Beem

Letter: Honor code enforcement shuns due process

Thanks to Edgar Allen Beem for last week's commentary. That a Yarmouth High School student was apparently interrogated and sentenced by school authorities for an honor-code violation without representation – all based on a Facebook photo submitted by an anonymous source – looks like a...

0 • Opinion •
Monday, April 19, 2010 at 10:10 am
What's 'A Picture's Worth' doing in Falmouth?

FALMOUTH — A Route 1shopping center seems an unlikely place to discover one of the best Maine photography shows in recent history, but that's just what "A Picture's Worth" is.

Lifestyle •
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 at 2:58 pm
'Go ahead'

Hannah Merker called me from Bristol last week to ask a few questions about how I write my columns and where I get my ideas. I told her my motto is "Make a week's pay off everyone you meet" and warned her that she might easily turn into a column. And here it is.

• Opinion •
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 at 2:43 pm
A case of hibernal torpor

Subnivian – now there's a word I'd never heard, let alone used, until I started reading Bernd Heinrich's "Winter World," a wonderful natural history about how animals survive the winter. The word isn't even among the 260,000 in my "Unabridged Random House Dictionary of the Engl...

• Opinion •
Wednesday, March 11, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Rising to a level of incompetence

Has anyone else begun to suspect that the Peter Principle is hard at work in America? With all the other trendy theories that have passed through our culture in the past 40 years (Remember Total Quality Management? Remember when we thought the Japanese had all the answers? Now we've got Malcolm Glad...

• Opinion •
Monday, February 16, 2009
Maine Turnpike: 109 miles of highway robbery

When I woke up this morning I was in the midst of a recurring reverie in which I become a folk hero by leading a popular revolt against the Maine Turnpike Authority.

Mo Mehlsak • Opinion •
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 8:13 am
pnms-beem-020409 You're only as old as you look

For the first time in my life, the president of the United States is younger than I am. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are my rough contemporaries. They would have been seniors when I was a freshman, but I was 12 years old when Barack Obama was born. That was 1961, the year Roger Maris hi...

• Opinion •
Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 8:50 am
pnms-beem Speaking of Lincoln, Kennedy, King and Obama

Barack Obama is the President of the United States today (and amen to that) primarily because he is a brilliant orator. He possesses the power and the persona to make people pay attention and to believe in what he says. He literally talked his way into the White House. So I must admit that I wa...

Mo Mehlsak • Opinion •
Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 8:43 am
pnms-beem-012109 The economic crisis is all in our heads

According to the Social Security Administration, in 1980 I had a taxable income of $24. That paltry sum must have been interest income as I was employed at the Portland Public Library at the time and, therefore, was on the state retirement system and not paying into Social Security. In 1981, ho...

• Opinion •
Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 9:48 am
pnms-beem-011409 Advertisements for myself (and others)

My new book arrived today. Although it will be a few weeks before it hits the bookstores, "Backyard Maine: Local Essays" (Tilbury House, Publishers, $15) is a collection of columns from The Forecaster masquerading as a book. I wanted to call it "The Universal Notebook: Scribbling for ...

• Opinion •
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 8:11 am