While watching the Gator Bowl and now Rose Bowl on TV and occasionally checking Breaking News on the Sun site and the home page of boston.com, I’ve been reading “Irish Thunder’ by Bob Halloran, a vivid account of Micky Ward’s struggles and success. Parts of the book describing life in…
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Check this discussion thread from 2002 on Jacques L’Heureux’s Franco-American Connection website for the cultural significance of New Year’s Day among French Canadians. And why is New Year’s Day an official holiday in Massachusetts? Here’s the Lowell connection from worcester.bettysgenealogy.org : New Year’s Day, however, was not an American holiday. It…
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I’ve never seen a copy of the newspaper written and published in the late 1920s and early ’30s by Jack Kerouac’s father, Leo Kerouac, when he owned Spotlight Print, a small printing business downtown that got washed out in the 1936 Flood. Called The Spotlight, the newspaper had items about local entertainment…
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How many times have you said something like that to yourself? What is that, a reflex reaction to psychological muscle memory of what certain days “feel” like? This usually happens when holidays get into the mix, shuffling the pattern of days off. Out with the Boston Terrier this morning on…
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Shawn Levy, my old friend from graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, is a film critic for The Oregonian newspaper in Portland. Here’s Shawn’s take on “The Fighter,” which he calls “terrific.”
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Dick mentioned CNN in a comment tonight. I went to the CNN site and found the network’s review of “The Fighter.” The reviewer gave the film an A- rating. Read it here.
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My family did a little shopping in south Nashua this afternoon. The lines were long and money was flowing. In Best Buy, 40 people waited at the registers. The exchanges line was 25 deep. We lucked out because we bought an item in the computer department, which has its own registers.…
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Speaking of the power of cities, after two highly successful productions in Lowell (2008-09), the Massachusetts Poetry Festival will move its tents, workshops, coffeehouse readings, and auditorium events to downtown Salem in 2011, with a packed schedule of activities set for May 13 and 14. Keep checking www.masspoetry.org for updates as the…
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Tonight, with my wife and two friends I saw “the movie” at the Showcase Cinemas, just a slapshot away from Micky Ward Circle. The film ended two hours ago and I’m still in a kind of shock from the hyper-realism on screen. Lowell appeared to be under a colossal magnifying glass.…
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Here’s the link to the Facebook Page for the Beat Museum in San Francisco.
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