Hank Stuever

Yesterday I turned 41. Not much to report — I don’t think it’s possible to have a more boring birthday than the one I had yesterday, mostly because I’ve been fighting off some weird head cold. After a long day at work for both of us, and a muggy walk home (just once I’d love…

July retail numbers are out today. Economists were hoping for “flat as a pancake” and got Less Than Zero instead. Ylan Mui has the fast report, with a picture of somebody’s bored someone just-a shoppin’ at the Kohls. Above, one dude does his part at Express for Men, which, back in the glory days, was…

Michael and I went to see “Julie & Julia” on Saturday afternoon and we both really liked it. It’s true what the critics are saying, though — whenever the story switches back to 2002-’03 and the “Julie blogger so frustrated with her life” parts, you simply bide time until the action reverts back to Meryl…

The ever-intrepid Derba in Dallas sent these iPhone pictures from her shoppin’ rounds on Saturday with the subject line “He is Risen.” Baby Jesus is ready for you now. Derba reports FOUR AISLES of this — where? Sam’s was my guess, but I shoulda known better: It was Hobby Lobby. (What was she doing there?…

The Staples commercial is back! From 1995, probably one of the best Christmas TV commercials ever, only it’s about Back-to-School. (Which is second-biggest retail event of the year, and often a harbinger of the Christmas forecast.) I’m sure retailers are wishing it was the mid-to-late ’90s again, too. In 2009, they get excited about year-over-year…

I start my TV critic job on Monday, and some of my friends have asked me how I’m going to manage the deluge. It’s a lot of watching. It’ll be a while before I figure out how to manage my time and draw sharp lines around my pop-culture compartments: The TV shows that I watch…

Recent circumstances (the death of director John Hughes today at age 59) have swayed me to re-post the story about JAKE RYAN for The Washington Post in 2004, one of the stories I’ve received the most mail on, ever. UPDATE: You can now read it on washingtonpost.com, which has revived it and reposted it. See…

Well, if you’re anywhere near St. Louis, or plan to be, please go visit Nikki at Pudd’nHead Books in Webster Groves, Mo. She sent the nicest e-mail after she read the beginning of Tinsel and blogged about it, too. Let me just say that if you ever think an author would tire of hearing this…

My friend Charles read Tinsel a couple weeks ago, while on a trip to his place out in Alaska. (Charles gets around. I get nowhere these days — I’m so busy that I just had to cancel the briefest four-day visit to Albuquerque in a couple of weeks, which is a bummer. On that note,…

Dy’all ever watch Ruby? (Or as I call it: “Rube-Y”?) It’s a show on the Style network about a morbidly fat woman in Savannah, Ga., trying to get her weight down to the state of being just, say, merely fat. I like this show. It’s not so much about how to lose weight (though she…