Author: admin

Not this one.

“A Grove Street man was reported dumping cat litter onto Grove Street from a second-floor apartment. When officers spoke to him at 11 a.m. Wednesday, the man agreed to stop dumping the litter in the street and instead throw it into a garbage bag.”

“A 21-year-old Gloucester man who was subdued by pepper spray after allegedly assaulting three police officers and a taxicab driver over the weekend while wearing only his underwear is facing multiple charges.”

“Gloucester police arrested a man in connection with a past assault during which the victim said he lost his front tooth, which was found on the ground afterward. The victim told police that the incident occurred on Rogers Street after a “difference of opinion.” “(The victim’s) mouth was bloody and had an apparent missing front tooth that he was able to find on the ground,” the police report states. “He also reported that a few other teeth were loose enough to move around with his tongue.”

“A disturbance reported at a Washington Street restaurant at 7:03 p.m. Thursday turned out to be a man talking loudly on his cell phone “trying to get someone to pay for his food,” according to police.”

“Police responded to a disturbance at a restaurant on Main Street at 12:45 p.m. Saturday. An officer on the scene reported that there was a “man face down in (a) pizza pie.”

somehow relevant.

Apparently, a patron of the Minglewood bar on Rogers Street was “making fun of” another man for wearing overalls, prompting the fight. Police responded to around 4:30 p.m. for an apparent fight. Upon arrival, Officer David D’Angelo spoke with a man who “had dried blood on his face,” according to D’Angelo’s report. This man said he had been punched in the face twice by the man wearing overalls after the two “exchanged words and profanities.” D’Angelo then caught up with the other man involved, who said the other was “making fun of him for wearing overalls.” The bartender on scene told police that the man not wearing overalls approached the overall wearer “aggressively, using threatening language.” He apparently got close to the overall wearer and that’s when he was allegedly punched.”

“Police responded to Goodwin Road for a resident reporting that a neighbor was throwing potatoes at his house. Upon arrival, the resident said “that it had been an ongoing problem as his house has been bombarded with potatoes in the past.” The resident added that it appeared to be three youths throwing the tuberous crop this time. Police went over to the neighbor’s house and the residents said “it would not happen again.”

A Gloucester man may have been seen stumbling down Pleasant Street on Thursday, but he was certainly able to run when police asked to speak with him, leading to his arrest on an active warrant.

Hello out there in G-Clam World. It’s time for another edition of Fuck It Mondays, where I collect all of the best stuff I’ve seen all week so that I don’t actually have to write 2,000 words on how people in this town need to learn to drive.

And since no one’s going to do anything tomorrow because snow and anger, here. Here y’all go.

Some Guy in Fall River Starts Shooting Cars That Were Parked In Spaces Other People Shoveled. Like one does.

this headline.

Okay, this snow is officially bullshit.

It was kind of a little fun and quaint last week for like ten minutes before the snow got in our preschooler’s mittens and he started wailing and then his snot froze to his cheek and then it was not fun anymore for anyone.

But then it happened again with the damn snow. Before we really even got a chance to deal with it. And now it’s like seven billion tons of snow and we definitely can’t deal with it now. And now we’re due to get even MORE snow? Are you SHITTING me? It already looked like my street had a terrible cocaine problem, now it’s just ludicrous.

Oh look, how cute and Rockwellian!

Oh hell to the NO.

I can’t deal with this cold white scourge. I bet you can’t, either. Remember the summer? Man the summer was rad as heck. Sure it gets a little hot once in awhile, but that’s when we jump in the ocean.

Anyway Gloucester’s a total mess now, despite the herculean effort our DPW has been making to clean up. I have officially abandoned 2 of our 3 vehicles now, and our neighbors are sharing our tiny driveway because they’ve got nowhere to go, all the street parking is gone. I’m literally running the whole family around in a 2WD, 13 year old Nissan XTerra with 205k miles on it, all-season tires (damnit) and an alternator that I can best describe as “sketchy.” My 6′ fence that keeps my annoyingly barky hound dog firmly in my yard is starting to disappear – the snow was plowed right up and over and apparently now he can waltz right over the fence and run around barking which I learned the hard way this afternoon.

I cannot deal with more snow days, either. My kids have been home for 4 days. We have played all the Mario Kart we can play (even Rainbow Road ugh), and we have LEGO’d for too hard and too long. We have nerf gun bruises and our DVR has nothing new on it. Every single glove, hat, and scarf is sopping. We can’t take much more.

I have our only solution:

We hack the island off from the mainland with a bunch of band saws and slowly row our way south.

I know, that probably sounds like crazy talk. But I talked to a guy who says his brother’s girlfriend is like totally a geologist and he told me that this plan is totes foolproof. Couple dozen band saws and a weekend’s worth of work and we’re floating down the coast. Then we just gotta get some people to row, maybe use my neighbor’s 20HP Evinrude to save some time.  We tie the greasy pole behind us with a heavy rope, wave goodbye to West Gloucester and everything up the line and motor southward.

PROS:

– Uh, it’s warmer and we won’t have snow, duh.

– Still have tourism economy and probably fishing but more the kind with long boats and spears of some type.

– We can teach the locals onshore how to make seven different kinds of greasy pizza.

– Health care!

– A 95.1% literacy rate.

CONS

– Giant Motherfucking Spiders

– It becomes really expensive to call people you still kinda have to care about but I mean there’s Skype.

– A lot of people’s bosses really mad about the increased commute time to Danvers.

As you can see, CLEARLY the benefits outweigh the downsides of such a move. So join me, Gloucester, and we shall demand this plan be set forth posthaste.

Before the next frickin’ storm. Please.

I am kind of over people being incredibly sanctimonious about football. It doesn’t help.

Facebook is a minefield on days like yesterday. You have a bunch of people that are wicked hyped up about football and love it to death, some people who get into it when the timing is right, and then people who hate it. I can understand the reasoning behind every single stance on the NFL itself and football as a sport. It’s honestly hard to tell who’s more vocal about it lately – the screaming fans or the folks so adamantly anti-football that they’re willing to call football fans any name in the book. Idiots. Sheep. I honestly can’t even repeat some of the stuff I saw on Facebook yesterday, and this is the goddamn Clam, which is pretty much a mayonnaise fetish site at this point.

Spread it on my buns. You know how I like it.

But calling football fans names and insulting their intelligence is not going to help solve any of the giant, looming problems the sport has. And it needs to stop. 

Of course, I say this as a person with a hockey-related tattoo. I’m sure everyone in high-horseville will knock twenty IQ points off their idea of me just for that, and I’ve totally lost Manic Pixie Dream Girl status with more than a few of you. I’ve got to be an absolute fucking dolt, right? Also I spent my teen and tween years in Foxboro, getting my schools paid for by ticket sales. So, biased. Obviously. Wake up, stupid!

Sports are culture, and it’s intertwined with how we live our lives. It’s not that simple. 

If you didn’t watch the game, you missed quite a fucking show. There’s no doubt about it. It was insane. It had everything, and it was only settled at the last few fucking seconds when of course, a rookie intercepts a pass and saves the damn day. Hollywood would kill for a script like that.

And I mean, Katy Perry’s Left Shark kind of won the entire night.

Here’s the rub: the inherent complexity and chess-like maneuvers of American football are not for idiots. You can watch, of course, slackjawed and with dog food for brains – but to cast the sport as something for rubes is missing the point completely. It’s a logic puzzle at times, a series of pick-your-own outcomes, and it turns out that sometimes it’s not chance, or sporting as hard as you can sport, but it’s brilliant coaching that makes the game. There are massively relatable characters on both teams. It feels fucking amazing to win. Men who have worked their whole lives for what they just accomplished celebrate on live TV, entire cities get to bask in something incredibly positive to keep the rest of the world’s shitty news at bay. Champions, baby.

The sport has major, major, glaring problems – there is no way to dance around that fact. There’s a huge, and reasonable, argument that it shouldn’t even exist because of the overarching negative health impact on the humans who play the game. I will go out on a limb and say that I don’t think kids should be playing it. We now know too much about how football can seriously hurt developing brains, and that even in high school, a player who may not even suffer a concussion can show changes in their brain with one season of play. One season. On the college level, too much money gets spent on football – taking everything to a grotesque level of admiration and hero worship, and the cover-up of absolutely awful, terrible behavior. It ends up being the farthest thing from academia one could even fathom.

On the NFL level, a blind eye towards the long-term effects of concussions on players, domestic violence, criminal activity, and racist-as-fuck team names leaves a terrible taste in a lot of mouths. There’s no painting that shit in a positive light. It’s awful. No excuses can be made for it, although there’s no lack of trying.

But here’s the thing: A sea change is coming. A wave of awareness has hit – there’s no escaping the mountains of data piling up, the news of cover-ups. Football fans and non fans know it’s bad. But the cognitive dissonance is still too vast a gulf to traverse right now, and it will take years of pushing to get change accomplished. That’s just the way it is.

Calling fans of the sport stupid is misguided and doesn’t help push for positive change at all. It just ends up being divisive, promoting backlash, and making the anti-football movement look bad. It’s like blaming Walmart employees for being poor instead of blaming fucking Walmart. And guess what? A lot of smart motherfuckers watch sports, and watch football.

It’s massively entertaining for a huge swath of our country’s population, if you’re wondering why. It’s as stimulating as a play, a movie, or an opera, at times. And almost every form of human entertainment we’ve got involves some kind of level of suffering. Look no further than what has just happened to Bobbi Kristina. Fame destroys people’s psyches. Heath Ledger. Michael Jackson. Brittany Murphy. Chris Farley. I could go on for hours. It’s not just football that leaves broken people in its wake, so singling out football fans as being stupid is disingenuous.

When you strip away its problems, the core of the sport is still deeply likable. It’s been ingrained in most of us since youth and it will not just turn off like a switch. The relationship between consumer and product with the NFL is not as symbiotic as people assume. The NFL is in charge, not the people watching – yet. It will take time, and it will take education, and it will take intense outside pressure on the league to change. And guess who needs to exert that pressure? Fans. Not the guy who wasn’t watching in the first place. If that guy not watching is a major fucking dick to the fans, it’s not going to work.

Also, go Pats.

I, for one, am sick and tired of stupid gimmicky winter storm names. They’re not hurricanes, Weather Channel. Just stop. So instead of referring to this storm as “Winter Storm Juno” (does it come with a teenage pregnancy and Michael Cera?), The Gloucester Clam declares this winter storm to be named “Your Mom.” That way we can say things like:

Your Mom at the MBTA station at midnight last night.

– Your Mom is sucking up moisture off the coast of New Jersey

– Your Mom is full of powerful winds. She’s blowing a solid 30 knots.

– The overtime necessary to plow out after Your Mom may push the city budget into the red.

– Your Mom makes me want to just stay in bed all day.

– Your Mom was so powerful they shut the schools a day in advance.

– Your Mom has been blowing all day, and looks like this may continue into a second night.

– No one in town escaped a good dumping from Your Mom!

– Your Mom is going to responsible for a lot of blackouts and probably a couple of deaths.

– A 75 year old man died of a heart attack right in the middle of Your Mom.

–  I threw out my back plowing Your Mom this morning.

– If it weren’t for Your Mom, I’d have had a productive day.

–  Your Mom is going to keep the entire DPW busy for a week.

– I’m hoping that Your Mom somehow sputters out and only gives us a few inches.

– I think the back end of Your Mom is going to hit us the hardest.

–  I’ll probably be up to my waist in Your Mom, in fact.

– Your Mom is hardest on the elderly and the disabled

– My husband’s beard will be dripping wet by the time he’s done shoveling out Your Mom.

– Your Mom is so massive she can only be seen in her entirety from a satellite.

– ACE ran out of plywood in advance of Your Mom pounding the coast.

– Please seek shelter from Your Mom in the nearest designated municipal disaster shelter.

– I’m really concerned that Your Mom is going to kill my fish.

– The liquor store was packed with people getting ready for Your Mom.

–  They are predicting major beach erosion from Your Mom’s flooding.

– I really worry when they send Al Roker to report live from inside Your Mom. He’s going to drown someday.

– The excessive cold of Your Mom could deflate the Patriots’ balls.

– I, for one, will be tackling Your Mom wearing rubber boots and gloves.

– The supermarket was out of bananas, all because of Your Mom.