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Dec 8, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Chris Busby |Katy Finch |Bob Bergeron |Samuel James
Adventures of a Used-Record Dealer Something happened to me decades ago that, to this day, helps keep me optimistic about humanity. Some say everything happens for a reason. I present my tale here to the gentle reader to make of it what they will. I run a small used-and-new record store in Maine that I opened in the ’80s. The business and this incident are loosely connected.
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Dec 8, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Chris Busby |Katy Finch |Bob Bergeron |Samuel James
How DIY Psyops Can Save Our World “I’m a spy / In the house of love / I know the dream / That you’re dreamin’ of / I know the word / That you long to hear / I know your deepest secret fear” — The Doors, “The Spy” This past summer I was listening to the podcast version of “God’s favorite radio show*,” This Is Hell!, a public-affairs program out of Chicago, when it dawned on me: the way we, the schlubs of the earth, can save the world! Host Chuck Mertz was interviewing Reuters reporter Chris...
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Dec 8, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Katy Finch |Bob Bergeron |Chris Busby |Samuel James
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Samuel James |Al Diamon |Edgar Allen Beem |Katy Finch
Who Angus thinks is a hero “We’re a nation of immigrants,” said Senator Angus King. I’m standing in the audience when I hear him say this and I am so confused. Surely he knows that immigrants are people who choose to live in a foreign country. Does he know there were indigenous people living on this land roughly 5,000 years before the concept of a country existed anywhere in the world? Obviously their descendants living here cannot be immigrants.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Al Diamon |Samuel James |Edgar Allen Beem |Katy Finch
Golden showersEverybody is pissing on Jared Golden. He must be doing something right. Golden is the incumbent congressman from Maine’s 2nd District, which comprises those parts of the state where economic development mostly consists of black-market Chinese pot facilities. He’s a Democrat if you use that word loosely, and given the divided nature of a country where one can’t be too choosy about one’s allies, loosely is the only reasonable way to use it.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Edgar Allen Beem |Samuel James |Al Diamon |Katy Finch
illustration/Larry Hayden, courtesy BeemAn op-ed by Edgar Allen BeemMy checkered journalism career came to an abrupt end in the summer of 2023 when the weekly Portland Phoenix ceased publication. I started writing for Maine newspapers as a 16-year-old high school student in 1965, so it is a little strange to be put out to pasture at 75.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Al Diamon |Samuel James |Katy Finch |Bob Bergeron
Pink slimeLet’s suppose — for quirky, possibly psychotic reasons —you wanted to know how much money was spent in Franklin County on women’s collegiate football in 2023. Only one Maine media outlet has dared to reveal this shocking statistic. Not the Portland Press Herald. Not the Bangor Daily News. Not a single one of the state’s TV stations. According to a website by something called Metric Media, the answer is zero dollars. And it was zero the year before.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Samuel James |Al Diamon |Katy Finch |Bob Bergeron
Will’s GutMaine’s Bailey Island is part of the town of Harpswell, and it’s known for a lot of things. Carl Jung gave his first American lecture at the Bailey Island Library Hall in 1936. Bailey Island is also the home of the only cribstone bridge in the world, a cobwork design built in 1928 to withstand rough tides. The bridge connects Bailey Island to neighboring Orr’s Island over a body of water called Will’s Gut.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Samuel James |Leo Hylton |Al Diamon |Katy Finch
Slavery by any other name In 1639, Virginia passed this country’s first specifically anti-Black law. It read, “All persons except Negroes are to be provided with arms and ammunitions or be fined at the pleasure of the governor and council.”Countless anti-Black laws followed and they came from every direction. For example, by the mid 1600s, so many Black children were being murdered in Virginia that something had to be done. It wasn’t just that these children were being killed.
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Apr 2, 2024 | 
thebollard.com | Al Diamon |Leo Hylton |Samuel James |Katy Finch
Angus: The “g” is silentIt’s time to project the winner in Maine’s U.S. Senate race. With zero percent of precincts reporting and the polls not scheduled to open for months, our incredibly accurate analytical program predicts incumbent Angus King, an independent (stop smirking just because he votes exactly like a Democrat), will win reelection to a third term with so many more votes than his feeble opponents that it would be a waste of time counting them.
