Corey Coyle, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that among the latest big-money-sponsored insults to life as the keeper’s crowd knows it, is a warning from the DNR that eating the trout out of Black Earth Creek comes with the risk of cancer, a lower birth rate and …
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Category:Environment
Foul Weather
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter Over the past two weeks, our Wisconsin weather—always a wild card—has been beyond extreme. We shot up from a high of sixty-one degrees last Wednesday to a high of ninety-five on Thursday (never mind the heat index). That next night the temperature plummeted to the low sixties. This …
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Kickass and No More Fetch
Maulor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, informs the keeper that if the Earth were a tennis ball, no dog would fetch it, there being no fun in playing with what is coming to resemble a rotting meatball being picked over by opportunistic vultures and consumed by rich maggots. …
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Old Guard
Photo by Geoff Carter By Geoff Carter My family is lucky enough to own lakefront property in Northern Wisconsin. We’ve been going there for over fifty years, ever since my brothers and I were children. My mother would pile us into our red VW bug on the first day of summer vacation, drive for five hours, …
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Kickass and Bird Migration
Antonio, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in his fascination with the fact that, according to ornithologists, 340 million birds will migrate across the skies of the US tonight. The incredible timeless night migration of birds is now being negatively affected by human …
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Kickass and Earth Day 2022
NASA images by Reto Stöckli, based on data from NASA and NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper on this Earth Day to lament the physical and mental “dung ball” condition of the planet; and to remember Earth Day 1966 when the keeper was among the …
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Kickass and A Walk in the Woods
Photo by Bill Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper, fresh from reading The Overstory, where Richard Powers relates trees to humans, walked in the woods with son Larry to assess the kill of ash trees by the invasive emerald ash borer. The walk included pauses at many of the …
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Kickass and DNR Board Outrage
kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in reporting on the recent unbelievable DNR Board meeting at which Walker appointees, one of whom—Wausau tooth-jerker Fred Prehn, refuses to step down from his expired term, voted in favor of continuing to allow the poisoning of surface water …
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Kickass and Those of the Forest
Shadowmeld Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper has finally finished his before-sleep book—”Those of the Forest” by Wallace Grange, which is an accounting of the symbiotic existence of all things, complete with all the necessary predatory/parasitic violence and transformative extinctions. There are no people …
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Oh, Christmas Tree
Artwork by Michael Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter (Originally posted in December, 2019) Each year, in the family holiday tradition, my wife and I venture out to buy our Christmas tree. We’re lucky enough to live across the street from a big tree lot so we don’t have very far to go—we can walk right …
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Kickass Suggests the Zoo
Photo by Chris Briggs on Unsplash By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper, suggesting to Phyllis’s son Todd and granddaughter Taylor on how they might spend Tuesday in Madison, said it was a toss-up between the Vilas Park Zoo and the Capitol where there will be a public hearing on establishing a hunting season …
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Kickass and Earth as Garbage Dump
D J Shin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in acknowledging that planet Earth has obviously been designated by the rich one percent as the celestial garbage dump, and is rapidly being overrun by greedy rats and gorging fat cats to the point of being unlivable. …
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