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Tuesday, September 11 — Well, here it is, September 11, 2007. It’s raining like stink, and thunder and lightning are expected. It’s a far cry from the exquisite weather of six years ago. The daily papers are doing nothing to lighten the mood. The Boston Globe’s obligatory piece on today’s anniversary looks at people coping with successive discoveries of the fragmented remains of their loved ones. The Award-Winning Local Daily does its part by offering a smorgasbord of predictable thoughts from the usual subjects. Meanwhile, in DC, Congress is sitting in the expensive seats, at the taxpayers’ expense, watching a command performance of “Waiting for …

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Friday, September 7 – The new date on the masthead above is your tipoff that we have put out another paper. By our calculations, since each issue contains about 16 square feet of printed surface, that adds up to somewhere on the order of 32 acres of text, photos, &c., all of it given away free. None of the content is dictated by any political party, corporation, or non-profit organization. The cost of the operation is born entirely by subscribers and advertisers. Now, if you will excuse us, we have mailing and distribution chores to attend to. At right: an anonymous reader enjoys a previous …

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Monday, September 3 – In the penultimate frame of yesterday’s Doonesbury, after rattling off a short but appalling set of facts about the U.S. national debt, radio talk show host Mark Slackmeyer asks his guest, “Where did the myth of GOP financial responsibility come from?” While we can’t verify or refute Trudeau’s notion that the Easter Bunny and the myth of GOP financial responsibility share the same origin, we are compelled to point out that the myth of which he speaks shares a delivery system with his own cartoon: newspapers — corporate-owned, profit-driven newspapers. They are so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible, like water …

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Thursday, August 30, 2007 — Richard J. Ducey, 58, recently of Fritz Creek, Alaska, died August 30th 2007 after a long battle with cancer caused by his exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange. He had been a resident of Concord and Barnstead, New Hampshire for over 25 years. He attended Pinkerton Academy, Derry, New Hampshire and was a graduate of Chester College of New England and Franklin Pierce College. He is survived by his beloved wife of many years, Pamela J. Ducey, his mother Eleanor M. Salisbury of York, Maine, a daughter, Sandra L. Duquette of Lowell, Mass., a stepson Gregg A. Stockman of Alton, …

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Friday, August 24 —Well, there goes the ballgame. Old timers can hang out the “For Sale” sign. The New York Times has discovered Portsmouth. The article appeared in today’s “Havens” column in the “Escape” section. Those categories indicate to me, not that life is so great here, but that it sucks everywhere else. Portsmouth, of course, has been discovered many times before since it first ventured into the tourism biz in the 1850s. But amazingly, New York Times writer Jeff Schlegel almost gets it right in a piece entitled “A ‘Mini-Boston’ on a Small Slice of Coast.” While New Yorkers still like to think of …

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Friday, August 24 – Well, it’s publication day. An image of the front page of our Volume 251, No. 24 appears at right. We should be working on the mailing labels, and clearing away the debris so the labeling crew can fold the papers so as to meet the Post Office’s latest set of deranged regulations designed to make America safe for the corporate point of view. Instead we’ve been fiddling with this digital whizbang. But we’re done fiddling, for now. We hope to be back here soon with a brief update on the progress of the fifteen Iron Butt riders who came by Federal …

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