Larry the K's Lineup

  As the pandemic approaches its two-year mark, there’s no question that pandemic fatigue is understandably real, and we should all be encouraged by what appears to be --- yet again --- a sharp drop in COVID-19 cases across the country. That cautious optimism is good news, though we should never forget that the United States' death toll from the virus stands at 928,000 and counting at this writing. Still, it's good news that many states are easing their vaccine and masking mandates, but opponents of those mandates have time and again overstepped the bounds of decency in their opposition, by threatening the lives of local officials, becoming a public nuisance by holding loud protests outside officials’ homes and by assaulting flight attendants, among other questionable tactics. But one of the most despicable overreaches has been the comparisons   of those mandates to the Holocaust --- not only by people who, by making that comparison, showed their ignorance about the Holocaust...

With 3G mobile phone service about to be either vastly reduced or eliminated altogether in March, depending on where you live, most people like myself who still had “dumb” flip phones had no choice but to finally upgrade their phone. I did just that in January, and the transition has been a gradual one, though I’m slowly getting accustomed to my new phone. This column describes my, at times, bumpy transition from my old 3G phone to my new 5G one. This column was published in the February 2022 edition of Jewish Rhode Island of Providence, RI: Over the years, I’ve had to adapt to many new computer systems, and I’ve always taken a practical approach: Expect glitches and take what the people doing the instruction say with skepticism --- especially when their presentation makes even the simplest operations seem a lot more complicated than need be. One of my first experiences with that phenomenon was while serving as the managing editor of a weekly newspaper in Titusville, Fla., in the...

  Longtime readers of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA, are intimately familiar with the sports stories, features and columns of Peter Gobis, who was the face of the newspaper’s sports department for the last half-century, and with very good reason. Over the last 50 years, Gobis did his best --- and then some --- to make sure that the exploits of the Attleboro area’s young athletes were remembered by his dedicated coverage of local sports. But, like football and New England Patriots fans will have to adjust to life without future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady after he retired on Feb. 1 after 22 years, readers of The Sun Chronicle are adjusting to life after Gobis, who also retired on the same day. I worked with Gobis for nearly 30 of those 50 years, and saw firsthand the hard work and perseverance that he always brought to his job. As a tribute to the GOAT of local sports writers, I’d like to share this column that I wrote to honor Peter. This column was published Monda...

Here are three sports thoughts on timely topics: the baseball lockout, David Ortiz' election to the Baseball Hall of Fame and fans continuing to bash Tom Brady for leaving them out of his first retirement post: ******* Baseball fans being taken for granted The owners and players are showing that they don't really give a damn about baseball’s fans, as their labor impasse drags on and on. In the greater Boston area, Red Sox' fans' equivalent of Groundhog Day --- Truck Day --- has already been stolen from us. Yes, the departure of the Boston Red Sox' equipment truck leaving Fenway Park in early February is a silly tradition, but it's one that's always made Red Sox fans feel as if spring were that much closer. But not this year, thanks to the lockout and protracted half-hearted negotiations between the players and owners. On a more serious note, spring training and the season are now both in jeopardy, thanks to the owners' and players' stupidity. It'...

  Those of us who witnessed Tom Brady’s seemingly routine comebacks from deficits in his 20 years with the New England Patriots, both in the regular season and the playoffs, came to take them for granted. But of all of Brady’s comebacks, his greatest one, on Feb. 5, 2017, in Super Bowl LI against the Atlanta Falcons, was one that no one except the most diehard of Patriots fans thought would happen. That’s because, after a lackluster first half during which the Pats trailed the Falcons 21-3, the deficit grew to 28-3 --- 25 points or FOUR scores (three TDs with two-point conversions and a field goal) --- with 8:31 left in the third quarter. I spent most of that time listening to the game on radio, and like most fans, I was stunned by the score. But I had to write an editorial on the game for Tuesday’s edition, so I basically wrote one based on what I thought would be an embarrassing loss until I paused my writing after the Pats scored a TD to make it 28-9 (the extra point was mis...

As unlikely as it seemed two years ago when Tom Brady was fixing to become a free agent and leave the New England Patriots after his 20-year career, Brady --- by leaving the NFL behind before he’s forced to quit due to a catastrophic injury --- wound up beating Father Time. After leaving the Patriots in mid-March of 2020, he got two more seasons in the NFL while playing quarterback at an extremely high level and winning an unprecedented seventh Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2021. He then followed that up by coming very close to going to an 11 th Super Bowl this year when he led the Bucs back from a 27-3 halftime deficit in the Divisional Round against the Los Angeles Rams. (The Rams beat the Bucs 30-27 on a field goal as time expired, and will be in Super Bowl LVI against the Cincinnati Bengals on their home turf on Sunday, Feb. 13 after beating the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, Jan. 30.) But Brady, who retired on Tuesday (Feb. 1) after the news leaked prematurely ...

The Blizzard of 2022, as I write this in the late afternoon of the first day of the storm (Saturday, Jan. 29), has lived up to its hype, dropping upwards of nearly 2 feet so far on many parts of the Attleboro area, according to various reports, including from The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, MA. Here's one person's Blizzard Journal, from Jan. 29 and Jan. 30, followed by an aftermath: ********* DAY 1: AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY Early-morning hours to about 10:30 a.m. --- I look outside several times and by 10:30, with the storm really ramping up, I decide to start this snow day in earnest and venture outside. 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. ---  I find about 6 inches of snow on my walkway, and I shovel it as the winds intensify and whiteout conditions are starting to take hold. Despite not seeing a plow since about 2:30 a.m., when they did a sweep of my cul-de-sac, I try to walk-jog on the cul-de-sac. Big mistake! It was slow going doing the quarter-mile heading out, but conditions turned impos...

As the nation approaches the beginning of its third year of the coronavirus pandemic, and with nearly 870,000 Americans having died from COVID-19 since the pandemic’s start, we’re increasingly looking for some good news --- and the return of the Attleboro Arts Museum’s Flower Show for the first time since 2019 certainly qualifies as that. The show had to be canceled the last two years, and the cancellation was especially bitter in 2020, as it happened just a few days before the show was set to open and right after Massachusetts went into lockdown. The museum was shut down for three months after that cancellation, but has been able to stay open ever since with a combination of virtual and in-person exhibits that operated according to COVID-19 protocols. The flower show was canceled last year as well, although an art exhibit was held. Museum officials began planning for the show’s return in 2022 last summer, and to their credit, they were able to announce last week that the show, with so...

My friend and colleague at The Sun Chronicle, Staff Writer George Rhodes, has a knack for telling the most inspiring, comprehensive and amazing stories about World War II veterans. All of the veterans profiled by Rhodes have had incredible stories to share about that time in world history when the entire world was involved in a struggle to defend freedom, but Rhodes has outdone himself with his latest story. His story on a Foxboro man, Franciszek "Frank" Zaleski, may be the most compelling story he's written yet on World War II. Not only was Rhodes able to get a three-hour interview with this Polish resistance fighter on Jan. 17 --- his 100th birthday--- but this courageous man passed away just two days after the interview, in which he told his harrowing story of leading Polish resistance fighters against Nazis during the most terrifying days of the Nazis' reign of terror across Europe. This editor's note sets the scene for Rhodes' story. After that, click on ...

Memo to the 60-plus million unvaccinated Americans who are so fond of saying they're making a "personal choice." Your "personal choice" is not only selfish and misguided --- unless you have a legitimate medical exemption --- but it's endangering millions of lives, and not just from COVID-19. And that's not only because your choice is helping to spread the coronavirus, nor is it because by not getting vaccinated, you're very likely going to come down with far more serious bouts of COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated and boosted. No, with the vast majority of people who are hospitalized with COVID remaining unvaccinated, that "personal choice" is not only playing a major role in pushing hospitals to the brink, but it's also endangering the lives of thousands of patients who need serious, but not necessarily life-threatening, surgeries. As the Boston Globe reported last week, many hospitals, in the midst of this COVID surge, are making ...