[Amusing picture of me drinking Belgian beer at a Paris cafe]

Find out what I'm doing right this minute (kind of) at my Twitter page.

Mr. Greg's Home Page

Welcome to my home page. My name is Greg Kline, but all my friends call me Mr. Greg. You can too. I live on North Prairie Street in Champaign, Ill., near West Side Park, which is kind of our version of Central Park without the muggers but with the winos. I am a newspaper reporter and a Macintosh nut with a 20-inch Intel Core 2 Duo iMac and an "icebook" iBook now running Ubuntu Linux. I also own a Newton MessagePad 2100, one heck of a great machine, a Handspring Visor Deluxe, my all-time favorite 'puter, and a Treo 600, now retired. I had a Windows gaming box built for me by the good folks at Alienware and I once owned a Sony MagicLink. My current mobile devices are a Palm TX and a T-Mobile Sidekick II, my world phone and a device that amuses me to no end. Love the flip-out screen. Check out my photo of the month, taken with my little Canon Digital Elph camera. My other gadgets include a nifty 8-GB iPod Nano III (so wonderfully compact) and an even more compact 1-GB iPod Shuffle, which mean I'm never without tunes, and great-sounding tunes at that, and a teeny tiny Fujitsu Lifebook P7000 running Windows XP Pro. But not as small or light as the Eee PC from Asus I acquired at the end of 2007, which I think is a game-changing mobile laptop. Gotta love the portability and the almost-instant boot time. I received an OLPC XO about the same time, which I'm gradually exploring; a laptop with a noble cause and some interesting hardware and software technology. I cover science and technology for the paper, including personal computing. I used to cover the People's Republic of Urbana, declared a nuclear-free zone by its city council.

I love the Bears, Boilers

I am also a Chicago Bears fan, despite the team's continued lack of a real NFL quarterback, and a 1982 Purdue University graduate and Boilermaker hoops fan. Things are looking up with a great season and the stellar crew put together by Coach Matt Painter, all but one of whom will be back in 2008-09. I root for the Purdue football team, too, of course. (God bless Coach Joe "the Snake" Tiller, quarterback Drew Brees and the rest of the 2001 Rose Bowl squad.) Coach-in-waiting Danny Hope looks to me like the guy to continue Tiller's winning ways. I think the Bears should have drafted Brees (they would have won the Super Bowl), but the late Walter Payton is my all-time favorite football player, and Bear. I maintain that the late Wilt Chamberlain was the best basketball player ever. Better than Michael "the Pitchman" Jordan. I used to root for the Celtics because of Larry Bird and I root for the Pacers now that Larry is in charge in Indy. I follow the Grizzlies because of Brian Cardinal. Chamberlain wore No. 13. I myself was born on Friday the 13th. Book suggestion: "Wilt, 1962" by Gary Pomerantz. Forget 20,000, think 100.

And I love beer

I've done a lot of long-distance canoeing in Northern Minnesota and Canada, which I learned to do at Camp Voyageur outside Ely, Minn. One summer, I went across Alaska, from Dawson in Canada's Yukon Territory to Kotzebue on the Bering Sea, a trip that took 68 days during which time I wore the same pair of socks, now retired. My current hobby is drinking beer, especially good Belgian- and English-style beer. I enjoy the pubs of London, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. I can suggest, for your pleasure, Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout, Taddy Porter and Nut Brown Ale, Young's Old Nick and anything made by the Dogfish Head brewery. I love Rodenbach Grand Cru from Belgium, which is cask-aged for two years. Pranqster is a good Belgian-style beer from North Coast Brewing in California and I also like Bell's Oberon. I dig the beer and food at the Free State Brewing Co. in Lawrence, Kan., and the Manhattan Beach Brewing Co. in Manhattan Beach, Calif. If you ever get a chance to drink Granny Gear porter from Colorado, do it. So rich it's like liquid cheesecake with alchohol.

I appreciate the pipes, you should too

Call me weird, if you haven't already, but I love bagpipe music. My favorite tune is the "Lament for Red Hector of the Battles." I'm also partial to the blues and especially jazz. My favorite musician is Sonny Rollins (the Wilt Chamberlain of the sax in my opinion, and a far more admirable person). I'm partial as well to Albert Ayler, James Carter, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Miles Davis (anything, but I love his electric music), Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Ike Quebec, Archie Shepp, the late, great Jimmy Smith and his Hammond B-3 organ, and Sonny Stitt. Armstrong's "West End Blues" is my favorite single and Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" my favorite album. My goal in life is to grow up to be half as cool as Duke Ellington. Want to hear something marvelous? Check out the Bruce Eskovitz Jazz Orchestra CD "Invitation." Rousing proof bigger band jazz in the tradition of Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band is progressing yet. For more CD suggestions, see my Twitter page or my periodic jazz Web log or All About Jazz.

Read, think

In addition, I enjoy reading, mostly nonfiction, and movies. John McPhee is my favorite author. Two books you should read, which I bet you've never heard of, are "Praying for Sheetrock" by Melissa Fay Greene and "Rodinsky's Room," by Rachel Lichtenstein and Ian Sinclair. I especially enjoy history. Some topics that have captivated me are the Titanic, the Boer War, arctic exploration and Lyndon Johnson. If you don't read anything else this year, read "April 1865: The Month That Saved America" by Jay Winik and ask yourself what happened to the kind of leadership exhibited in buckets at this pivitol moment in the nation's history. George W. Bush couldn't carry these guys' jocks. Also, read everything by these guys and you won't be sorry. The best movies I've seen lately are "The Descent," "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and "Born Into Brothels," which will not make you feel good, may make you cry and should make you think. (Speaking of thinking, I think a lot of critics panned "Lady in the Water" because it takes a wicked poke at their profession. See it anyway. It's a good movie.) My all-time favorite movies are "Breaker Morant," "Big Wednesday" and "Monster." I never watch TV and suggest you give it up as well. Heck, read a newspaper, a book, or something good on the Internet instead.

My not-too-big wax museum

Visit the IOSF Page to learn more about my amusing life-sized wax statue of bridge great Ely Culbertson and how it inspired the annual International Othersports Festival my friends and I hold.

Favorite fortune cookie fortunes

Visit my list of favorite fortune cookie fortunes I've received and others sent to me by Net surfers from all over.

Net stuff

My pages are based at Prairienet, our great local freenet.
This page is maintained by Greg Kline. Updated 3/22/2008. Please email gnkline@prairienet.org with comments and corrections.

URL: www.mrgreg.net or www.prairienet.org/~gnkline/homepage.html

[The Bobster, may he rot]