Ask Mr. Punctuation
Wondering how to end that sentence you’re working on? Don’t know what an “interrobang” is? Ask Mr. Punctuation, if he doesn’t know the answer he’ll look it up in his fourth-grade English book. Dear Mr. […]
Author: Con Chapman
I'm a Boston-area writer, author of The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees pennant race, and 50 books of humor including "Scooter & Skipper Blow Things Up!" by HumorOutcasts Press. My work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor and The Boston Globe among print outlets. "Rabbit's Blues," my biography of Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington's long-time alto sax player, will be published by Oxford University Press in September.
Excitement in the Air as New Bank Branch Opens
WELLESLEY FALLS, Mass. The corner of Wembly and Algernon streets in this affluent western suburb of Boston has long been known as a “dead zone” where retail businesses perish at a higher-than-average rate of mortality. “Maybe it’s […]
Hopes For COVID Sexcapades Fade as Familiarity Breeds Contempt
PLAISTOW, New Hampshire. If anybody can look on the bright side of things in this town of 7,609 near the Massachusetts border, it’s Amanda Byfurd, an avid collector of cloying ceramic figurines and a compulsive […]
March to End Sweater Pilling Fights Tragic Fashion Problem
WESTLAND, Mass. Arlene Douthat used to feel, in her words, as if she was “all alone” in dealing with the difficulties she faced in life. “There was nobody I could turn to,” she says as […]
Your High Culture Etiquette Advisor
Ever wonder if it’s okay to blow your nose during a Beethoven sonata? Or take a “selfie” in front of a grieving Virgin Mary in Michelangelo’s Pieta? Ask your High Culture Etiquette Advisor for artistic demeanor guidance! […]
On the Attack With the Fighting Russian Girlfriends
Pamela Toler’s Women Warriors: An Unexpected History highlights lesser-known women who have gone into battle, such as Maria Vasilyevna Oktiabrskaya, a Russian mechanic in World War II who drove a tank christened “The Fighting Girlfriend.” The American […]
My Desperate Last Stand Against Remote Notarization
A law passed recently in Virginia permits notarizations using video or audio conference technology. An iPhone app has been developed to provide remote service by a 24-hour team of Virginia notaries. The Boston Globe […]
The Vast, World-Wide Conspiracy of Dance
Dance, according to Robin Collingwood, was the original art form, and are you really going to argue with a guy who has been referred to as “the best known neglected thinker of our time”? I […]
As Virtual Proms Spread, Chaperones Are on the Outside Looking In
WESTLAND, Mass. Millicent “Millie” Hawkins has been a tenth-grade English teacher at this town’s highly-ranked high school for the past twenty-five years, but before that she was a student here, and a noted “chrome polisher,” […]
Great Gatsby Roulette
It was May of my senior year in college. Everybody was coasting, knowing either what they were going to be doing the next year, or that they’d be doing nothing. Except for one guy, Tom. […]