J.P. Devine: Pass the macaroni salad Watching the darkness spread on TV while eating dinner, J.P. Devine ponders the calamities in store for Maine and the world. Share For years, we watched NBC 6:30 news before dinner. Those were the good old days, the George H.W. Bush days, the Barack Obama days. We’d have nuts and cheese, a sip of wine, and then sit down to dinner at seven or eight, like those fashionable people in L.A. who would invite us outliers to dinner because I had just started writing for the Los Angeles Times. Long ago and far away.