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From the UMass Lowell Office of Public Affairs: “First-year students are officially welcomed to the university community at Convocation on Tuesday, Aug. 31 at 10 a.m. at the Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell. The keynote speaker is Bill Strickland, winner of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ and more than 10…
Read More »The National Park Service has opened a $27 million visitor center overlooking the famous “Old Faithful” geyser at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Today’s NYTimes reports on the “cathedral to the shrine of nature.” We can be proud that Lowell is on the same distinguished list of important American places…
Read More »The following link takes you to a pretty useful summary of President Obama’s remarks on Sunday during an interview with Brian Williams of NBC-TV news. The report is by Tom Kavanaugh of AOL. What the President says reverberates in our local and state election campaigns this fall. The agenda put…
Read More »“Swedish actor Warner Oland poses as Charlie Chan in 1937” (web photo courtesy of time.com) No week goes by without a mention of Lowell’s Jack Kerouac in the major media outlets. Yesterday, the new Time magazine arrived in the mail. On page 65, there’s a review of scholar Yunte Huang’s book…
Read More »We’ve had a Netflix subscription for several years and use it mostly to compress a season of “Mad Men” or “Friday Night Lights” into a week rather than several months. But once in a while a movie will come to my attention and I’ll stick it in the queue. Eventually…
Read More »web photo courtesy of washingtonpost.com I saw the aerial-view pictures of the “restore America’s values” rally in Washington, D.C. The organizers and attendees deserve credit for an impressive looking gathering. A lot of people. They put their shoes on and showed up to make a point and pump themselves up. The…
Read More »In September 2001, my wife and son for the first time picked grapes to make jelly from the venerable vine that crawls all over our modest backyard arbor. We had been coaxing the vine back to health for a couple of years before we got a large enough yield. In…
Read More »Fellow blogger Nancye Tuttle just returned from Atlanta and posted the following report on her own blog, Nancye’s World, and has allowed us to repost it here: I recently returned from Atlanta – or Hotlanta as my brother-in-law calls it. Indeed, it was hot and steamy there last week. But…
Read More »One of our regular readers, writer and poet Jacquelyn Malone, shows up today as a contributor. Jackie is living in Lowell for the second time around; she was here during the high-tech boom of the late ’70s and into the ’80s. I was introduced to her work in the ’80s…
Read More »Writing about the upcoming Bread & Roses Festival in Lawrence sent me to the vault for this poem written in the late 1970s, when I first encountered the political puppeteers and bakers in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Coincidentally for our blog community here, this poem was selected by Tom Sexton (before I knew who…
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