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Stewart’s shops are part of our Capital District culture. Philadelphians have their Wawa stores, but everybody knows Stewart’s is superior. Well, technically, if you’re from up here, it’s not truly “Stewart’s.” It’s “Storts.” Pronounced as one six-letter word. Stewart’s offers a series of beverage “refreshers,” 20-ounce plastic bottles of milk and teas and the like.…

You know what today is? Yes, it’s Cinco de Mayo. 5th of May. Mexican Independence Day, let’s all drink beer and wear sombreros! No. Wrong. Stop. Ugh. First off, how many times have holidays been corrupted into excuses to drink? St. Patrick’s Day, I’m looking right at you. Yeah, you too, New Year’s Eve. The…

Yesterday, just because everyone should do this at least once a year, I went to my Facebook blocked list and looked it over. I currently have 21 people blocked on Facebook. Blocked in that they can’t contact me, can’t see what I write, and can’t hassle me. How long will they remain blocked? For as…

Last year, I wrote a blog post about finding this little treasure, a bottle of Star Wars: The Mandalorian hand sanitizer. Which I thought was kind of cute. I mean, you get your hands clean, and you’ve got the cute little image of Grogu / The Child / Baby Yoda on the package. That was,…

Follow along with me. It’s April 2017, and the Times Union and I just had our major schism. As I left, I requested my archives, so that I could import them into a new chuckthewriter.blog portal. They eventually sent the archives to me. And I uploaded the archives to the new blog portal. And the…

In an unexpected turn of events that no one saw coming, NBC has announced that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been tapped to host the April 10th edition of Saturday Night Live, replacing Carey Mulligan, who had to drop out due to a very recently disclosed scheduling conflict. Cuomo, who has been battling various…

Several years ago, I spent Monday nights playing competitive team trivia at Revolution Hall in Troy, and Marc Pallozzi was the co-host of those highly competitive events. A few months later, he joined me on my own Street Academy trivia team, and he was on the squad when Street Academy won the second of our…

Arguably, one of the most potent authors of my youth was Beverly Cleary. All those great stories with Ramona and Beezus, the Quimby sisters; Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy; and a mouse that rode a tiny motorcycle. These were stories about kids just being kids. Lots of amazing stories that are still fun to…

Well, this seems to be some news. Apparently the Canadian Pacific Railway is in major talks with the Kansas City Southern Railroad for a merger. This would create the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railroad, which would be the first rail service to operate entirely within Canada, the USA and Mexico. That’s something impressive. And it…

If you’ve read my blog for any discernible period of time, you know that there are times when I’ve gone through some personal challenges. Essentially, having a really bad day. When I had a really bad day in ninth grade – for example, that one time when I got off the bus and there were…