An old boxing adage, maybe the oldest, is “They never come back.” It means when pugs retire, it’s for a good reason, namely, they’re no longer at the top of their game. In fact, au contraire. And that’s why almost every boxer who came out of retirement, hoping he still had his ...

Last Friday night was pretty uneventful — or at least at its start. I had my dinner of Bachelor’s Standby (angel hair pasta and Ragu), read a bit of a crappy mystery, and then had to take the dogs on their nightly walk, this time around the Petrova school. When I parked and got out, a ...

The third Immutable Truths of My Home Town is: Everyone is half the man his father was. It is as established a fact and as impossible to escape as gravity. It’s also most “provable” if father and son were in the same line of work and were lifelong residents, because then the ...

This week’s column continues the theme of Small Town Truisms, and discusses Cronk’s Law, named after one of our constabulary, Sgt. Cronk. It is, “Everybody dies famous in their hometown.” I can add to this that not only do they die famous, but they die bigger and better too. It’s ...

Last week, I survived a brief — but not brief enough — encounter with The Number One Gothamite: Benjamin Franklin Fairbanks XIV. Though he claims he’s related to the original Ben Franklin of kite-flying and bifocal-inventing fame, he’s as directly related to Old Ben as I am to Jesus. ...

In journalism parlance, “scoop,” as a noun, means the latest news. As a verb, it means to get your story in print before any of your rivals. In the dog-eat-dog J-Biz world, where breaking news is everything and morality is nothing, scooping another paper or reporter is just bizness as ...