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This past Thursday night I attended one of the opening events of the Kerouac Literary Festival at the UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center (formerly known as the Doubletree Hotel). Novelist Russell Banks, the author of a dozen major books and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction,…
Read More »In honor of the Jack Kerouac Literary Festival, Tony Sampas share some photos central to Kerouac’s Lowell. The crucifix shown above is atop the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes at the Franco American School on Pawtucket Street. The below photo of a sculpture with the crucifix tucked into a…
Read More »Late yesterday afternoon I traveled to Middlesex Community College for a presentation on a study on “voter participation demographics in Lowell, Massachusetts” conducted by Professor Marcos Luna and his graduate students in the Department of Geography at Salem State University (the full study is available HERE). Luna was attracted to…
Read More »Charlie Baker has been catching some heat lately for seeming “too angry” – while I’m certainly no fan of Baker’s, expressions of anger by a candidate running for governor don’t bother me. But the Republican nominee for governor of New York, Carl Paladino, goes off the charts. Tea Party favorite…
Read More »Tony Sampas wraps up his photo essay on the smokestacks of Lowell with two more views.
Read More »Keep your smart phones out of sight starting today; the Commonwealth’s new ban on using electronic devices to send or receive messages while behind the wheel goes into effect today. I suspect that the police will be especially vigilant and aggressive in enforcing the law which is a “primary offense”…
Read More »Ken Burns’ latest film, “The Tenth Inning”, just got over on Channel 2. The four-hour program, shown over the past two nights, was an extension of “Baseball” the 1994 Burns program that covered baseball from the beginning. The highlight of tonight’s show, of course, was the Red Sox historic victory…
Read More »Tony Sampas shares photos of a smokestack in the Acre (above) and one repurposed as a cell phone antenna (below)
Read More »It seems that we are constantly bombarded with news that innocuous items in the food supply may pose a threat to our health: tainted eggs, tainted peanut butter, tainted tomatoes, tainted spinach – those are only the ones I remember. Our industrial-style food supply chain certainly creates risks, but what…
Read More »With some prompting by Dean Johnson of 980 WCAP, Nancye Tuttle recalls her relationship with American Bandstand on Nancye’s World. Here’s what Nancye wrote: Listening to Dean Johnson interview Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon today on WCAP took me back to my teen years when I was an American Bandstand fanatic…
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