Columns

Trump-style payback for Bernie

The national Democratic Party is in full panic now, its leaders in a headlong flight like something from a 1950’s sci-fi flick where terrorized townspeople flee a 10-story tall monster crushing cars and flattening buildings. It’s not some Godzilla-like creature risen from the ocean depths.

Defending my church when no one else will

The accusations of pedophilia in the Catholic church have never faded from the public eye, and while there are moments when other cataclysmic events push the tragedies a little further back from our immediate view, the fact that children were abused by prelates is never far from our consciousness.

Legendary treat sweetens again

Every time I bite into a Clark Bar, I become 10 years old again. Irish immigrant D.L. Clark created the legendary chocolate-coated peanut-butter-crunch confection in Pittsburgh in 1917.

Can we have more middlebrow citizens?

“Middlebrow.” I sit typing this column on the 20th anniversary of the massive heart attack that took the life of my father, and “middlebrow” is one of the words that pops into my mind when remembering Dad.

Nearly all our presidents were big baseball ‘bugs’

Out of all our presidents, not many are suspected of being indifferent to baseball. The most notable is probably Thomas Jefferson, who no doubt considered games that involve balls frivolous, and would distract him from his multiple intellectual pursuits.

How to renew the dying art of romance?

The day my Mother and Father met, he was arguing with some high school friends about whether a slice of lemon would corrode the coating on a porcelain sink. “I never came across any man quite like your Father,” my Mother says, still happily befuddled by the stubborn old fellow.

Do greeting cards face a St. Valentine’s Day massacre?

Spending a rainy Saturday afternoon reminiscing over congratulatory keepsakes stored in the attic. Clutching vintage Valentines purchased at an estate sale. Sorting through all those shoeboxes of yellowing mementoes in your late great-aunt Sadie’s House Where Time Stood Still.

Clarity’s cost: The $5 million comma

Clarity is in short supply across America, but no longer at dairy farms in Maine. In 2014, you see, drivers for a dairy company in Portland, Maine sued their employer for overtime pay because a state law pertaining to overtime-pay exemptions failed to include the Oxford comma.

I can’t endorse the Times’s approach

The New York Times provided lessons in both journalism and television Sunday night, by way of bad examples. First: If a newspaper believes in making political endorsements it shouldn’t balk when a tough call comes along, leaving voters more mystified than before.

Should older people be banned from church?

Just because a mentor starts unconsciously humming Motown tunes during a heart-to-heart talk with you about temptations, that doesn’t mean his advice is irrelevant.