By Brett Yates Editor’s note: The following is the first in a short series of reviews of mostly older films whose narratives prominently feature skiing and ski resorts. The opening shot of “Downhill Racer,” the 1969 Alpine drama starring Robert Redford, initially registers as an abstract composition: a dark, diagonal bolt against a white backdrop.…

By Dom Cioffi  Throughout my school days (elementary through college), I rarely stepped foot into a library. Sure, I wandered in whenever I had a book report due or needed to research something, but other than that, I avoided the institution like the plague.  To me, the library represented work, and I was much more…

By Elise Tillinghast Every year around this time, my husband, kids and I haul out the tent blind from our garage and set it up in the field in front of our house. We toss in a few folding chairs, a thermos, maybe a neighbor. At dusk, we take our seats. First come the vocalizations…

I suspected Trump’s surprise electoral victory was Russia’s doing, until I discovered an important puzzle piece I knew nothing about. Now I believe the meddler extraordinaire was more complicated, sinister, and insidious than Kremlin hacking alone. Have you ever heard of “psychometrics?” I hadn’t until I happened upon an article called “The Data That Turned…

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…