Bostworld

The day after Christmas, my wife and I attended a hockey game at the Jobing.com Arena. This state-of-the-art facility stands adjacent to something called the “Westgate City Center.” On what was once a quiet corner in Glendale is now erected this new mall “concept:” a pre-fab fake “town,” surrounded by lots of freshly bulldozed, freeway-accessible [...]

When I was growing up, nobody could explain my grandfather’s job to me. Even when I was an adult, my mom couldn’t really tell me what he did for a living. I knew he was a Shriner, because I saw his hats. I knew he liked to collect restaurant menus, because I saw the blog [...]

These days, the songwriting/production team of Chris Arnold, David Martin and Geoff Morrow is probably best known for giving us Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You,” and for bubblegum singles like Edison Lighthouse’s “It’s Up To You Petula” and Domino’s “Have You Had A Little Happiness Lately” (featuring Tony Burrows). They also wrote for Elvis [...]

Like so many guys my age, I made my first connection with male sexual identity in the back of mass-market magazines like “True Detective” and “Man’s Adventure.” Naturally, I was drawn to the so-called “adult” content in these tiny sidebar ads, but what strikes me now is how juvenile they are, and how devoid of [...]

I haven’t been to Chicago in over a dozen years, but I still have my memories. Unfortunately, most of them involve trying driving around the club trying to find safe legal parking for two vans and a trailer. So the next best thing for me are these postcards from my grandfather’s collection, some of which [...]

I’ve loved Jack Cole’s work ever since I first saw it — probably in an old DC Special or Super Spectacular from back in the seventies. Or perhaps it was in the books by Jules Feiffer or Les Daniels. I’ve been happily binging on Plastic Man, thanks to 8 volumes devoted to the stretchy supersleuth [...]

God bless America’s secularized public school system for teaching generations of students the proper habits of good citizenship, public safety and personal hygiene. But don’t count out the scores of church schools who had their heavy hands in the game as well. Sure, they had a lock on the materials devoted strictly to religious instruction, [...]