Don’t be nervous. You’ve been here before. Just relax, take a deep breath...hold it ... Now let it out. Better? OK, you’re next.“Forgive me, Father Time, it’s been one year since my last list of New Year’s resolutions. Even though I wrote these resolutions down, I can’t remember a single darn one of them. But I’d bet you a box of Dutch Masters they’ve all been broken at least once. But it’s the old habits that are hard to break. Am I right?” Familiarity has its comforts, my son. Now get to the point.“Yes, Father. Well, once again, I am going to submit to you a list of New Year's Resolutions. …

Man’s search for meaning continues. Last week, I went out in search of Christmas cheer, and not the kind that can be bought. I covered the parks, the malls, the tennis courts of America to find the warmth and camaraderie we have come to associate with this holiest of high holidays. An errant knight on yet another quixotic quest? Hardly. I knew I would come back the better for it. But where to start?I went to the teachers, the leaders of tomorrow’s followers. One of them told me he was looking forward to the Christmas break. “And may Santa leave a bucket of reindeer dung for each bastard on …

Everything I know about the Tea Party is as follows: they are flesh-eating, fear-mongering racist lunatics, and they drink the blood of young virgins. Oh, and they hate the media. Armed with this understanding I decided to attended my first Tea Party meeting, figuring as a white, already-deflowered male who simply happened to be a reporter, my chances of survival were better than most. Still, I did not identify myself as a reporter, not so much out of cowardice, although there’s that, but more because I wanted everyone at their best behavior, unvarnished. Nothing brings out the worst in …

"Now I been lookin' for a job but it's hard to find/Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line" The only thing scarier than being overly familiar with those two lines from Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” are the next two lines of the song: "Well I'm tired of comin' out on this losin' end/So honey last night I met this guy and I'm gonna do a little favor for him..."Every time I hear that last line it gives me chills. We don’t have to search too hard to figure out that, in this context, “a little favor” means big trouble for the man in the song. …

1. What’s love got to do with it?Forget the groovy cosmic vibe of the '60s. Free love is dead. So far the rallies in Philadelphia and around the country have remained mostly peaceful between occupier and occupied. Still, there’ll be no hippie chicks sticking daisies down the policemen’s gun barrels this time around. Like Tina Turner facing down a drunk angry Ike after a bad performance on Shindig!, everyone here feels they have been pimp-slapped by the man for the last time. These protesters are angry, hurt, confused, broke, and, as one woman told me, “(they) have had enough.” Or, as Ms. …

Scientists turn brain activity into moving images. So says a recent headline on Slate. Great, now the bastards want to get inside the last private refuge left for us in this brave new world: our heads. Well, I for one won’t let them in, no matter how much they ply me with promises of a hoverboard and my own cover shot on Current Biology - that’s the “scientific” journal in which the brain imaging study was first published last month.According to Slate, researchers at UC Berkeley “were able to reconstruct YouTube videos from a subject’s brain activity with the help of magnetic resonance …

Last Wednesday a friend of mine had some personal business to take care of in Washington, D.C., and asked me to come along for the ride. Seeing as I had nothing better to do other than look for a job, I agreed to make the trip. I’m about as a politically active as the next guy, which means, I watch cable news, too. But visiting the nation’s capitol sounded like one of those fashionable things “to do before you die,” along with scaling Macchu Picchu and listening to The Beatles’ “White Album.”Two down, one to go.We arrived in Washington a little past noon. My friend went off to tend to …

I sure hope master astrologer Mary Silvernail knows what she’s talking about. On Saturday, she was handing out pamphlets at the 19th Fall Spiritual Holistic Expo at the Agri-Plex Expo Center in Allentown. The one I took was titled “Your September 2011 Horoscope.” Naturally, I went right to my zodiac sign, Sagittarius, and read the horoscope: “You are given an important assignment that only you have the know-how and energy to complete. This will bring your next level of success.”Hot dog, my column is going to be syndicated! What else could it mean? After all, I was at the Expo on an assignment…

Is it possible to write a column being published on the 10th anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and make it about something completely unrelated to the events of September 11, 2001? Yes, I think so. Would it be wrong? Perhaps. But worse than wrong, to not address the attacks would be a failure on my part as a reporter. Even more, it would be an affront to the 2,977 people who died on that day - not including the 19 hijackers. In light of the extensive media coverage leading up to today’s anniversary, I promise to be mercifully brief with my comments. There is nothing I …

Imagine you are at the beach, staying in a rental house where one of your friends has just prepared a hearty Mexican dinner: beans, rice, tacos, burritos, guacamole, salsa, etc. The food looks and smells so good you decide to dig in while ignoring the events of the last three days, when you valiantly battled and lost against the enemy of all mankind: diarrhea. Now, imagine it being less than one hour after eating said meal and you find yourself on the boardwalk at an amusement park being hurled back and forth in the air on a ride that looks like a pirate ship. It may as well be in the shape …

Forgive me as I am about to start my column with, “When I was a wee lad...” But it seems entirely appropriate since I am writing about my childhood memories of the Great Allentown Fair and midgets. Only the midgets aren’t part of my memory, they belong to someone else who also grew up in Allentown and went to the fair as a child.“That’s when the fair was the fair,” said the 75-year-old woman whom I sometimes call “mom.” We had just come from the Allentown Fairgrounds where crews were setting up bingo tents and funnel cake stands for the fair, which runs from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5. I didn’t see …

Crowdsourcing. What is it? I’m not sure but I think it has to do with reporters using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to cull story ideas from the online masses huddled behind their computers. Or at least that’s what I think it is. I don’t care much for crowds, online or in person. Get more than three people in a room or on a chat site and the conversation tends to quickly turn to static. Everyone wants to be heard, few of us have the patience to listen.     But life is about give and take and we must learn to adapt to its paces. Adapt or die. Why do you think us reporter…

Summertime and the livin’ is easy; at least it used to be. What happened to me? Anymore I’m like a vampire when the sun is out. Anything above 80 degrees and my skin starts to broil like a Christmas ham; at 90 I burst into flames. When I go to the shore, I always travel with a fire extinguisher and a flame-retardant Speedo. I much prefer a shady nook to the wide open furnace blast of the beach. Keep your sun and surf, I’ll be over here reading my book, under the umbrella.  Are you getting the picture? I’m not a summer person. But, oh, the sweet romantic summer nights of my youth ... someone …

Since I’ve been working for Patch these past few months I have come into contact with a breed of people I’d seen before but seldom thought about: the WiFi crowd. These are the people you see at cafes or coffee shops staring into computer screens, seemingly oblivious to the world around them.  Ear buds in, laptops up. The only time they emerge from their computerized cocoon is when they need to order another double espresso or use the bathroom.  I know this because I am now one of them. I am not entirely sure how this happened, it just did. The change was practically overnight, like one of …

Last week I was at the Borders bookstore on Bethlehem Pike in North Wales. It was a very sad occasion. Early afternoon on a weekday and the parking lot was full. The signs in the windows said it all: GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! EVERYTHING MUST GO!Inside it was like Christmas at K-mart: the only smiles were on the faces of the shoppers scooping up the loot at cheap prices. Sure, the Borders staff were friendly enough, grinning through the pain, perhaps, or just tired of customers walking up to the counter, arms groaning under stacks of books and CDs, wearing worried looks as they offered their …

In the midst of a terrible heatwave blanketing the east coast, I and a traveling companion got in the car and headed south to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the weekend. The purpose of the trip was to attend a surprise birthday party for a friend’s wife who was turning 40. A milestone. For this trip I brought along a notebook, a pen and a new cell phone impersonating a camera. Whilst my fellow traveler drove the entire 200 plus miles, I jotted down notes and snapped pictures, when I wasn’t thumbing through books or playing road DJ on her iPod. Lewis and Clark never had it so good. Martin and …

When railing against the venality of Hollywood, it’s cliché for writers to quote Nora Desmond, the faded movie star played to chilling effect by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s 1950 noir classic Sunset Boulevard. So, in the interest of ingenuity, I’m going to quote someone else. “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”That’s Nathanael West writing about Depression-era Hollywood in his novel "The Day of The Locust." He was referring to ugly …

I’ve been going to the movies for a long time now and I have come to a dramatic conclusion: (CUE DRAMATIC MUSIC) There hasn’t been an American movie made in the last 30 years that’s worth a damn.There, I said it. Let’s fight.The first rule of Movie Fight Club is: you can talk about Movie Fight Club. But, fanboys and girls, as the de facto leader of Movie Fight Club, spare me your trenchant, impassioned remarks on the latest or soon-to-be-released digitized disaster porn or superhero wet dream spewed from the cankered cancerous maw of Hollywood. Please? Like the man says at the end of the …

Ty Stofflet is a man of many talents, not least of which, bowling. He also loves playing guitar, a devotion  he carried over from his younger days playing in a band with his brother Larry. But these are surface pleasures. His heart belongs to softball.  As a kid in the 70s I had the pleasure of watching Ty pitch softball when he played for the Reading Sunners. He pitched against his former team, the Allentown Patriots, at Patriots Park at 10th and Wyoming streets. I went to the games with my dad who then worked with Ty at Mack Trucks. Calling Ty Stofflet a great softball pitcher is about the …

No blarney, they got him. After 16 years of searching, the FBI captured South Boston hoodlum James "Whitey" Bulger. The Feds finally caught up with their man, along with his girlfriend Catherine Greig in the remote confines of Santa Monica. California. It’s been reported that the happy couple lived there in a modest two-bedroom apartment for about 14 years. “Hiding in Plain Sight” read some of the headlines. Less obvious, evidently, was the store of guns and cash investigators found inside the apartment. Enough to last another 16 years, in or out of plain sight.  Sixteen years. That’s a long …