Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoffrey Carter A polar vortex descended upon the lower United States last week, bringing freezing temperatures across the South. While the entire region had to deal with shoveling snow, cold temperatures, and relearning how to drive, the great state of Texas found itself in a full-blown crisis. The extreme cold …
Read
Category:Michael DiMilo
Injustice For All
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem Finch, a young boy, is shocked when, in the face of overwhelming evidence proving his innocence, a white jury convicts a Black man of raping a white woman. It seems, however, as if nearly everyone else in the novel (with …
Read
Divine Intervention
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter During the Spike Lee movie Jungle Fever, the character Gator is so badly addicted to crack that he breaks into and robs his parents’ apartment. For his father, it is the last straw in a prolonged and agonizing struggle to wrest his son’s soul from the clutches of crack …
Read
MAGA Land
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoffrey Carter American culture has entered what might be called a fractured state, divided along splintered planes of competing realities. A majority of us are still living in the real world, but a substantial portion of our population is living in a carefully manipulated alternative existence—a sort of ideological twilight …
Read
The Politics of Paranoia
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoffrey Carter We’ve reached a strange crossroads in the American experience. Homegrown terrorists threatened to violently disrupt a presidential inauguration. As a result, over 25,000 National Guardsmen were stationed at the Capitol Building. The FBI is investigating possible collaboration between members of Congress and violent factions of the far-right, allegations …
Read
Conditional Love
By Geoffrey Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo It’s almost over. We’re just waiting for Donald Trump to be done with his tantrum. I’m sure he’ll file a couple more lawsuits, but that’s just posturing. He lost the election. Despite his promise that “you’ll have to drag me kicking and screaming” from the White House which—hopefully—won’t …
Read
Bottom of the Basket
By Geoff Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo As future generations look back on this period in our history twenty or thirty years from now, I’m sure they’ll be scratching their heads and wondering what the hell happened. In four short years, we’ve gone from world leader to global laughingstock. We’ve watched over two hundred thousand …
Read
The Worst of Times
By Geoffrey Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo 2020 began badly—and quickly worsened. In early January, devastating brushfires in Australia ended up killing wild animals by the billions and destroying millions of acres of land and property. About a week later, scientists first detected the coronavirus in Wuhan. It swept across China, Europe, and began its …
Read
The Things We Carry
By Geoff Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo America is sick—sick at heart, sick in the mind, and sick in the soul. And the worst thing about it is that we’re in a state of denial about our illness. We know something’s wrong, but we’re like the guy who keeps putting off going to the doctor …
Read
The Couch Potato’s Guide to Early Retirement
By Geoff Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo Movie Review: The Old Man and the Gun There really is no typical caper movie. You can find everything from gritty Hollywood dramas like The Killers, Dog Day Afternoon, and Asphalt Jungle to tongue-in-cheek romps like Oceans 11, Snatch, and The Sting to terse dramas like Heist, Bonnie and Clyde, and Reservoir Dogs. The only elements all …
Read
Priceless
By Geoff Carter Artwork by Michael DiMilo How much is a human life worth? Depending on your sources, you might hear numbers ranging from ninety dollars to nine million to absolutely priceless. That’s quite a range. Ask a parent what their child’s life is worth, and they’ll say priceless. Ask Donald Trump, and he’ll say …
Read
The Couch Potato’s Guide to Northern New Jersey
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter The Irishman The stated mission of The Couch Potato’s Guide to Home Viewing has been to inform my readers about some of the outstanding programs available for your home viewing pleasure. I’ve done a couple movie reviews, put together a couple of lists classifying films by theme and …
Read