Author: Matt Maldre

Why Chicago has the digits 3, 1, 2 in their area code

A poem I submitted for a zine about a beloved local grocery store.

Macon Mall, once the largest shopping mall in the Southeast, is now home to pickleball courts.

Amen. I'm all for making public art that does not damage the public property.

Penciling is a new category in my Now page

I gave Chat GPT my 125 most recent blog posts dating back three years. I asked it for overall trends from my blog posts.

Cicadas come out when the soil temperature is 65 degrees at 8 inches deep. A handful of tools will tell you the current soil temperature and forecast the upcoming soil temperature.

“The Symbols in the City” by Tiffany Owens Reed of Strong Towns Or, let’s take sidewalks. So many of ours here in Waco are extremely skinny, overgrown with grass, often existing only in disconnected segments or, in some parts of…

“Artists Mourn Death of Flaco, the Owl Who Inspired Millions” by ET Rodriguez of Hyperallergic. This article has some nice photos of items left behind, memorializing an owl who lived in NYC’s Central Park. I kinda wish someone would photograph…

Would there be an animal that has a nose hole, but not a nostril?

Can you think of any other companies with an unnecessary double-vowel?

Almost every day I load up around 100 tabs in my browser. One of the tabs is a search on Twitter for the phrase “Art Institute of Chicago“. Today this search showed this fun tweet of a couple sculptures with…

When you write a blog post, you can say as much or as little as you want. “Blogging is the medium of incomplete stories” by James G Indeed. I work for a company that syndicates columnists and newspaper articles. I…

If you paid for a subscription to Apple’s iCloud anytime in the past four years, you could be part of lawsuit against Apple regarding iCloud (and potentially get some money if the lawsuit prevails). Why? With your iPhone, you can…

Today I figured I'd start posting on tumblr again.

In the mid-80s, I unexpectedly enjoyed playing with Swine Sucker, a Madball. Despite its gross appearance, throwing it around became a surprisingly amusing pastime.

Artist Chris Killham takes Blackhawks relic cards and finds the exact spot where the swatches comes from on a Blackhawks jersey.

And the middle part of a sunflower is actually hundreds of tiny flowers

Kerry Skarbakka photographs himself falling from trees, jumping off bridges and in the midst of fires – all in the name of art. Inspired by the helplessness he felt after the 9/11 attacks, Kerry's work captures him frozen in a…

To celebrate the greatest living contemporary composer, I'd like to fly an Estonian flag on his birthday. But it falls on a day when I should be flying an American flag instead.

The Art Institute of Chicago is welcoming people to send them mail art in the form of postcards. If you were to send some mail art to the Art Institute, what would you send?

When making lunch, do you ever have a hard time deciding between leftover pizza or a sandwich? Why not combine them? Make a pizza sandwich.

Transforming large sculptures into two-dimensional photograms.

Did you know there were basketball cards from the 1970s—and they certainly look like hey are from the 70s

Searching a newspaper can be a lot easier through a PDF than their website.

Camille Casemier curates weekly pop-up art exhibitions in the Mount Sinai Resale Shop's fitting rooms. It reminds me of when I had a gallery in the Tribune Tower.

Sir Elton John owns colorized Rothko prints that are all purple.

It’s fascinating how different cultures can come together to form cute ASCII art.

Do you keep a gardening notebook?

What a wonderful idea! The “growing” of the LEGO piece, but also the notion of having a Sunday Sketch series, looking at a familiar object and reinterpreting it.

BlueSky is the new Twitter alternative social media platform. It currently has 4.9 million users. Tired of the algorithm on Twitter? Wish you can create your own feeds? One of the cool things about BlueSky is that lets users create…