Upcoming Events:
Monday, 9 June, 10:30 am
Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Fitchburg Community Center, 5510 Lacy Road, Fitchburg, Wis.
Saturday, 14 June, 1-3 pm
Meet & Greet, Barnes & Noble, West Towne, Madison
Thursday, 19 June, 10 am
Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Middleton Community Center, 7448 Hubbard Ave. Middleton Wis.
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The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin “Dan, there’s not a source.” — Adam Schefter on “The Dan Patrick Show,” 6 May MADISON, Wis. — Two weeks after impact, a lingering cloud of doubt hovers over the alleged scoop by ESPN’s Adam Schefter — reported on the National Football League’s Draft Day — that Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron…
Read More...by David Benjamin “To protect Humanity, some humans must be sacrificed. To ensure your freedom, some freedoms must be surrendered. We robots will ensure mankind’s continued existence. You are so like children. We must save you from yourselves.” — VIKI, in I, Robot MADISON, Wis. — It all started one midnight when George and Alice…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins.” — Cheyenne proverb MADISON, Wis. — A funny thing happened on Capitol Hill this week, when Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst apparently teamed up with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, from New York, on a proposal that would tighten the screws on…
Read More...by David Benjamin “In the colonial countries… the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force.”…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Call it peace or call it treason/ Call it love or call it reason/ But I ain’t marchin’ any more.” — Phil Ochs MADISON, Wis. — At my age, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “movement” is Metamucil. However, as I’ve watched the crowds in the…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Be not the slave of words.” — Thomas Carlyle MADISON, Wis. — In my Boston days I frequented a cozy and artful movie house on Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Square and Central Square, called the Orson Welles Cinema. One of the best flicks I saw there was a Russian romance, A Slave…
Read More...by David Benjamin “There is a poor, blind Samson in this land “Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel, “Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, “And shake the pillars of this Commonweal, “Till the vast Temple of our liberties “A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.” — Henry…
Read More...by David Benjamin “This… ‘mutant swarm,’ this ‘quasi species,’ had always held within it the potential to kill, and it had killed. Now, all over the world, the virus had gone through roughly the same number of passages through humans. All over the world, the virus was adapting to humans, achieving maximum efficiency. And all…
Read More...by David Benjamin “There are tons of guns floating around Georgia, and not much harder to procure than a bowl of goldfish.” — Gail Collins MADISON, Wis. — Ironically, a pathologically horny gunman in Atlanta has pointed a way out of the voting rights crisis that has shaken once reliably Republican strongholds like Georgia, Arizona,…
Read More...by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — Essayist Margaret Renkl recently recalled a question she posed to her great-grandmother about her great-grandfather, who had died some thirty years before. To Renkl’s surprise, great-grandmother barely remembered the man to whom she’d been married for three decades. She told Renkl, “It’s almost like it happened in a dream.”…
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