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North Common Village by day and night
Tony Sampas shares contrasting views of North Common Village in the snow
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Does snow make you SAD
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression or winter blues, is a mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter . . . Once regarded skeptically by the experts, seasonal affective disorder is now well…
Read More »City Hall in the snow
Tony Sampas ventured out into the snow to capture these pictures of City Hall
Read More »No school in Lowell
An email alert arrived at 5:55 am and the robocall just came in at 6:02 am – no school in Lowell on Tuesday. Not a flake has fallen yet, so this is a prospective cancellation but also a wise one. Several years ago school was held in the face of…
Read More »Review of “The Town”
Not to be confused with the play (“Our Town”) I wrote about yesterday, “The Town” is the 2010 Ben Affleck film about a gang of bank robbers from Charlestown. I ordered it from Netflix, mostly to try to discover why “The Fighter” was winning so many awards while “The Town”…
Read More »Signs of Winter
Tony Sampas preserves views that are all too familiar to us these days.
Read More »“Our Town” at Lowell High
Last evening I attended an excellent performance of “Our Town”, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, at Lowell High School’s Little Theater. Under the direction of Sharon Bisantz, the Student Theater Company did a masterful job of presenting this classic that is set in a fictional New Hampshire town near…
Read More »Mandatory minimum drug sentences
Back in the late 1980s when I did a lot of criminal defense work, the “war on drugs” adopted minimum mandatory sentences as its tactic of choice. The most onerous and ill-considered was a mandatory minimum 5 year sentence for a second offense of distribution of heroin. In the abstract,…
Read More »Unrest in Egypt
The last time I remember rioting in the streets in the Middle East, it was 1979 and the people of Iran overthrew the Shah. Islamic fundamentalists seized control, the US Embassy was seized and its staff taken hostage, and the world became a much more dangerous place. Could the same…
Read More »Dusk in Lowell
By Tony Sampas: Above is dusk in the Acre; below is dusk in the Highlands.
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