Fourteen years ago, a poverty-stricken demolition worker from Detroit took the stage of a South African arena. He stood there, guitar in hand, while the thousands in attendance drowned out his attempt to launch into a song. They showered him with a five-minute ovation, screaming his name and shouting that they loved him while he slowly took it all in.

The Egyptians used it to stylize their mummy cases. The Romans picked it up from the Greeks, who used it to waterproof boats. And Sue Winkler? She uses it to make pretty, colorful paintings. Who says there's no such thing as progress?

When the Tin Can opened in Lansing two years ago, everything you needed to know about the place was scrawled in chalk in all caps right there on the wall: "WORLD CLASS DIVE BAR."

Sometime in 2015, "Star Wars: Episode VII" will come out and you can already picture the midnight premiere: middle-aged fanboys and fangirls dressed like Vader, Fett and Slave Leia, swinging plastic lightsabers at each other as they stand in 12-hour lines that stretch around the movie theater.

Biopics, lately, have been wasted on the eccentric. But if ever there was a man who deserved one, it's the 16th president of the United States — and who better to deliver than the one-two punch of über-auteur Steven Spielberg and method actor extraordinaire Daniel Day-Lewis? It’s a match made in celluloid heaven.

Despite those doomsday prognosticators who've been trying to scare us into thinking we're one minor calamity away from being a third world country, things really aren’t that bad, fiscally speaking.

If it weren't for chili, there's a good chance folks would just roll down the metal shutters and call it a winter. The cold weather staple has become so prevalent in Michigan, you'd practically think we invented it (we didn't, of course — credit the 16th century Aztecs).

At the 2012 East Lansing Film Festival — kicking off tonight — Scandinavian art thieves and time-traveling romantic rivals go head-to-head with real-life sushi masters and a mythical folk singer from Detroit. This will be ELFF's quindecennial (that's the big 1-5, folks), and director Susan Woods says she's still finding ways to pique the interests of festival attendees.

Downtown Lansing already seems to have a little bit of everything: high-end dining, casual dining, Mexican, Middle Eastern, a brewpub — man, you can even get sushi down there now. The market, you'd think, has reached critical mass. But then again, you're not one of the two guys named Paul who still saw something missing.

Why did Andy Warhol find inspiration in, of all things, a can of Campbell's Soup? Kitsch appeal? Nostalgia? Or could it have been hunger? You're probably going to get an appetite either before or after your trip to the Broad — cutting-edge art can take a lot out of a person.