Artwork by Michael DiMilo Originally Published 2/14/2022 By Geoff Carter In her novel Surfacing, Margaret Atwood wrote “The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.” She‘s probably right, although what passes for love today might not be as important to us as snow …
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Month:February 2024
Kickass and Wisconsin Winter
Attribution: Richardfabi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, passes along the keeper’s observations as he and Phyllis drove to a Mauston lunch date with Phyllis’s son Todd: This cannot be Wisconsin in mid-February, this brown, snowless land with its clusters of naked trees and exposed expanses of dead …
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The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: Review of “American Fiction”
Illustration by Michael DiMilo True Stories: Film Review of American Fiction The buzzwords inclusion and diversity are common these days. Through DEI and other programs, they have been touted as necessary tools to establish cultural equity, yet racial stereotyping, cultural expectations, and insipidly clueless racism continue. They are everywhere. The film American Fiction delves into issues of …
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Can’t Buy Me Love
Attribution: Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash By Geoff Carter When I was in elementary school back in the early 1960s, St. Valentine’s Day was the day that brought life and color—and candy—to the gray slushy doldrums of grade-school winter. Everyone would attach manila envelopes with our little names block-printed on the front —our “mailboxes”—to the fronts of …
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Kickass and Real Super Bowl
Attribution: daSupremo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in insisting that a Super Bowl is one full of something good to eat, like Alpo or Phyllis’s “refrigerator” soup; and it is not a bunch of millionaires owned by billionaires banging against each other to possess an …
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Kickass and the Fox Hunts
Attribution: Photo by Amanda Frank on Unsplash By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper recognizes this time of year as the season of the great fox hunts when he and country cousins and comrades in northwest Wisconsin spent Saturday afternoons slogging through deep midwinter snow as they followed the track of a fox that …
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Kickass and the Thunderstorm
Attribution: Photo by Michelle McEwen on Unsplash By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper and Phyllis in celebrating the magnificent thunderstorm that flashed and boomed over west Madison last evening. Its spectacular jagged slashing and eching rumbles as it dominated the landscape was a rare sensory embrace as the unseasonal storm moved in and over …
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Kickass and Car Experience
Attribution: Ford Model T, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper is fresh off one of those high-tech car experiences that discourages him from so much as opening the hood as corporate decisions and sophisticated techies make a big deal out of a simple dead battery. …
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Out of the Woodwork
Illustration by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter Ten years ago, the idea of a mob of American citizens attacking the U.S. Capitol Building would have dismissed as absurd, the stuff of apocalyptic fiction. In the 1950s, parents whose children’s lives had been saved by Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine would have been shocked and appalled …
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Kickass and Spring in February
Photo by Phyllis Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, passes along the keeper’s suggestion on what to do with a spring day that occurs early in February: 1. 2. 3. And when you have finished with 1, 2 and 3, do: 4. 5. 6. All of this will slow down the passage of …
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Kickass and Sigurd Olson
Attribution: Ville Kurki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper and Phyllis frequently compare notes about various outdoor adventures in their earlier lives, with Phyllis citing her hiking in all the national parks and camping on Isle Royal, and the keeper telling Canada fish stories and …
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Kickass and Weather by Republicans
Attribution: Photo by David Moum on Unsplash By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes, along with the keeper, that the strange unseasonably warm temperatures are due to a systemic responsibility slipup in which the turtle-like US justice system somehow ended up in charge of the weather, and the Repubs then filed a petition for summer. A prominent …
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