When I was a kid, I never woke up in the morning and said, “When I grow up, I want to have a needle in my spine.”  Of course I also never said, “When I grow up, I want to be single at the age of 46.” And also, I never said, “When I grow…

By Brett Yates [Verse 1] In the time of bloated budgets, I got real wonky, Made PowerPoints in vain, became a fiscal junkie. With the widow’s peak, the airbrushed headshots, Wisconsinites voted for the beefcake hotshot. Kill the entitlements and put it in neutral; Stock market’s gaining with the White House under our control. Body…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Cancer Moon, with aspects and changes that make me wonder if I have any business trying to make sense of it all. Venus just moved backwards, over the Aries Point. In the late degrees of Pisces,…

By Dom Cioffi Nearly 35 years ago, on the day after I received my driver’s license, I drove to my girlfriend’s house and parked out front. After hanging around inside for a couple hours, I returned to my car and found a ticket slid between the wiper blade and my windshield. When I read the…

By Marguerite Jill Dye Throughout life, coping with physical, mental, and emotional highs and lows is part of the human condition. Sometimes our challenges do us in; other times we survive and thrive. Now and then we require intervention of professionals in their fields, so I thought I’d see what professionals thought of healthcare in…

I have said a lot of mean things about my Guinea pig Pip (“The Impaler”).  To be fair, he has deserved most of it over the past year and a half since I rescued him. But also to be fair, the first year of his life was horrible, and he was basically feral when I…

By Declan McCabe Gutter pipes full of soggy peat show up on the bench by my office each March. This means one thing: my colleague Peter Hope’s Saint Michael’s College students are about to experience time travel. You might reasonably ask how pipes filled with peat could possibly relate to time travel. What? No DeLorean,…

By Brett Yates During the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Neil Gorsuch, the federal appellate judge from Colorado, Republicans strove to give Donald Trump’s nominee opportunity to present himself as a friendly, well-rounded human being—as opposed to the Constitutional pedant and heartless enforcer of unjust power structures that leftists might suppose him to be. During…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a late Pisces, soon-to-be new, Aries Moon. Along with the Sun and the Moon, Mercury and Venus are also in Aries. From what I can see, the Martian fireworks that fuel this sign look like they’re getting…

Getting together with friends for coffee usually brings up a topic that shows our senior status. We reached the conclusion that “old” has a very different meaning depending on our own age at the time. To a young child, babysitters are in the “adult category” even if the person is just a teenager. You have…

By Dom Cioffi I’ve had several people ask me if my outlook on life has changed since my recent cancer scare. I suppose it’s a valid question. We all face the quandary of mortality, but under the auspice of a life-threatening diagnosis, forming (or reforming) a viable life thesis can take on a much greater…

If you’re a fan of the Talking Heads like I am, you’ll want to head to the Pickle Barrel Thursday night to see the awesome tribute band, Start Making Sense. Even if you’re not a fan, they’ll turn you into one because of their musicianship. I had the pleasure of speaking with lead guitarist/vocalist Jon…

By Marguerite Jill Dye I was outraged to hear Utah Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz comment that low-income Americans could sacrifice their new iPhone for health care instead. I wondered how he could be so blind to the struggle of America’s poor to pay food and rent. But it was House Speaker Paul Ryan who called…

By Michael J. Caduto Imagine ten nearly round white eggs snug in a hollow tree, lined with soft feathers plucked from the mother’s breast. The hen carefully tends the 2-inch eggs for about a month until the chicks hatch. Prompted by their mother’s call, downy day-old chicks clamber up to the opening in the tree…

By Kevin Theissen It’s tax season! Every year, around this time, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) publishes its dirty dozen—a list of scams criminals use to try and ferret out personal information and/or steal money. For example, if you received an email from a top executive in your company or organization requesting data from IRS…