Artwork by Michael DiMilo As we were trimming the tree last weekend, my wife asked me to bring in the laptop so we could listen to Christmas music. I complied—as any trained husband will—and set up the sound system in our dining room. And so we trimmed the tree and drank some wine and listened …
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Tag:Michael DiMilo
Thoughtless
Artwork By Michael DiMilo In the 2006 movie, Idiocracy, the main character, a very average guy, volunteers to be a test subject for a top-secret hibernation program. After a mishap, he awakens five centuries in the future into a society that is so ignorant that the president of the United States is a retired professional wrestler …
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Hands I Cannot See
Artwork by Michael DiMilo This last Saturday, I installed myself at a table at the Authors Market at the Southeast Wisconsin Book Festival to hawk copies of my novel, The P.S. Wars: Last Stand at Custer High. A lot of people stopped and engaged me in some very interesting conversations. We talked about everything from self-publishing, …
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Cool Beans
Kudos for Michael DiMilo Congratulations to Michael DiMilo for his award-winning short animated film Cool Beans. We are incredibly lucky to have Michael provide many of the outstanding illustrations for this blog and now you can see his outstanding animated work, too. If you haven’t yet seen it, check out coming attractions for this delightful …
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The Big Burnout
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter After Donald Trump was elected—and even before then (during the non-stop drama of his reality-TV campaign and election)—I was an avid consumer of political news. On cable TV, I followed Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher, Joe Scarborough with Mika Brzezinski, and even, for as long …
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The Big If…
Artwork By Michael DiMilo Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would be commencing an impeachment inquiry against President Trump based on whistleblower evidence alleging the president had pressured Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. After speaking to the urgency of the situation and the …
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Immoral Support
Artwork by Michael DiMilo In a story that recently went viral, an ad agency employee was summoned to a meeting with his human resources supervisor, presumably to be terminated, and was told that he would be able to have a “support” person accompany him to the interview. The employee elected to bring a clown as …
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The Sounds of Silence
Art By Michael DiMilo A couple of weeks ago, during one of our late summer hot spells, my wife and I were sitting on our front porch sipping a fine chilled French rose. We live on a relatively busy city street, but even with the traffic and other ambient noise, we were still able to …
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Giant Steps
Giant Steps Toni Morrison, one of America’s great visionary authors, passed away last week. We lost not only a supremely talented writer, but also a woman of profound courage, incisive vision, and sublime sensibilities. As an African-American woman, her writing enveloped and embraced the marginalized in our society—her society. Novels like Sula, Beloved, The Bluest …
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Civil Obedience
CIVIL OBEDIENCE I heard a great story the other day at my barbershop, that time-honored venue for a good conversation and the occasional bawdy tale. Things have changed, of course, and the barbershop is now not always a stronghold for the masculine sensibility. And that can be a good thing. The story I heard concerns …
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The Blurry Line
Artwork by Michael DiMilo This last week, my family and I took a mini-vacation to the family cabin in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. The cottage has been in our family for a little over fifty years and sits on a beautiful spring-fed lake. After my father passed away, my mom—as she’s fond of telling—used to …
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The Part You Won’t Recognize
Artwork by Michael DiMilo The controversy over the freshmen Congressional members of the “Squad”, ginned up by President Trump in inflammatory tweets last week, reminds me of how prominent black athletes who spoke out for black rights in the ‘60s and ‘70s were condemned by mainstream American culture. Muhammad Ali is the archetype for this …
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