Croz

Last week I went to the Amherst Cinema.

The movie I went to see was Remember My Name the new documentary on the life of singer/songwriter/musician David Crosby. I wish I coulda swiped this poster.

The film was great. Crosby's life dovetailed with many of the cultural changes of the later part of the prior century. Today, this new century finds him old, cantankerous, but very much alive and eager to retell his many adventures, supplemented by old film footage and of course his wonderful music, much of which was done as a member of the super-group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

This film autobiography is quite engrossing, but also a little bit sad when you contemplate all the music that was never made due to the way he and his fellow band members were always letting personal squabbles get in the way of their music. Crosby appears at times to almost beg his former band members to bury the hatchet and reunite for one last tour, and hopefully that is what this fascinating and enlightening documentary will succeed in making happen. Here's the trailer to the film:



The blood-thirsty Leftist dictator Robert Mugabe has finally been sent to the eternal hell he surely deserved when he died last week. But as the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby reminds us, Mugabe had his American fans, among them the clueless Lefties at the University of Massachusetts:

The atrocities committed by Mugabe’s forces were reported on at the time by human rights organizations and international media. By 1987, the death toll carried out in Matabeleland had reached 25,000.

That didn’t keep the University of Massachusetts from awarding Mugabe an honorary degree. In October 1986, Zimbabwe’s increasingly ruthless ruler was extolled in a special convocation on the Amherst campus as a champion of human rights. The UMass chancellor, Joseph Duffy, hosted Mugabe at a dinner in his home, where he praised his leadership and economic reforms and expressed the hope that Mugabe’s record in Zimbabwe was a preview of what a post-apartheid South Africa would look like.

It took 22 years for the UMass trustees to have second thoughts about the honor they had bestowed on the Zimbabwean butcher. Mugabe’s honorary degree was revoked in 2008.

Read the entire article here.

In downtown Amherst across from The Black Sheep there is this sidewalk made of bricks that have memorial names engraved on most of them.

I was very pleased to see that a new brick has been installed in honor of blogger Larry Kelley.

Yesterday, I encountered a Wooleybear Caterpillar on the woodland way into downtown Northampton.

It looks a little thicker than the one I saw last year.

Supposedly, how wooley the caterpillars are is an indicator of how cold the winter will be. By that standard, this winter should be a bit harsher than last year.