Meeting at Ma Fischer’s (finally!)

Posted on June 18, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

Yesterday I met a group of old friends for lunch, something we’ve been doing about once a month for 25 years now!

Actually we started out as a writing group, meeting in the basement of the old Shorewood Library. When we reserved the room, the librarian listed us in the book as the “independent writers group,” and we decided we liked that moniker well enough to adopt it as our unofficial name.

We’ve been through a lot together: births, deaths, cancer, family traumas, you name it. Although we’ve continued writing, our interests have diverged considerably from our initial interest in the romance genre. At this point our main reason for getting together is probably more for the social ties that bind us than our need for feedback on our work—although we do get back to writing fundamentals on a regular basis.

Anyway, yesterday we met for lunch at Ma Fischer’s Restaurant, a Milwaukee landmark. I had NEVER been there before, not in the entire time I’ve lived in Milwaukee.

And that’s saying something.

Back in the 1980s when telephone poles along Farwell and Prospect Avenues around North were plastered with flyers for shows by local bands like the Violent Femmes, Da BoDeans (later just the BoDeans), and Oh! Those Spanic Boys (later just the Spanic Boys)—all of which played on Saturday Night Live, Letterman, and similar national stages—Ma Fischer’s was the place to go for breakfast after the bars closed.

It still is. Ma Fischer’s is open 24 hours a day and serves “Breakfast” and “Not Breakfast” anytime. How could I have missed out on it all these years? (But then I’ve never closed Wolski’s, either. Clearly I have some living to catch up on 🙂 )

Some pics . . .

“Welcome to Ma Fischer’s”

The tile floor at Ma Fischer’s, which is your basic, standard bathroom floor in every house in Milwaukee built before, say, World War II.

The iconic “sign”

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Got a problem? Start a business!

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

I love stories of creative ingenuity. Here’s an article from today’s Inc. about a man who started a line-waiting business five years ago: “If You’re Broke But Want to Start a Company and Make $100K+, You Need to Read This.”

Hokey title, but I got past that. Yes, one can apparently make a decent living just by standing around doing nothing. Good to know, right?

What I really liked about this article was the story it told. Robert Samuel started his business, “Same Old Line Dudes,” in response to a problem every single one of us was aware of—but only he had the vision and inspiration to solve. When the iPhone 5 was announced, he ran a Craigslist ad offering to stand in line at the Apple Store in New York City for someone who wanted to buy one. He got enough of a response that he hired friends to stand in line, too. And then he also started offering services to line-standers, like selling people crates to sit on while they waited.

Think of all the lines you’d rather not stand in. Would you be willing to pay someone to do it for you? Would you be willing to do it for pay yourself?

I’ve always admired Peter Lynch (former Magellan Fund manager at Fidelity) for his ability to see things that the rest of us didn’t. Strike that. What Peter Lynch did was understand what he saw that the rest of us merely had looked at without really seeing.

Case in point: when I was walking up Michigan Avenue in Chicago about 25 years ago and noticed a storefront for Au Bon Pain, I realized that the bakery I’d visited in Boston was a chain. “Great!” I thought. “I can get those almond croissants I liked anytime I come to Chicago.”

Then I saw Peter Lynch on “Wall Street Week” talking about how he picked companies to invest in just by paying attention to businesses he frequented in his daily life (like, famously, Toys ‘R’ Us when he was shopping for children’s products). One company he said he liked was Au Bon Pain.

Light bulb! Whereas I was happy this bakery was a chain because it meant convenient purchases of almond croissants, Lynch was happy it was a chain because it meant a publicly-traded company he could invest in.

Louis Pasteur is credited with saying, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This is one of my favorite quotations. When you read widely and continually pay close attention and practice the art of connection-making, you’re more likely to recognize opportunity when it’s staring you right in the face.

If only I’d been sharp enough standing there on Michigan Avenue to understand the true significance of that bakery storefront . . . .

I could have invested in my croissant and eaten it, too!

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Interior Staircase

Posted on April 29, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

I continue to be fascinated with the construction of the Milwaukee Bucks’ arena. Every week seems to bring some new sign of progress. You can now see a flight of stairs leading upward from the ground floor.

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GOOD USED REFRIGRATORS [and] STOVES

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

Taken from an upstairs window at the Repairers of the Breach center, Milwaukee’s only daytime homeless sanctuary, where I volunteer as chair of the Communications and Fund Development Committee. If you are ever looking for a very worthy cause to support, please remember this organization and consider helping them in their mission of saving, supporting, and restoring lives. You can contact me for more information anytime.

Link to their Facebook: https://Facebook.com/Repairers

Link to their website: http://www.repairers.org

P.S. My post’s title, originally misspelled correctly, is now correctly misspelled😄

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First Buds! – Red Arrow Park

Posted on April 12, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

Spring has arrived in downtown Milwaukee. On my coffee run at noon, I spotted one tree in bud around the perimeter of the Slice of Ice skating rink in Red Arrow Park.

And a panoramic view of the entire rink below (just because 🙂 ) with the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in the background. The tree sprouting buds is at the far left, just to the right of that pine and practically invisible against the brick of the Milwaukee Center office tower behind it, while all the other trees are still winter bare.

 

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Skywalk is up!

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

Look what I saw on my way to working the UX program table at MSOE’s Open House this morning. The Skywalk  connecting the Milwaukee Bucks arena with the parking garage across the street is up!

Below is the post I started writing yesterday morning. On my way to work, I had noticed a skywalk-looking thing on the ground, so I took a photo of it. But I don’t know a skywalk truss from a generic truss intended to carry electrical wiring or whatever, so I was a little hesitant to stick my neck out and call it a skywalk. Plus, before I could hit “publish,” I had to run to meetings and teaching and more meetings and more teaching. And then I took one of my colleagues to the train station after work because she’s going to be gone at a conference all weekend. Long and short of it: I never finished yesterday’s blog post, so I’m including it here just so you can see the before and after 🙂


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Can membership-based community journalism thrive in the U.S.?

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

Another “journalism” post as a follow-up to my last one. I’ve heard rumblings previously about this community-created, membership-driven model of journalism from The Netherlands’ De Correspondent (click on the “English” button at the top of their page), and today I found this intriguing article from NiemanLab regarding the publisher’s plan to launch a U.S. version in spring of next year.

Why is this such a big deal to me? Because even if a model  based on a business model that gets revenue from membership/subscriber/community sources will even further segment and stratify the news-reading public, at the same time such a model can totally save news media from the peril of serving other masters than their readers/audience.

In the De Correspondent model of journalism, readers run the show—both as audience recipients and as active contributors to stories. De Correspondent has no advertisers or PR agencies it owes loyalty and column inches to. No advertorial “content” driving news coverage, in other words. No articles in editorial amplifying the ads placed by companies that the publisher is trying to keep happy.

For example, have you ever seen newspaper or magazine articles on how how everyone desiring good health should eat more “whole grains” like breakfast cereals and then lo and behold, there just happen to be several breakfast cereal ads in the same issue? Or articles on career advice that emphasize the importance of personal appearance to advance in business, and then here are ads for makeup and personal trainers and clothing stores. While it’s handy to have those ads right there to help you put your newfound insights and resolve into action, it’s also pretty manipulative on the publication’s part to prime you and then deliver you and your credit card to their real audience, to their real customers. You, the reader/viewer aren’t an informed citizen so much as you’re a product being sold to the companies that pay for you via advertising space (or time, in the case of television or radio).

The once-sacred wall between editorial and advertising has been crumbling for quite a while now. Some publications, like Time magazine have openly demolished it. I used to think of Time as a semi-serious news magazine. Now I know it’s really just a content provider.

Not to rant at any length here. I’m just very optimistic about the potential of a new news model and wanted to share this article about De Correspondent.

Milwaukee entrepreneur Roy Reiman did something similar by starting up a publication for farm women that was supported entirely by subscriptions when all the other farming publications were cutting the women’s pages due to lack  of advertising support. Reiman knew from his own mother (he grew up on a farm) how important and looked forward to those sections were to their readers. By providing stories readers wanted and were willing to pay for, Reiman cut out the advertising middleman completely. He built a company on this model that published a number of popular magazines, including Taste of Home, and when he was ready to start retirement in 1998, he sold his majority interest for $640 million.

So it’s possible that with imagination and courage, news media will be able to shed advertising, build a different kind of business model, and actually do okay financially. I can’t wait to see where the press goes from here.

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Milwaukee Bucks Arena – Becoming #2

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

About a week ago I posted a photo of the new Milwaukee Bucks arena that is under construction downtown. I drive past this site just about every day, and it really has been intriguing to watch it develop. Don’t know if anyone else is interested, but here’s another picture I took today. This arena is going to be an arresting piece of architecture when it’s finished.

Update: As I pressed “Publish,” I noticed for the first time what looks like will be a spot for a skywalk connecting the arena with the parking garage immediately to the north (or, in this photo, to the left). See where there’s a square space in the middle of all that curved steel?

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Accepted!

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Katherine Wikoff

I am SUPER excited to share that two of my photographs have been accepted for inclusion in the 2017 Alumni Exhibition at Wright State University!

Grohmann Museum, Steel and Shadow

Grohmann Museum – Temporary Fresco

The exhibition will be presented at the Robert & Elaine Stein Galleries from May 12 through June 9, 2017. There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 12 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. in the Stein Galleries.

So now I have more stuff to learn—like how to print, frame, and ship my photographs to an exhibition. I’m also wondering if there’s any way I can work it out to be at that opening reception. I teach two classes on Friday afternoons, but I maybe I could switch around what I’d been planning to cover on that day (Friday of Week 9 in our quarter) so that a colleague could sub for me relatively easily. On the other hand, then I’d have the stress and expense of getting myself down to Dayton (Ohio) and back to Milwaukee over a weekend.

Oh, well. One thing at a time. Meanwhile, I’m going to enjoy (bask in!) the euphoria of knowing my photos have actually been accepted!

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