ArcaMax

An Irish immigrant friend of mine once told me that, in the Ireland of his youth, the word "noggin" was, as he put it "the most elastic word in the language."

"If my uncle said he had a 'noggin of whiskey,' that meant anything from a swallow to a quart," my friend said."

That kind of word is handy to know.

In America today, the most elastic ...Read more

Because I am old in the ways of sin, I dropped the butt of a $5 cigar onto the rain-darkened blacktop of a convenience store parking lot. I was going in for coffee, black, no sugar.

The owner, an immigrant American citizen from a former British colony, saw me from the front window of his small, but sincere, store. When I came in, he told me I ...Read more

The Brothers Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, were a pair of 19th-century Germans whose "fairy tales" often involved the cooking of children. Disney cleaned that up quickly, and the whacky brothers' fairy tales were a childhood staple until we forgot them in favor of British-accented pigs.

Always, in the tales, the princess sleeps or is in some kind ...Read more

I live in Fall River, Massachusetts, a dear little lost place. It's dear if you're from here. It's lost to everyone else. And it's much more little than it was 100 years ago, when the great gray granite cotton mills were lit up for the third shift. During the mill years, 120,000 people lived in the city. Now, it's 86,000 and, if it weren't for ...Read more

The vaping industry, tragically unrepresented by the National Rifle Association, is in danger of seeing its profitable berry- and s'mores-flavored business go up in smoke, or at least in vapor. The doctors say vaping kills you.

I'm an old-fashioned pipe smoker. Not so long ago, I was sitting outside at my job, peacefully puffing a pipe, when I ...Read more

There was a "straight pride" parade in Boston last week, maybe 50 miles from my house. I skipped it, and went out for pancakes instead. Then, I came home and did some laundry.

About 300 people marched in the parade. Maybe the other straight guys do their own laundry, too.

And several days later, my wife, Deborah, continued her effort to gain...Read more

It's Labor Day, when we celebrate by studiously not celebrating in hopes that the folks "at corporate" won't think that we're thinking of ourselves as "labor."

Instead of thinking of ourselves as "labor," we are encouraged to think of ourselves as individuals, gun-owning frontiers people who just happen to have central air conditioning and ...Read more

President Donald Trump wants to buy the island of Greenland from Denmark. Denmark won't sell, and they turned him down rudely. Trump said he won't go to Denmark because they turned his offer down without even giving him a chance to borrow the purchase price from the Russian mob. In addition, he turned them down because he is a petulant child. ...Read more

I had to buy birthday presents for my wife. Her birthday was last week.

I'm not bad at present buying. I specialize in scarves, perfume and jewelry. None of those items come in a specific size, so there's less room for error.

This year, I took a jump off earth's flattest edge and bought her a sweater. It fit, too, and she liked the color, so ...Read more

I've got a little list.

It's a list of the places I go most often.

I live in a town of 88,000 in southeastern Massachusetts. I go to the same places all the time, and because I'm not what anyone ever called "sophisticated," they're mostly small, unfashionable places.

Work, which is a small radio station. Five different diners because I like ...Read more

The city where I live, an undistinguished place in Massachusetts, is getting ready to build a replica of the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C. It is a thing keenly desired by the population, most of whom make less that $30,000 a year, which is a hell of a lot less in Massachusetts than it is in Georgia.

It's an old city. We have a monument to ...Read more

If we can't chant it, we don't want it.

Doesn't rhyme. Doesn't have to. It's too long anyway.

Like "Yankees Suck" or "Sieg Heil," what you want in a chant is brevity. If possible, two words, maybe three words.

"Couldn't arrest him because he's a sitting president," can't be chanted, so it's no good.

"Lock her up!" Now, there's a chant. It'...Read more