They are having a big t-shirt sale at Faces in downtown Northampton this week.
Apparently the big fashion statement for the summer of 2010 is the Grateful Dead, as it has been in these parts since at least 1967.
I understand why the t-shirt below sells. What I don't understand is how they sell them in Massachusetts. Maybe they're a hit with the snobs that come up here from New York City.
Graffiti in downtown Hamp.
Damon and I walked across the overpass on Main Street.
The view of downtown Northampton from the middle of the overpass.
What is the sense of this garish yellow line at the bottom of the courthouse steps? For two hundred years people have been climbing those steps, now all of a sudden there needs to be a safety strip?
Are people still protesting about Darfur? Yes.
Rachel Maddow spoke at the Smith graduation ceremony yesterday. Here's the video of her accepting her honorary degree.
I wonder whether she noticed these signs in a Main Street window.
Bill Gunn, who is running against incumbent John Olver in the upper Valley congressional district, gave this fiery speech Saturday.
Okay people, I've been rummaging through the vaults again and have unearthed a few out of print pieces that I'll be posting in the coming days. Let's start with this reprint from May 22, 2001:
Vonnegut Versus the Thought Police
In an article that originally appeared in the Boston Globe and later reprinted in the Springfield Republican, it is reported that best-selling author Kurt Vonnegut is leaving our Valley to return to live in New York City. For the past year he has been teaching at Smith College in Northampton and offending the politically correct types on campus with his irreverent ways. As reported in the Globe:
Vonnegut has always found a certain poetry in vulgarity, and his language hasn't been muted by the tacit taboos of the ivory tower.
And that has stirred a bit of discomfort at Smith. During his public lecture last fall, which he titled ''How to get a job like mine'' or ''A performance with chalk on blackboard,'' Vonnegut strayed into forbidden territory. After getting laughs mocking the National Rifle Association and drubbing the Internet, the legendary technophobe told a self-effacing story about how he lusts for an Indian woman who works at a Manhattan grocery store and wonders whether, like dentures, she puts the jewel she wears between her eyes in a glass of water at night.
More than a few students gasped. The mix of laughter and shock sparked a staff editorial in the student newspaper headlined ''Deify Celebs Much, Smith?'' ''Why did offended audience members feel compelled to tolerate Kurt Vonnegut saying such things, however the statements were intended, when they would have walked out on anyone else who uttered the same things?'' the paper fumed, adding: ''How many of you read your first Vonnegut book in August?''
Smith's writer-in-residence laughed when asked about the tizzy his comments caused. Then he got serious. ''I'll say whatever I want; that's the price of my freedom,'' Vonnegut says. ''If it hurts someone's feelings, too bad! That's the way it goes.''
It isn't just students who have grown uneasy with the novelist's impolitic anecdotes. When he showed up in an old sweater with holes in the elbows to lecture in Elliot Fratkin's anthropology class, the professor remembers squirming a bit when Vonnegut said beauty is everywhere, including ''a young coed leaning over to grab a book.''
''A lot of us just looked down on the ground and wondered, `Where is he going?''' he says. ''At Smith, it's not especially popular to talk about the beauty of the opposite sex.''
Vonnegut has made more of his time at Smith than stirring up trouble. Over the past year, the author has read poems and told jokes at local cafes, scatted as the lead vocalist of a band he called ''Special K and His Crew'' in the city's annual talent show, exhibited what he calls his ''new-cubist'' artwork at a local gallery, and helped a local bar brew a beer his grandfather made more than a century ago.
So what does Vonnegut have planned for his post-Valley life? For one thing, he intends ot file a lawsuit against the tobacco companies, but not for the usual reasons. A heavy smoker even in his late seventies, Vonnegut wants to sue Big Tobacco for not living up to the health warnings printed on every pack. "They promised to kill me on the package," he complains, "and they haven't done it yet." He's also working on a new book, despite a promise he made when he turned 75 to write no more. Instead he soon realized he would "crack-up" psychologically if he stopped writing.
Many of his friends and family are now dead - and that has deeply affected him. But there is a more honest reason why Vonnegut is writing another book: He can't stop writing. If he did, it might really kill him.
''Writers are very lucky. They can treat their neuroses every day,'' he says. ''When writers crack up, when they really end up in the nut house, is when they can't do it anymore. The treatment stops.''
It was nice of the Boston Globe to send a reporter out here to the hinterlands to record such witticisms from Vonnegut before he departed our Valley. What's strange is that no local print, television or radio media ever reported on his political correctness troubles on campus while he was here. Once again we had to rely on media from outside our Valley to tell us what was happening in our own backyard.
Climategate
The stunning revelations that the top scientists and most respected "experts" in the global warming debate plotted to exaggerate the data supporting global warming in what some are calling "the worst scientific scandal of our generation," draws into doubt the necessity of even having the climate summit in Copenhagen next week, says Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun:
If you’re wondering how the robot-like march of the world’s politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed “climategate,” it’s because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don’t give a s*** about “the science.” They never have.
What “climategate” suggests is many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.
Now they and their media shills—who sneered that all who questioned their phony “consensus” were despicable “deniers,” the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust—are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.
An incident happened last week at Northampton's Smith College that attracted little media attention but perhaps should have. Ryan Sorba, author of an unreleased but already controversial book titled The Born Gay Hoax attempted to give a speech presumably based on his belief that homosexuality is not determined primarily by genetics.
Speaking for myself, I definitely have the sense of having been gay my whole life. If it is a "lifestyle choice" then it was one I made too early in life to be conscious of doing it. But what exactly Sorba's theory is was not possible to ascertain because angry mobs of chanting protesters made it impossible for him to speak.
I didn't attend the event. The person who alerted me to it, as well as to a site with some photos and videos of the incident, was local writer and photographer Ben Duffy, whom some of you may remember as an occasional contributor to this website. He sent me the following email:
Ben Duffy
Tom , I thought that you might want to take a look at these pictures and videos. They are astounding.
I've noticed from your blog that you seem to harbor a hatred toward the so-called "religious Right", due to the fact that they think that your sexual behavior is immoral. Well, I do too.
In any case, you're still free to do it. Here's the BIG LIE of the homosexual lobby--that they just want to secure the freedom of two consenting adults to do what they want to do behind closed doors. In fact, that is NOT the case. What they want is for everyone to approve of it, nay--to CELEBRATE it.
The educational system is their vehicle. They'll get right down there in the elementary school if they need to.
I remembered once how you mention the supposedly "anti-gay" Mike Huckabee, and how you remembered a time when Republicans just wanted to stay out of your bedroom. Well guess what--we still do. Even Mike Huckabee approves of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that found a RIGHT to Sodomy in the Constitution. Mike Huckabee is in no way suggesting that cops should be running around, breaking down doors and arresting homosexuals in their acts of indecency. He just wants the right to SAY that it is indecent.
And that's the freedom that is in jeopardy in the United States today. Frankly, the "gay rights movement"-- aka the homosexual lobby, aka the sodomy gestapo--is the greatest threat to our freedoms today. They will silence anyone who gets in their way. If this video doesn't convince you, just Google Tyler Chase Harper. Or look into the San Diego and Providence firefighters who have been forced to march in Gay Pride Parades. OR look at the Christian activists who were arrested at the Philadelphia gay pride parade for engaging in peaceful protest. Or the way that the homosexual lobby shut down Catholic Charities of Boston because they refused to put children in the unhealthy environment of homosexual parents.
If I were a bumper sticker person, I'd have one made that says "homosexuals stole my right to vote". I don't buy this bullshit that we can't vote on gay marriage because it is a "civil right". Voting is a civil right, gay "marriage" is a judicial fabrication. What happened here on June 15, 2007 was tyrannical. That was the day that the government stopped working for us and we started working for the government. Honestly, I have never seen such a dishonest circumvention of democracy in my life.
Homosexuals are not the victims. Homosexuals are the aggressors. Their rights are not in jeopardy, but the rest of ours are.
BEN
Sheesh, it's a good thing I don't require my friends to agree with me on every issue! Actually I don't argue with people who try to tell me my queerness is immoral. I just say:
Fuck you, it's my body and I'll do what I want!
Anyway, if the past is any guide, Sorba's book is just a lot of word games designed to make hatred and ignorance seem respectable. But that's beside the point. Any attack on any public speaker, regardless of what they are saying, is an attack on the free speech rights of every member of the community. If anyone is shouted down into silence, then anyone who has anything to say is at risk of censorship. Always it is the speech we find most offensive that we must fight most vigorously to defend. That those values are not respected on today's college campuses, where the leaders of our future are being trained, is more than sad. It's frightening.
To its credit, the president of Smith College released a public statement expressing regret over the incident, which is more than UMass did over the Mike Adams affair in which the speaker was practically chased off the stage. But we obviously still have a ways to go to restore open thought and freedom of speech to our institutions of higher learning.
To see a detailed account, complete with amazing videos, of the unfortunate events at Smith, CLICK HERE.
Meanwhile, the Valley Press Club held it's annual roast in Springfield the other night. I didn't go to that either, but Bill Dusty did and filed a report on his website. Here is a picture he took of attendees Mike Dobbs, who keeps a foot in both old and new media with his gig with The Reminder and his multiple blogs, with Jim Polito, the former TV40 dude who now has a new gig in the Worcester area.
What was unique about this roast was that for the first time it was made known through the inter-media grapevine (more efficient in its own way than the Associated Press) that local bloggers would not be unwelcome if they attended. That's a far cry from the days of old, when the roasts were very elite affairs where only true insiders attended and Dave Starr always had a table in front for skits such as local reformers Bob and Karen Powell being ridiculed as "trailer trash."
Here's a view of downtown Northampton from behind the gates of Smith College.
Sunday is April 20th, or 420, or as it's also sometimes called, Bicycle Day, because that is the day Dr. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, enjoyed the first moments of psychedelic consciousness. When he first got off on the acid, he rode his bicycle home stoned out of his mind, making the act of riding a bike the first psychedelic experience.
Anyway, I saw from multi-colored messages scrawled on the sidewalk around Smith that the college is having a High Pride celebration on the campus quadrangle Sunday afternoon.
Of course tomorrow is the annual Extravaganja, put on by the UMass Cannabis Club, on the town common in Amherst. I, however, will not be attending any High Pride events.
I support the legalization of marijuana. It seems stupid to me that such deadly drugs as cigarettes and alcohol are perfectly legal while ganja, the most gentle and harmless of the naturally occurring mind altering substances, is illegal. I live in a halfway house full of drug addicts, and frankly none of us would have ended up here if we had only been pot smokers.
Normal folks - "Earthlings" as we druggies call them - can smoke marijuana safely and pleasurably and the law should let them do it. I would express my solidarity with the legalization movement by attending the High Pride celebrations but frankly I'm too new in sobriety to risk it. I think I could go and refrain from smoking, but at this point it's better for me to play it safe. I have to remember how close I came to dying last fall, and how I can't be sure I'll be lucky enough to survive again if I relapse.
So all you Earthlings, go to the High Pride events and raise hell! In spirit I will be in solidarity with your noble cause. On 420 itself I will write my long promised review of the videos Captain Skypilot sent me.
