I’ve got a clunker in my garage that my family would love to see me get rid of. It’s got a dead battery, needs a new catalytic converter, and now the hood latch doesn’t work so it takes pliers to open it up. You’d think I would be eligible for […]
I am easily impressed by famous people. I always feel like it is some big deal when I sit near somebody who a bunch of people know, or pass by someone more famous than I am. Chris Collingwood is a founding member of Fountains of Wayne, a band that gets […]
I remember a friend of my sisters who farmed in Arizona laughing when we showed him our rain collecting tank. “With so much rain here, why would you possibly need that?” he laughed. We felt like we were doing ‘the right thing’ but the fact is our east coast water […]
Aggie Roberts is the Music Man of the Jersey Shore. His ice cream shop on Grand Central Avenue in Lavallette packs them in seven days a week. While serving ice cream treats, a troupe of singers dances and clowns with the crowd for an hour of fun. There’s nothing quite […]
What could be more exciting when you’re a little kid who has to go to bed at 7 to stay up way, way really late and go on all the rides you want while the ocean crashes just below? We took two little tykes and one little baby (who slept […]
WOW! That’s how I remember last night’s Green River Festival. It was a beautiful night, with many friends, colleagues, aquaintances and fabulous music, all beneath a gentle summer night that ended with five enormous balloons being filled with hot air, lit up with their firestacks blasting into the nylon billows. […]
It’s been at least five years since I last bought a ticket to the Green River Festival, happening this Saturday on the lawns of Greenfield Community College. I remember this as an important event in the Valley, sort of a marker of summer. But I’ve spent so much time down […]
Daniel Whitten reported on Bloomberg about one of my favorite oilman…wind-power promoter T. Boone. “Billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens said today that he is delaying, not canceling, a $10 billion wind energy project in Texas.” The so-called Pampa project will be postponed until 2013 when Texas is expected to complete […]
The last time I wrote about Venus & the Cellar Bar, I got many comments from people interested in this new Easthampton restaurant. I have been wanting to go back and sample the cuisine, and tonight was a grand occasion to do so–my parents were visiting. Here is my earlier […]
I joined 35,475 other Red Sox fans at the 503rd consecutive sell-out at Fenway last night. Despite the impressive record, I was surprised at how many desperate looking ticket scalpers greeted me along Yawkey Way. I held an extra ticket myself, and didn’t think I’d be able to unload it […]
It’s great to be back to my beloved cafe and to GoNOMAD. I got a message on Facebook from another Iranian friend named Solmaz who I met while I was there. She has no qualms about posting controversial pro-revolution materials, as indicated by this cartoon she posted. Funny, when I […]
We made it to the tiny town of Brix, in Normandy’s La Manche, a peninsula that makes up the western side of the province. Our trip from the seaside village of Barneville-Carteret took us past many tall hedgerows, behind which were rows of corn and wheat. At the end of […]