We all make difficult choices on a daily basis: Do I make someone else assemble, cook and drive a pizza to my front door by ordering it from my smartphone or my tablet? Do I get together with my friends in a Google+ hangout or on Skype? Do I walk all the way to the end of the driveway to get the mail or should I just have my iServant do it? Apple admittedly hasn’t developed…

 Strong vegetables elicit strong opinions. They’re either loved or hated, with very few people taking the middle ground. Beets fall into that love ’em or hate ’em category, with their intense, earthy flavor and outrageous color. It’s only fair to disclose that I’ve been a beet hater for most of my vegetable-eating life. Growing up, my experience…

Check out the playful new exhibit at the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen gallery

Stop by the True Brew Barista on Feb. 1 for a night of warm hearts and cold butts, as a handful of brave souls take a seat on a chair made of ice and shed their clothes to help raise money for Special Olympians. The third annual Ice Sit will be held from 5:30-7:30 p.m. and will feature an assortment of ice sitters – celebrity and otherwise – who will strip down in the name of charity (not a stripper named Charity) to raise money for the Concord’s Coolest Special Olympics Penguin Plunge team. How chilly the participants get is entirely up to you – clothing is removed…

 Jan. 29, 1896: Concord’s first Walker lecture (on Abraham Lincoln, by former Massachusetts governor John Long) is held at White’s Opera House. Money left to the city by Abigail Walker made the lectures possible. They continue to this day. Jan. 29, 1942: Local stores report an early casualty of war: toilet paper. Most stores have sold out. They attribute the run on toilet paper to hoarding. Many set a limit of two rolls per customer. Jan. 29, 2001: Jerry Madden, a 21-year veteran of the Concord Police Department, is promoted to chief. “I think it’s wonderful,”…

 This week the Grammarmatrix looks at some juicy words which were used last week to fully express ideas in the Insider: inimitable, cache, titular and of course more awesomer. Did you already know these words? Maybe you were able to glean their meaning from the context of their sentences. Perhaps you had to look them up? There’s no shame in that; the Grammarmatrix looks up words all the time! And that’s what this article is all about – dictionaries! The most prestigious and detailed dictionary ever made is the Oxford English Dictionary. The idea came about because some…