RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Tour de France 2026 – Last Stage

Tour de France 2026 – Last Stage

By Louise Peloquin

On July 4th, the Tour de France took off from Barcelona for the first time, and offered spectators a magnificent view of cyclists whizzing by Antoni Gaudí’s  Sagrada Familia.

courtesy AFP

     This brief is for readers who enjoy following the Tour each year.

     When reviewing the 2026 itinerary a few months ago, one sportscaster enthusiastically announced “the return of the Montmartre fury” meaning that the last stage on July 26th would once again include climbing la Butte Montmartre (Montmartre Hill) and would become part of la Grande Boucle (the Big Loop) from now on.

La rue Lepic (18th arrondissement) welcomed the world’s best cyclists last year and during the 2024 Paris Olympics.

courtesy AFP

    Details on the 2025 Montmartre climb are found on this link:

https://richardhowe.com/2025/07/15/tour-de-montmartre-in-2025-tour-de-france/

To prepare for the 2026 Tour, la rue Lepic spruced up. Back in June, worn out cobblestones were removed and replaced.

     Renovation also included narrowing the street to install flower beds, in keeping with “the greening of Paris.” Begun in July 2015 during Annie Hidalgo’s first term as mayor, la végétalisation de Paris entailed narrowing hundreds of city streets, eliminating thousands of parking spaces and planting hundreds of trees.

Now narrowed, lower rue Lepic will be all the more challenging for le peloton (pack of cyclists) to climb sans problème. And a bit higher up, the slick cobblestone will test strength and stamina.

     The 113th Tour is certainly exciting to watch. La rue Lepic is ready!

upper rue Lepic

     By the way, if you’re on site on July 26th, a 5-minute walk will take you to la rue des Martyrs which we discovered on June 23rd.

Here’s the link:

https://richardhowe.com/2026/06/23/streetwise-in-paris/

Goddesses and Men

Goddesses and Men

By Stephen O’Connor

When I was a child, my parents gave me an oversized storybook entitled Pegasus. On the cover, a brilliant white stallion charged heavenward on great feathered wings, bearing the young Bellerophon. I was smitten. My interest in classical mythology has never waned. One Christmas, when I was a teenager, my parents gave me a book I treasure to this day, Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Iliad.

I thank God or Fortune that I was born at a time when the written word and the human imagination were paramount. Gladstone once said that he had read The Iliad twenty-five times. “The Iliad teaches one how to die,” he explained.

It has also taught us, for nearly three thousand years, the power of words to create in the human imagination, ideas, ideals and scenes that stay with us through life. I remember as a young man, sitting in a Greyhound station in New York waiting for a bus, but worlds away in time and place, reading The Iliad. The mighty Akhilleus, driven to anger by Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces at Troy, is about to draw his sword to settle their dispute when

…Athena, stepping up behind him, visible to no one,
except Akhilleus, gripped his red-gold hair.

The warrior recognizes her immediately. “What now, O daughter of the god of heaven…”

This is one of those scenes that is permanently catalogued in the hall of literary scenes that every reader acquires over a lifetime: the great son of Peleus, lion in war, subservient to a goddess, his head tilted slightly backward as she grips his hair and whispers her message in his ear: he may lash Agamemnon with words, but may not draw his blood. “Obey,” she says.

He “stayed his massive hand on the silver pommel,” as he must. Though he unpacks his heart with bitter words, a tongue lashing for the ages, he is galled and humiliated. He goes and sits “by the grey wave, scanning the endless sea,” weeping, and prays to his mother, the sea-nymph, Thetis. For thousands of years, readers or listeners have imagined the scene:

…her ladyship his mother heard him
In the green deeps…
Gliding she rose and broke like a mist from the inshore
Grey sea-face, to sit down softly before him,
Her son in tears… 

No one in life will ever love us, believe in us, suffer so much for us, or be so ready to die for us as our mothers. Paul McCartney was tapping into a beautiful and universal connection when he sang,

When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, ‘Let it be.’

Veterans of the grisliest battlefields have related how dying men often call for their mothers, and even Akhilleus, the pillar of the Greek army, cries like a child, seeking and receiving the comfort of his mother’s care.

Aphrodite was the mother of Aeneas, and though it must have gone against her divine nature for a goddess of love and beauty to intervene on a plain where swords flashed and spears flew, she was not reluctant to do so to save her son. What mother can watch her child in danger and do nothing?

There is something about a goddess that men don’t find in gods. Maybe they see something of the longed-for maternal in a figurative sense. The embodiment of the Greek ideal of a warrior, Odysseus, who, unlike Akhilleus, relied on guile and intelligence as much as on raw strength, was naturally beloved of Athena, the goddess of courage, wisdom and the strategies of war.

There was no Olympian that a warrior would rather have on his side, and that includes Zeus, who may often remind the reader of one of the men who appear in modern advertisements, a helpless blockhead who needs the guidance of a woman. “The Lord of Storm” can be humored, and he can be manipulated. Athena is well able for him.

After his return to Ithaca, Odysseus, outnumbered and apprehensive, lies awake knowing that the following day he must take on the throng of suitors with the help only of his son and an old swineherd. He is visited during the night by “the grey-eyed goddess.”

Why so wakeful…?
Though a hundred swords sing for your blood,
With me by your side you will come away unscathed,
And steal their cattle.

As Christianity spread across Europe, a new sort of goddess, the Virgin Mary, replaced the old. Athena herself had been called Athena Parthenos, the Virgin. A virgin goddess is beholden to no man and can act independently for the supplicant. In his book The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller, spoke about Henry Adams, and his feeling that “the love of the Virgin Mary which had raised the cathedral of Chartres, was ‘the greatest force the Western world had ever felt,’ or even ‘the highest energy ever known to man.’”

The recitation of the rosary is a long meditation on and a prayer to the Virgin Mary. It’s a religious practice I saw my grandparents and parents perform as Irish Catholics, and for many years my wife has said the rosary in Spanish every evening on Zoom with her family.

So humans in Western religious tradition have long sought the help of goddesses. Ancient Greeks, like modern Catholics, wanted a heavenly woman on their side, just as on this mortal plane, men generally need a woman on their side; a mother, then a wife or a trusted friend, and let the Fates and the jealous gods do what they may.

Epic tale of caste and class in Pakistan by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a totally captivating novel starting in 1950’s Pakistan, colored by the caste system that frames the past, present and even future for its people. The backdrop is the turbulence following Partition, the 1947 separation of Pakistan from India. The story continues through 2013.

In a gripping beginning, a little boy has been abandoned by his mother in the bazaar of Rawalpindi. Barefoot, he sits clutching to his chest a pair of shoes, waiting, waiting for her to return for him. Ultimately he is taken in by Karim Khan, the kindly operator of a tea stall and curry shop, who creates a space for him to sleep in a former store room. Karim teaches him to do small chores and names the boy Bayazid. As the years pass, Yazid takes on more and more tasks for his guardian. Karim himself is illiterate, but Yazid teaches himself to read. He makes friends with comfortable middle class boys from a nearby private school, and, at 14, he becomes infatuated with the sister of one of them. But class differences mean the relationship is not to be.

The book, published in January, then jumps to the countryside, feudal in its social and power structure, and a wealthy family one of whose properties is a huge farm just outside of Lahore. Mueenuddin, who attended Dartmouth and Yale Law School, is himself the son of a family with a farm outside Lahore and splits his time between there and a home in Oslo.

In the second section of the book, he introduces the reader to a whole other set of colorful characters. There are the super-rich who jet off to city parties in Pakistan and beyond, who sleep with the wives of their friends and indulge in drugs and porn. Then there are the hired managers of their properties (munshis) who enrich themselves by skimming off the top of the family-owned businesses, the underpaid laborers whom the munshis influence by threats and violence, and the corrupt Punjab police who extort vendors and low-level business people, with tools of persuasion that include brutal torture.

Chapters later, we meet again the orphan Yazid. Now a mature man, grown tall and muscular, approaching middle age, he is in the employ of that wealthy family, first as the trusted chauffeur of Colonel Atar, a powerful industrialist and member of the government, and – after years of proving himself – working for Atar’s son Hisham and daughter-in-law, Shahnaz.

Yazid, now enjoying access to the world of the wealthy and widely respected in the nearby villages, takes under his wing a young man named Saqid, son of the trusted gardener on the estate. But Saqib is impatient to become rich and is willing to cut corners to achieve, even if that means betraying the trust of his mentor Yazid, his employers, and the economic and cultural system that has permitted him a level of advancement based on his intellect and apparent business acuity.

Mueenuddin’s character portrayals are intimate and enticing, many drawn from his own personal background. His Pakistani father was a diplomat and landowner. Despite the author’s upper class status, he writes with deep empathy and understanding of the plight of the underclass. In an interview, Mueenuddin says he modeled Yazid on a man who drove for his father and was his companion when he was a youth. Collections of Mueenuddin’s short stories were finalists for the Pulitzer and National Book awards in 2009 and 2010.

His use of language is colorful and polished, bringing the reader equally into the geographical landscapes and the interior of his characters. His storytelling is brilliantly crafted, and his saga is spellbinding, raising questions that will gnaw at you long after the book is closed.

What are the rules of the discriminatory system within which one can advance but just so far? How can a code of morality still matter within a corrupt and violent country? How far can one go in playing the system without self-destructing? This is a remarkable book, taking the reader to places one sees only in simplistic headlines, if at all. It will stay with you for a long time.

Lowell Politics: July 19, 2026

The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday, July 14, 2026. No single issue dominated the meeting although there were several interesting public policy discussions that I’ll review today.

****

Underage drinking – A trio of motions addressed the presence of minors in establishments that serve alcohol. A steady stream of incidents over the past year indicate that several downtown bars routinely serve alcohol to individuals who are not yet 21 years old. You might ask, why aren’t these places checking IDs at the entrance and not admitting anyone who is underage? That would be a reasonable and easily policed procedure if the city’s licensing ordinances did not contain a massive loophole.

Specifically, any establishment that has a licensed kitchen is deemed to be a restaurant which can admit patrons of any age. There’s a certain logic to that policy: when a family goes out to dinner, the parents might want a glass of wine with their meals while their minor children join them. But as I heard the Lowell ordinance explained at a prior city council meeting, a liquor establishment need only have a licensed kitchen to fall into the “restaurant” category that allows customers of all ages to enter. It doesn’t matter if the kitchen ever opens, if it passes the city’s inspection, there’s no need to check IDs at the door. True, the server is then supposed to ensure that the person being served is of legal age, but even if that happened diligently, it would not be as effective as totally excluding underaged people from the place.

The challenge for city government comes with drafting the ordinance. A bar that has a kitchen that is never opened should not be treated like a full-service restaurant. But what if the place serves microwavable pizzas? Is that enough? Where do you draw the line? It may be difficult, but making laws and rules is all about drawing lines so the city should get its act together and revise the existing rules.

Of course, that assumes there is a desire to revise those rules which I sometimes doubt. For all the “we have to protect our children” rhetoric from councilors, I question whether there is a collective will to address this problem. People who run for public office are not recluses. They don’t sit quietly at home. They are social and like to be out and among other people. Such socialization frequently occurs at places that serve alcohol which inevitably makes elected officials familiar and friendly with those who own and operate such establishments. With such familiarity comes sympathy, or at least a desire to avoid inflicting economic pain, an attitude that inevitably softens regulations.

Another factor is a firmly established culture in some segments of Lowell that tolerates and even celebrates underaged drinking. Perhaps it flows from an “I did it at that age so why should I deprive my teenager of the same fun I had” attitude. Whatever the source, I think that attitude exists and has some political potency.

In the face of those factors, it will be interesting to see if the council separates rhetoric from action on this issue.

****

“Canvassers and Solicitors” – After a public hearing, the council unanimously voted to amend the city ordinance governing “canvassers and solicitors.” Among other things, the revised rule limits soliciting to a 12-hour window from 7:30 am until 7:30 pm; makes it unlawful for a license-holder to enter onto a premises displaying a “No Trespassing” or “No Solicitation” sign; requires the license-holder prior to doing any canvassing to notify the police department either in person or by telephone of the “date, time and approximate location said business will be conducted.”

As someone who has run for office and worked on political campaigns, I have done my share of door-knocking and sympathize with those who do it for a living. That said, if I want to switch internet providers or acquire a rooftop solar system, I’ll research the options and make a deliberate choice. I don’t think I’ve ever purchased goods or services from someone who arrived unannounced at my door, so I have no problem with this ordinance. Notably, canvassers engaged in charitable or political activities are not affected by this rule.

During the brief council discussion on this issue, Councilor Dan Rourke speculated that the city should perhaps include a “do not solicit” list for those who don’t want commercial canvassers coming to their door. That wasn’t take up but it seems homeowners could achieve the same result with a “no solicitation” sign.

****

Smith Baker Center – The council confirmed a vote taken in executive session by the prior council to enter into a Purchase & Sales Agreement (P&S) and a Land Disposition Agreement (LDA) between the city and the Smith Baker Preservation Corporation for the Smith Baker Center at 400 Merrimack Street.

A representative of the Corporation presented a brief video to councilors depicting how the first floor of the building will look and function in theory. It’s an impressive video which can be seen at 1 hour, 13 minutes of the YouTube video of the council meeting.

Although the details of the P&S and LDA have not yet been made public (if they even exist at this point) some elements were mentioned during the discussion. The purchase price to be paid to the city is $470,000, however, all that money will be paid to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, to cover the HUD grants that were used by the city to purchase the property back in the 1970s. Unfortunately, repayment isn’t just paying back the 1970s grant plus interest. Instead, the amount due to HUD is the fair market value of the property right now. That means the city will not keep any of the $470K, however, it will eliminate any HUD claim on the property if this proposal doesn’t work out.

Speaking of not working out, the deed to the Preservation Corporation will have a reversionary clause that would restore ownership to the city if the Preservation Corporation failed to meet certain deadlines for restoring the property. However, that reversionary clause will become subordinate to any mortgage the Preservation Corporation may obtain on the property. That means that if the city declares a default that would trigger the reversionary clause, the lender could step in and foreclose since the lender’s position would be superior to the city’s. As regrettable as that may be, there is no practical alternative since if the city’s reversionary clause was superior to the mortgage, no one would ever make a loan on the property.

Finally, if all goes according to plan, the Preservation Corporation expects to obtain an occupancy permit for the property in the summer of 2029.

The council voted 10 to 0 to confirm the executive session vote with Councilor Belinda Juran abstaining. She explained that while she was supportive of the proposal, she did not participate in the executive session since she was not on the council at that time and retains some unease with the timelines and the ownership sequence should the proposal fail.

****

Data centers – Two motions, both jointly filed by Councilors Kim Scott and Sean McDonough, indirectly addressed data centers in the city.

The first motion asked for a report explaining why the city issued permits for demolition and for fire hydrants to the Markley Group (or a related entity) for property at 2 Tanner Street even though the city has a Data Center Moratorium in effect. Markley, which operates a data center at the former Prince Spaghetti plant in South Lowell, recently purchased a parcel on Tanner Street with the presumed intent of constructing a data center there.

The second motion asked for the drafting of a regulation that would prohibit the installation of diesel generators of more than a certain size anywhere in the city. While the words “data center” or “Markley” were not mentioned in this motion, it clearly targets data centers since those are the only types of facilities with generators of that size contemplated by the motion that would conceivably be in Lowell.

Both motions passed, so I assume we’ll see a report on Tanner Street and a draft ordinance about big diesel generators.

Although he voted in the affirmative, Councilor Dan Rourke cautioned against a reflexive anti-data center approach to city policy, explaining that whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence is working its way into every aspect of business, commerce, and life. While Lowell city government has an obligation to protect the quality of life of its residents, it should find a way to do it that’s compatible with reasonable economic development.

I’ve always been an early adopter of new technologies and artificial intelligence is no exception. OpenAI first released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, and within a week I was using it extensively, amazed by its capabilities and its potential. But technological innovation always occurs in the context of society and the world around it. Whatever one’s feelings about the usefulness of AI, most people today recognize that the billionaires who control that technology have a track record of enriching themselves at the expense of American workers. In a functioning democracy, the government would establish policies to assist those who lose their jobs to AI and ease the transition to new work. But we live in a system where the ultra-wealthy exercise enormous control over our political system which in turn works for their benefit and at the expense of everyone else. Whatever their political party, I think most people recognize this and would like to do something about it. Data centers provide tangible objects that are emblematic of the threat to working people. As such, people who live far beyond the detrimental quality of life issues that come with data centers have reason to oppose their construction. Consequently, whatever barriers the city council erects to data centers will likely find widespread political support.

****

This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reviewed a book about visiting historic sites across the US; commented on the Boston Celtics trade of Jaylen Brown; noted an article about how shifting to all electric vehicles harmed Honda; reviewed the telecast of the Boston Pops July Fourth show; and commented on a newsletter by economist Jared Bernstein on grocery prices.