Items (mostly media)

Niniane, child prodigy and an old friend of the Pie and Coffee gang, is working out of Google’s China office and blogging about it.

Worcester Movies Weekly: Nobody else in town seems to be doing the web + print thing as well as this publication.

Worcester Movies Weekly

I picked up this month-old copy today. Problem: there’s no mention of the date until page 6! Presumably they’ve fixed this since then.

I have another article about local media at the Worcester Activist blog, now more or less “launched.” They also have an events calendar, wiki directory of organizations, and a place to post comments about T&G articles.

MassResistance Watch comments on an event where gay marriage foes kept drifting into the pro-gay-marriage area:

I guess I could understand the Vote on Marriage people wanting to sit on our side since their side had Larry Cirignano . . . .

Why does Cory Doctorow hate America? Interview via Bruce Sterling:

The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks.

Items

A couple updates from the Christmas T&G.

Cirignano hearing Feb 20:

Larry Cirignano, the Catholic Citizenship executive director who pushed a protester to the ground during a Dec. 16 anti-gay marriage rally here, will appear before a clerk magistrate on Feb. 20 on a charge of assault and battery.

Also, there’s a settlement of the lawsuit against the Library for its lending policy towards the homeless. For more info, see our podcast with all the background you’d ever want.

I’m not sure how a couple of legal stories end up in Monday’s paper. Wouldn’t these announcements have come out on Friday?

Items

WCCA funding battle: This week Worcester Magazine and the Telegram & Gazette came out in support of WCCA, Worcester’s public access cable station. WoMag: “Public access television is both often boring and fundamentally important; and WCCA has distinguished itself in the breadth and accessibility of its offerings at its three-studio Main Street location.”

Hospitality: Catholic Worker opens in Erie.

City Council pay raise: Worth quoting in full:

Official Vote to approve 9-3. Voting against Lukes, Rosen and Palmieri. Watching the meeting tonight District Councilor Haller mentioned that she had spoken to people throughout to the Distict and received “overwhelming” support in favor of the pay raise.

Larry Cirignano flip-out: Telegram says, “Police have filed a criminal complaint against the executive director of Boston-based Catholic Citizenship on allegations he pushed a female counter-demonstrator to the ground during an anti-gay marriage rally Saturday outside City Hall.” Bay Windows has one of the longest stories out there. Additional details from BlueMassGroup’s David, Michael Ball, Edge Boston, and probably a dozen other blogs.
Continue reading “Items”

Items

Greetings from the Mid-Ohio River Valley, where the excitement never stops.

Bunnie Huang, on China: “It’s also obvious (to an outsider) that the press is government controlled and biased. The writing style and headlining of the China Daily reminds me a lot of The Onion.”

The Parkersburg News isn’t government controlled, but it’s a lot like The Onion, too:
Electronic billboard placed
Continue reading “Items”

Bonus items

I slipped up on the last “Items,” forgetting the biggest Worcester news of the month: Bruce played a show at the Hotel Vernon. Wish I could have been there. Thanks to Cindy for organizing the show, and to Jim and Jacob for being the backing band. I promise I’ll have another coffee review from me & Bruce on Sunday. In the meantime, here’s Bruce’s original “Burn in Frozen Wasteland in the Deepest Pits of Hell,” Stale Urine’s cover, and Incisor covering Bruce’s “The Legend.”

Worcester: This city should be destroyed.
Continue reading “Bonus items”

Items

Items

We had a fair amount of site traffic on Thanksgiving, with lots of folks looking for Wal-Mart’s Thanksgiving hours and ending up at Mark Dixon’s Wal-Mart article. So I added a note at the top of the article about Buy Nothing Day.

Worcester: Dave McMahon has a blog.

Breaking news: Local man likes Jasmine Guy.

Snow Ghost: Bruce’s latest studio tracks are available for download. Note that he was last month’s Employee of the Month at Happy Birthday Mike Leslie.
Bruce

Naming a Worcester street after MLK: Efforts are moving forward.
Continue reading “Items”

Items

Funeral: The Telegram & Gazette reported yesterday on the funeral of Michael A. Cerrone in Worcester. Cerrone was killed by a car bomb in Iraq.

Godzilla: The Worcester Public Library will be screening “Godzilla, King of Monsters” Saturday at 2pm.

Oaxaca: Infamous Worcesterite ChaCha Connor is in Oaxaca. Indymedia has an interview with her about the situation there. MP3 (original post)


powered by ODEO

KNIMBY: The West Side’s anonymous author writes:

Now I know that most of the politically correct crowd is going to say that it is naive to believe that drug and/or alcohol abuse does not occur in our neighborhood. That may be so. However it would also be ridiculous to say that our area is riddled with substance abuse on par with other parts of the community.

(According to Technorati, we’re the first blog to link to The West Side. And we’re darn proud of it.)

Winslow Street Park:
DSCN8143
schematic

Bad buildings: WoMag profiles the ten worst propeties in the city.
Continue reading “Items”

Items

WoMag blog? http://worcestermag.blogspot.com/ is listed in the blog log this week, but it doesn’t exist. In fact, the name worcestermag.blogspot.com is still available! What hoodlum will grab it first?

Update: Two seconds of sleuthing reveals it shoulda been http://worcesterma.blogspot.com/. Typos in URLs are serious things.

Next SMOC meeting: Monday, there’s another public meeting with SMOC about the June Street program. A judge will be the moderator.

You’ll recall that this June Street dispute prompted the classic line: “I will be the neighbor from hell.

You gotta ask yourself: is being the neighbor from hell going to accomplish your goals, or just make your neighborhood more hellish?

Downtown Worcester: The Worcester Regional Research Bureau is sponsoring an online survey about Downtown Worcester.

Winslow Street Park: Note that the future Winslow Street Park is right next door to Ed Hyder’s market, one of the finest groceries food stores in the city.

Ed Hyder's & the Winslow Park Site
It’ll be so sweet to grab some olives and baked goods and sit in the park with a young lady snacking and watching the passersby on Pleasant Street.

When Clive McFarlane sees this, he thinks:

. . . it is difficult to see how a park of leisure and peace can long endure in a neighborhood where many people live lives patched together by welfare, drugs and alcohol, and to which those who are lucky to escape with a college education seldom come back.

I think: “Picnic heaven.”

China slaughtering dogs over 35cm tall: Part of their one dog policy. Washington Post:

Keeping pets has been controversial in China for decades. Banned as a middle-class habit during the radical Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, dog-raising surged anew with the introduction of free-market reforms.

The government line is that this is about stopping rabies. Are bigger dogs bigger rabies risks?

Items

Election roundup

Sadly, Chris Chocola, once South Bend’s Congressman, was defeated in his bid for reelection. I don’t like his politics or his attitude, but his name is awesome.

Count Chocula

Back in my home district of WV, Alan Mollohan won re-election. I first met him back in 1988, and have rooted for him to lose ever since.

Arizona voters chose to ban putting cows in veal crates and pigs in gestation crates. This measure was strongly opposed by Big Agriculture, and it’s a tribute to both activists on the ground and the common-sense compassion of Arizonans that it passed.

John Robb says that, Iraq-wise, we’re just getting more doomed.
Continue reading “Items”