Upcoming Events:
Tuesday, 4 February, 10:30 am
Book Talk, “The Paradox of Smalltown Crime”, Attic Angel, 8302 Old Sauk Rd., Middleton, Wis.
Thursday, 20 March, 5-7 pm
Tomah Chamber of Commerce Author Showcase, Three Bears Resort, 701 Yogi Circle, Warrens, Wis.
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The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin “Wait a minute, Mrs. Twombly! Now that we’ve graduated, you want us to call you ‘ALICE’? That’s like having a friend named Alice and suddenly she asks you to call her ‘Spot’!” MADISON, Wis.—One Friday night in my seventeenth year, probably after a football or basketball game … Wait a minute, how…
Read More...by David Benjamin “I’m from Milwaukee and I oughta know/ It’s draft-brewed Blatz beer wherever you go!/ Smoother, fresher, less filling, that’s clear!/ Blatz is Milwaukee’s finest beer.” MADISON, Wis.—During my strange career interlude as a public relations flack in Boston, I became an avid reader of Advertising Age, the bulging weekly chronicle of the…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Parents had nothing to do with school. Once you were out the door in the morning, your parents washed their hands of you. You became entirely the property of the school. St. Mary’s could do anything it wanted to me—hang me by my thumbs and tickle my feet—and Mom didn’t want to…
Read More...by David Benjamin “You have to be a man first before you’re a gentleman.” —John Wayne, McClintock (1963) MADISON, Wis.—A couple of women recently scolded me for broaching the question—sensitively, I thought—of whether, how and when a guy should compliment a gal on her appearance. In the news that very week, coincidentally, a wave of…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Whenas in silks my Julia goes,/ Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes.” —Robert Herrick MADISON, Wis.—Is it chivalry, I wonder, or sly salacity? How, without making the wrongimpression does a 21st-century guy compliment a woman on how she looks, particularly if she’s a total (but fetching) stranger?…
Read More...by David Benjamin “How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?” —J.D. Vance,…
Read More...by David Benjamin “An entire human life recorded on an intricate network of hidden cameras, and broadcast live and unedited, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to an audience around the globe. Coming to you now from Seahaven Island, enclosed in the largest studio ever constructed, and along with the Great Wall of…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Some eighth graders … had set up fake TikTok accounts impersonating teachers… “… In the days that followed, some 20 educators—about one quarter of the [Great Valley Middle] School’s faculty—discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts rife with pedophilia innuendo, racist memes, homophobia and made-up sexual hookups among teachers. Hundreds of…
Read More...by David Benjamin “What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did…
Read More...by David Benjamin “We don’t go steady, ’cause it wouldn’t be right ”To leave your best girl home on a Saturday night.” —The Beach Boys, “I Get Around” MADISON, Wis.—Notwithstanding the moral clarity articulated in “I Get Around,” the Beach Boys are among the less appreciated ethical philosophers of the past millennium.…
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