Cult of Lack of Personality

A Salute to the Flag Police

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Saturday, July 2, 2011 — The Flag Police get a rare nod — outside of our own paper, of course — in the current (July) issue of New Hampshire Magazine, available on newsstands right now. We must congratulate Managing Editor Barbara Coles for summing up the history of our paper so concisely, and capturing the spirit of the Flag Police so nicely. The caption of the photo describes the flag the editor is holding, “bearing the initials of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans organization,” noting that it “definitely would have violated the [Flag] Code, but it was pre-1942 and pre-code.”

An Irrelevant Distraction

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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 — Any hour now, our Commander in Chief will deliver a stirring call to further sacrifice in Afghanistan. Because victory is just around the corner … or just a little further down the tunnel. Forty some-odd years ago, the editor of This Olde Rag would be called upon from time to time to fill in for the Vietnamese guard of a medical lab in Saigon, who had the habit of disappearing from his post whenever a free-range chicken would wander, clucking, past his little bunker. But surely that’s all irrelevant now.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today!

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Friday, May 1, 2009—Seriously. It was twenty years ago today, on May Day, 1989, that Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s Secretary of State for Life,* officially assigned the legal right to publish The New Hampshire Gazette to the current editor, publisher, &c., &c. This brief video, created by Dan Freund and Jason Tublewicz, of Kinney Hill Media Partners, contains the short version of how that came about. We’ll add a few details after the show. * OK, we’re kidding about “For Life”—but he has been in office since 1976. The pamphlet in question was titled, The Monster of Monsters, by the pseudonymous “Tom Thumb, Esq.” It …

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