'The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise': a Monty Python-esque tale of life in the Tower of London

A review of Julia Stuart's charming novel "The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise." It features a grieving married couple living in the Tower of London, a Monty Python-esque cast of characters and a menagerie that includes a 181-year-old pet tortoise.

Out of the Woods / There's nothing like a book

Call me a curmudgeon. Or a newspaperman who reveres the past. Or even a stubborn holdout against "progress." Whatever. Like you, I am obviously trapped in the phenomenon of runaway technology in 21st century communications. But I don't have to like it. Or even use much of it.

Guide to typewriter repair shops

Sure, it might seem strange that an online magazine would post an article about typewriters, but OnMilwaukee.com did it anyway. So, should you need to fix a sticky T on your Underwood, here are a few local places that still repair typewriters.

A brief history of video game piracy

For as long as there has been stuff, people have wanted that stuff for free. And they've found ways to get it. Illegal ways called theft. In gaming, we use the jolly, Pugwash-evoking phrase 'piracy', but that doesn't make things any less illegal.

Where I was, in every sense, when Bobby hit ‘shot’

André Breton, meet Leo Durocher. Bobby Thomson, meet Gertrude Stein. For a few years in the first half of the 1950s my place of residence was a smashing three-room Greenwich Village skylight-studio apartment five flights up at 265 West 11th Street.

Zany adventure in the Tower of London

Usually, one must wait in frustratingly long lines to see the treasures of the Tower of London. But a delightfully zany and touching novel, The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, by British writer Julia Stuart, has jumped the queue to take readers on a fictional romp through the Tower's realm. Set in contemporary London, the story has a cast of characters one might expect to find in a Monty ...