ArcaMax

Last week, because, as my wife puts it, "You think you're funny," I referred to Rep. George Santos as Rep. George Santos (nee Horowitz.)

The joke was that Santos is a carnival of lies and once alluded to a Jewish heritage he doesn't have just to get some votes.

See, that's why giving the guy a Jewish "maiden name" was funny.

Turned out, I was...Read more

It's not a pretty story, but it really happened.

A number of years ago, the paper I was working for sent me and a photographer to a local high school. The high school was having a presentation aimed at convincing their students not to get pregnant during their high school years. The dropout rate was high. Test scores were low. It probably wasn'...Read more

Remember the big trucker protest convoy of, what, last year?

Yeah, a bunch of the concrete cowboys who drive the big rigs rolled into Washington, D.C., to protest COVID-19 vaccinations and restrictions.

And then?

I don't remember. Hardy anyone does.

The guys who did the driving remember, but I'll bet they don't talk about it much.

Meanwhile...Read more

I paid $20 for a ham and Swiss cheese omelet this morning. The omelet came with fried potatoes, two slices of white toast and coffee. It wasn't an upscale restaurant, either. The guy sitting next to me at the counter had plaster dust on his boots. A couple of years ago, one of the patrons had a dope seizure in the booth by the back door.

But I ...Read more

On the way into the drugstore, I ejected the stump of a cigar from my mouth and put it out with the heel of my shoe. These days, smoking in a store is as bad as smoking in a church, which was almost the only place you couldn't smoke when I was a kid. If you don't remember a woman in the market, squeezing a tomato with a cigarette hanging out of ...Read more

Other than teaching me to speak it, my French Canadian immigrant grandmother taught me three things about the French language.

The first was that all animals and all babies speak French.

The second is that God speaks French.

The third is that on Christmas Eve, very late, after midnight Mass, the animals can speak. In French, of course.

That ...Read more

Writing about Nazis, in fact any contact with Nazis, is like stepping in the leavings of a large dog who accidentally got into the Ex-Lax. It's gonna take longer to get it off your shoes than it did to get it on your shoes.

I stepped in it last week, writing about a band of German neo-Nazi, monarchist stumblers whose "coup" was about as ...Read more

In the movie "Gone With the Wind," everything is all hunky-slavey until the Confederates quit, and the next thing you know, you can't whip the skin off Mammy for being late with your morning cornpone.

In the movie "Schindler's List," the Nazis get to queen around in overcoats and shiny boots until, whoopsie, the allies come a-knockin' on the ...Read more

When President John F. Kennedy died, he took the brown Catholic air with him.

The brown Catholic air was in the corners and stairwells of Catholic schools in the working-class neighborhoods, along the brown wood bannister, and it was across the street in the church, in the brown corners, where the sexton hadn't pushed his broom deep enough to ...Read more

Out there in Nebraska, where the air is clean and pure, up there in Minnesota, where they have those gosh darn cute accents, federal investigators found 30 teenagers working overnight shifts at meatpacking plants. The kids, some of them as young as 13, were alleged to be employed cleaning all sorts of shiny dangerous equipment. As a treat, the ...Read more

Trumpism pauses at the gates of the city, teeth bared, howling, swords flashing, warhorses prancing, and then slinks away.

Time after time.

Ah, the triumph of that first unimaginable glory, when Trump, loser of the popular vote, squeaked into the White House on a white horse that turned into a mouse, on which he fled, knees high on his too ...Read more

Don't read any more polls, not even if the midterms are nearly here.

Well, actually, you don't "read" polls. You "look at" polls. They're just numbers, although you can read a newspaper column containing poll numbers written by a guy like me, particularly if the guy like me needs to write something about an election that hasn't happened yet.

...Read more