Author Archives: floegel

Two Down, Ten to Go

12/27/2001 – 1:48 pm

Today is the third day of Christmas; your true love should be giving you three French hens, two turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree, but probably will not. Traditionally, the Christmas season lasts 12 days, from Christmas Day until January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, when the magi were supposed to have […]

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Let It Snow, Let It Snow

12/20/2001 – 1:47 pm

We have an affinity for snowflakes in Vermont. About this time every year we import a googol or two from Canada. We’ll be enchanted by our snowflakes for the next three months, but the flakes will outlast our enchantment, sticking around until April. It was a Vermonter, Wilson Bentley, from over in Jericho, who took […]

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A Nice, Clean Fight

12/13/2001 – 1:45 pm

“War – what is it good for?” the old song asks. “Absolutely nothing,” comes the reply. That song was not written by a defense contractor, because war is the best live-action research and development program a weapons maker could ask for. The current conflict in Afghanistan has been a boon for the arms industry, particularly […]

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Stop Beating Your Wife

12/6/2001 – 1:43 pm

Last Saturday, December first, my probation ended and I was returned to full-fledged citizenship. I was arrested in late August with some folks from Greenpeace for occupying a coal-burning, carbon dioxide-spewing power plant in Salem, Massachusetts. We were trying to make a point about global warming. The local judge all but thanked us for protesting, […]

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The Long In-Between

11/29/2001 – 1:42 pm

We are deep in the middle of the part of life Hollywood leaves out of every movie: the long in-between. This is the time when we grieve for the immediate past and fret for the near future. At best, this period might be shown in a movie as a calendar, with the pages tearing away […]

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Justice for Just Us

11/22/2001 – 1:40 pm

Today is Thanksgiving, the American holiday, and when we bow our heads over the turkey, many of us will take an extra moment to contemplate our civic good fortune and count the blessings of our American values. There’s been a good deal of talk about American values in the past few months – American values […]

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Unlearned Lessons

11/15/2001 – 1:38 pm

A federal court in San Francisco last week threw out a five billion-dollar punitive damage award in the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The court called the award excessive and ordered a lower court judge to reduce the amount. In the 12 years this thing has been floating through the legal system, Exxon […]

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