The notary public embosser used by Sol Ripinsky was returned to the Sheldon Museum last month, but half of the die – the part that sqeezes a piece of paper into a raised insignia – is missing. The embosser came from a house, an old Army building on Union Street that Richard and Mary Manuel had spent decades filling shoulder…
Not unlike Sarah Palin, the fat, philandering, bankrupt businessman who masqueraded as president liked to bash the press. But “lamestream media” and “fake news” are hardly new. Fifty years ago, soon-to-be disgraced U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew lambasted reporters as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Not that press criticisms are the exclusive domain of the right. Progressives can be just as…
Unless you want political leaders who are as inept as well as corrupt, stop already with the term-limits memes. It’s not longevity in office that’s corrupting our political system, it’s money. You could replace every member of Congress and Senate every year and get the same result of what we have today – a state and federal government that have…
If you’re depressed that we’ve been stupid about the COVID-19 crisis, buck up and learn a little from the past. As a species, we’ve been this stupid before. Plenty of times. And we’ll be this dumb again, and again. We tend to forget that we’re only the planet’s smartest ape. Dolphins have bigger brains. We are still evolving. Consider that…
Almost 50 years ago during and after the turmoil of the Vietnam debacle, a most popular TV show featured two hip Army surgeons wise-cracking about the lunacy of war while working wrist-deep in its horrors. A Saturday Night Live skit from the same era mocked TV commercials aimed at recruiting soldiers. As a nation riven by government-sanctioned killing and its…
I drove north last weekend to see my shadow, to use fifth gear again, to look out at something that was not familiar. I wasn’t disappointed because thankfully, Canada’s still up there, all sunny and civil and kind. Oh, Canada, land of immaculate campground restrooms and free firewood, land of public trails and parks and ice rinks and drivers who…
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Honore de Balzac Rich jerks in space went viral on Facebook a few weeks back. Except that most of the memes used a less polite word for jerk. One said, “My mom watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I saw the guy who killed bookstores float around in space.” No…
National Geographic magazines once came with great maps. One of them detailing the Midwest states I hung over my bed in a tiny room I shared with three guys on a floating cannery offshore Togiak, Alaska. In far-flung, gray and barren Togiak, I needed reassurance I was still somehow attached to civilization, or at least to Wisconsin. I picked up…
She was a pale-skinned girl working at a coffee shop like all the other pale-skinned girls working at coffee shops, her light brown hair parted in the middle and tied back into a short ponytail. She wore small hoop earrings and a gray hoodie and jeans and she moved in an efficient way, making lattes and Americanos for customers at…
The Fourth of July is something to make you think. To think about the nation, how it got here and how it’s going and where it’s going and whether it’s going to last, or to last in any semblance of the great words written on the day of its birth. Great words were the legacy of that first Fourth: Life,…