Everybody please welcome “Rodney”, my old Ford-selling pal, to these pages. We’ll be hearing quite a bit from him in the near future. At the end of the piece I’ve included a gallery of video captured from a trip we took to Woodward Skate Park back in 2003, just for fun. Rodney’s not afraid to…

I truly envy people who get excited about traveling. When I see somebody post something on social media like, “OMG, I’m leaving for San Francisco in two days and I HAVEN’T EVEN PACKED!” it makes me want to reply something like, “I’m leaving for Paris in the morning, and I’ll be packing approximately an hour…

I know some of you haven’t missed me that much (Hi, Volando!), but I’ve been super busy and stuff as of late and, as a result, haven’t been doing much writing at all. I’m incredibly fortunate that I don’t have to write for a living. That sounds like a strange statement to make—after all, who wouldn’t…

“They can never take this from you, Mark. Never. You’ll always be a champion.” It’s true what they say about time. Twenty years comes and goes in the blink of an eye. I could barely believe it when I got an invitation to return to my old high school for the twentieth anniversary of my…

Yes! I’m super excited to announce that I will be playing at The Slippery Noodle Inn in Indianapolis on September 11th and 12th with the Jeff Jensen Band! Those of you who came over from the dearly departed Bark’s Doghouse (the domain barkm.com has expired, but you can still get there using barkm.wordpress.com if you…

   Go read me at Jalopnik. Please. It’s a wonderful tale of a brilliant young M&A specialist and his gorgeous Porsche, and how I drove the heck out of it at Atlanta Motorsports Park. I give my own work two thumbs up. 

James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers created quite a social media stir on Instagram over the weekend by posting about some participation awards that his children “earned.” Harrison posted a photo of the trophies with the following text: I came home to find out that my boys received two trophies for nothing, participation trophies! While…

As most of you know, my dear brother and I decided to combine our blogs a little over two months ago. As a result, I won’t be renewing the domain over at barkm.com. However, it occurred to me that the page still gets a fair number of hits (around a hundred a day or so),…

Why is Soccer is the most popular sport in the world? I’m no social scientist, but I’d suspect that there are socioeconomic reasons for it—it required nothing other than a ball and a field to play, making it possible to play literally anywhere that one can find a few square feet and a suitable amount…

Let’s say that you’re a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed eighteen year old, and you LOVE music. In fact, you love music so much that you have decided that you’d like to be a Professor of Music at an Institute of Higher Learning someday. So, you embark on a journey to gain not only an undergraduate degree…