ArcaMax

When the Olympic Games come sprinting into Paris for their most recent sweaty installment, among those carrying the Olympic torch will be Snoop Dogg, American rapper and stoner superieure.

Snoop's leg of the run will take him through the streets of Parisian suburb Saint-Denis. It's a rough neighborhood, the kind of place where someone will ...Read more

I'm 67 years old, and when I was a kid, we used to shoot politicians like they were ducks sitting on a pond. We didn't always kill them, but we always hit them squarely.

Not many American boys hunt anymore, and not that many of our citizens serve in the military, so the standard of civilian marksmanship under pressure has declined. A kid who ...Read more

They say youth is wasted on the young.

"They" are old people who are hugely offended by the beautiful carelessness of youth and its beautiful disrespect. Those qualities are beautiful in young people because they haven't been broken to the saddle yet. They're still frolicking in the green grass of the pasture, going everywhere at a run, long ...Read more

Honor is the lost virtue. Honor, in the minds of our ancestors, was that thing beyond religion, beyond laws, beyond self-preservation, that thing that would make you stand and die rather than retreat.

Honor had some oddly twisted variants. Men banged away at each other with pistols, dueling over their honor. A man "defended a woman's honor" ...Read more

It hasn't made it to my part of the urban Northeast yet, but the word "glizzy" has emerged as something you can call a hot dog.

It seems to have come from Washington, D.C., where the hard guys call a Glock pistol a glizzy. A hot dog is about the size of the extended magazine you use in a Glock pistol.

In the beginning was the gun, and the ...Read more

Juneteenth is done, but the horrors of Pride Month continue, and there's still no "White History Month."

And white folks like me still have to work, which is practically the same thing as slavery, except your boss can't sell your kids, at least not yet.

And there's no "Straight Pride" parade, and if there is, it's a comically dangerous ...Read more

I spent $46 and a little change today. All told. Complete. Definitely not $47. I would never spend $47 in the middle of the week.

I buy my tobacco on Saturday. I buy gasoline and beer on Friday. My gym dues are $29 a month.

I would have spent much less, but I ran into an old friend in a diner this morning, a white-haired preppy-looking ...Read more

A few years ago, if you were making just a breath over $20 an hour, you could consider yourself lower-middle class if your husband made at least as much. You had your Valentine's Day dinner at Applebee's, but both your cars ran. In some sections of the country, you were middle-class.

Of course, you said you were middle-class, and you say it ...Read more

My wife, Deborah, and I own a three-floor apartment house in the urban northeast.

How urban? We can walk to two Chinese takeout places, a bar, two liquor stores, two diners, two bakeries representing two different nationalities, and a fortune teller.

There are three apartments in our house, one on each floor. We live in one and rent out the ...Read more

I had a boss once, not a big boss, a little boss, the kind of boss you see every day.

And this boss and I disliked each other in the way two cats dislike each other if you put them in the same pillowcase.

I was disagreeing with the boss one day, and the boss reminded me that she was my "superior."

And I remember the boss paused before using...Read more

Artificial Intelligence is a huge concern among people in my business because first of all, we think we're gonna lose our jobs, plus we think AI will produce mediocre writing, and we don't want to lose our jobs.

Also, it's creepy, although it's not nearly as creepy as some of the people I worked with and for during a 40-year stumble through ...Read more

I hope someday to be 100 and writing myself a birthday column, but I'm a ways from that event.

What I am is 67 and writing myself a birthday column, which is serious enough. I've been writing this column for 15 years now, and that also seems like a serious number.

Hell, they're all serious numbers. The number of years you are when you get ...Read more

A judge with a keen grasp of the obvious recently found possible felon/president Donald Trump in contempt.

After 40 years as a reporter/columnist, I haven't had to type "possible felon/president" very much, but I didn't have to type "climate change" or "nonbinary" either. Things change.

Trump, who has an at best slippery grasp on reality, ...Read more