It was at a Waffle House in North Carolina when I realized the South is a foreign country. Now, lest the Dixies among you feel like chucking boiled peanuts at my head, I should note that I don’t say this disparagingly. It was actually an endearing dose of Southern hospitality that threw the region’s relative […]

4-H clubs in Maine are marking a big birthday this summer, 100 years since the first club was established in the state. Locally, clubs will celebrate the occasion at the Acton Fair, which starts today and runs through Sunday. One such club is the Four Leaf Clover 4-H Club in Shapleigh, which has operated continuously […]

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has avoided embarrassing itself, as it decided Tuesday to reverse its earlier decision, thereby allowing a former Marine who served his country for five years to play college football immediately this season. When Antioch, Tenn. native Steven Rhodes graduated from high school five years ago, many colleges heavily recruited him […]

Because my wife knows she doesn’t need to buy me anything when she travels, I wasn’t anticipating any gift(s) when she returned from New York recently. But even if I had been expecting something, it wouldn’t have been what she brought: An ancient-looking, yellow envelope she got from my cousin Amy and her husband Jim, […]

There’s an intriguing quality to woodlands that I like to call the layered effect. It’s most obvious when staring into a forest that spans a large area and is composed of many different species of trees and other growth. Those in the foreground appear, of course, the clearest and offer the most detail. Pine needles, […]

Sending the parking garage plan in Biddeford to a public vote is both unnecessary and unwise. Several citizens have been pushing for this issue to go to referendum, but we don’t believe it’s in the city’s best interests to do so. A recent parking study commissioned by the city showed that the mill district cannot […]

The call for urgency comes as regulators have missed 60 percent of the rule-making deadlines.

As many of you know, I have the honor of serving on the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee. I am very proud of the service of our veterans, and believe we must do everything we can to honor their service and their sacrifices for our country and our state. This session, we passed several […]

Thumbs up to the many people who gave their time, money, materials and ideas to help create a memorial for the 26 people ”“ including 20 children ”“ who were killed in a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in December. The memorial was dreamed up ”“ literally ”“ by Richard Gray, […]

Did you ever wonder whether Maine’s congressional delegation is conservative, moderate or liberal? Or whether, on balance, Congress is conservative or liberal? Well, so did I, and I developed my own system for getting answers about the political orientation of members of Congress. Instead of using my personal view of how to determine who is […]