Snow day

First snow day of the season today.


The snow turned to rain and by the time I went to the last journalism class of the semester, there was thunder and lightning.

Students seemed to be in high spirits.

And our friend Ramari's wife Sabita and son Ruchon have arrived from Nepal. Just in time to enjoy the snow!

Who won the cookies?

I won Amherst Bulletin columnist Phyllis Lehrer's annual postcard contest for having been the one whose card was sent from the farthest point from the place we don't pronounce the "h." My wonderful trip to Thailand this summer just keeps giving. Here I am with my prized cookies -- seven different kinds -- in front of Town Hall. (You can see my "going gray" hair is really going.)

The day has gone gray too, but it was 66 degrees earlier, as noted on the Amherst Cinema marquee.


An excellent day to eat cookies and read the last batch of papers from journalism class. The semester wraps up next week. And thank God the primary election for U.S. senator to succeed the great Ted Kennedy finally transpires on Tuesday. NEVER have I received so many automated calls -- from the Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano and Celtics owner Steve Pagliuca campaigns. Enough already!!! I'm tempted not to vote at all in protest.

Some Thanksgiving snapshots and the yarsagumba

This year we were joined by our three Nepalese friends, Bikram, Ganandra and Ramari, who told us some fascinating stories about their homeland, including about the yarsagumba, a combination caterpillar-fungus known as the "Himalayan Viagra," said to cure sciatica and other ailments.




As it says at Weird and Funny World:

 "Just earlier to the rainy season, spores of cordyceps fungus infect these Himalayan caterpillars that live on moist grass and hollow soil. After the fungus buries itself in the caterpillar’s body, it works its way out through the insect’s head. The parasite gets the energy from the caterpillar. The fungus parasite gets so much into the body of the caterpillars’ that it drains all the energy from the insect and ultimately it dies."


Back to Thanksgiving. Cora and Zena played classical music and Russian folk songs (at least I think they were) on the organ Brian and company found for free on Craigslist.

We visited my sister Maureen on Saturday.


Evangeline, the Queen of Make Believe (as it says in the Los Lobos song).


Megan and Alina.



My brother Billy and wife Lena.

Journalism class fun etc.

One of our most engaging guests ever came to journalism class yesterday -- Amherst Police Capt. Jennifer Gundersen. Students barraged her with questions and her answers were way more informative and sometimes entertaining than I expected them to be.
"Great transparency," Julian, our Hampshire College student, commented at one point.
A Westwood, Mass. native, Gundersen said she wanted to be a police officer because she likes to be "in the know on things." She picked Amherst, because she likes interacting with people and she wanted to feel like part of a community, she said. She's been here for about 15 years, having begun when she was 24.
Gundersen is second in command of the department of 45 officers, six of whom are women, or about 10 percent which higher than the East Coast average, she said, but lower than on the West Coast. The homeless are a particular interest of hers and she's trying to get a warming station established in town. She encouraged students to lock their doors and not to drive drunk. Police receive at least one report a day of break-ins, in which the thieves just walked inside and helped themselves to laptop computers and other expensive items. About 140-150 people are arrested for operating under the influence in Amherst every year.
One of the worst experiences for Amherst police is when young people start throwing beer bottles at them when officers approach large, unruly parties, Gundersen said. "Everyone we can put our hands on will probably go to jail," she said, adding, "We do recognize that this is the minority of people who will do something like that."
A surprising thing she told us is that public urination is becoming a problem and it's not just men, anymore. D'oh! I hope this can be nipped in the bud.



Sunderland sky.


I love old-fashioned postcards like this one. I wonder if my siblings would mind if I dressed up my little nieces and nephews and tried to recreate postcards like it.


My newest niece, Alanis, of Boise, Idaho, born Monday!


Rez, the owner of Moti, a new Mideastern restaurant in town, and his dad. I'm going to be writing a review for MassLive next week. In the meantime, I highly recommend the rose-water lemonade!

My favorite vegetable, the romanesco cauliflower, and the state of journalism etc.

Brian brought my favorite vegetable, the romanesco cauliflower (or broccoli, if you prefer) home from the Hampshire College farm, Tuesday. It was already dark, so I couldn't get a great photo of it. As I suspected, Hester was very interested. I still recall the first time I saw one, a miniature version, in a Korean supermarket in Los Angeles full of similarly bizarre items. Its spirals are said to be a fine example of the Fibonnacci sequence, and/or a fractal form. (See "Fractal Food: Self-Similarity on the Supermarket Shelf")


Close-up

I love it for its looks, but it also tastes delicious -- more refined than broccoli and tastes fresher and greener than cauliflower. I put it in a big pot with about an inch of water and steamed it whole before somewhat reluctantly dismantling it and putting it in a spinach salad.


Steve Fox, the UMass journalism department's go-to multimedia guru came to class yesterday and underscored my own cheerleading about what an exciting, if financially uncertain, time it is for young people to be in journalism these days. "It's not overstating it to say the profession is going through a revolution right now," he told them. As for the big wigs telling everybody else what's news, how to cover it and where to get it, good luck! "The Alpha telling the masses what's important -- that role is gone." The commenter/reader, photographer, videographer are all in it together and teamwork is key, he said. "The era of the lone, crusading journalist has come and gone."
Steve repeated this several times like a mantra: "The death of print does not mean the death of journalism."


The much-anticipated new recreation center at UMass is open, and it looks like it's packed!

As I sit waiting for the penultimate episode of Mad Men, Season 3

I thought I'd post some pics. Full moon over the Norwottuck Rail trail late this afternoon.


My beautiful sister Maureen and baby Evangeline, born Oct. 13 in a photo by my brother-in-law Marc.


I love this photo by Marc of Meghan, Evangeline and Matt. (I think they're going to call her Angie.)



I sent them a basket with these chocolate mice which have totally captured my imagination although I've never seen them in the, um, flesh.


We went to Tony and Penny's, a Portuguese restaurant in Ludlow, on the recommendation of my blogging friend Tony and this pot of rice with seafood (for about $18) was the largest meal I have ever gotten at any restaurant anywhere -- bar none.

Other people's adventures

This is my friend Ellie, 49, a world traveler I met on my teaching English as a foreign language course in Thailand, this summer. While I came home after the course ended and am now a volunteer ESL tutor through the Jones Library, many of my classmates went on to exotic locales to teach. When I met Ellie in Thailand, she had just completed an intense, month-long yoga teacher certification course. She's also a registered nurse and had spent a year in Malaysia and a year in England working for a health care-related company. After our ESL course, she traveled to Japan, Taiwan (where she experienced a typhoon) and China and then I lost touch with her for a month when I think she was in India and beyond. Here, she is learning to surf in Bali.
Another friend I met in Thailand is romance writer Sue Swift, 54. Her next stop was China, where she plans to remain until July teaching Kindergarteners. I asked her if she is learning a lot about teaching English as a foreign language and she wrote "I'm learning more about how small children learn than anything else."

I'm plotting to do something adventurous like my role models Ellie and Sue this summer, but I don't know what it will be. Meanwhile, here are some of the last of the fall photos, I suspect. The red, red tree is on Sunset Avenue.
The yellow ones are on Strong Street.
And this is last weekend on the Norwottuck Rail Trail.
Don and Betty Draper of "Mad Men." Tomorrow is Season 3's penultimate episode. Some of the chatterers at the Slate chat group I check in with think it's going to involve the assassination of JFK. In anticipation, my fellow "Mad Men" fans have been recalling where they were when they heard the terrible news. I remember talking about it excitedly at Sacred Heart School, in Pittsfield -- I would have been 6 -- and an anguished nun telling us to stop it.
I see this year's First Night New Year's celebration poster is a view of Northampton by local artist Randall Diehl.

Creature Feature

Thought a bug and other creature post was in order, as a lot of my Facebook friends and UMass students have been receiving unwanted visits from these Asian ladybugs the past few days. They're known as Halloween bugs, according to About Amherst's entomologist, because this is about the time when they usually descend on people's home looking for a place to hibernate. They're a "minor agricultural pest" in some places, I learned at Wikipedia's excellent Asian ladybug page. I vacuumed up dozens of them a couple of days ago, but this is not advised as they secrete a smelly chemical that can cause the vacuum cleaner to smell. D'oh.


This brazen character was eating all the bird food this morning.


The noyve.


Meanwhile, my brother-in-law Marc sent this snake photo yesterday for Brian to ID and Brian in turn, sent it to his friend Bart, a bug and snake man, who said it's No it is definitely a "juvenile black rat snake." Says Bart, "The pattern on the bottom and the keel scales which are barely discernible give it away."


On another note, I had a delicious lunch with Ana's friends Jeff and Carla at Miss Saigon today which I plann to write about soon at MassLive.

Snapshots around town

Another beautiful day after a freezing cold weekend with snow. I got a video of Hester checking out the snowflakes --on Oct.16! I thought it was quite newsworthy at the time, but it turned out some of the neighboring towns at higher elevations got enough snow to accumulate and they were sledding in some places in New York state. Snapped this photo of the Wildwood pond today and turned it upside down.


Hester checking out the early snowflakes.

Ripples in the pond.

I see a new seafood restaurant is planned downtown. I like the light blue storefront.


Ran into Bill Elsasser today who is still cleaning up the streets. Here is he is front of Jones Library where I met with Bikram of Nepal who told me about a very interesting holiday Hindus observed on Monday: Bhai Dooj, which celebrates the bond between brothers and sisters. Why don't we have a holiday like this?


Two of my three brothers.

Evangeline

My sister Maureen had a baby early Tuesday morning outside Poughkeepsie in Rip Van Winkle country. I joined the family on Sunday, when she began having labor pains. Here she is at lunch on Sunday with son Matt and daughter Meghan.
Meghan plays with her pony in the playroom.
On Monday, we pick up some Halloween teeth at a gift shop in nearby New Paltz.
Time to go to the hospital that evening.
Maureen hopes it's not too early and she doesn't have to come back. Six hours later she delivers Evangeline. Meghan picked the name in advance inspired by the kind scullery maid played by Kelly MacDonald in the movie "Nanny McPhee."
Evangeline's namesake. Here's what it says about the name at the site ThinkBabyNames.com, which also tracks the popularity of names. Evangeline's heyday seems to have been in the 1920's although it trending upward again.

ev(a)-nge-line\ is pronounced ee-van-ja-LEEN. It is of Greek origin, and its meaning is "good news." From "evangel," the term for the Gospels. Literary: title of a 1848 poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

And of course there is the Los Lobos' song Evangeline, "the queen of make-believe."

While Maureen, husband Marc and Evangeline wind down following the big event at the hospital, Meghan goes off to school and my brother Billy, young Matt and I check out the brand new Hudson River Walkway, the world's tallest pedestrian bridge.
It reminded me a little of the time Brian and I biked over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Then it's off to meet the newest addition to the family.
Evangeline!

Fantastic foliage etc

I'm still deeply involved in old "Mad Men" episodes, while outside the trees are breaking loose with the whole array of fall colors.


Has anyone noticed, as Brian has, that the weather and the weather people's forecasts of it haven't been a close match lately? We saw this unusual cloud driving "the back way" from Amherst to Northampton Sunday. Yesterday, it was supposed to rain all day and be windy in the afternoon. We did get some wind but it turned sunny instead.


Here's Brian and my former co-workers, garden writer Sherry Wilson and Phyllis Lehrer at the Three County Fairgrounds in Northampton, where the annual celebration of local agriculture called "Eat the View" was held Friday night. It's a fundraiser for the group Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA), which Brian helped get off the ground by co-writing a successful application for a W. K. Kellogg Foundation grant in 1993. CISA has made quite an impact with its Support a Local Hero campaign promoting local farmers.

Now, Brian is going to help me write about our adventures eating out for a MassLive blog. I posted my first entry today in which I ask people to recommend restaurants for us to visit so I can write about it. Let me know if you think of anything!


Wildwood pond.


A classic fall day.


Strong Street

Phyllis retires

Me, Judy Harris, the incomparable Phyllis Lehrer and Bonnie Wells at a gathering at the Amherst Bulletin office on University Drive in honor of Phyllis's retirement from the Bulletin and Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Phyllis, who turns 69 this month, is a legend in Amherst, where she's been a fixture at and has documented just about every major event you can think of. I don't know how many hundreds of people she has profiled in her weekly "Page 2er" over the years or how many births, birthdays, deaths, graduations and other milestones she's noted in her popular column, "The Lehrer Report," which she'll continue to write. (I aspire to be this year's winner of a generous batch of homemade cookies for having sent her a postcard from the farthest point from Amherst. Thailand, where I went this summer is almost as far as you can get from here, Phyllis.)

Tons of people turned out to wish Phyllis well. Here, publisher Jim Foudy is standing in her cubicle.

Phyllis has been a mentor for me not only because I admired the no-nonsense, impartial way she covered a story, but also because of the way she has been such a stalwart of the community. She belongs to the League of Women Voters, where she got her start in journalism reporting on meetings. She's a member of the Amherst Club, the Thursday Club (I had never heard of it either until she told me about the South Amherst club a while ago) and three book groups! She's a St. Brigid's communicant, a Sunset Farm farmer, who sells produce at the Amherst Farmers Market; a regular theater and concert goer and who knows what else.

Everywhere you go with Phyllis, somebody knows her.

But the thing that really makes her like no one else is the way she always saves some of the cookies or brownies or whatever other refreshments are available wherever she goes to share with everyone back at the office, especially Scott Merzbach, the Bulletin's beloved Amherst police reporter.

I'm pretty sure that's not going to stop.

The field I used to walk through to get to work and where I'd sometimes see Phyllis picking vegetables for the farmers market.
It's that beautiful time of year again.

Snapshots of Amherst's 250th anniversary parade

My former co-worker Phyllis Lehrer who retires from the Daily Hampshire Gazette this week after some 30 years! Here she is representing Amherst's agricultural past and present.
It wasn't the greatest weather for a parade, but it wasn't too bad either, although it seems the rain may have prevented the vaunted Budweiser Clydesdale horses from running through town.

Select Board and town float

Don't we have a great chairwoman of the Select Board?


Select Board members marching.




Amherst swimmers


I love old cars.


There were tons of farm implements, a staple of Amherst parades.


I never knew Robin could walk on stilts!


A cute train with kids in customized barrels. I guess some of the kids dropped out before they got to the center of town.


Mr. Minuteman, the UMass mascot.


An out-of-town contingent from Lincoln, I think. Waltham was there too.


Lots and lots of candy was exchanged!


Selectwoman Alisa Brewer


Daily Hampshire Gazette photographer Kevin Gutting took this photo of Brian and me. I love Kevin's photography.


UMass students Mark and Sara.


Amherst icons "Mr. Baseball" Stan Ziomek and Steve Puffer.


Amherst's animal welfare officer, Carol Hepburn and her little pony.


U.S. Rep. John Olver


A sweet float.

Anthony!

Sacred Heart School's sixth grade class of 1969, Pittsfield.

Amherst celebrates its 250th birthday with an-all-stops-pulled-out parade tomorrow, beginning at 1 p.m. in front of Amherst College. I'd be there, even if the Budweiser Clydesdale horses weren't part of the lineup. I've seen them racing through Galveston, Texas in a parade and it was spectacular, although the idea of them galloping down the streets of Amherst makes me nervous.
It promises to be an eventful weekend, as the Red Sox are playing their chief nemeses, the Yankees, which never fails to make baseball fans edgy around here. Parents of UMass students got an email with a pretty good description of what can happen. "Most students do not actively engage in destructive behavior," it reads, in part, "but it is common for students to gather at the scene and watch as their peers endanger others and destroy University property. Unfortunately, students who are 'just standing around' are actively contributing to the problem: their presence provides an audience which spurs on the aggressive action by their peers, and this congregating impedes the efforts of law enforcement to protect students and the property of the Commonwealth." Here's hoping everyone stays mellow.
I didn't wait for the parade to take a trip down memory lane. I've been immersed in the past ever since Brian got me the first season of the TV show Mad Men for my birthday last week.


The eldest three of six Carey siblings in Waltham Sunday.


And the same three of us, in the same order, with Eddie, who came next, looking on.
Now in its third season, Mad Men, for those who haven't seen it, is a mesmerizing drama set in 1960, the year John F. Kennedy was elected, a pivotal moment in U.S. history we see playing out in the background. In the foreground are the mad men, a bunch of maddeningly sexist and racist good old boys working in advertising during the golden age of that enterprise. Being a lifelong fan of the look of that era, I can't get enough of the costumes and sets.


Speaking of nostalgia for a bygone era, I've been thinking about Anthony from the famous 1971 Prince spaghetti commercial lately. I wonder how many other people developed a fascination for cultures where the members of vast extended families all live under the same roof from watching that commercial. Now, THAT was a brilliant ad. UPDATE: O'Reilly alerted me to a link to a recent Boston Globe story about the actor who played Anthony. His name was really Anthony and some ad men discovered him in Boston's North End. He was paid about $1,500 total from the commercial. Says the Globe: "That commercial, the award-winning “Wednesday Is Prince Spaghetti Day” spot that ran nationally for 13 years, would become a symbol of Boston’s North End. Its famous opening scene – an Italian woman leaning out of a window on Powers Court, yelling for her son (“Anthony! Anthony!”) to come home and eat spaghetti -- made his first name a part of American pop culture, like 'Stella!' in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Adrian!' in 'Rocky.'"


Also in the vein of the golden past, my best friend Mary from sixth grade who I've only seen briefly twice since we graduated from high school, spent yesterday afternoon in Westfield.


Mary on the far left, me on the right in the photo from our sixth grade party.


Stanley Park, Westfield, a fine destination.


Meanwhile, back in 2009, we had some Hampshire College Farm-grown vegetables for dinner.


And I ran into state Rep. Ellen Story after she got a flu shot.
See you at the parade!