Every Friday, Off The Record looks to other Milwaukee publications (and beyond) for bits of news we missed throughout the week.
• When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was 13 years old, he gave his life to Christ. “I said, ‘Lord, I’m ready. Not just in front of my Church and the world, but most importantly at the foot of your Throne,’” he told the Christian Businessmen’s Committee in Madison in 2009. “‘I’m ready to follow you each and every day.’” The Lord, who was apparently also at the Christian Businessmen’s Committee, having given Walker directions to the meeting like the infallible GPS system He/She/It is, did not comment.
Thirty-four years later, Walker’s long-distance relationship with his divine BFF paid off in spades, for lo, on the tenth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand fifteen, former Charles In Charge star Scott Baio tweeted his support for the thrice-elected governor and presidential hopeful. “Gov. Walker sounds a lot like President Reagan. #WalkerForPres,” tweeted Baio, tossing in a picture of himself posing with Walker for good/hilarious measure. “Thanks! We both love Reagan, I’m flattered #ChachiandWalkerLoveReagan,” tweeted Walker in response, referencing Baio’s role as Chachi Arcola in Happy Days. And the seas boiled and the skies fell. Judgement Day. Politico has more.
Gov. Walker sounds a lot like President Reagan. #WalkerForPres pic.twitter.com/orvn8v9EkM
— Scott Baio (@ScottBaio) March 11, 2015
.@ScottBaio Thanks! We both love Reagan, I’m flattered #ChachiandWalkerLoveReagan — Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) March 11, 2015
• There’s a moment every winter—a.k.a. late February—when shoving your head in the oven seems more agreeable than suffering the sub-zero chills of the outdoors for the 8,000th time. A life that requires multiple layers and multiple minutes to warm up your car, you tell yourself, is not a life worth living. Why do you live in this godforsaken city, this godforsaken state, in the first place? Better to end it all now than live another day. You open the oven. You set it to “broil.” At least you’ll be warm.
Then, like Noah’s dove returning with an olive leaf, hope arrives. A voice sounds in the distance: Bob Uecker is back on the radio. It’s spring training, and Ueck is once again behind the mic, calling balls and strikes, shooting the shit with Joe Block, and, this year at least, expressing complete and utter bafflement at the new pace-of-game-clock. You close the oven door, turn off the heat, turn up the radio, and listen. You choose to live.
So yeah, the Brewers’ spring training season recently began in Arizona, and Uecker is indeed back at it. He was also recently back in Milwaukee accepting the Vince Lombardi Award of Excellence. The Milwaukee Business Journal has the pictures to prove it.
• CNN premiered The 414s: The Original Teenage Hackers, a short film about the exploits of a group of Milwaukee computer hackers in the early ’80s. The short is directed by local filmmakers Michael Vollmann and Chris Thompson, creators of The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, a quasi bio-pic on Milwaukee’s most satanic figure.
• The 2015 Equinox Music Festival is headed to Linneman’s Saturday, March 21, and it promises to be a pagan-rific blowout. Sugar Stems, The Atomic Spins, Great Lakes Drifters, Tigernite, and Mortgage Freeman will perform.
• Dave Reid at Urban Milwaukee attempted to start a holy war by calling out Milwaukee Record’s Matt Wild and the Journal Sentinel’s Mary Louise Schumacher in a piece about the soon-to-be-extinct Fortress Building. Elsewhere, Milwaukee Magazine spoke to some of the artists that currently call the hulking former boot factory home.
• In the wake of Thrillist opening a Milwaukee branch last week (“33 MORE Bad Decision Bars Where You Can Eat A Burger And Drink A Bloody Mary And Here’s Bryant’s For Some Reason”), OnMilwaukee continued to double down on the listicles with “14 reasons you used to come Downtown in the ’80s.” Sadly, many of these places now reside in that great Downtown in the sky.
• 88Nine Radio Milwaukee’s Dori Zori chatted with Body Futures singer/all-around-awesome-gal Dixie Jacobs for the latest installment in the devilishly good “DoriZoriStories.”
• Chalk it up to divine intervention: The Mary Nohl House—a.k.a. the “witch’s house—won’t be moved from its original location in Fox Point after all. The Journal Sentinel’s Mary Louise Schumacher has more.
• Another light at the end of the winter tunnel: Milwaukee’s bike-sharing program, Bublr Bikes, is scheduled to kick off its second season next Monday. According to the Milwaukee Business Journal, the fledgeling program is adding more stations and revamping its pricing structure for 2015.
• The East Town Association revealed their heavenly schedule for the 2015 Jazz In The Park. The long-running Cathedral Square series kicks off June 4 with Christopher’s Project, and wraps up September 3 with Bill Bonifas & The Legends Of Milwaukee Jazz.
• Looking for even more local goodies to mix in with your unholy Slayer singles and heavenly Pete & Pete soundtracks at this year’s Record Store Day (April 18)? Look no further: Polyvinyl is celebrating the love-it-or-be-kind-of-annoyed-by-it holiday by releasing Pele’s 1999 album Elephant for the first time on vinyl. Later that night, the legendary Milwaukee rock band—featuring Jon Mueller, Chris Rosenau, and Matt Tennessen—will play its first show in over a decade at the Cactus Club.
• If there’s a better band in heaven or on Earth than NO/NO, we’d love to hear about it. The deeply awesome New-Wave-by-way-of-Riverwest group released a VHS-tastic video for “Red Flag”—a track from 2014’s excellent X.O. EP—via Austin Town Hall this week.