Most of the mail that lands in the box on my porch these days I don’t want to open, much less read. Increasingly, my so-called snail mail has nothing personal about it.
Worse than that, many of the mailings are what my daughter and members of her generation would call “sketchy.” I strongly suspect they come from people out to get me.
The Winter Hill gang’s chief executioner confessed in court to murdering 20 people. For those crimes, he served a mere 12 years in prison and he now walks freely.
Becoming a government witness enabled John Martorano to get off with this wildly disproportionate sentence. Of this arrangement, Donald Stern, the former U.S. Attorney in Boston, says: “The only thing worse than this deal was not doing this deal.”
John McCain has six or seven houses he can call his own.
So what?
Barack Obama grew up living in areas outside of the continental United States.
What difference does that make?
I don’t care about such things. In fact, I regard making much of them as a waste of the public’s time. More than that, they distract us from real issues.
Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry. What do all these men have in common?
They all received my vote for president.
If you think this is narrow thinking, you are correct. However I remain stubborn enough to judge that, in virtually every instance, the candidates mentioned above would have made better presidents than those who defeated them. How’s that for political obstinacy?
Finding oneself old ranks among life’s most astounding events. For me, it comes as staggering surprise to discover myself 80.
Yet next week this discovery will be mine. Unfamiliar as it sounds, I will have to acknowledge the fact: “I am 80.”
I’m mad enough to sue the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. No agency should be allowed to do what this one has done to me. And without any provocation on my part.
All I did was apply in person for yet another driver’s license. For that, the attendant made me take off my eye glasses. Then she snapped my photo, surely the worst in the annals of the Registry. If not, at least the worst ever taken of me.
By far.
If you lived in London, or were visiting there, you would be subject to at least 500 thousand cameras discreetly posted on many street corners in that huge city. Every day, photos of you and your companions would enter an archive of countless other pictures, available for the police and other authorities to consult.