Fox Insurrection
Wily foe battles Postal quartet in Battle of Rochester NH
“An attack on one is an attack on all”
Medical privacy concerns vetted as dire portents suggest that not all is well with our Union
The US Postal Service is an unsung bastion of our democracy. In all sorts of weather, day after day, to people of every background and description — even during pandemics — it delivers! But lately this most essential institution has come under attack.
In Rochester, New Hampshire in October, a brave quartet of local postal workers was set upon by a subversive foe: a vicious, stubborn, curiously resourceful, and possibly rabid fox. The assailant did not attack just once but four times, a siege whose details remain necessarily vague, in part due to medical privacy concerns and in part because such details might reveal vulnerabilities in a system crucial to our well-being as a nation.
The first stage of the onslaught occurred outdoors and came, it seems fair to conclude, as a surprise. The threat posed by unruly domestic dogs is well known to postal employees (a modern unionized workforce firmly …
A Farewell to Dinosaurs
Psychedelic colossi made of concrete
The Rowdy Beaver is up the street from the cathouse
The Christ of the Ozarks Meets John Agar Meets Tyrannosaurus Rex
Is a fallen Kong still King? Is any royal ape, once disarmed and rendered recumbent, deserving of the title of King? Is it still even royal?
These are my questions, as I shimmy up King Kong's flanks, scaling the fallen Eighth Wonder of the World. The forty-foot statue of the Great Ape ― once the largest in the world ― was toppled a few years ago, losing the limb that once held an effigy of the Ayatollah dangling from a noose. This Kong can’t stretch necks anymore. His right arm broke off in the fall. He holds his left arm close to his body, as if cradling a chest injury. The red eyes once lit by "Psycho Lights” from RadioShack are vacant now, gazing skyward. In this ruined Ozymandias-like state, the supine Kong looks scared, not scary.
I suppose Kong knows. Some part of him knows that for him the end is near, as it came for all but the concrete dinosaurs, here at the former home of Farwell's …
The Front Porch
There is no shortage of opinions going around these days. What they mostly have in common is that the people who offer them don’t have the slightest idea of what they are talking about, and at the same time imagine that they themselves will bear zero responsibility for the consequences of their passionate opinionating, which removes any normal incentive to tell the truth. If someone begins a sentence with some version of the words “I believe,” it is therefore a sure-fire signal that what follows will be some form of a lie, which will in turn diminish our ever-shrinking common reservoir of trust.
Lying is in general a nasty business that should always make you feel a bit low. It’s bad for your character, and it almost always means treating someone else unfairly, by denying them access to an accurate picture of reality, which is why even well-intentioned lies can be so cruel. Lying interferes with the human …
