Business experts say sound personnel management is the key to surviving tough times. These are the same business experts whose current advice on “best practices” is “Your business sucks–if you switched to making kids wooden arrows you could get a government handout.”

The kids are getting older--they're in high school now--and with summer jobs and college campus visits, every year it's harder to squeeze in the special family time of aggravation and bickering we used to experience during summer vacations.

"We need to get away and just do it," my wife sai

Today is the 74th anniversary of Raymond Carver's birth.  Carver, who died at the age of 50 in 1988, was a writer who produced poems that were like short stories, and short stories that were like poems.  He probably didn't lengthen his time on earth by the heavy drinkin

CUMMING, Georgia.  At first, Tiffany Marie Shoemaker and Naomi Wingate were getting along fine at a Mary Kay Cosmetics party at a friend’s house in this exclusive Atlanta suburb last Thursday night.

Mary Kay Party

“Naomi has a little girl, and so do I, so we we

WATERTOWN, Mass.  Spiro “Patsy” Theokratis has been the owner-operator of a railroad car diner in this near suburb of Boston for over forty years, but he can still remember the first dollar he made the day he opened his doors.  “Guy come in for a cup of cof

BOSTON.  Jed Kraznow "had a good run," in his words, as a slightly lumpy but loveable teenager appearing in several direct-to-video gross-out films that appealed primarily to the all-important adolescent male demographic, including "I Saw You Scratch Yourself" and "Farthammer II."  "I was

There are certain critical moments in human history at which, had events unfolded differently, our lives today would be changed, changed utterly, beyond all recognition.

 
Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated on his way to the Gap to buy pleated pants.

Assassinations of heads of

Legend has it that one day in 1936 a 16-year-old girl named Julia Jean Mildred Francis Turner decided to skip typing class at Hollywood High School and went to the Top Hat Cafe on Sunset Boulevard for a Coca-Cola.  There she was noticed by William Wilkerson, publisher o

GREEN RIDGE, Mo.  Eunice Holcomb has long been a valued employee at the Swift Poultry Processing plant in this idyllic town in central Missouri that features a horseshoe pit on the town square and not one but two full-time village idiots.  "I have been employee of the month at least

So you've recovered from your last affair, and are ready to re-enter the dating scene.  As any astronaut will tell you, re-entry is the most treacherous part of the job, with temperatures reaching several hundred degrees Celsius even before you get back to your place.  Here are a

Today’s top business story:  Bruno Michel Iksil, a trader nicknamed the “London Whale,” may have caused J.P. Morgan Chase to lose $2.3 billion.  This makes the $1.3 billion that Nick Leeson cost England’s Barings in 1995 look like pocket change.

“S

I came upon a jar in Southie,
With salsa was it filled.
It sat within a sidewalk square,
A centerpiece on a table bare.

The barren land fell all away
and left it there in low relief.
The jar was round upon the ground
and sat alone beside D Street.

I was on a

Every year, there are fewer banks because of bank failures, industry consolidation and Japanese movie monsters such as Godzilla, who go on rampages and crush small to medium-sized community lenders.  As a result, consumers are increasingly at a disadvantage in their search for pens ch

Saturday night in Boston, and my boyhood friend Mad Dog is in town. Normally I take such an opportunity for a guy's night out at one of Beantown's four major league sports venues, but this time Mrs. Dog is with him, and my wife has put