This week the Grammarnator takes a moment to mourn the passing of two handy words: “there are.” They seem to have been replaced everywhere by “there’s.” Had I been keeping a list during the last year of all the times I’ve read and heard “there’s” when it should have been “there are,” the number might be in triple digits. The example in the Insider last week popped up in the first paragraph of the informative article about downtown art, which told me that “there’s some talented people running around the city.” I’m sure that if the writer had eschewed the contraction,…

Last week at the Steeplegate Mall, Santa spent some quality time with his furry friends during animal night. These photos, sent to us from reader Jane Toumpas show Santa with Tony Soprano Pony and Sullivan O'Toumpas, the black Lab. Santa got hungry, so Sullivan shared his rubber chicken.

Stealing from the Salvation Army kettle On Dec. 14, about 1 p.m, Officer Matthew Nelson was dispatched to Market Basket on Ft. Eddy Road to assist the Concord Fire Department with a Salvation Army bell ringer who appeared intoxicated and was acting strangely. When Nelson arrived, he saw a man, later identified as John Fitzpatrick, 46, of Concord walking away from the firefighters and heard him say, “Leave me alone.” Nelson followed Fitzpatrick through the parking lot and could smell an “obvious odor of alcohol” coming from Fitzpatrick, who appeared unsteady on his feet, Nelson wrote.…

A while back, reader Jim Place from Penacook e-mailed us the following: “I have a question about the trucks picking up our recycling. In Concord we’re supposed to separate paper and cardboard from cans and bottles, but I noticed that they are all dumped into one bin on the truck and mixed together in the truck. Why separate?” Well, Jim Place from Penacook, we would have gotten back to you sooner but we were busy dividing up our empty eggnog cartons from our bare bottles of rum. And when we weren’t doing that, we were drinking the said eggnog and rum. Sick of the creamy spiked beverage,…

Dear Casper and Bill, I need to get my boyfriend’s parents a snazzy Christmas present but I’m stumped. They’re pretty wealthy and seem to have everything they need. Any ideas of something small and sweet to get for them this holiday season? Dear stumped-no-more: We have the perfect solution to relieve you of deciding on something useless think about this. I’m only 5’ 6” ..considered…

I’m sitting in the airplane on my way to North Carolina. It’s great – not just the plane, but this whole journey. The U.S. is so big and I’m just very happy to say that I have already visited five states. It may sound very fancy when people from Europe talk about all the countries they have visited, but it’s not! I just need one hour to the Netherlands and two hours to Paris with the car. London is just…