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Timing is Everything By George Chigas One day last week, I hoofed it up to UML Lydon Library to get a couple of Inter-Library Loan books for an article I’m working on about how Kerouac actually met Neal Cassady at Columbia in December 1946. The basic facts are generally well-known,…
Read More »From time to time through the pandemic, I have posted updates to capture the events and the look and feel of that moment in time. Almost exactly a year ago today I did my first. I called it “Covid-19: March 12 edition” never imagining that I should have included “2020”…
Read More »Boarding School Blues By Louise Peloquin Chapter 7: Beginning to Belong Blanche and her classmates stepped up to the academic pace. Freshmen followed required courses such as English, algebra, biology and social studies. Because the school had been founded by a religious order from Québec, French had a prominent place…
Read More »Recent events on the Lowell School Committee have drawn attention to the method used to fill a vacancy that occurs on the School Committee (which is the same for the City Council, as well). Since the city’s adoption of “plurality voting” in 1959 – that’s the system in which all…
Read More »A Windy Treatise on the Development of Theogony By Steve O’Connor Well, March certainly came on like a lion. I’m sure you all remember the night of March 1st when the wind, to quote Bob Dylan, “shook our windows and rattled our doors,” and howled around the eves. The wind…
Read More »My Mother, Smoking By David Daniel A recent editorial in the Sun reports how Massachusetts’ ban on menthol cigarettes has cost the state a lot of tax revenue, while, simultaneously, tobacco sales in neighboring states without such a ban have spiked. I know almost nothing about public tax policy and…
Read More »Boarding School Blues By Louise Peloquin Chapter 6: Settling In The first week at SFA was a whirlwind of adjusting to a new environment. Blanche had left Earth to land on another planet. With her peanut head and tight ponytail – the regulation hairdo for long hair – not only…
Read More »February 18, 2021 – (above photo from NASA website) – Members of the Perseverance Mars Rover team watch in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is…
Read More »The 2021 Lowell City Election will be the first under the new hybrid election organization that features a mix of at-large and district councilors. This past week, the City posted an announcement that the previously released district map will be used in this year’s election and will not be adjusted…
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