Battle stations

9:00 PM

While Amherst public safety personnel were on high alert this Halloween weekend for the plethora of loud drunken parties expected, the situation changed dramatically this afternoon as a winter storm rolled in, felling trees and limbs--many of them also taking down power and phone lines resulting in electrical outages, transformer fires, and impassable roads.

DPW road crews--especially the tree division--and crews from WMECO have joined the battle. It's going to be a very l-o-n-g night.

Slip sliding away

Professor Hyunsuk Lee (yellow) and her merry band of Korean students

And they're off

About 100 runners braved the cold weather and mud this morning to participate in the 7th Annual Larch Hill English Style Cross Country Classic held at the sprawling Bramble Hill Farm about a mile south of Amherst town center.

Little kids kicked off the event with a 100 yard dash, medium kids did a mile, while the hardy adults negotiated three miles. All proceeds benefit the educational collaborative between Bramble Hill Farm, and their immediate neighbors, Common School and Hitchcock Center.Ten South Korean college students on a whirlwind tour of Massachusetts also participated in the race. I would love to have dragged a few of my "Party House of the Weekend" winners out of bed early this morning for a UMass team to compete against our Asian visitors.

Why the Koreans would win

It's begining to look a lot like

The Barn

Who needs a barometer; I have my neighbor, the DPW. Today they broke out the free sand pile, telling me winter is coming (or maybe it was the snow squall last night.)

Weekend throw down

Yeah, this is the B-I-G party weekend--probably more so than September 9, which culminated in a riot at 121 Meadow Street with rocks and bottles launched at public safety personnel. But maybe the colder, wetter weather will act as a deterrent...maybe.

Either way it's still "all-hands-on-deck" mode for UMass and Amherst police and the Amherst Fire Department. For AFD it's a dual threat, as dumpster fires seem to spontaneously occur late at night like fireworks on the 4th of July, and ETOH (alcohol overdose) students, one or two drinks away from death, litter the landscape.

The AP reported--and our local papers dutifully picked up--the sorry saga of students arrested by the busload at Gillette Stadium while attending the UMass/UNH football game last Saturday, which attracted far fewer fans than the previous New England Patriots game but had far more arrests for alcohol related matters.

Yeah, that's the kind of press UMass needs as they make the big expensive jump to Mid-American Conference next year.

Foxborough Police Chief Edward O'Leary is concerned because UMass has five games scheduled there next year. Lucky thing he's not police chief in Amherst, dealing with this dangerous nonsense most fair weather weekends.

No trivial pur$uit

Representative Ellen Story and her saucy sequined blue dress

In spite of the snow the Amherst Middle School auditorium was packed with people of all ages to watch four member teams sponsored by local businesses answer obscure questions without benefit of the answer God, Google.

Tonight's 17th annual Trivia Bee, promoted by the Amherst Education Foundation, is expected to raise in the neighborhood of $10,000 for the Amherst schools. No extra charge for all the fun.

Bad Form Rising

Select Board member Jim Wald posted to the unofficial Amherst Town Meeting listserve (privately owned by Mother Mary Streeter, protector of all things Larkspur Drive) an ominous sign for proponents of article #17, Form Based Zoning--the most controversial warrant article coming before Fall Town Meeting.

The information packet snail mailed to all Town Meeting members will be slightly delayed because when town staff crammed the quaint 9" by 12" brown manila envelopes with all the information printed on the remains of dead trees, the mailer was overweight by USPS bulk mail standards (and generous are those standards). Yikes!

Of course the main reason was the plethora of paper pertaining to Form Based Zoning. And as pretty as it is with all the color graphs and architectural renderings, as with Godzilla movies, size does matter.

Form Based Zoning is already in trouble because as the name succinctly says it's all about zoning, with zoning requiring a two-thirds super majority of Amherst Town Meeting. And naysayers (NIMBYs) are usually more motivated than calm, rational altruistic members who simply have the best interests of the town at heart.

Town officials should take a hint from the simple two-word description of the zoning amendment and synthesize all the supporting materials down to one single page of text, about the same number Lincoln used in the Gettysburg Address.

Town Meeting is about as simple an institution as you can get, so by all means, apply the KISS principle!

John, we knew ye well

Congressman John Olver

So the announcement this afternoon from Amherst resident Congressman John Olver about his retirement at the end of this term is kind of like when a sickly relative passes away after a very long illness: you're still surprised, even though it's hardly unexpected.

And I learned the news from my Facebook buddy--also an Amherst resident--Stan Rosenberg who posted it about an hour ago, thanking the Congressman for his four decades of public service. Of course Stan is now in a slightly weird position because it's a forgone conclusion he will run for the open seat if his redistricting committee does not nuke it first.

If he votes to keep the seat and then runs for it, his opponent (presumably a nasty Republican) will have a field day with that. Even the left leaning Boston Globe mentioned Stan co-owning a Beacon Hill condo with Congressman Olver, and he started out as his legislative aid.

But Stan is the hardest working guy in politics, and if anybody deserves to be a Congressman, he does. Besides, they're both from Amherst.