Red faced Got a message from a nice lady who enjoyed my Wednesday column “Sympathy for the Dope Sick.” Such gushing praise. It went like this: “I usually can’t even make it halfway through your columns. They’re silly, stupid and they don’t make any sense. Not good. But this one was.” Aww. I’m blushing. You […]
Mark LaFlamme
Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Mark LaFlamme
Street Talk: Sympathy for the dope sick
The aching is intense and it is everywhere. It’s there in your legs, humming like a million angry volts. It’s in your back, too, a constant band of pain you can’t put out of your mind for even a few seconds. It’s hard to say which is worse, the roaring ache in your bones or […]
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Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
The runaway hair and other capers
Tell it like it is Heard a police call the other night during which some downtown ne’er-do-well was reported to be acting strangely in the narrow dark between tenement buildings. The first cop to arrive in the area totally dispensed with the legal mumbo jumbo and tedious 10 codes and reported that the shady suspect […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
The weeping 12-year-old is fine. Probably.
It was just after midnight on a drizzling, cold and miserable Friday night in Lewiston. The call came in after a long period of silence over the police scanner. Somewhere on College Street, a boy of 11 or 12 had been spotted barefoot, coatless and weeping on a cold, wet sidewalk. There was nothing frantic […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
We're going to need a bigger boat
April showers The last time I complained about dreary, wet, gloomy, lousy, rotten, vaguely fish-smelling April weather, the day the column ran it was sunny bright and T-shirt warm. Clearly, I have powers you mortals can’t even comprehend. You don’t even know, man. So in hopes of sparking another warm, sunny weekend for us all, […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
These are the words they don't want you to read
For many years now, I’ve had great fun inserting certain words into my news stories and columns in order to make an editor’s head pop off. Great fun, I say. On a quiet day, you can actually hear the delicious sound of cranial detachment as the editor in question stumbles upon the verboten word. POP, […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Despite the lack of snow, there were plenty of flakes
Probed It’s kind of funny that the Facebook privacy revelations are such big news right now. Are people really that stunned to learn that social media is a privacy nightmare? That’s like being surprised by what occurs during a colonoscopy. I mean, what did you THINK was going to happen? It happened one night Late […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Talk of the town: Stop that laughing!
War in the streets Last Thursday, several people alerted me to a planned citywide snowball fight scheduled to start at 10 p.m. at Bartlett and Walnut streets in Lewiston. Seriously, a snowball fight. Starting at 10 p.m. In downtown Lewiston. I scoffed at this idea. Sneered at it. Rolled my eyeballs all the way around […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Street Talk: Don't mess with Jesse
The very moment I heard Jesse’s name uttered at the scene of the crash, I knew I had a big story on my hands. It is news when anybody gets hit by a car, but this was Jesse Kontoes lying there in a heap on the cold, slushy street. This was a local icon. A […]
Posted inMark LaFlamme, sj-web
Talk of the town: Say it like you mean it
He went that-a-way A police foot chase one recent night came to an end right next to the Wendy’s drive-through window on Center Street in Auburn. See? This is exactly why, if I was a crook, I’d keep a red-headed pigtail wig and some fake freckles as a disguise. As it turns out, I already […]