After college I worked as a convenience store clerk at the world-famous Ralph and Jerry's, did a year at TV Guide inputing data, then moved over to a free weekly called City Pages, where I was food critic - really - and finally a columnist. I always end up as a columnist. I keep writing everything as a column until they give up and just let me write what I want to write. But I still wrote features; here I'm dong a piece on the National Guard, up at Fort Ripley.

Haven't read it, but I'm sure it had something in it that earned me a drubbing by someone who actually knew the subject first-hand.