Kickass goes encyclopedic

Kickass, the doorstop dog, is doing his best to prevent the keeper from sinking into the depths of a serious malaise, though in this case the cause of his distress is readily identifiable—throwing out his set of Encylopedia Brittanica, so what he is suffering may be more of a funk. The volumes of EB came to him some 50 or more years ago through what he considered a garage sale coup.  They not only occupied prominent shelf space but were journalistically useful in the pre-internet days, and—probably most important, they somehow made the keeper feel smarter than he really is.  Then the electric age dawned and the simple tap on a keyboard did what EB might do if you took it down off the shelf and paged through one of the thick volumes and tried not to be distracted by fascinating information on unrelated subjects.  But it has been years since the keeper so much as touched one of the EB volumes, and so in an unusual display of taking the bull by the horns and thinking he was doing a smart thing, he threw out EB, all five feet of it.  Unfortunately, not only did this put him into a funk, it made him feel dumber than he really is.  How can that be?  He should have sent EB to the White House.
(See billstokesauthor.com for more Kickass and news of the novel Margaret’s War.)