Lately I've been riding my bike on the Norwottuck trail every day, keeping fit and trying to remember all the rules. (click photo to enlarge)
It really is a beautiful ride through God's country, beginning with the old trestle over the mighty Connecticut.
And don't worry if your tires get soft or your throat gets parched, both air and water are provided by Country Nissan for the price of free.
Much of the trail is through the farm fields of Hadley, where the heavy snow this winter caused this old barn to completely collapse.
At one point I came across a couple of chickens that had escaped their coop and I got off my bike and chased them around a bit. Chickens have wings, so why do the chickens run instead of flying away? Can chickens fly? Perhaps they can, but maybe they just don't want to.
Meanwhile, a tranquil serenity has settled over UMass now that the students are gone for the summer.
There was no such serenity earlier this month however, following the announcement of the assassination of Osama Bin Ladin. This video captures the moment when the UMass students came pouring out of the towers into the courtyard.
Although the title of the video refers to the event as a riot, it was really more of a celebration. Rioting at UMass is reserved for sporting events, not politics.
Speaking of politics, at Rao's in downtown Amherst you get your coffee served with a side of Republican.
I see from the red X on the side of this old ruin that it is set to be torn down.
An old freak once told me that back in the 1960's that rambling old place was the wildest hippie house in Amherst. When the wrecking ball hits it, ghosts of the Summer of Love will fly away.
Oh well, this sticker on a neighbor's house has the right attitude.
What has this Norway Maple on the Amherst Common got to do with Memorial Day?
It was planted 41 years ago to honor the fallen.
My cousin was planning to pick me up in Amherst to go to a cookout on Memorial Day. However, there were no buses, so the only way for me to go to Amherst was to walk. My cousin would have come into Northampton to get me of course, but I welcomed the adventure of travelling the Norwottock on foot.
My quest began in Northampton at the start of the new addition of the rail trail, located by the combination Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell - or as everybody calls it, Kentucky Taco
.
Here is a view from an overpass looking down North Street towards King Street.
Frankly the new section is not all that scenic, consisting mostly of back views of the businesses on King Street.
While passing behind the abandoned Honda dealership, I noticed that one of the large windows was broken. Indeed, it was large enough so that I could go inside if I wanted to.
Dare I?
But of course, we citizen journalists routinely go where others fear to tread.
However, once I squeezed my way through the window there really wasn't much worth seeing. Vandals have been through the place, and it's a mess.
The letters that once made up the front sign now lie scattered among the debris.
A roadtrip poster is all that holds together the shattered glass.
On well, it was time to leave this decaying remnant of the local automobile industry and continue on my merry way. Soon I was on the Norwottock Trail, where I could see the crops rising on the fertile farm fields of Hadley.
All along the way there was evidence of the tree-toppling storm of last week.
At one point on the trail I passed an old abandoned factory - and noticed that a window was open!
Should I commit yet another Memorial Day trespass? I would have, but the window was too small. Yet I did stick the camera through the opening and captured this image of the ruins inside.
It was just as well that I couldn't get in, as it did not look very safe at all. What is very safe and very welcome is the new ice cream place that has opened on the trail by the Maple Farms health food store. I stopped for a vanilla cone.
The man in the mirror.
Finally arriving in Amherst, I waited in the Starbucks for my cousin to arrive. Here is the view through the window of downtown Amherst as it appeared on Memorial Day.
Late that afternoon on the ride back my cousin wanted to stop at the old railroad trestle over the river to watch the sun set.
As dusk fell upon the mighty Connecticut, I was reminded once again of how our Valley is truly God's Country.
Jeff Ziff sent along this video showing Memorial Day in Monson.
Jeff is best known to the Valley blogosphere as the videographer behind one of the most indepth YouTube sites for local music. Alas, his priceless archive of musical performances was wiped out by YouTube recently, as Ziff himself explains:
Hi Tom, I saw this sign in Brimfield State forest, I thought you might get a kick out of it.
So...My youtube site has been deleted, all fucking 401 videos.....all 300 subscribers...and the sodafixer name....gone! This was over 4 years of uploading! My first thoughts were....fuck this...Im not even going to bother doing that again, and then of course...I came to my senses...like you the blogger...I have to constantly show the world my videos and my photos..I am hooked. I started building my youtube site again, this time as...what else...SODAFIXER2. As of this email I have 13 videos uploaded. 1 year ago, I uploaded a video from a local blues band which was thrilled to have me give them exposure, they really liked the video and was happy to see the numbers spinning. Well, it turns out the song they were singing in the video was a Bo Diddley song, and the label (BMG I think) was not as happy as we were to see the video. That was strike one. Now, I got home from work a few days ago and checked my email as I do, to find one from youtube saying...there has been a complaint against you from Sony records because of copy right infringement on my Johnny Winter Video (when he was at Stearns square 2 years ago). The very next email says...there has been another complaint against you from Sony on your Johnny Winter video...this is strike 3 we have deleted your account! Tom, I felt like crying...all of that work....gone. I knew this was a possibility, I know you are supposed to get permission (it has the rules on youtube everytime you upload) but I really thought seeing there were millions of users...what are the chances they would bother me? Well, I guess the bigger you get...the more you are on their radar. DAMN!
Fortunately, Jeff has many of the lost videos on backup at home and will repost them, but tragically there is no way to completely restore the priceless archive of local music that was lost.
Speaking of local music, Damon was rocking Sunderland this weekend.
I'm shocked that I continue to hear people say on TV and in the papers that one of the main goals of the so-called health care reform efforts in Congress is to control spending. Huh? When the hell has that ever happened? On the contrary I strain in vain to think of any area in which the government getting involved in providing any service has resulted in cost savings.
If anything, government involvement is an invitation to waste and fraud. If Congress were really interested in controlling costs, they would not model their program, as they have, on what increasingly appears to be the failing model of universal health care here in Massachusetts. Reason columnist Jacob Sullivan explains:
Since 2006, Michael Cannon notes in a recent Cato Institute paper, health insurance premiums in Massachusetts have risen by 8 percent to 12 percent a year, almost double the national average. During the same period, total medical spending has increased by 28 percent. The cost of subsidizing coverage through the state’s Commonwealth Care program is expected to hit $880 million next year, 20 percent more than originally projected.
Second, despite stricter penalties, Massachusetts seems to be experiencing adverse selection. Cannon notes that, while the share of residents without insurance has shrunk from about 10 percent to about 5 percent, the proportion of uninsured people in the 18-to-25 age group has increased from 30 percent to 35 percent, indicating that “the young (and presumably more healthy) are less likely to comply with the mandate.”
Third, requiring people to buy insurance entails defining the minimum level of coverage, which necessarily makes insurance more expensive than it would otherwise be. In effect, the government prohibits the cheapest insurance plans, the ones with the highest deductibles and the least generous benefits.
The upshot is a phenomenon we have seen many times before: Instead of protecting us from big business, big government buys it off with our money.
Canadian High
With Grace Slick in poor health the Jefferson Starship is today primarily a Paul Kantner solo band. Currently touring Canada, a rev,iew from a Canadian paper yesterday describes the 68 year old Kantner as still overseeing a realm of spacy chaos.
Kantner sang and played mostly rhythm guitar. Here’s one dude who’s still living the dream. He spoke several times on the quality of Vancouver Island drugs, which apparently, pale to his usual toot.
“Some of the stuff I had from your local dispensary is pretty good,” declared Kantner sagely. “But it’s not as good as San Francisco.”
Hadley in the Rain
Today is another one of those gloomy, wet New England fall days. On the bus into Amherst this morning I took some pictures through the rain streaked windows of the farm fields of Hadley. Sometimes I captured a nice effect.
Other times I didn't. Those blurry light and dark blobs on the grass are white ducks and black hens.
This area is so rural you need a sign just to warn you of an approaching sign.
All the farmer's fields are dead, patiently waiting until next spring to be reborn.
Growth, harvest and then rebirth, the unchanging cycle of hundreds of years.
It's seems like it's been all Ted all the time on TV these past days following his death, but is anybody watching? Nielson ratings are in and according to the New York Times ABC's special Remembering Ted Kennedy drew four million viewers. The CBS special The Last Brother earned 4.6 million viewers. However NBC crushed them both with the nearly 11 million viewers it drew to the America's Got Talent reality show, which is more viewers than both Kennedy specials got combined.
Am I being cynical or just realistic when I say that many Democrats secretly hoped that Ted would die next month, when Congress is in session, instead of now, when congress is on vacation and any emotional outpouring is of little use in ramming through the Obamacare plan?
Oh well, at least we're seeing some good Pioneer Valley memorabilia surfacing regarding Kennedy. Amherst writer Mary Carey shares this picture of herself and Kennedy in 2004.
And this picture of her sister-in-law's sister in 1987 at the Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day parade. Waving beside Ted is former Springfield Congressman and local Democrat machine boss Eddie "House Mouse" Boland.
My sister Beverly once waited on Ted Kennedy in 1992 when she was working as a waitress at the Friendly's that used to be located in downtown Springfield across from the courthouse.
One day Ted stopped in with then Springfield Mayor Robert Markel. Both men ordered a coffee, a bill which in those days came to only a dollar and a half for both cups. Ted paid with a ten dollar bill, telling my sister to keep the change, resulting in an $8.50 tip on a buck and a half purchase. Hey, say what you will about Teddy - he was a good tipper!
We've heard a lot in the last several days about how Ted Kennedy was the "Liberal Lion" who fought relentlessly for the leftist cause. However, little has been noted about Kennedy's occasional libertarian tendencies. According to Reason Editor Nick Gillespie:
There is, buried deep within Kennedy's legislative legacy, a different set of policies worth exhuming and examining, precisely because they were truly a break with the normal way of doing business in Washington. During the 1970s, Kennedy was instrumental in deregulating the interstate trucking industry and airline ticket prices, two innovations that have vastly improved the quality of life in America even as—or more precisely, because—they pushed power out of D.C. and into the pocketbooks of everyday Americans.
We are incalculably richer and better off because something like actual prices replaced regulatory fiat in trucking and flying. Because they do not fit the Ted Kennedy narrative preferred by his admirers and detractors alike, these accomplishments rarely get mentioned in stories about the late senator. But they are exactly the sort of legislation that we should be celebrating in his honor, and using as a model in today's debates about health care, education, and virtually every aspect of government action."
That Ol' River
You just can't beat the gorgeous view of the mighty Connecticut that you get as the river passes through Hadley.
Of course you have to stick to the public paths.
I'm jealous of the people who have homes right on the river.
