Before going through security at the Cyril E. King Airport in St. Thomas, we had inadvertently put a bottle of bourbon, a gift for a friend, in my backpack. “No liquids!” barked one of the security people, while removing the bottle. “The hell with it,” I said to Tina, “let’s just leave it.” […]

Well, what a week it has been. We have seen declarations, proclamations, pronouncements and curfews. We have seen scary stories and uplifting tales. Warnings and pleas. All getting our attention. As the area settles into what could be a rather prolonged period of change and all of us are faced with scenarios that few planned […]

We have all seen or heard about it – the empty shelves where toilet paper, flour, rice and canned vegetables once were. We might have shrugged – “What does toilet paper have to do with a pandemic?!” — maybe rolled our eyes, perhaps nervously laughed because we had just returned home from our fourth trip […]

One of the few things older than I am is this bit of advice from wartime Britain in 1939. Another old maxim is that “Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.” Both are good principles for dealing with the hysteria over COVID-19 and we all should take a pause from reading […]

The word eel conjures up slimy, slithery images for most – not something delicious to eat. But, in places outside the United States, eel is a delicacy. It’s one of those rare resources that we have here, but don’t often enjoy locally. This is a hot topic since the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) […]

My Aunt Cecelia was just beginning the eighth grade when it happened. In late spring 1951, she came home from school with a high temperature, feeling very ill. The next morning, her legs gave out as she tried to get out of bed. By that evening, she was so weak she could barely move. She’d […]

The time to shut down Bath Iron Works in the face of the coronavirus epidemic is NOW. With 8,000 workers living in 16 counties and traveling to work by bus and van from remote parking lots, BIW has the capacity to set the state on fire, not to mention the Bath area. Both the President […]

Two or three times a year, falling trees knock out power at my home, in a heavily wooded section of Central California. When outages stretch over several days food in our refrigerator goes bad, cell phones run down, and flashlight batteries fail. Sometimes roads are impassible and my wife and I are stuck in our […]

As the coronavirus pandemic exerts a tighter grip on the nation, critics of the Trump administration have repeatedly highlighted the administration’s changes to the nation’s pandemic response team in 2018 as a major contributor to the current crisis. This combines with a hiring freeze at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leaving hundreds of […]

Shortly after President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel got into a bit of hot water when he observed to an interviewer, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” A decade-and-a-half ago, America was in the throes of The Great Recession, and Emanuel rightfully took […]