Andy Hallman

Washington?s beloved ?Demon? mascot has come under fire lately. Not only will the school have to change its logo for copyright infringement, but there is a movement afoot to replace the mascot altogether with something less satanic.Before I get too deep into this topic, let me start by saying that I don?t have a dog in this fight. I did not graduate from Washington High School but rather from Pocahontas Area ...

A friend of mine brought to my attention a very interesting phenomenon the other day, which is the large number of words that are derived from a person?s name. A word that has a person?s name as its root is known as an eponym.My friend told me one of the surprising eponyms he came across was the word ?galvanize.? The word means ?to stimulate or shock with an electric current.? It is also employed in more ...

The time has come once again to do some Christmas shopping. My family has done a ?Secret Santa? gift exchange for the past couple of years. What we do is we each write up a wish list and then somebody compiles all the wish lists and sends them out in a mass e-mail. Once we learn who our person is, we try to buy him or her something from the wish list.On the one hand, asking someone for a wish list is good ...

A member of the U.S. Congress makes somewhere between $175,000 and $230,000 depending on their leadership position. If you follow politics, you know that candidates often promise that they won?t give themselves a pay increase if they?re elected.U.S. politicians who want to appear modest had better hope they never have to run against Jose Mujica, because their austerity will pale in comparison. Mujica is the ...

I haven?t been in school for over four years, but when I walk through my old school buildings, I have flashbacks to those days gone by.I recently had the pleasure of attending a class at my collegiate alma matter, Iowa State University. My youngest sister, Mary, is a senior there, and the family and I went to see her a few weeks ago when she received a scholarship from the College of Human Sciences.The awards ...

If you were outside in the late morning Wednesday, there?s a good chance you saw a large group of people walking around. What you witnessed was students and adults participating in the Healthiest State Initiative, a program that began in Iowa last year to help people get in shape through walking.I?ve lived in five towns in my life, and in all of them I have lived smack dab in the middle. That has allowed me to ...

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debated each other for the first time last week. I was able to catch most of it. I was interested in how the ?talking heads? on cable TV would interpret the debate.The overwhelming response from all corners was that Romney ?won.? From what I heard, Romney was declared the winner mostly for his superior poise and body language and less for the substance of his remarks.Exactly two ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I grew up as a very risk-averse boy. Well, earlier this month I met my polar opposites in risk aversion ? rodeo clowns.My family and I went to a rodeo in the town of Dayton on Sept. 2. Dayton is a small town of about 800 and located 15 miles south of Fort Dodge, but on this day it was anything but small. The streets swelled with cars and horses as the attendance at the rodeo ...

Over the past few weeks, I?ve taken an interest in a new vegetable sold at the farmers market: jalapeños. Don?t worry. I still eat a lot of tomatoes. But now I complement those tomatoes with something spicy.For nearly my entire life I assumed I was incapable of eating spicy peppers. I always had to buy mild salsa because even what they call ?medium? was too hot for me. Living for six months in Mexico didn?t seem ...

This Saturday is the most anticipated day in the state of Iowa. It?s the day when students from the two largest state-sponsored universities duke it out for 60 minutes on the gridiron. When the final buzzer sounds, we will know the answer to the age-old question: which school is the best? To answer that question we will have to examine the storied histories of these two illustrious academic institutions. Star ...

A few years ago I was at home visiting my parents and my youngest sister, Mary, who was in high school at the time. Mary was going to hang out with her friends one night, and before she left, my parents reminded her of her 10 o?clock curfew.After Mary shut the door, I turned to my dad and said, ?Curfew?? I never had a curfew when I was growing up. Perhaps my parents had become overprotective since I moved out. ...

We have to wait all winter to enjoy locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables. If you?re like me, you buy as many of them as you can when they?re ripe, because you won?t have fresh ones again until next year.My family in Pocahontas has a garden in which we have planted peas and tomatoes for many years. We often plant cucumbers and green peppers, too. Every once in awhile a volunteer cantaloupe finds its way into ...

One of the downsides of getting older is that your friends seem to move farther and farther away. I used to be able to see my high school friends in Pocahontas every couple of months because we all came home for holidays. High school was eight years ago, and we?ve grown up since then. I live four hours away, and many of my classmates live much farther than that.Planning a get-together can be a chore because of ...

July has to be the worst possible time of the year to run a race. And yet, that?s what I did a week ago when my family and I participated in a 5K run in Omaha.It?s a run my extended family organizes in honor of my late cousin, Justin Nealon. Justin enjoyed playing sports and loved running especially. He ran well enough in the 2003 Chicago Marathon to qualify for the Boston Marathon the following year. Unfortunate...

My parents and my sister came to visit me over the weekend. They were on their way to Fulton, Mo., where my sister had just gotten a job. She will be the activities director at a small college called Westminster College, which is famous for being the site of Winston Churchill?s ?Iron Curtain? speech in 1946.For my sister Julie, Missouri is the fourth state she has called home. That is three more states than me, ...