Jay Fitzgerald writes in today’s Boston Herald that gas station owners are hurting despite the huge price increases we are seeing at the pumps. “Huge rivals such as Wal-Mart and Stop & Shop that now sell gasoline at cheaper prices to draw customers into theirlarge stores. But the biggest current […]

Symphony orchestras are becoming a hard sell to time pressed, distracted Americans. But some orchestras have begun introducing novel ways to stem the outgoing tide..with martini bars, free buffet lines, speed dating and special event tee shirts. The rub is that the biggest drop is in the subscriber numbers. People […]

Some villages in South Korea “haven’t heard babies crying in 18 years,” said Lee Kwon Hee, an official who was quoted in today’s NY Times. So the country has changed its national health care plan to cover reversing vasectomies and tubal ligations, in order to spur more couples to have […]

My mother Valerie visited us last week, and showed me a column by David Brooks from the NY Times. Apparently there has been a huge increase in virtue in America. According to Brooks, family violence in all forms is way, way down. Violent crime overall is down by 55% since […]

Donna Goodison writers in today’s Boston Herald about an ingenious idea. “It could answer Boston’s pesky parking meter woes. Instead of fishing for a quarter to feed the meter – or jamming it – dial your cell phone. Representatives of a Finnish company were in the Boston area this week […]

Lakshmi Mittal had a good year. He made $19 billion in profits from his, the world’s largest steel company, by acquisitions of other mills. Forbes gave details about this $25B Rich Dude. “Mittal’s Wharton-educated son, Aditya, is the group’s president and chief financial officer. But it was Mittal’s other child, […]

Carla M. Collado writes in today’s Boston Herald: “The woman behind the striped bikini silhouette that launched millions of iPod sales says she sees herself everywhere but still can’t afford one of the digital tune toys. Mandy Coulton, 26, a dancer and nanny from Los Angeles, was paid $1,500 to […]

“The magazine should be called ‘Brandon,’ after the new editor. Jane doesn’t exist. Jane has left the building,” says Robin Steinberg, director of print services for Publicis Groupe’s MediaVest…”I will definitely monitor to understand the audience’s reaction,” she adds. Today’s Wall Street Journal weighed in: Tradition says that magazines named […]

In May a New York television reporter who apparently thought he was off the air lit into two men who had intruded on his shot, broadcasting a word-bomb to the five boroughs. From the New York Times Style section July 31 “This month a card player at the World Series […]

Jackie Mason on his least favorite coffee shop, Starbucks. “You want coffee in a regular coffee shop, they’ll give you all the refills you want until you drop dead. You can come in when you’re 27 and keep drinking coffee until you’re 98, and they’ll start begging you: “Here, You […]

Esquire Magazine has begun arriving in my mailbox, and I am usually impressed with their ribald mixture of anecdotes, intriguing photos and plain common sense. In this month’s Seven Most Remarkable Things about Culture, they included this tale about the world’s most famous blond. “She was wearing a diaphanous, totally […]

Famed for the biggest trees in the world, Sequoia National Park is now No. 1 in another flora department: marijuana growing, with more land carved up by pot growers than any other park. Joe Robinson wrote about this in the LA Times. “Parts of Sequoia, including the Kaweah River drainage […]