SPICEDOGS

Hapy Birthday Boy!

2011-01-15T00:52:00.002-05:00

Neon Kitty

2010-11-14T18:36:00.003-05:00

I Love You!

2010-10-26T11:52:00.002-04:00

A Purple Elephant? Oh, My!

2010-10-22T17:07:00.002-04:00

Are We in Kansas, Yet?

2010-10-18T14:45:00.002-04:00

Staircase

2010-10-03T22:19:00.004-04:00

The Discovery Building

2010-09-23T08:47:00.001-04:00

Rescuing One Basset at a Time

2010-09-04T14:42:00.002-04:00

Dog Days of Summer

2010-07-08T07:49:00.004-04:00

This beautiful dog is available for adoption at BROOD

The Sparrow

2010-07-05T17:35:00.002-04:00

My X-Rated Post

2010-06-21T20:37:00.003-04:00

Pee-A-Boo

2010-06-05T21:22:00.001-04:00

Reflecting

2010-05-29T15:37:00.003-04:00

Read about his performance here.

Comfortable

2010-05-16T23:22:00.003-04:00

A Grand Old Dog Went to the Bridge!

2010-04-25T17:36:00.001-04:00

I Got It

2010-04-16T12:55:00.000-04:00

Birds of a Feather

2010-04-11T16:01:00.001-04:00

Does the shoe fit?

2010-04-03T23:56:00.004-04:00

Time to Smell the Flower

2010-03-16T23:07:00.002-04:00

How did you get to be so tall?

2010-03-01T15:13:00.001-05:00

Pretty

2010-02-19T22:47:00.002-05:00

Endless Snow

2010-02-10T21:11:00.003-05:00

Help! I'm Stuck

2010-02-08T23:44:00.000-05:00

It's Snow , Not Soap

2010-02-07T23:21:00.002-05:00

Something Other Than Snow

2010-02-06T20:24:00.000-05:00

National Cathedral

2010-01-28T22:06:00.003-05:00

Architecture

2010-01-27T22:26:00.000-05:00

I See You!

2010-01-25T21:39:00.000-05:00

Peaceful Sunday

2010-01-24T16:25:00.002-05:00

When the Humans Are Not Home!

2010-01-22T16:23:00.002-05:00

Pretty Pink!

2010-01-21T22:38:00.002-05:00

Good Food

2010-01-20T21:13:00.000-05:00

Nice Winter Day

2010-01-19T13:17:00.003-05:00

Gotta Get That Honey!

2010-01-18T11:38:00.001-05:00

Mastering Chopsticks

2010-01-16T22:22:00.001-05:00

Ring Around the Rosies

2010-01-15T23:22:00.002-05:00

Peacefully Swimming

2010-01-14T20:18:00.000-05:00

Ceiling

2010-01-13T22:39:00.003-05:00

Chandelier

2010-01-12T16:28:00.001-05:00

She's Mine!

2010-01-11T22:38:00.001-05:00

Beautiful Bird

2010-01-10T12:56:00.000-05:00

Kitty

2010-01-08T22:10:00.003-05:00

When a Church Becomes a Bank

2010-01-05T22:41:00.003-05:00

Walk a Mile in My Shoes

2010-01-03T19:49:00.001-05:00

Thai Food

2010-01-01T23:18:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year, 2010

2009-12-31T08:49:00.005-05:00

Imagine

2009-12-30T21:12:00.002-05:00

HoHoHo

2009-12-26T22:35:00.001-05:00

Holiday Joy!

2009-12-23T23:44:00.000-05:00

Christmas Bird

2009-12-22T21:50:00.001-05:00

Holiday in the City

2009-12-17T21:01:00.001-05:00

Happy Chanukah

2009-12-11T17:19:00.002-05:00

Edible?

2009-12-06T21:09:00.001-05:00

Not Really Black and White

2009-12-06T00:11:00.003-05:00

This photo was taken at night without any flashlights. It looks as if it is black and white, but there's a slight color at the mailbox.

The Sign of the Times

2009-12-04T21:54:00.006-05:00

Festive Winter Evening

2009-12-04T00:45:00.004-05:00

Another Bird

2009-12-02T22:46:00.002-05:00

Dinner Anyone?

2009-12-01T22:35:00.001-05:00

Eid Mubarak

2009-11-30T20:52:00.004-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T10:27:00.004-05:00

Burst of Colors

2009-11-21T00:50:00.004-05:00

Up on the Roof

2009-11-11T13:52:00.004-05:00

Me and My Shadow

2009-11-07T08:52:00.003-05:00

A Grand Old Dog

2009-10-07T11:20:00.000-04:00

Michael Emerson Wins the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama

2009-09-21T22:44:00.001-04:00

Silly Basset

2009-09-14T21:42:00.003-04:00

2009-08-18T20:03:00.000-04:00

NO H8

2009-08-08T14:27:00.003-04:00

You can own your very own 8x10 of this picture. Details here: http://michaelemerson.net/

Happy Birthday, Garrison Keillor

2009-08-07T11:38:00.002-04:00

Happy Birthday, Garrison. Hope you have a great day!

Reunion

2009-08-05T21:03:00.003-04:00

Patriotic Bird

2009-08-03T15:06:00.000-04:00

The Wise Owl

2009-08-01T22:13:00.001-04:00

Chandelier

2009-07-31T14:49:00.001-04:00

Silhouette

2009-07-29T10:52:00.000-04:00

Bon Appettit

2009-07-26T14:27:00.001-04:00

Red Sky

2009-07-25T00:23:00.002-04:00

A Pirate's Life

2009-07-23T12:19:00.001-04:00

View

2009-07-21T03:08:00.005-04:00

Flying

2009-07-20T19:57:00.001-04:00

Decoration

2009-07-20T00:27:00.003-04:00

Alcatraz

2009-07-19T03:00:00.002-04:00

Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries

2009-07-18T02:53:00.002-04:00

La Marseillaise

2009-07-14T12:59:00.004-04:00

Little Birds

2009-07-14T06:26:00.003-04:00

You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog

2009-07-13T10:49:00.000-04:00

Staircase to Heaven

2009-07-11T13:56:00.002-04:00

Let It Shine

2009-07-09T11:41:00.000-04:00

Pretty Flamingo

2009-07-08T08:34:00.002-04:00

How Sweet It is

2009-07-07T06:46:00.001-04:00

Happy 4th of July

2009-07-04T00:07:00.004-04:00

Cathedral

2009-07-03T00:35:00.000-04:00

Night and Day

2009-07-02T17:50:00.003-04:00

Lester, the Pitcher

2009-06-30T00:04:00.000-04:00

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

2009-06-29T14:12:00.002-04:00

A Cloudy Day

2009-06-28T23:06:00.003-04:00

Poetry in Motion

2009-06-27T23:23:00.005-04:00

This Blog Changed

2009-06-27T23:21:00.002-04:00

I will not post Garrison Keillor essays here. I will post my photos or those that I like.

Garrison Keillor: Bereft

2009-02-04T00:09:00.000-05:00

Getting a note of appreciation from John Updike could buoy you up for weeks. Now who's left to bless us?

By Garrison Keillor

Feb. 4, 2009 | Ten a.m. A phone call from my daughter's school, and instantly the father's mind goes to Dark Foreboding, but no -- this is her teacher calling to say that the child scored 96 on the spelling test. The child's instant reward is the phone call home and the words of praise. She sits at her desk pretending not to listen, basking in the acclaim. Well done.

Having begotten a good speller is no small matter to a writer. Writing is an act of paying attention, and if you don't care about the difference between "their" and "there" or "needle" and "noodle," then I am sorry for you.

The teacher's praise of my child is a large moment in the day. I live with fear as any parent does. I know people who've gone through catastrophes -- schizophrenia, the suicide of a child -- the skin shrivels at the words, and so the life of a parent is one of constant wordless prayer. Today, my child scored 96 on spelling. A good day.

It has been a good winter with plentiful snow. The skiers are grateful, so are the men with snowblowers. The people who loathe winter are happy in their loathing and can practice the fine art of grumbling and grousing, and we who love a winter night can bundle up and walk the streets of St. Paul in the friendly lamplight past billows of snowdrifts and the houses concealing the lives of our neighbors, though of course we can speculate -- this unscraped sidewalk, is it not a sign of alcoholism? And I think of John Updike, who illuminated private lives and wrote so lovingly of the world, who called snowfall "an immense whispering" and compared a brilliant snowy day to overdeveloped film. Who re-created the backyards and clotheslines of small-town 1940s Pennsylvania and described the way a girl walked in the hall of high school carrying her books against her body, and in a great story, "My Father's Tears," three years ago in the New Yorker, he gave us his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform. Nothing was beneath his careful attention.

I saw him a year ago in New York, and my wife and I rode the subway with him from 155th Street down to 72nd, and he grinned all the way, a white-haired gent of 75 in a tan raincoat, like a boy going away to school, and a little nervous. As it turns out, that was my very last chance to tell him, standing above him, the train swaying, that "The Centaur" and the Rabbit Angstrom books are permanent masterpieces and also his Olinger stories, and I didn't tell him that. I opted to be cool. And then a gaggle of college kids boarded and crowded around him, not recognizing him, and in all that chatter and attitude, Updike sat soaking it all up. Material.

He was the great American man of letters of the second half of the 20th century, critic, poet, novelist, master of the short story, and a man of Lutheran virtues, cheerful, hardworking, self-deprecating, ever grateful for opportunity. He was a charming and generous interview though he claimed to dislike being interviewed. He was dark on the subject of celebrity -- "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face," he wrote. "As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen" -- but as a Famous American Writer, he was a champion, worthy to wear the belt.

He was the cheerfullest writer in the world. He mourned the loss of a wide readership -- he loathed the term "literary fiction," which seemed to quarantine serious writers like him (why not just call it "fiction you won't enjoy"?) -- but he was full of gratitude and appreciation. He was a great appreciator. And if John ever wrote you a note of appreciation for something you had written or done, it buoyed you up for weeks.

This is what the obituaries leave out. The giants fall and we leave them behind but who is left to bless us? Nobody. As long as John was in the world, you could imagine him calling up one morning and saying, "That was good. I liked that." And now the phone is dead. I feel bereft.

Garrison Keillor: What were you thinking?

2008-12-02T22:17:00.002-05:00

This is a really funny essay. It talks about the recent men's-room sex between two drunken football fans. What were they thinking? They weren't thinking and Keillor nicely makes fun of the situation.

Midwesterners usually go south to misbehave, not to the handicapped stall in a Minneapolis men's room at halftime.

Dec. 3, 2008 | I've been trying not to think about the man and woman from Iowa who had sex in the men's room at the Iowa-Minnesota football game in Minneapolis a week ago and to think about the environment instead, or the future of American fiction, but it is hard to put something like lavatory sex out of your mind. And the environmental impact is slight. Some paper towels, that's about it.

The Iowans apparently did not know each other until they got really, really drunk and ran into each other on the concourse. Probably their shared Iowaness in enemy territory was an initial bond -- Minnesotans tell the same jokes about Iowans that used to be told about Polish people -- and they were a little happy about the fact that the Hawkeyes were walloping the Gophers (55-0 was the final score), and somehow the 38-year-old woman and the 26-year-old guy wound up in a handicapped stall in a men's room and had intercourse, which drew a crowd who cheered them on.

They were interrupted by a security man who spotted two pairs of feet under the partition and saw underwear on the floor and called police, who arrested them for indecent conduct, a misdemeanor, and released the male perp to the custody of his girlfriend and the woman to her husband. That is mostly all we know, except that the woman has told reporters, "It's ruined my life," which is pretty much what a nice Midwestern lady should say after she's gotten drunk and had sex in public with a complete stranger. It shows good manners. You can't have drunken public sex with a stranger and say, "I don't know what got into me!" You are supposed to sit in the ashes and rock back and forth for a while.

Midwesterners have always needed to go elsewhere to misbehave and so when people head south to Florida or Arizona in January, purportedly for the warm weather, we know better. "Warm weather for what?" we ask. Public sex, most likely.

This is one area of life that American literature needs to explore. You read about the Iowans and you think, "I would never do such a thing as that. No no no no no no no." And it's the job of the novelist to create empathy and to write this story so as to put the reader into the toilet stall with a heart full of passion and his or her drawers on the floor.

I'm going to put them at a Minnesota Orchestra concert instead of a football game. He's there with a girlfriend he's trying to break up with. He's had two glasses of Merlot at dinner. Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is the opener, and at intermission he brushes against a lady in the lobby and quickly apologizes, and she says, "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" He is. Men always are. "I said to myself during the Stravinsky," she says, "that I would offer myself to the first man who touches me." This is OK by him.

She leads him into the women's john and into a stall, and she says, "I never did this before," and he says he never did either, and the two of them have wild sex and it is magical, it is stupendous, until 50 women waiting for a stall start shrieking, "Hey, there was a line!" and pound on the door and security comes running and pulls them apart and they're arrested, and there's shame, of course, being led by police through a crowd of the sensitive and genteel ("They did what? You're kidding!"), but also pride -- they crossed a line and it feels brave and good and also it's their ticket to something better. He was National Guard but now he's thinking about acting school. She's thinking she'll write a memoir called "Lavatory of Love."

All very believable, but there's one detail I can't quite get my head around. Midwesterners I know would not, even if three sheets to the wind and overwhelmed by hormones, use a handicapped stall to have sex in, just as we would never have sex in a car parked in a handicapped spot. It's a basic taboo. The adultery we cannot approve of, the drunkenness is immature, sex with a stranger is definitely sketchy, but the handicapped stall is beyond the pale. As your mother would say, "How could you do it? What were you thinking?"

Source: Salon.com

Garrison Keillor: Finally, no need to pose as Canadians

2008-11-11T22:26:00.003-05:00

So, we have a new president and the world has hopes for us again. And so does Garrison Keillor with this uplifting essay.

By Garrison Keillor

Last update: November 11, 2008 - 5:07 PM

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor -- he said, "I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference -- the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis -- you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he’s going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early Nineties, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of The Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails -- imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes The First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.

Source: Salon.com