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…
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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”…
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Tony Sampas preserves views that are all too familiar to us these days.
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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By Tony Sampas: Above is dusk in the Acre; below is dusk in the Highlands.
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Last fall, local environmental attorney Matt Donahue was forced to contemplate (and live) life without a car. He wrote about his experience here and here. As 2010 drew to a close, Matt assessed his experiment and shares his observations below: Well, here is my year-end review (through December 23rd). To…
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Snowy views of the Francis Gate on the Pawtucket Canal, by Tony Sampas.
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The weather this week has made it tough for all of us to get around. The MBTA Lowell line has not escaped. In anticipation of traveling to Boston by train earlier this week, I signed up for email alerts of “notifications” that are generated whenever a problem arises. It’s been…
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