Hard to believe another week has ended and once again I’ve escaped the swine flu. With all the media carpet bombing by the fly boys and girls of television and our own earnest NPR reporters, I thought I was a goner for a while. For fear of touching door handles, people stalled and jammed at [...]

With the fabulous bike-ro-phone invented by engineer Tim Skoog. The patent involved getting a hockey helmet from the Goodwill and equipping it with a microphone on the face guard that sits about an inch from one’s mouth; to limit wind distortion the microphone is covered with blue fake fur from the arm of a stuffed [...]

No, it’s not the Depression, as the latest unemployment numbers for Massachusetts—7.8 percent—indicate and economists remind us. But that’s little consolation for those who are out of work and can’t find full time jobs that fit their qualifications.
We’ve heard from a lot of people this week. One caller, a recent college graduate, tells us he’s [...]

Last summer, the numbers didn’t look so good. Then last fall, the financial markets started melting down, Wall Street cratered. Then, economists occasionally started saying the word “recession” under their breath.
It didn’t become official until December — meantime those same economists started saying that this recession would be “tough” and “difficult.”
I kept thinking to myself, [...]