(PHONE CALL INTERCEPT, SANTORINI, Greece) – “Vlad, Vlad, pick up. I’m schvitzing over here. The cops changed the locks on the yacht and they took my rugby team and Olga – remember her, the gymnast with the great caboose – she left me for some punk flanker who plays for Manchester.” “Sorry, Boris, I’m kind of tied up with Kiev…
“I didn’t expect civilization to collapse quite so quickly.” – popular Facebook meme Quite frankly, neither did I. History tells us no one ever does: Empires and civilizations just kind of bumble along as they slowly degrade into depravity, lawlessness, authoritarianism, vice and barbarity. Eventually, Vandals breach the castle walls and we’re all eating gruel for 1,000 years before…
I was a freak for the Olympic Games from the moment I first saw them. An early memory was dragging a mattress outside and using some boards and nails and mom’s clothesline pole to fashion a high-jump pit in our backyard. Fortunately, I married a fellow fan, a former women’s hockey player who was paid real money to teach cross-country…
The climate people say the Winter Olympics may go away for lack of snow. In Beijing, skiers complain about surfaces of man-made snow that diminish their performances. In the Alps, reflective tarps are used to preserve glaciers, huge tourist attractions that are melting away. In Haines, a half-dozen or more skiers leave every winter for trips to Washington or Colorado,…
Linda was sitting on a log at the water’s edge, smoking a cigarette and nipping at a flask bottle of hootch. If ever there’s been a more fitting image of the Haines Polar Bear Dip, I haven’t seen it. We’re a ragtag crew, not an elite athlete in the lot. Linda is neither young nor petite and she sank in…
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I haven’t done a damned thing to promote racial unity or end discrimination. That’s mostly my own fault, of course, but some of the fault lies with society and how, by deifying our heroes, we so often diminish their message. First, it’s a safe bet that MLK would not have been okay with…
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…