Mark LaFlamme: James Earl Jones must hate the new baseball rules

Street Talk: Major League Baseball is tampering with tradition all over the place, and in a variety of perverse ways.

Mark LaFlamme: Lost ladies find their way home

Street Talk: Maybe someone will write a folk song about Maine's lost ladies. Someone should. 

Mark LaFlamme: 21 years of blither

Street Talk: It's downright strange to me that a person sitting next to me, drinking legally at a bar, could have been born the year I started writing Street Talk.

Mark LaFlamme: Abused feline has found a home, wanted in another

Street Talk: For the cat named Harlow, the long road to recovery was just beginning. But for the young woman who rescued the animal, all that awaited was frustration.

Mark LaFlamme: Victims are awaiting justice and finding it lacking

Mark LaFlamme: Alcohol: The forgotten drug epidemic

Street Talk: Where a substance like fentanyl is apt to drop a man where he stands in his dreamy nod, liquor takes its time; a cat toying with a field mouse before delivering the fatal blow.

Mark LaFlamme: A beloved fire investigator is leaving, and reporting will never be the same

Street Talk: At every fire scene I went to in Lewiston over the years, the first guy I looked for was Paul Ouellette.

Mark LaFlamme: Editors ain’t so bad . . .

Street Talk: Editors have the magic to make bad writing good and to make good writing better. When they're not sending you off to do stupid stuff, that is. 

Mark LaFlamme: Lewiston-Auburn police radios remain silent — for us

Street Talk: It's been a year-and-a-half of police radio silence now in the Twin Cities. In other parts of the country, compromises have been reached but in Lewiston-Auburn, police have dug in their heels.

Mark LaFlamme: Out with the old, in with the new

Street Talk: Moving just down the road a sneeze from 104 Park to 64 Lisbon St.