Dane101 - Current

Danecast Roundtable: Brett Favre a "drama bomb", Vern Stenman talks Madison Mallards, and dane101 hosts a fundraiser

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:20:24 +0200

Dane101's roundtable podcast returns this week with a discussion about Brett Favre possibly returning to football (and Jason Dean calling him a "drama bomb"), an interview with special guest star Madison Mallards GM Vern Stenman, and Adam Schabow unveils the details for dane101's first ever fundraiser. This episode was recorded live at the Mallards game on Thursday and features dane101 contributors Jason Dean, Michael Donnelly, Erin Rasmussen, Paul Spilburg, Bessie Cherry, Shane Wealti, Jesse Russell, and Adam Schabow. It clocks in at 20 minutes (cut down from two hours).

Click here to listen or download.

Dispencing Ashley: For all the ketchup in Ireland

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:08:03 +0200

I’ve always considered myself a lucky person, which can perhaps be attributed to the fact that I can trace my roots back to Ireland. With my bright red hair and my white skin littered with freckles, it made perfect sense for me to spend my last summer in Dublin. I looked like a native and spoke like an American — which pretty much drove men throughout the country insane.

That summer, I met so many amazing people, especially the other people on the trip. We had the best time of our lives going to clubs, bars, and the vast green countryside. We macked (literally) on the Blarney Stone, we encouraged each other to jump off the cliffs of Mohr, and we spent our entire life savings in one week.

Reflecting on the lost innocence of Crandon

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:26:34 +0200

Every summer, the family and I head up to the small town of Crandon, Wis. to vacation for a week and enjoy some fun in the unpredictable, up-north sun. The days consist of fishing, golfing, reading books and magazines, deep frying turkeys, grilling, watching movies, taking naps, guitar sing-a-longs and of course, politically motivated discussions that conclude with my old man calling me a soulless tree hugging socialist and me responding back, calling him a heartless rightwing hack. Oh, fun with the family.

Despite the few arguments and the occasional claustrophobia, I always look forward to that week up-north and my time with the people of Crandon. In fact, I have not been similarly charmed with such a small, quaint town since being introduced to the people of Sicily, Alaska during my Northern Exposure obsession in college.

Madison Mentions: The Newspaper Report Weekending July 20, 2008

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:50:49 +0200

Monday has arrived, so that means we once again turn to the yellowing stack of pulp cluttering the floor of Dane101's office to find out what newspapers and similar publications wrote about Madison over the last week. Note to readers, by "yellowing stack" we mean "Google News" and by "Dane101's office" we mean "coffeehouse."

University of Wisconsin-Madison Astronomers Ed Churchwell, Marilyn Meade and Brian Babler contributed to an investigation that revealed the Milky Way actually only has two spiraling arms and not four. The study, presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis, was made possible by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The story was published on NASA's website.

An Offering To The Gurus, A Meditation For Healing

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:46:15 +0200

“Under the burden of solitude,

under the burden of dissatisfaction

the weight,

the weight we carry is love.”

- Allen Ginsberg, “Song”

I came to this city singing a sad tune, stretching the notes over miles of American roads. Humming the highway blues and fading to the west, I tried to leave my problems behind for a fresh start in Madison. Unfortunately it feels like I went from skid row to the madhouse, lonely and uncertain how to find happiness. There’s so much I want to understand about the world and give back to it, yet I found myself struggling to make a change.

Should Wisconsin bloggers use the "Texroots" model to create "Wiscroots"?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:00:45 +0200

Kerfuffle, a.k.a. Dave Wilcox, is at the DailyKos Netroots Nation Convention is Austin, Texas. Before he left he offered dane101 the opportunity to crosspost anything he writes that has a Wisconsin focus. This is the first of his entries.

"Yearly Kos" changed its name to "Netroots Nation" to, as I understand it, reflect that the many gains made for Progressives and Democrats in recent years have been greatly assisted by internet-driven activity. Citizen journalism, online activism, lefty blogging. Call it whatever you want, but nowhere is it more organized and I'd say, effective at the state level than here in Texas. I look at their success and, like a little kid looking at his pal's tricked out new bicycle, find myself asking "How do I get one of those?" One look at the scheduling grid for Netroots Nation will tell you that you have to make some choices in what event you want to attend. I had planned on going to a caucus of state bloggers, but at the last minute decided to sit in on the Texas bloggers caucus instead. As it turned out, I was the only non-Texan in the room, but they let me stay. Until very recently, I had no idea that a large group of Texas bloggers had formed the Texas Progressive Alliance.

Madison's Pride Weekend is alive and well

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:07:04 +0200

Contrary to yesterday's article in the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison's LGBT Pride weekend is alive and well. Sure the central event at Brittingham Park has been streamlined and stripped of much of the glitz and glamor of previous years, but what the article missed is that the weekend has expanded to multiple venues over multiple days making it a truly citywide event. Madison's Pride weekend just ain't your Daddy's Pride anymore.

As the article points out the organization, Madison Pride, is suffering from serious financial issues and missing records. Last year they pumped $30,000 into the Pride weekend, this year they are only pumping in roughly $500 and the events, including the Pride March, speakers, and music from the Cowboy and the Gentlemen, will take place on Sunday. The organization may have "reduced scope" but the weekend itself has expanded.

Dispencing Ashley: Good Morning, Balls!

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:19:57 +0200

There’s really no aspect of college that I dislike — Badger games, beer, mysteriously sexy art majors — these are the gems that shine and give meaning to my life. The only issue I have with college is that it’s changed the way I live my life, making it hard to adjust when I move back home to Chicago for the summer.

When I am at college it’s perfectly acceptable to have a bedroom full of kitchen utensils and left over food, it’s fine to not clean a bathroom all semester and to steal toilet paper from Starbucks. It’s perfectly acceptable to have stacks of Miller Light cans sprinkled throughout the living area, to lay with those sexy art majors in bed all weekend and to have fingerprints and dust collecting on the windows, coffee tables and TV sets.

While my roommate expects to find me on a Friday knocking at the door without keys, clutching an Ian’s pizza and the occasional boy toy, ready to start an A-bar dance party, this sort of thing really isn’t tolerated at the Spencer home, and rightfully so.

In Madison, It's Easy to Be Kinky: The Space (Part Three of a Three part series)

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:30:31 +0200

This is the third part of a three part series on the Madison Kink scene. Part One can be found here and Part Two can be found here.

Leather and Lace, the first-Saturday-of-every-month event at Club Inferno on the North Side, being kinky Madison's signature event. Here one sees roughly the same proportion of persons in dedicated fetishwear as at a comparable club night in San Francisco, for instance, the same proportion of painfully self-conscious women leading through the crowd on leashes husbands looking rigorously neither to the left nor to the right. Voyeurs and the clueless, in their swoosh-bedecked athletic shoes, are likewise about as numerous as they'd be in a much bigger city. But there are lots more transvestites -- ranging from a balding, rotund, bespectacled, perpetual grad student type in a tutu to a long tall vision of beauty in a 70s prom gown, and a great, great many more single men with perfectly straight waist-length hair and dead eyes, looking like the ghosts of 1969, except for the bottles of beer they clutch before them like talismans. There is the same relentless industrial music going thud! thud! thud! loud enough to loosen your fillings, and enough cigarette smoke (Commercial Street being beyond Madison's no-smoking-indoors zone) to guarantee that nobody's clothing will cease reeking long before the following month's event.

Struggling with a personal British Empire

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:45:44 +0200

Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I am in my twenties, when I can so vividly remember being a nervous, sweaty, breast budding tomboy in grammar school, who wanted to wear Bulls Jerseys that came down to the knee, not dresses. And when I look in the mirror, I see a girl who looks slightly older and more hung over than my eighth grade counterpoint—sans braces, pimples and hair wraps. It’s not just that I look young, I feel too young to be doing anything real with my life, too young to make any life decisions, too young to know what I want. This is why it seems perfectly fitting that my mom still runs errands for me, deposits checks for me, buys my underwear and socks. Sometimes I wonder how someone who feels like an eighth grader can already be thinking about jobs after college, auto insurance, and Botox.

Bring on the Birthday Cake: "Our Lives" Turns One-Year Old

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0200

Madison's gay magazine Our Lives — affectionately known by me as "Gays of Our Lives" — is one-year old. Seriously, think about it: would you have predicted that a free magazine centered on "the gays" would make it through one issue, or two — or seven? Well, it has, and it has done so in style.

Our Lives, published every other month, went from booklet-size to a slick, full-sized, thirty-six-page publication. Issues are theme-driven. Photography is impressive. Advertisers are plentiful. And aspiring writers get the chance to shine the spotlight on people or businesses that are making the Madison LGBTQA community what it is.

By the way: I'm a regular contributor to Our Lives and author of the July/August cover story. So, do I want you to pick up the magazine or read it online? Of course. But not because I think I'm so great. It's because the magazine is so great. And necessary. And informative. And surprising. And really, because it exists at all.

My goodness Wisconsin, have you lost weight?

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:59:54 +0200

When I first skimmed CalorieLab's most recent analysis on state-by-state obesity rankings I was thrilled to see that Wisconsin had fallen out of the top 25 and dropped four spots overall in comparison to 2007. "Sweet," I thought, "I can report to dane101 readers some good news about Wisconsin's reputation as a beer belly state." Alas and alack, after further analyzing the numbers I was disappointed to find that it wasn't that Wisconsinites overall have lost weight, it is just that Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Delaware all put more weight on at a faster rate pushing them past America's dairyland.

We are now ranked 26 overall in comparison to our rank of 22 in 2007. According to CalorieLab, 25.3 percent of Wisconsinites are considered obese and overall 62.3 percent are consider obese or overweight. Since last year our obesity rate has increased by 0.7 percent. Our three-year obesity average is 25.4 percent.

In Madison, It's Easy to Be Kinky: The Community (Part Two of a Three part series)

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:15:23 +0200

This is the second part of a three part series on the Madison Kink scene. Part One can be found here.

Women wanting to be owned by men occupy only one of innumerable niches in the world of kink, of course. For every woman who shares Frances's and Hannah's predilection, there's a man who wants no less avidly to surrender completely to a woman, or at least be "forced" to put on an item of her intimate apparel and then cruelly ridiculed for having done so, or one who wants to be spanked or flogged. There are men who ask only that their lovers wear seamed stockings and high heels in the bedroom for them, and others who require girdles, opera gloves, garish red lipstick, and false eyelashes too, and others who ask that their lovers also regulate their intake of oxygen. Just as there are women who, like Sir Keith's young self-described slave girl Phaedra, are thrilled to be treated almost like pets, there are other women who delight in slipping into gleaming latex catsuits and imperiously leading their naked spouses, forbidden to address them as anything other than Goddess, or at all, around on leashes.

In search of the summer fling

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:15:52 +0200

I remember my first real summer fling — it was the summer after my freshman year of college and I met an older, dapper man drinking seltzer water at a bar. I was too young to be there, he was probably too old to be talking to me, and we were an odd pairing. I was 19, he was 24. Maybe 25 or 26. The details are fuzzy. He had graduated from UW and was in law school. He came from money, listened to jazz and he had a nice watch. I’d never known a man with a real watch who was not hairy or related to me. He had a desk in his bedroom and a bookshelf, and despite the fact that he smoked weed and lived at home, he was toxically handsome and impressive.

I was completely uncomfortable around him, and that’s how I knew I should stay over at his house one night. I had this idea, as I drove to his house in Winnetka, the hit rap song “Bossy” blaring on my radio. As we sat on his porch, drinking wine, the strap to my shirt broke. He tied it into a knot and kissed my shoulder, and looked around, possibly thinking that his mom was coming back early from her weekend vacation.

Madison Mentions: The Newspaper Report Weekending June 29, 2008

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:30:13 +0200

Madison Mentions return with Mario Lopez, Ritalin, wieners, badgers, and more. Find out what publications outside of Wisconsin are writing about Madison.

What is Madison's connection to the tragic two-helicopter crash outside of Flagstaff, Arizona? One of the two helicopters involved in the crash was leased from Air Methods, the same company that provided the helicoptor that went down outside of Madison in May killing a surgeon, nurse and pilot. The Rocky Mountain News has the story.