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BSO

Friday, February 29, 2008

Stuff


The assorted kind.

Some people thought there might be a big confrontation at UMass today over the allegedly obscene safe sex posters. If so, I missed it. However, I did uncover some new indecent posters, shown below, at the UMass Democrat Club. No, not the Vagina Monologues one. I mean the re-elect Kerry Tsongas posters!





In all it was a pretty slow day on campus, with people just chillin' at the Umass library coffee shop, appropriately titled Procrastination Station





You know that you are living in an academic community when the buses have posters with physics problems on them. They are put there by the UMass Physics Department, and they do indeed give you something to think about as you ride along.







For the answer and more problems to strain your brain click here.

Damn, it's been cold out. My neighbor's flower holder is frozen solid. 





Don't put those plows away just yet, there's supposed to be more snow tonight!





The snow is already so high that half the names are obscured on the Northampton war memorial.

 



Finally, here's a great half-nekkid guitar player. 






Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Jerry Garcia's Book


Harrington Street.

Whew, let's take a break from politics and write about the Grateful Dead!

The other day somebody gave me a present - a copy of the now out of print Jerry Garcia biography Harrington Street. It's only 76 pages long, with most of it illustrations, so it didn't take long to read. 





The title of the book refers to the street in San Francisco which Jerry Garcia lived on as a boy. Garcia lived at number 87, in a house which is still standing. The current owners complain that hippies are always sitting on their steps. Here is Jerry's house as it looked in 2003.





I like this book. It is colorful, whimsical and fun to read. The problem is the book was incomplete at the time of Garcia's death. Various editors and friends tried to piece together what they could from the material Garcia left behind, but are only partially successful.

Garcia's intention was to make an illustrated biography mixing written narrative with his own paintings. Unfortunately at the time of Garcia's death he had only got as far as telling his life story to the age of ten. That leaves out a whole lot of things that were worth writing about in Garcia's life.

However, for a guy that always seemed to have starch in his grin Jerry Garcia had a pretty traumatic childhood. Born sickly, he was confined to his bed a lot as a child. At the age of two, he was nearly drowned when a drunken guest at a family party threw him into a swimming pool, from which he was barely rescued in time by his father. His Dad, a well known San Francisco musician, would himself drown to death in front of his entire family at a swimming resort. Watching his father die was a major trauma for Garcia, who for over a year later would burst into tears whenever his father's name was mentioned.

His mother never recovered from the tragedy, and Garcia ended up being raised by his eccentric grandparents, whose sterile marriage forced Garcia to retreat into art and music. He recounts two other disturbing childhood events, one of which involved a time when he tried to pursue what he thought was a kitten into the bushes but instead discovered was a rat. It reminded me of an event from my own childhood. When I was around four or five I was really fond of squirrels. One day a mean boy called me over to look at something in the gutter. When I did so I saw that it was a squirrel that had been hit by a car and its guts were all over the place. I remember I ran into the house and got sick, but when my mother asked me what was wrong, I said nothing.

Another traumatic event for Garcia was when some sadistic older girls stripped him and made fun of him while he was nude. Gosh, with all these childhood traumas, you'd think it would be enough to make somebody grow up and take drugs!

Garcia is a good writer. When telling about a seafaring ancestor, Captain Olson of San Francisco, he writes:

In truth, I only know of his existence because of a few meager pieces of evidence in the form of two anecdotes and one ancient photograph. The photograph, faded, out of focus, shows a blurred foreheady gaussian blur, as if the endless, restless motion of the sea itself had robbed from Capt. O. the ability to stand still for a photo, thereby denying the future a good look at him. Allowing him to sneak, so to speak, into the past, unseen, like the phantom he was....

Disappointingly, the book never goes past Garcia's early childhood, since he died while undergoing treatment in a California detox before he could write anymore. What saves the book from just being a dead rock star rip-off are the paintings Garica did to accompany the text. Garcia was a masterful psychedelic poster artist whose trippy mindscapes are simply beautiful to behold. If the text is maddeningly short, then the paintings provide endless fascination.

Alas, only used copies are available of this book on Amazon.com. However if you can get your hands on a copy there or somewhere else then I recommend you do so. Not just because this is a visually delightful book, but also because it is bound to become a valuable collectors piece. 



The other day I was wandering around downtown Northampton just before sunset and looking at all the posters, like this sort of Victorian one.

 



This wall has a whole lot of posters, mostly for musical events. 





There is an old sign painted on the side of this building, but so much has peeled off I can't make out what it used to advertise. Can you?





This sign reminds me that maple sugar season is just around the corner. Once the sap starts to rise, Spring will be right behind! 





So hurry the hell up and get here!

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Ravosa Was Right


Another flashback.

It's hard with the distance of time to recall just how vilified former Springfield City Councilor Anthony Ravosa Jr. was in the 1990's when he single handidly waged war on Springfield's corrupt Democrat Party machine. The level of attack on Ravosa by the powers that be was merciless, and sadly, Ravosa was unable to hold up under the assault. 

Yet in matters involving his political career in Springfield, events have proven him more than correct on all the major issues. Here is an old essay about Ravosa from the February 1997 issue of The Baystate Objectivist but much of it still reads as if it were written this morning. 

 


Tony Ravosa 1994



Recent developments in local politics, such as the final steps taken in the privatization of Municipal Hospital, the mysterious persistence of cost overruns in public school building projects, plus the newest suggestions of sleazery at the long troubled Springfield Redevelopment Authority, have all provided me with reasons to reflect on the career of former Republican City Councilor Tony Ravosa. Yet for better or worse, what you're most likely to remember about any given situation is whatever happened that was the most weird. Therefore, I regret that my clearest memory of Ravosa is the occasion when we watched a woman urinate on the lawn of Court Square at high noon.

It was the summer of 1992, and I was in Ravosa's office, which is located just above the famous Ravosa marquee that hangs over the entranceway to the courtyard of the family's downtown estate. Ravosa was running (unsuccessfully, it turned out) for the congressional seat held both then and now by Richard Neal. Ravosa had the Republican nomination without a challenger, but there was a rock 'em, sock 'em Democrat primary race that year that featured Councilor Kateri Walsh attacking Neal from the right, and liberal activist Charles Platten challenging Neal from the left. Also in the mix was Ross Perot supporter Thomas Sheehan running as an independent. 





I did not play a major role in the Ravosa for Congress campaign, but I did help out on a few small writing projects that required me to meet with Ravosa and his staff on a couple of occasions. I recall that one day I was seated in his office as Ravosa spoke to me and several staff members while pacing around the room. At one point Ravosa stood facing the large windows in his office which look onto Court Square, when suddenly he paused in mid-sentence. We all turned to look out the window at whatever had caught his attention.

Looking in the direction of Ravosa's gaze we saw an overweight woman of no determinable age, squatting in the sunlight with her jeans around her ankles, urinating in plain sight as casually as a dog at a fire hydrant. What was most remarkable was the expression on her face, which showed such a bovine indifference to what she was doing and where she was doing it, that it seemed as though only the most powerful drugs or soul destroying despair (or both) could explain her behavior.

Yet as repugnant as this sight was, there was a mildly humorous aspect to it provided by the presence of two lawyerly types sitting on a bench nearby. They appeared to have been sharing a take-out lunch when the woman came and squatted almost directly in front of them. They quickly got up and hurried away, dumping their lunch in a trash barrel. Ravosa shrugged off that incident as all too commonplace. In fact, Ravosa's father had asked, in vain, for the city to set up a Port-A-Potty on Court Square for the homeless.




Ravosa being sworn in as his wife and father look on.


 

There was a lot on Ravosa's mind that summer. Across Court Square was City Hall, where Ravosa was engaged in a bitter feud with Mayor Robert Markel, as well as several key members of Markel's Administration. Further down Main Street, out of sight but never far out of mind, was the Springfield Newspapers, the local outpost of the Newhouse Corporation's media and real estate empire, whose publisher, David Starr, was Ravosa's arch-enemy. On the occasions when I visited Ravosa's offices, I sometimes perceived an almost bunker-like mentality, a sense that Ravosa and his supporters felt continuously under seige, but I could never dismiss that attitude as mere paranoia.

Ravosa's enemies were very real, and it is useful to reflect on the powerful forces that tried to silence Ravosa, humiliate him and destroy him financially and politically.

It was Ravosa in 1992 who waged a lonely battle to warn the city that unless it privatized Municipal Hospital on State Street immediately, Springfield would encounter serious financial difficulties. In response to his common sense warnings Ravosa faced brutal criticism from detractors who tried to portray him as the Ebenezer Scrooge of local politics. Ravosa did not ask, like the subject of that Dickens novel, whether there were no prisons for the poor. Nor did he give a speech calling for the privatization of the hospital with his foot on the neck of an elderly person. Not once did he kick over a wheelchair or push an old lady to the ground. It was only the tone of the press coverage he received that would have caused you to assume that Ravosa had done such things, or at least wanted to.

Four years after Ravosa endured such abuse, the Albano Administration announced that the mushrooming expenses of subsidizing Municipal Hospital had reached such a point that if the hospital was not transferred almost immediately into private hands, the city would have to close the hospital by the end of 1996, regardless of the consequences to the mostly elderly patients. Unfortunately, this reality placed the city in the worst possible position as far as getting a good deal on the hospital, since it was impossible to bargain from a position of strength when every prospective buyer knew in advance that the city's back was to the wall.

In the end, the only way the city could get a half decent deal was to put together an early retirement package that allowed over 50 employees to retire before the private owners had to fire them in order to make the hospital profitable. While this solution side-stepped the ugly political fall-out that such lay-offs would have created, it certainly did no favor to the taxpayers or the city's pension fund, which now has to pay millions of dollars in extra retirement benefits based on a benefits formula reflecting years of service that those in the early retirement program never actually served.

If we had listened to Raavosa when he first suggested privatization back in 1992, instead of demonizing him as a cruel, hard-hearted Republican, everyone would have been better off. Today, let's at least own up to the fact that for all the criticism Ravosa received during the privatization controversy, the passage of time has proven that Ravosa was right.

Then there's the matter of school construction cost overruns. It was back in 1993 that Councilor Ravosa first raised the issue of whether there were political shenanigans going on surrounding the city's school construction projects. The case he cited as the best example was the land purchases surrounding the building of the Rebecca Johnson School in Mason Square. In that controversy, an auto repair shop called Action Auto, which was far behind in its tax payments to the city, received a huge payment for its land and relocation costs (although it never did reopen) despite the fact that the city could have simply seized the property for back taxes at no cost to the public. Even more intriguing, Action Auto was owned by an individual with close personal and political ties to then State Representative Ray Jordan.

Ravosa took an interest in this controversy, and brought his information (complete with his trademark oversized charts and graphs) directly to the site of Action Auto, where he held an outdoor press conference. However, City Councilor and Jordan defender Morris Jones showed up, and ordered Ravosa to leave the premises. When he refused, Councilor Jones threatened Ravosa physically, saying he would put Ravosa "on the ground" if he didn't stop his presentation to the media.

Whether Mo Jones would have actually assaulted Ravosa is something we will never know, because it was then that Jones realized that the entire incident was being filmed by WGGB-TV, at which point Jones suddenly became more reasonable. The footage of Jones making his threat was aired repeatedly on Channel 40, yet Jones was never reprimanded by the council or anyone else for his aggressive behavior (although it's interesting to speculate how Ravosa would have been treated had it been he who had threatened to assault Jones).

Despite Ravosa's efforts to keep the Action Auto controversy alive, it was finally buried by a report that stated that by a strict legal technicality nothing illegal had taken place (the city has the right to waste its money if it wants to) although the logic behind why the city would want to pay handsomely for land it could have had for free was something no one was ever able to explain.

Whatever the truth may be, it was Ravosa who first suggested, to an indifferent public and a hostile political establishment, that much greater scrutiny needed to be paid to the process behind public building projects, in part to avoid the risk that the projects might be subverted for political reasons, as many suspected might have occurred in the Action Auto case. Had we subjected the school projects to the scrutiny that Ravosa first warned us we ought to, then enormous sums of money might have been saved on later projects that experienced widespread cost overruns. In other words, once again Ravosa was right.

Of all the foggy bottoms in Springfield politics, no bottom is foggier than the one at the Springfield Redevelopment Authority. It was his struggle to open up the SRA to public examination that proved to be Ravosa's most bitter battle, and the one for which he received the most abuse. When the local real estate market turned sour in the late 1980's, the SRA was left holding a lot of bad investments. That was when a mysterious rash of fires began striking the SRA's insured properties. Valley Advocate reporter Al Giordano quipped at the time that Springfield - The City of Homes -  should be renamed, "The City of Arsoned Homes."

Ravosa demanded that the SRA turn over its records for examination by the City Council. At one point SRA chief Dominic Sarno (not the future mayor) questioned Ravosa's sanity, and demanded a City Council investigation into whether Ravosa should be expelled from the Council as psychologically unfit to serve. Sarno's demand was denied, but Ravosa never received the documents he was requesting.

There is some question whether the documents Ravosa was seeking even exist. State Auditor Joe DeNucci held a press conference in which he called the SRA's bookkeeping "the worst I have ever seen." According to DeNucci, in just one year alone (1993, the year in which Ravosa was most fiercely attacked) nearly four million dollars had vanished without a trace. So was Ravosa "insane" for having pressed for an investigation into the SRA? Once again, Ravosa was right.

In 1993 Ravosa stood for re-election. He was clearly hoping to be re-enforced in his struggles by winning re-election by a wide margin. Instead he barely survived, holding on by only a few hundred votes. One small consolation however was that the voters threw out Morris Jones, the councilor who had threatened to assault Ravosa over the Ray Jordan scandal.

It was a few month after that election that I had my last conversation of any length with Tony Ravosa. Jay Libardi and myself were sitting at the Tavern Inn on the riverfront (the unofficial watering hole for politicians at the time) when Ravosa and his wife stopped in. They joined us at our table after informing us that they had just stopped in to kill some time before they had to leave to pick up Ravosa's father at the airport. In the course of our conversation it became obvious that Ravosa was disillusioned by his narrow election victory. After all he had endured on behalf of the public, he felt it was embarrassing to have just eeked by like some newcomer fighting for a seat.

His razor thin margin also deprived him of the mandate he needed to continue to press his issues. As we talked I saw little of the fiery determination that in the past had sustained him through so many battles. When I asked him what he foresaw as his agenda for the new term, he was vague and non-committal. After Ravosa and his wife left, Libardi turned to me and said, "This is Tony's last term."

And it was. Around this time Ravosa got a job in Boston through Governor Weld, and the to-ing and fro-ing from the Hub everyday left him more and more out of the loop in local affairs. His wife then became pregnant, and Ravosa began focusing more of his attention on family matters. He had little time to conduct investigations. Near the end of his term Ravosa began missing council meetings altogether, something that would have been unheard of in the past. When he finally announced that he would not seek re-election, no one was surprised.

But his slow fade from the scene can not erase the number of times when Ravosa was almost the only public official who had a clue as to what was going on. He warned us to sell Municipal Hospital while the market was still good, but the city refused and suffered major losses. He demonstrated how school building costs could be politically inflated, we ignored and paid through the nose. He led a fight to expose mismanagement at the SRA, today we know that his charges were just the tip of the iceberg.

That is why we must now state clearly, even though perhaps it must be said in the tone of an apology, what we should have acknowledged long ago.

Ravosa was right. 




Tony Ravosa checking in at the State Republican Convention, held at the Springfield Civic Center in 1994. That's controversial deal maker Heriberto Flores on the right. 
 
When former City Councilor Tony Ravosa ran against Richard Neal for Congress in 1992 he had the following cartoon as part of his promotional material. Shown sitting atop the Springfield Newspapers building is publisher David Starr, manipulating his puppet Richie Neal while his editors look on. The Springfield paper was called the Union-News in those days.





Once upon a time, in a kingdom long ago and far away (yet still quite familiar) there lived a brave young knight the people called SIR ANTHONY THE MAVERICK. He resided in the "Fiefdom of Homes" called ARSONVILLE where the Knights of the Roundtable, all except SIR ANTHONY, lived by the motto, "Go Along to Get Along." But SIR ANTHONY lived by a different motto: "Time for a Change!"

The other Knights of the Roundtable took orders from the COURT PUPPETEER and the evil town crier, THE STORYTELLER. But the COURT PUPPETEER and THE STORYTELLER and their band of MERRY MONEY MAKERS preferred to work in the shadows, away from the public's view, and so they had KING RICHARD THE FIRST serve as their pawn and to shield ther evil deeds from view. If anyone tried to challenge KING RICHARD, or expose THE PUPPETEER and his band of MERRY MONEY MAKERS, THE STORYTELLER would weave a web of lies to turn the people against KING RICHARD's enemies.

So it was, that when SIR ANTHONY discovered that the wicked TAX COLLECTOR was burning down the peasant's shacks, in order to collect the insurance, the brave young knight called upon THE STORYTELLER to alert the people of the evil deeds. Instead, THE STORYTELLER, afraid that the scandal would tarnish the glory of KING RICHARD and upset the MERRY MONEY MAKERS, told the people that SIR ANTHONY was a villain and a maverick who was disloyal to the sacred code of "Go Along to Get Along."

THE STORYTELLER (who like all bullies was a coward at heart) finding no lies suitable to discredit SIR ANTHONY, chose instead to attack SIR ANTHONY's family. THE STORYTELLER harrassed SIR ANTHONY's father, the owner of a humble tavern, with unsubstantiated tales of petty infractions of Arsonville's business codes (while turning a blind eye to much more serious transgressions by THE MERRY MONEY MAKERS).

But the people were not fooled. They had seen brave SIR ANTHONY stand tough against THE STORYTELLERS relentless attacks, and they recognised at last that SIR ANTHONY was their true champion. One fair day in November, the people took to the streets, waving their brooms and exclaiming, "More than the streets need cleaning!" as the multitudes descended on their polling places and swept KING RICHARD from his throne. From that day forward, with SIR ANTHONY to defend them, the people of Arsonville lived happily ever after.

THE END
(of the King and his Court)
 


This afternoon a sudden snow squall broke out at UMass as I was approaching the Southwest tunnel.





I laughed when I saw these "Freudian Slippers" in the window of a Northampton novelty shop.





Monday, February 25, 2008

Valley Politics Photo Review


Look back and remember.

Recently I was rummaging through my vaults and came across these old pictures. Most of them originally appeared in The Baystate Objectivist and are now out of print. In a Valley in which, politically at least, we too often stumble down Amnesia Lane, let these pics help us to reclaim our past.

This 2004 photo was taken at the second meeting of the state-imposed Financial Control Board and shows then Mayor Charlie Ryan and City Council President Dominic Sarno. If Charlie seems to be looking at Sarno a little apprehensively then he may have had good reason - Sarno would eventually take his job!





The old veteran teaching the young pup as FCB Chairman Alan LaBovidge walks past in the background. 





This photo shows the Sampsons, father and son, at their Pine Point music shop, shortly after it was robbed at gunpoint. The crime was never solved. In the left hand corner notice a poster for Tony MacAlpine, one of my classmates at The World Famous Thomas M. Balliet Elementary School who went on to have a successful career as a West coast rock star and sessions musician. 





 

Here is legendary Springfield activist Bob Powell (husband of Karen) and Pete Sygnatore, who has earned rave reviews as the man who cleaned up Springfield's notoriously corrupt Liquor License Commission. I believe this picture was taken at Charlie Ryan's 2004 inaugural. 





I think this picture was taken at the same inaugural. It shows in the back row State Senator Brian Lees, State Senator Tommy Petrolati, State Sen. Buoniconti, Superintendent Joe Burke and former Springfield Mayor Ted Dimauro. In the front row are City Councilors Jose Tosado, Kateri Walsh and Bud Williams with City Clerk Bill Metzger. 





Here is former Clerk Metzger taking notes at a Control Board meeting. The FCB ultimately decided that City Hall could not get a fresh start or create a new culture as long as such an old-timer like Metzger was around, and he was gently forced out. This picture captures a sense of his growing isolation during his last days. 





Oh wow, it's the beloved Playtown, where many a Springfield school skipper squandered many a quarter!





A motley crew gathers at STCC: Springfield City Councilor Bill Foley, his cousin Congressman Richard Neal and Councilor Bud Williams in 1999.

 



Longtime Springfield civil rights activist Attorney Mickey Harris at a MassGOP convention in 1994.





The old McNamara's bar at Stearns Square. It was a classic longtime establishment forced out of business by the Albano Administration in order to hand over the location to a cartel of Albano insiders. Remodeled and renamed The Pour House, it became notorious as the preferred hangout for the sleaziest elements of local politics, in particular the Ardolino Gang. 





The dean of Western Mass TV broadcasters, Ray Hershel, at a Police Commission meeting during the Meara era. I don't recognize the person next to him. 





Activist Eamon T. O'Sullivan, who is best known for attacking local pols with his answering machine messages, relaxes at Russell's Restaurant in Pine Point with the owner, Sandy Russell in 2003. 

 



Eamon used to occasionally come on The Tony Gill Show on WAIC. Here he is advising former Chicopee Mayor Richard Kos during a commercial break. 





In City Hall, insurance guru (now School Committee member) Chris Collins watches as finance guru Mary T. walks past in 2004. 





Today Bo Sullivan is best known as WHYN's long-running morning co-host. At the time I took this photo of him at the WHYN studios he was the producer for The Dan Yorke Show in the mid 90's.





I'll be searching through my vaults periodically and showing whatever other gems I find.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Hotel Hamp


Encounter in Room 512.

Hey, I got lucky yesterday and a friend called to say they had rented a room at the luxurious Hotel Northampton!





We went to the glassed-in bar of the Coolidge Dining Room.





Of course I couldn't have anything stronger than orange juice, but that didn't bother me. My willpower is a lot stronger these days.

The oldest part of the hotel is the Wiggins Tavern, which dates back to 1786. Here is the ancient brick and stone fireplace around which generations of Valley residents have sought warmth.





This is what the room looked like, with old fashioned furniture throughout.





The pictures were of local scenes, such as this watercolor of Northampton's Academy of Music. 





The view out the window was nothing special. 





In the morning they leave a copy of The Springfield Republican outside your door. Not the Hampshire Gazette?





I recommend you plan yourself a stay at the historic Hotel Northampton!



The cyberzine Local Buzz has a funny satirical piece up featuring my old radio and Valley Advocate buddy Tom Vannah with his look alike Comrade Fidel.



I like these psychedelic sneakers I saw in the window of a shop in Hamp.





Finally don't try this at home.


Saturday, February 23, 2008

Photos of Polito

The photographic record.

When I was writing about Jim Polito recently, I was surprised by how difficult it was to come up with a photo of Jim to use in my story. In the end I couldn't find one, and had to go instead with a generic picture of the WGGB headquarters on Liberty Street in Springfield. Amazingly, for someone whose face once saturated the media, Polito has become an almost Orwellian non-person about whom no physical image can be found.

A big part of the problem is that most of the images and articles about Polito were on the WGGB-40 website, which appears to have gone to considerable trouble in order to erase them all. When I told Polito he had become an internet non-entity, he sent me some pictures to put on the web, thereby restoring him from cyber-oblivion to the land of the living. Polito helpfully supplied his own explanations with each picture:

This is a picture that was taken last summer for the intern in the picture. His name is Brendan Monahan. He was an intern from UMass and was very good. His cousin Aaron Saykin used to be a UMass intern at the station years ago. Aaron is now an investigative reporter in Pittsburgh. I took the picture for Brendan on his last day. He thought it was hilarious that I was wearing shorts to anchor the news one weekend last summer. He thought it was confirmation of the old cliche that anchors wear jeans, shorts or boxer shorts underneath the desk where viewers can not see them. I did not do it for the laughs. I did it to stay cool. The air conditioning always crapped out in the studio on very hot days. The temps could get above 85-90 degrees under the hot lights.

 



Someone took this picture of me riding on the sands of Daytona beach during one of my spring trips down south. This is one of the only times you'll see me riding on my Harley without a helmet. The speed limit is 15MPH on the beach.

 



This is a picture of a picture of me doing a live report from ground zero on the one year anniversary. Sorry about the quality. I do have images of me at ground zero on 9/11/01 and the days that followed but I have not converted them from video to stills.

 



This picture was taken by abc40 chief photographer Bob Hastings from his car while we were driving east on the MASSPIKE on 6/18/06. It's quite amazing that he got this picture in one shot with his cell phone camera at 65MPH. That's why he's the chief photographer. I was driving to my parent's house with a father's day gift for my dad, the green bag on my luggage rack contains two books. Bob was driving to his part time job at New England Cable News. It's quite a coincidence that we met up. I won't tell you who passed who.

 



I included the above picture of me riding on the highway for another reason. My biker friends always say, "Jim, you ride a motorcycle but you're not a biker." They would point to that picture as proof. One, it's not considered cool to ride in shorts. Two, for safety reasons you should at least wear jeans in case you fall and slide. However, these same biker friends hate wearing helmets and take them off in state where it's legal to do so. I don't, no matter what the law. So, if we wipe out, I may have road rash all over my body, but there's a better chance I'll still be alive. As for helmet laws, I have no opinion, I'd wear one whether it were the law or not

This is how I ride when I take off for two weeks. That's all my luggage and included in there is my wireless laptop computer so I can check in with the world (including your blog, Tom) while traveling. On that particular trip I towed my bike up to Toronto with an old girlfriend who had family there. Then I loaded up and did 3600 miles. I zig-zagged down the east coast, visiting old friends, until I made it all the way to Key West, the southern and eastern most point in the US. Then I repeated some of the stops on my way home.

 



So thanks for the pics Jim, and now those searching for photographic evidence of your career will have somewhere to look!



I am shocked and dismayed by the recent closing of two major restaurants in downtown Springfield. The worst blow comes from the closing of L'uVa located by the arch which was one the city's best high class restaurants. It was the last thing holding back that end of Main Street from turning into a complete slum.


 

Almost equally devastating is the loss of the new deli that took the place of the beloved Gus n'Pauls at Tower Square (Baystate West). Here is a picture I took of that establishment after it closed.





To everyone's delight, the Ryan Administration successfully engineered a quick replacement. Here I am shortly after the grand opening posing with Lady Liberty and restaurant co-owner Stu Hurwitz. 





Yet after only three months it has gone belly-up, a stunning setback that only increases the growing sense of impeding doom among the business community of downtown Springfield.

Speaking of downtowns, here's something I came upon in downtown Northampton during yesterday's storm that you don't see very often: A giant tow truck taking away a bus disabled by the snowstorm. 





I spent some of yesterday's blizzard relaxing downstairs in Northampton's Haymarket Cafe. My eye caught something I'd never really noticed before, a battered red sign just outside the door. 





Stepping outside I saw that it was an old sign from the original Haymarket Cafe which if memory serves was originally only on the ground floor. It goes back to the days when it was also a bookstore. As far as I know, there is no longer a book to be bought in the place. 





I believe that sign was originally located at the top of Cracker barrel Alley and directed people to the what was once the front entrance but is now the back. Here is Cracker Barrel Alley as it appeared yesterday as I left the Cafe.