Photo by Bill Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper unhappy that he is not up in northern Wisconsin riding around the north woods in a Model T Ford with Phyllis’s son Kevin and his wife Colleen at the annual week-long “Doughty” summer Model T tour originated many years ago by …
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Month:July 2025
Geoffrey Carter’s New Best Mystery List on Shepherd.com
A great way to find new reads and new authors The Shepherd.com Website: My New Best Mystery List
Kickass and Global Warming
Attribution: NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper greeting the day by reading a Facebook post written by “John Scheve” and passed along by Tom G that does a deep dive into global warming’s catastrophic weather effects. In a complex explanation of how warming ocean currents …
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Kickass and July 21, 2025
Attribution: Steve Shook from Moscow, Idaho, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper likes to start the week off on a positive note and passes along the information that on July 21, 2025 both he and Phyllis got up, got dressed, got coffee, got into …
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The Pen in Hand Guide to the Movies: The Legacy of John Goodman
Attribution: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Geoff Carter He is not one of your pretty boys. As his character Lewis Fine says in True Stories, “I’m six-foot-three and maintain a very consistent panda bear shape”. John Goodman is a big guy and a huge presence in every film he in which he appears. …
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Kickass Gets a Tattoo
Photo by Bill Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes the keeper will be taking the commenting day off but as a space filler he will show a photo of the tattoo on the back of his right hand. Once as a columnist, the keeper asked readers to recommend a tattoo for him …
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Kickass and Conspiracy
Attribution: Photo by Brandon Morgan on Unsplash By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper is suspicious that the conspiracy theorists have more fun, particularly if they get appointed to the current administration from hell which happens to many of them. With this in mind, the keeper joins the conspiracy theorist ranks with the following: A “rapture” …
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Kickass and Good Trouble
Photo by Bill Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, congratulates Phyllis, the committee, and the several hundred people who showed up Thursday afternoon at Gammon Road and Tree Lane to send a “good trouble” message that “they are not willing to abide a leader who treats them as inconvenient garbage”. Passing that “good …
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Kickass and Canada Ostriches
Attribution: Oleksiy.golubov, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, noting how the keeper likes to stay informed about issues involving Canada since it is Phyllis’s birthplace, he was intrigued by the news that RFK Jr, the US Sec. of HHS sent a letter to Canada’s prime minister asking that 400 …
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Depraved Indifference
Illustration by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter According to The New York Unified Court System, “DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE TO HUMAN LIFE refers to a person’s state of mind in recklessly engaging in conduct which creates a grave risk of death. A person has a depraved indifference to human life when that person has an utter disregard for …
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Kickass and H. L. Mencken
Attribution: Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins Phyllis in indulging the keeper yet again as he swings on the big memory vine back to his early newspaper column writing days when the job had a glorious history with the likes of Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, …
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Kickass and Blueberry Pie
Attribution: Elizabeth K. Joseph from San Francisco, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes that the keeper and Phyllis try to find the reasons for any gains in their daily weigh-ins, with Phyllis being much the expert and frequently reminding the keeper of that. So it was …
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