Solstice Musings

Assorted stuff.

Community activist Victor Davilla sent me a couple of pictures from the Springfield Control Board meeting on Thursday. This one shows me with Heather Brandon of Urban Compass. 

At one point somebody realized that nearly all of the region's major independent political bloggers were gathered in the same room. The result was this historic photo.

From left to right - Mike Dobbs from Out of the Inkwell, Heather Brandon of Urban Compass, Bill Dusty of The Springfield Intruder, yours truly and kneeling in front is Matt Szafranski of Western Mass Politics and Insight.

 



I am pleased that The Valley Advocate gave me one of their haloes in their end of the year awards issue. They had this to say about me:

We've been fans of blogger Tom Devine (http://tommydevine.blogspot.com) since back in the days when he stapled together copies of his self-published Baystate Objectivist and dropped them at hot spots around Springfield. This year, though, has been an especially rewarding year for Devine's readers; in addition to his always fun political coverage, he's offered up such engaging pieces as "I'm Queer, But I'm Not a Fag," in which he compares the self-parodying images of gays in the mainstream media (think "Queer Eye") to 20th-century black performers who embraced racist stereotypes to endear themselves to white audiences. ("Instead of blackface, it's pinkface," he wrote.) And don't miss Devine's riveting series from last summer about discovering his long-lost brother.

Elsewhere in the issue, I especially like their comment on Springfield's former shadow-mayor Frankie Keough: "There's low, and then there's Keough-low."

Recently I posted a picture of the holiday display in front of The Teapot coffee shop in Northampton, with it's white trees and fierce samurai guards.

Today I went by and one of the guards is without his head while the other is missing entirely. Vandals?

I also recently pointed out the name of Dr. Seuss was misspelled in the window of Northampton's Michelson Gallery:

Since then, the misspelling has been fixed.

 



However, someone sent me an email pointing out that I was misspelling the name of the gallery as Michaelson, like it sounds, instead of the Jewish spelling which is Michelson. In other words, while I was pointing out the fact that the gallery was misspelling the artist, I was myself guilty of misspelling the gallery!

My life is dripping with irony.

The snow crew in Northampton buried this merchant's sign in a snowbank. 

Outside the UMass Student Union this week was parked this car that runs on flower power.

There certainly are no flowers to provide power in this arctic weather! Today is the Winter Solstice, technically the first official day of winter, but it's been acting like winter for some weeks now.

It's hard to believe it's been six months since the Summer Solstice. They were celebrating the Summer Solstice back in June at Hampshire College by looking for their spirit orbs, or whatever. Here's a nice trippy video filmed entirely in the wild woodlands of Amherst.