Monday, April 7, 2008
Safe Bet!
Tonight’s Select Board “reorganization” will see Gerry Weiss retain his exalted title, actually both of them: ‘Chair of the Board’ and ‘His Lordship.’
What controversy?
The Regional School Committee tomorrow night will take up the discussion of “Controversial Issues In School” policy for possible revisions (after the way the Committee handled things in the past I’m surprised to learn they have a playbook).
I only have two suggestions:
Don’t ever cancel ‘West Side Story’ (no matter how many kids sign a petition) and don’t ever allow the school to sanction ‘The Vagina Monologues’ again.
I only have two suggestions:
Don’t ever cancel ‘West Side Story’ (no matter how many kids sign a petition) and don’t ever allow the school to sanction ‘The Vagina Monologues’ again.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Colors of Spring
So Betsy Gage, who lives nearby and inherited the “job” from another neighbor, every year about now loads this big green bucket located on the South Amherst Town Common with brightly colored flowers (in late summer she may replace them with mums). She doesn’t get paid to do it, and she herself finances the flowers purchased from a very local farm.
Yeah, even the People’s Republic has people who genuinely care (thank God!)
Click photo to enlarge.
Friday, April 4, 2008
His Lordship: "Not Ready" For Prime Time
Since Amherst Select Board Chair Gerry Weiss just released this update about his anti-immigration law folly on an ABD (all but dead) website, I thought I would give it the wider circulation it deserves.
No agent, officer or employee of the Town of Amherst, in the performance of official duties, shall assist or cooperate with the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States in the investigation or arrest of any persons for civil or criminal violations of the immigration and nationality laws of the United States.
“I've decided to pull the article from the warrant. In my mind, it is not ready to go, and I'm not interested in using Town Meeting time fighting over a document that is not ready. This is too important to allow that to happen. I've been in touch with lawyers from ACLU as well as immigration lawyers who will help craft this into something that will be ready for Fall Town Meeting; or not at all.”
Notice he declares "I've decided". Hmmm. Last I looked it took a majority of the Select board (3 of 5) to place an article on the warrant or call for an Override. Now you know why his nickname is "His Lordship.".
And if we take up this "Welcome Aliens" legislation this Fall perhaps Mr. Weiss will put some money in the budget so we can construct a UFO landing pad on the Town Common.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Bomb the Bully?
So the buzz on the (privately owned by Mother Mary) Amherst Town Meeting listserve the past couple of days has been about the good ship Amherst Bulletin hitting an iceberg on their maiden voyage into political endorsements.
Amherst Town Meeting Buzz
One former Select Man suggested a boycott. Naturally Leo Maley the campaign manager of top vote getter and editorially supported candidate Diana Stein suggests everybody get over it and move on because, after all (and I can envision a Cheshire Cat smile as he typed this) “It is better to be a winner than a whiner.”
And talk about serendipity. Just after I point out it’s hard to “boycott” a free publication, I receive in my mailbox a plea from the Bully to send in this postage return paid postcard saying I want to receive the publication. This allows them significant reduced rates with their bulk mailing costs. Hmmm….
So even if only Hwei-Ling Greeney’s 1,393 supporters withhold that postcard it could tip the balance. Worse yet, they could check off the “No I do not wish to continue receiving the Bulletin” then wrap up a heavy brick in brown paper and tape the post card to it (with the “all postage is paid for by the Amherst Bulletin” showing).
Personally I liked my Abby Hoffman idea from a few days ago about wrapping a dead fish in the Bulletin let it ferment a few days and then mail it to them. Of course, now you could attach the post card and let them pay for it.
BUT, BUT, BUT: I’ve been there all too many times over the past 26 years in business. Last year after the Override failed a bitter woman sent me a snotty, condescending email saying she was forbidding her husband from renewing his relatively long-time membership to my club.
Fair enough…I guess. It’s one thing to suddenly decide you don’t like something a business owner has done (even though it has nothing to do with the business itself) and decide not to continue patronage.
But it’s another thing altogether to wage psychological warfare as punishment over daring to invoke my First Amendment rights.
Yeah, the Bulletin screwed up. And the good old boys in the ailing Bricks and Mortar newsprint industry never explain and never apologize.
As Freud once (hopefully) observed, however: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
End of a beautiful day
UPDATE: 10:30 pm It’s been an interesting if not L-O-N-G day. My forever business partner (as opposed to forever wife) is in L.A. cornering for an Ultimate Fighting women’s World Champ he trains, so I had to do a tad more work at the athletic Club than usual. And I’m still in a bad mood over yesterday’s election results.
So, he whispered soflty, just between us, this is what transpired over the past four or five hours:
Discussion on the Town Meeting Listserve (mistakenly called a blog by one poster):
On Mar 31, 2008, at 10:27 PM, mlwentworth@comcast.net wrote:
The editor of the editorial page of the Bulletin made a commitment to an op-ed writer several weeks ago that his column would appear in the March 27th edition. It did not. The editor also established in writing the process by which letters would be printed. He did not fulfill that promise either. One can only surmise that he was overruled by his superiors in Northampton who decided to arrange the page — letters and column — to support their endorsement.
Furthermore, it is generally considered to be an unfair practice
for a news paper to print attacks on candidates in the last edition
leading to the election. The Bulletin chose not to do this either.
Some editors in the interest of fairness would have shown the
letters/columns to the candidate and given him/her an opportunity to reply
And finally, we were told that letters in support of Greeney that
were supposed to be printed and that addressed a misconception of
her stand in regard to the budget and the schools were Online. But
it developed that the only way these letters could be accessed was
by doing a search using the name of the letter writer. Very cute. Freedom of the press has limitations in the same way that freedom of speech does.
From: Richard Bentley
To: amhersttownmeeting@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 3:37 pm
Can we get their side of the story on this blog? It would appear they
owe the town a HUGE explanation, and it might allay future mistrust.
From: amherstac@aol.com
To: amhersttownmeeting@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 5:33 pm
Bricks and mortar editors NEVER apologize and NEVER explain.
Larry
My comment on Tommy Devine's stellar blog this evening:
Yeah, let's hope the Big Shots that own the Springfield Republican can find a way to keep Local Buzz buzzing along. With only a cyber footprint it most certainly has a cheaper overhead than all that messy printing and distributing of heavy material that comes from trees Amherst folks so love to hug.
The Net was born out of Doomsday and has grown into the communication revolution that has ushered us into the 21'st Century. As the Dinosaurs discovered a few million years ago, adapt or die (or try to avoid those damn meteors)
Speaking of Doomsday, my very first notification on THAT awful morning came via an AOL Instant Message, something I usually declined.
I had just posted a flaming message to the Gazettenet forum (that at the time was way more popular than the Masslive Amherst forum) about the 'Only in Amherst' anti-flag events from the Select Board meeting the night before.
I accepted the call (AOL used to open a pop up in your top left corner of the screen saying "Do you wish to accept this I.M. from so and so) because I knew he lived in Boston and thought--since the Select board meeting had made the AP wire in the pre dawn hours of 9/11--that it had to do with little old Amherst.
He sent the text message "Are you near a TV?" I responded, "Flags in Amherst?" No he came back instantly "A plane impaled the North Tower of the World Trade Center".
I responded "Holy shit!" Again he came back: "Make that two--another one just hit the South Tower." I said, "I gotta go". Only then did I speed home to turn on the TV and see those searing images. My God!
Fast forward and look at Gazettenet now. They have been in cyberspace forever in Internet time (over ten years) but this new major revision is a disaster. They launched on February 20 and claimed the beta version would be fully in place within a week and here we are almost six weeks later and they still rely on the previous build.
The blogs are a joke. Chief editor Foudy posted once on Feb 20 and has not updated since.
Newspapers of New England recently purchased The Gazette and Valley Advocate and the new publisher Aaron Julien (who married the President's daughter) has no journalism experience whatsoever. Unfortunately for me he moved to Amherst (like a lot of carpetbaggers) and his wife has been politically active in ACE the pro-education group that can't spell.
The Gazette spent millions installing a new color printer and constructing a giganormous (ugly as Hell) building to keep it out of the rain in their headquarters in Hamp and they recently acquired a subsidy from the taxpayers in the form of a $630,000 state tax credit.
And not so surprisingly the Amherst Bulletin (also under the control of Pretty-Boy Julien) at the 11'th hour endorsed Stein and O'Keeffe just when their campaigns were starting to panic.
So yeah, in light of that last second meddling by the Bricks-and-Mortar, Powers That Be, it's not so surprising that Hwei-Ling Greeney lost (although that pose with Kerry probably didn't help...Yikes)
Posted by LarryK4 to Tommy Devine's Online Journal at Wednesday, April 2, 2008 7:08:00 PM EST
So, he whispered soflty, just between us, this is what transpired over the past four or five hours:
Discussion on the Town Meeting Listserve (mistakenly called a blog by one poster):
On Mar 31, 2008, at 10:27 PM, mlwentworth@comcast.net wrote:
The editor of the editorial page of the Bulletin made a commitment to an op-ed writer several weeks ago that his column would appear in the March 27th edition. It did not. The editor also established in writing the process by which letters would be printed. He did not fulfill that promise either. One can only surmise that he was overruled by his superiors in Northampton who decided to arrange the page — letters and column — to support their endorsement.
Furthermore, it is generally considered to be an unfair practice
for a news paper to print attacks on candidates in the last edition
leading to the election. The Bulletin chose not to do this either.
Some editors in the interest of fairness would have shown the
letters/columns to the candidate and given him/her an opportunity to reply
And finally, we were told that letters in support of Greeney that
were supposed to be printed and that addressed a misconception of
her stand in regard to the budget and the schools were Online. But
it developed that the only way these letters could be accessed was
by doing a search using the name of the letter writer. Very cute. Freedom of the press has limitations in the same way that freedom of speech does.
From: Richard Bentley
To: amhersttownmeeting@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 3:37 pm
Can we get their side of the story on this blog? It would appear they
owe the town a HUGE explanation, and it might allay future mistrust.
From: amherstac@aol.com
To: amhersttownmeeting@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 5:33 pm
Bricks and mortar editors NEVER apologize and NEVER explain.
Larry
My comment on Tommy Devine's stellar blog this evening:
Yeah, let's hope the Big Shots that own the Springfield Republican can find a way to keep Local Buzz buzzing along. With only a cyber footprint it most certainly has a cheaper overhead than all that messy printing and distributing of heavy material that comes from trees Amherst folks so love to hug.
The Net was born out of Doomsday and has grown into the communication revolution that has ushered us into the 21'st Century. As the Dinosaurs discovered a few million years ago, adapt or die (or try to avoid those damn meteors)
Speaking of Doomsday, my very first notification on THAT awful morning came via an AOL Instant Message, something I usually declined.
I had just posted a flaming message to the Gazettenet forum (that at the time was way more popular than the Masslive Amherst forum) about the 'Only in Amherst' anti-flag events from the Select Board meeting the night before.
I accepted the call (AOL used to open a pop up in your top left corner of the screen saying "Do you wish to accept this I.M. from so and so) because I knew he lived in Boston and thought--since the Select board meeting had made the AP wire in the pre dawn hours of 9/11--that it had to do with little old Amherst.
He sent the text message "Are you near a TV?" I responded, "Flags in Amherst?" No he came back instantly "A plane impaled the North Tower of the World Trade Center".
I responded "Holy shit!" Again he came back: "Make that two--another one just hit the South Tower." I said, "I gotta go". Only then did I speed home to turn on the TV and see those searing images. My God!
Fast forward and look at Gazettenet now. They have been in cyberspace forever in Internet time (over ten years) but this new major revision is a disaster. They launched on February 20 and claimed the beta version would be fully in place within a week and here we are almost six weeks later and they still rely on the previous build.
The blogs are a joke. Chief editor Foudy posted once on Feb 20 and has not updated since.
Newspapers of New England recently purchased The Gazette and Valley Advocate and the new publisher Aaron Julien (who married the President's daughter) has no journalism experience whatsoever. Unfortunately for me he moved to Amherst (like a lot of carpetbaggers) and his wife has been politically active in ACE the pro-education group that can't spell.
The Gazette spent millions installing a new color printer and constructing a giganormous (ugly as Hell) building to keep it out of the rain in their headquarters in Hamp and they recently acquired a subsidy from the taxpayers in the form of a $630,000 state tax credit.
And not so surprisingly the Amherst Bulletin (also under the control of Pretty-Boy Julien) at the 11'th hour endorsed Stein and O'Keeffe just when their campaigns were starting to panic.
So yeah, in light of that last second meddling by the Bricks-and-Mortar, Powers That Be, it's not so surprising that Hwei-Ling Greeney lost (although that pose with Kerry probably didn't help...Yikes)
Posted by LarryK4 to Tommy Devine's Online Journal at Wednesday, April 2, 2008 7:08:00 PM EST
It's a beautiful day
Since I did not make the victory parties last night let me say congratulations to Select Board winners Diana Stein and Stephanie O’Keeffe. You will now join a board with very little diversity of thought or ethnicity or--interestingly enough--gender.
The ball is now in your court, run with it. But keep in mind the parameters of the playing field. If you want to be everything to everybody you will need way more money; thus requiring a Proposition 2.5 Override, failsafe legislation that requires voter approval.
Last May 2,650 Amherst residents voted down just such an Override. Yesterday, first place winner Diana Stein garnered only 2,200 votes. Do the math.
Remember?
The ball is now in your court, run with it. But keep in mind the parameters of the playing field. If you want to be everything to everybody you will need way more money; thus requiring a Proposition 2.5 Override, failsafe legislation that requires voter approval.
Last May 2,650 Amherst residents voted down just such an Override. Yesterday, first place winner Diana Stein garnered only 2,200 votes. Do the math.
Remember?
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