Dowbrigade

This photo was on the front page of the New York Times today, and for our money is an immediate finalist for news photo of the year. Actually, a smaller, black and white version was in today’s Boston Globe, but we glanced at it and read on - it is a good example of how […]

WASHINGTON — Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois are already rewriting the script of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, driving potential Democratic rivals to the sidelines.
Trading on their star power, capacity to raise tens of millions of dollars with relative ease, and ability to dominate news media attention, the […]

Despite the season of peace and goodwill, the Dowbrigade household has for the past week been enveloped in an acute pre-Christmas crisis.
Nothing as mundane as a cash-flow shortage, or as dramatic as domestic abuse, it was mysterious and disturbing nonetheless. The baby Jesuses were missing.
A bit of background. Among her endearing qualities, which are […]

WRENTHAM — Jeffrey Cardin walked into a pub Thursday night near the modest cottage where he lived alone and told a stranger he was suffering through the worst day of his life.
He didn’t know the half of it.
Cardin, 48, said he had recently buried […]

BEIJING, Dec. 18 — A Hollywood stuntman who worked on one of the "Men in Black" films suffered serious injuries in Shanghai on Saturday when he fell off a moving car while trying to jump through a ring of fire.
Oldrich Svarousky, 48, a member of the Hollywood-based Filmka stunt group, was […]

The $35-billion market value of U.S.-grown cannabis tops that of such heartland staples as corn and hay, a marijuana activist says.
SACRAMENTO — For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America’s biggest cash crop. Now they’re citing government statistics to prove […]

FUSHUN, China — Bao Xishun, the world’s tallest man, reaches in to retrieve objects from the stomach of a sick dolphin at an aquarium in Fushun, in China’s northern Liaoning province. Bao, whose arms measure more than a meter in length, was called in by the aquarium after experts failed to surgically remove unidentified objects […]

Dark clouds are gathering over the local blogosphere.
First there were "splog" attacks, pieces of spam left in the comments area of local blogs. That was kids’ stuff. Now it appears that at least two blogs in the western suburbs have become victims of a new, scarier menace: blogjacking.
As I went digging for more information, […]

The Dowbrigade is a sucker for a bargain. On rare occasions this means we stumble onto a true, historic bargain. Even a blind pig comes up with a truffle now and again. However, much more often we wind up being taken for a sucker. Case in point.
Last week […]

Scientists have discovered an extinct animal the size of a small squirrel that lived in China at least 125 million years ago and soared among the trees. It is the earliest known example of gliding flight by mammals, and the scientists say it shows that mammals experimented with aerial life about the same time birds […]