeavors are democratically controlled by both member artists and audience. Off the Cuff spoke with founding...

Ian Abston is the young president of NEWaukee. Off The Cuff asked him about the organization and its Young Professional Week, April 15-21...

 This week, Off the Cuff spoke with Katie Martin, an artist and educator who spearheaded the creation of 724 small owl sculptures for Renaissance Theaterworks’ upcoming production The Road to Mecca, which explores the life...

New breeds of networking groups for professionals are cropping up everywhere. FemFessionals, serving only women, is a distinctive variety that has arrived on the local scene as FemCity Milwaukee. Michelle Bertholf...

Ben Folds has kept busy since he disbanded his piano-rock trio Ben Folds Five shortly after the release of its bold final album, 1999's The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. He's recorded plenty of solo albums......

With the help of some enthusiastic praise from celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, Washington, D.C., pop-rock songwriter Eric Hutchinson rebounded from an unproductive stint on Madonna's Maverick Records, which shut down before......

More than 180 artists will display their works to tens of thousands of visitors at this year's Lakefront Festival of Arts, which raises funds for the Milwaukee Art Museum. Attendees may purchase much of the art on display, which includes......

Milwaukee's classiest free concert series, Jazz in the Park, begins its 2012 season with an evening of music from one of the city's most prominent blues combos: Reverend Raven and the Chain Smokin' Altar Boys. The group plays......

A sort of poetry slam without poetry—or, for that matter, slamming—The Moth was conceived in 1997 as an evening of storytelling, with each performer recounting a 10-minute autobiographical yarn, sans notes. Celebrities like Moby and Ethan......

Prolific rocker Steve Winwood was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 for his work with the prog-rock outfit Traffic, and it's not inconceivable he could be inducted again, since he was also a founding member......

Los Angeles promoter David Bash founded his International Pop Overthrow Festival in 1998 to showcase bands performing in the loosely defined power-pop tradition—pretty much any group playing melodic, guitar-based rock qualifies—and has since......

Gladys Knight and the Pips recorded a number of minor hits for Motown in the mid-to-late '60s, but it wasn't until the group left the label that they scored their signature hit, “Midnight Train to Georgia.” Knight has had a colorful career since......

While rules around Sturgeon fishing keep getting tighter and the deadline just passed for the 2009 season, for those of you who purchased a license, or are wishing you had. There are a few new stories that are must reads for avid fishermen getting prepared for life on the ice in 2008/09....

Wisconsin's regular nine-day gun deer season opens this Saturday and runs through Sunday, Nov. 30. State wildlife officials say hunters should be able to look forward to a good season. Even after a pretty tough winter in parts of the state, and a harvest of more than 520,000 deer last year, the deer herd is still a good deal larger than established population goals in much of Wisconsin....

Just before dawn Saturday, 631,223 hunters hit the woods with a license intent on bagging a deer as Wisconsin's annual nine-day gun deer hunt opened. Department of Natural Resources Secretary Matt Frank was out in south central Wisconsin visiting deer hunters and DNR staff at registration stations on opening morning of Wisconsin's annual nine-day gun deer season....

Some parts of far northern Wisconsin received up to several inches of snow last weekend, with the Hurley area in Iron County reporting 5 inches, but the snow cover had all melted by mid week. The leaf drop is now nearly complete in southern Wisconsin, with mostly oaks still holding leaves. Smaller lakes, bays and ponds in the north have continued their trend toward ice up. Water temperatures have...

Seems like more and more Milwaukee area school districts are using the Halloween holiday as a reason to schedule "in-service" days. That means that many of you are looking at a four-day weekend the last week of October and probably wondering what you can do since most cities and towns around Milwaukee will be finished with Halloween this weekend. Why not take a break before the really cold weath...

While Door County is best known for Spring, Summer, and Fall vacations, there's more to see and do in the off-season than you might imagine. Before the bitter cold shows up and the snow blankets I-43, make sure you make it "up nort."...

If you like fishing tournaments, but don't like having to drive up north every single weekend, you now have an option in your own backyard. Not only that, but you have a chance to win $100 cash for each winning fish in any of six categories....

With gas prices going up and down like a yo-yo it's hard to imagine that a trip anywhere could be cheaper by driving. Get ready, because in some cases it's true. I'll be exploring driving vs. train, driving vs. plane, and any other transportation in the next few columns. Take our near neighbor to the south, Chicago. Whether you decide to brave the roads, which are often torn up with construction...

You are what you eat, as the old saying goes. But we’d like to add this simple thought: What you eat can make you old. Last month we explained how age equals inflammation and why inflammation could play a role in many degenerative processes, including diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, high blood pressure and cancer....

We have all been told that we are doomed to suffer the negative effects of aging, to struggle with painful arthritis and other degenerative processes that are supposedly inevitable. But must the aging process be so difficult? Absolutely not....

The big news flash as we write this is that our tap water contains drugs. More specifically, 41 million Americans live where the water provides them with a dose of someone else’s prescription, free of charge....

The highway’s full of gamblers, you’d better use your sense; take what you have gathered from coincidence. —Bob Dylan...

We consider ourselves old school. Our parents are baby boomers; our grandparents tell stories of World Wars and the Great Depression. They lived in a society that changed so rapidly that it’s nearly unrecognizable today....