Author Archive
State of the Union
Looking forward to the President’s State of the Union address tonight. Remembering January 2009 and the massive gathering on the National Mall for the Inauguration of President Barack Obama. Here’s a look at the scene by Susan Walsh, a photographer from the Associated Press (web photo courtesy of boston.com) Here’s…
Read More »A Look Through the Red Base Window
What about that Gingrich win? Read this from the Red State blog, courtesy of realclearpolitics.com. And don’t you think it’s strange that the national GOP got tagged with the “red” label, given all the anti-socialist talk coming from those megaphones? Which art director at which national TV network first decided to color code…
Read More »My Plan E Comment from Gerry’s Place
With the currrent talk about city charter change in the air, I am copying and sharing here my comment on Gerry Nutter’s blog from a few days ago for the rh.com readers who are following the developing community conversation around this topic: Lowell is the envy of many cities of its size.…
Read More »‘Lamestream’
I don’t know why I’ve been watching as much TV news coverage of the Republican Party contest for the presidential nomination. I avoid Fox, but even on CNN and MSNBC and what we used to call the “network news” the reporting is staggeringly shallow. All the talk today, and this…
Read More »‘The Strand’ by Richard Marion
Here’s a memory painting of a night scene at the movies on Central Street in Lowell: “The Strand” by Richard Marion (c) 2012 See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net Here’s a link to Nancye Tuttle’s museum exhibition brochure about the movie theaters in Lowell. Her 1993 exhibit was called “Picture It: Lowell Goes to the…
Read More »‘Checking the Property’
With Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. being remembered tomorrow in a special way across the nation, I went back to a prose poem written after a family visit to Washington, D.C., in the early summer of 2004, another presidential election year. We were months away from seeing Barack Obama make news with a…
Read More »Lowell’s Proto-Blogger Charles G. Sampas, 1954
My brother Richard often stops by my home to drop off an interesting item he has found along the way in his travels, often a photocopy of a news article or a brochure that is not to be missed. Yesterday, he unfolded a large piece of paper that turned out…
Read More »Records
We called those round things records when I was growing up. For Christmas, I was the lucky recipient of a TEAC CD Recorder with Turntable/Cassette Player. A nice machine. I thought it would be fun to make my own discs of select LPs and cassette tapes that have been mothballed…
Read More »Decentralized Publishing
Dick’s post about changes in journalism applies in many respects to what has been happening in the publishing sector (books and magazine and e-pubs) since the 1960s, when the mimeograph machine made it easier to mass-produce written material. Remember those school test papers in faint purple ink? Editors, writers, and…
Read More »