Sorted by date Results 1 - 7 of 7
When President John F. Kennedy died, the wooden floors started to disappear. People still have wooden floors in their houses, of course, but so many of them in new houses are installed as a kind of a cozy wink. When the wrecking ball took the 19th-century cotton mill where my immigrant grandmother worked 14 hours a day in hellish heat and humidity, they sold the old wooden floors for flooring in new houses, where it will go well with the ecru walls and granite-topped kitchen counters. When Kennedy was elected president, I...
I’m a newspaper reporter. It isn’t good for the stomach, but it can be good for reflection on those quiet, cool autumn night shifts in the middle of the week when nothing’s on fire and the street crime is of the ignorable, drug-driven, non-fatal kind. And the circa-1987 florescent lights in the newsroom buzz like sleepy bees, and it’s time to get my baloney sandwich out of the crowded office fridge. And, because I am not without some guile when it comes to things modern, I slip on my earplugs, find YouTube on my compute...
In Brockton, Mass., about 30 minutes from where I live, someone beat a 74-year-old man to death with a hammer. Oddly (or maybe not), I have some experience with hammer attacks. I’ve helped cover two of them in the last 10 years — one fatal, one not. The best thing about a hammer killing is not the tearing screams of the victim, though you’d think it would be. It’s not the impressive “splatter factor” caused when the skull is smashed by a claw hammer (especially true if you use the claw end). It’s not even the once-in-a-lif...
So plucky little NSA rat Edward Snowden is safe in Russia, a country that has apparently started to give free speech lessons to America. Beautiful. We used to want to beat the Rooskies in the Olympics; now they’re hiding out our whistleblowers, gaining the kind of moral high ground you don’t get by winning the gold in women’s powerlifting. In the United States, if you kill 25 people at the behest of some organized crime “boss” and you turn rat, we cuddle you, give you a new name and ship your ratty self to the suburbs of Omah...
In the newsroom where I work, there is a mouse, and he is a freeloader, a non-working bum of a mouse addicted to the entitlements of cookies, taco chips, granola bars, candy and all the other wonderful treats to be found in the desk drawers of hardworking, taxpaying reporters. He raids us at night, chewing his way through the plastic wrap that protects our convenience store brownies, feasting while the reporters are at home, asleep, dreaming fitfully of the next mortgage payment. And he leaves behind small, black mouse...
If some of your friends are political cranks, then you know the argument. Goes like this: Your town spends, say, $600 providing a “get your picture taken with Santa” event for the local kids. Hopefully, they do it at Christmas “Great,” your crank buddy says. “The whole freakin’ city is fallin’ apart, and Mayor McCheese is playin’ with Santa. That $600 could be spent helping to get drugs out of the city.” The idea is that ANY money spent on ANYTHING other than simple education, minimal road repair and cops, lots of cops, is...
If I lived in a small peasant village thousands of years ago where it was customary to dance naked in the fields on New Year’s Eve to ensure a good growing season, I would be the first to drop his fur britches and start cavorting through the stubble corn. Which is to say I like ritual. I like the statues of the saints in church. I like Christmas trees and the Rosary. I like an omelet every Sunday morning. I’d have been a good 12th-century monk. Every New Year’s Eve, my wife and I attend a party in a local saloon. There...
