Did you get your deer yet? It’s a common question around Vermont these days. Trees are bare, snow is common, if not ubiquitous; driving on rural roads, one often sees men dressed in camouflage and blaze orange out walking, rifles slung from their shoulders. It’s easy to imagine a small insurrection is under way. There […]

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first drive to madness. If we’re not there yet, we must be getting pretty close. Weeks ago, almost all the respondents in my informal poll, more than anything else, just wanted this election to be over. The optimist sitting on my shoulder says when Florida absentee ballots are […]

The political season is old and stale and even the candidates are getting tired of hearing the same old lines and they’re groping for something else to say. Last week, Ruth Dwyer, the right-wing Republican who’s running for governor in Vermont, was railing against the state’s civil union law, the one that allows lesbians and […]

I’ve been reading classic Greek literature lately, trying to improve myself. So far, I’ve covered the cycle of stories around the Trojan War – the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Orestia and the Aeneid. I read some of these stories when I was young. I remembered them as being about heroes and battles; extraordinary feats of […]