Something odd happened last week. Greenfield held a town election on Tuesday and all the people I voted for won. Well, except for the flyer write-ins. Dan, if they call you saying that you've been elected a trustee to some esoteric local fund, I must have pushed you over the top.

Anyway, Mark Wisnewski won an at-large town council seat, by a ( Read more... )

It turns out that Saturday was a much better day for trains than Sunday was. The conference let out early, so I walked back to the station to catch the 3:37 p.m. train, which turned out to be almost an hour late, and cost me another $4 to change tickets. But, at that point, I wasn't up to fighting over it.

Eileen McNamara was feisty. The longtime ( Read more... )

The Courant asked a number of the speakers for this weekend's event to write a little something about blogs for special Arts insert that they had available for attendees. Many of the speakers wrote disparagingly about blogs, using mnemonics like "bogs" and "blah." One ran under the headline "I Want My Space, Not MySpace." Rajiv Chandrasekaran, ( Read more... )

Separated from his Iraqi minder for a moment, Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran came upon a book merchant dealing in classics in a bazaar in Bagdad. Seeing his chance, the bookseller pulled out a copy of Julius Caesar, flipped it open to a page and pointed to this passage:I was born free as Caesar and so were you
Having relayed his ( Read more... )

For a while now, I've thought it would be fun to write about train travel. I thought that Amtrak should post train stories on its website. Well, I just recently discovered that they have. It's called Whistle Stop. Now I just need to figure out how to write for it!

So, I'm registered for two conferences in April. The first, on April 7, is the New England News Forum conference in Lowell, Mass. It's called "The New(s) England Revolution" and its put on by the same new media types who did last summer's Media Giraffe conference. It's kind of an inconvenient time -- the day before Easter -- but I enjoyed visiting ( Read more... )

A week and a half ago, L. and I took a trip to New York City. We usually drive down to New Haven, park there, and ride in on the MetroNorth train, but this time, we decided to try something different. I started in Amherst, because I had an interview scheduled for work. L. drove on ahead of me and left her car at her sister's house in Springfield.I ( Read more... )

L. and I have tickets to the Metropolitan Opera tonight. We've been planning it for a while, but it kind of snuck up on us. We're going to see "Madama Butterfly," but I haven't listened to it yet. Last time we went down to New York to see Tosca, we had listened to the opera a dozen times and I had read a book on it ( Read more... )