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Music! Music! Music! By Leo Racicot The very first music concert I attended was at Freedomland, an amusement park in The Bronx. My sister, Diane and I, were in White Plains, New York visiting our aunt, uncle and cousins for three weeks in the summer of 1962. One of the acts…
Read More »A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. Article: “AI’s Market Dominance comes With a Warning” by Jeff Sommer, New York Times, July 12, 2026 – This is the “Strategies” column in the Business section. Despite relatively high inflation driven by tariffs and the war…
Read More »Mother Earth Grumbles – PIP #111 By Louise Peloquin “Peeks into the Past” #11 and #54 were a sampling of a local newspaper’s coverage of climate concerns. (1) As the summer of 2026 is punctuated by horrifying images of extreme weather all over the globe, these two stories…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Bay State Democrats have arranged themselves in a circular firing squad, leaving voters to choose between a senator who is old (80) but effective, or a congressman who is younger (47)– and gratuitously snide. Monday night’s televised debate…
Read More »There was no city council meeting this week so today we have more Lowell political history . . . **** Over the course of four weeks earlier this summer, I posted mini biographies of those who have served as mayors of Lowell since the receipt of the city charter in…
Read More »What Haberman and Swan’s New Trump Book Gets Right Rev. Steve Edington [Text of this op-ed as it ran in the July 17, 2026, issue of the New Hamshire Union Leader] I tried to purchase a copy of Maggie Haberman’s and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change at my local Barnes &…
Read More »My wife Rosemary and I live in a townhouse condo atop a former ski slope in Amesbury, Mass., just uphill from the compact but busy downtown. Called Powwow Hill for the original residents in this area, the 330-foot hill is crowned with a small public park and woods that…
Read More »Amusement Parks of the 1960s By Leo Racicot Canobie Lake Park in Salem, New Hampshire, was a favorite getaway for families seeking escape from city life, the daily grind, especially on weekends. Marie took us there many times over the years in her Rambler. It was a quick trip over…
Read More »A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. Book Review: Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs by Antony Beevor (2026). Earlier this year a glowing review of this book caught my attention and, since I’m already a big Antony Beevor fan (he’s a military historian…
Read More »Forest Fires – PIP #110 By Louise Peloquin American media have largely covered the unprecedented inferno consuming southern Europe. From January to the end of July, wildfires destroyed approximately 287,000 acres in France. In the Gironde region, over 220,000 people were forced to evacuate. Mayor Thomas Cazenave of Bordeaux,…
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