Carpe diem

-- Photo by Uew Kills

“Oh, we’ll drink once more
when the wind’s offshore,”
We’ll drink from the good old jar,
And then to port,
For the time grows short.
Come lad—to the days that are!''

--"Under a Patched Sail,'' by Marianne Moore

Lou D'Allesandro: In N.H., a 'Granite Guarantee' for some college students

Thompson Hall (1892), at UNH.

Via the the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org):

Regardless of where you come from, the ability to access and receive a high-quality education is the key to success.

The dream of an accessible education will now become a reality for many New Hampshire youngsters, thanks to a new University of New Hampshire (UNH) initiative called the Granite Guarantee Program.

The UNH Granite Guarantee will begin with the incoming freshman class in fall 2017. An estimated 400 New Hampshire students will benefit from the program, saving a combined $5.9 million in tuition costs at the UNH campuses in both Durham and Manchester. Freshmen who are awarded the Granite Guarantee aid will be eligible to receive it for four years, provided they remain eligible for at least $1 in federal Pell Grant aid.

Last year, 21 percent of New Hampshire students at UNH were Pell Grant recipients, and we know that the financial need of families in our state sending their kids off to college is real. As the cost of our public colleges and universities continues to rise, this is a huge opportunity for New Hampshire's own to secure a world-class education.

The intention is for the program to grow with each new class, so the group of freshmen entering in 2018 will be eligible, then the group in 2019, and so on. By the time the 2020 cohort begins their studies, there will be Pell-eligible New Hampshire students at each grade level receiving support from the Granite Guarantee. We estimate that could amount to as many as 1,600 New Hampshire students—a little more than 10% of UNH’s total enrollment.

The Granite Guarantee is totally supported by private fundraising and was made possible by UNH's 150th campaign.

UNH has a lot to be proud of lately. Its nationally competitive women's and men's basketball teams have helped bring more visibility, funding and vibrant campus life to the university. Its engineering and technology programs are key elements in supporting the high-tech industry in New Hampshire.

For example, a strategic partner like Lonza Biologics, in Portsmouth, N.H. employs a workforce of approximately 30 percent UNH graduates, uses university instruments for ongoing testing, and partners with faculty and students on internships, senior projects and research. Additionally, through the New Hampshire Innovation Research Center, UNH is currently providing research expertise to Turbocam International, in Barrington, N.H. and HALO Maritime Defense Systems, in Newton, N.H.

The university is increasing its profile in other ways, too. A recent study by the national journal published by the Ecological Society of America, ranked UNH's ecology program second in the country out of 316 higher ed institutions in research and scholarship opportunities—a clear indicator that our state's university is a leader in this significant and growing field.

While free tuition proposals have garnered a lot of attention nationally, New Hampshire's decisions are independent of those made in other states. We should all commend UNH's leadership for recognizing that cost is often unfortunately a barrier for students seeking a college degree, and for finding ways to balance their budget while reducing costs to students and families in an increasingly competitive world. Indeed with the Granite Guarantee, UNH is the only non-Ivy higher education institution in New Hampshire offering this kind of long-term, guaranteed financial support to low-income students. The Granite Guarantee will offer more confirmation that our land grant, sea grant and space grant university is a place to go and change your life.

Lou D'Allesandro is a New Hampshire state senator and former chair of NEBHE.

Willliam Morgan: Tacky corporate picture at Bowdoin

Jon Friedman, an artist known for portraits of  such celebrities as Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Ted Turner, donated this painting of Leon Gorman to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Gorman, the grandson of Maine sporting-goods store pioneer L.L. Bean, was a graduate of Bowdoin, in Brunswick, Maine, and served the college as a trustee. Gorman died in 2015.         

This seemingly generous gesture is really a slap in the face of one of the great college art museums in the county. Housed in a neoclassical gem designed by McKim, Mead & White, the Bowdoin museum is home to an exemplary collection of American art by such luminaries as Winslow Homer, John Singleton Copley, Edward Hopper, Gilbert Stuart and Abbott Thayer.

Based in New York and  on Cape Cod, Jon Friedman cranks out trite, officialese portraits of the rich and famous – CEOs, physicians and congressmen. All follow the same bland photo-realist formula. Leon Gorman's is one of Friedman's worst, looking like a knock-off of one of the L.L. Bean catalog covers, complete with the ubiquitous Maine hunting shoe, barn coat and a couple of incompetently rendered bird dogs.

            To be fair, the Bowdoin visage is a preliminary study for a portrait at L.L. Bean, which is based in Freeport. Museums often try to collect artists' sketches, believing them to be fresher, more immediate, and less fussed over than the finished canvas. Alas, the Leon Gorman study is neither appealing nor revealing..

William Morgan, based in Providence, taught the history of American art at Princeton. He was also a visiting lecturer at Åbo Akademi, the Swedish-language university in Finland.

Llewellyn King: Trump further weakens the West

HELSINKI

The love affairs between nations have some of the same dynamics as those between people: When they are sundered, they do not return to where they were before one of the partners betrayed the other. Trust, once lost, is not easily restored and when it is, it is changed; it is less complete, more suspicious.

That change, that loss of trust, was on display the week of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, and President Trump’s second trip to Europe. It was not restored, the doubts not assuaged by the clumsy speech Trump delivered in Poland. His speechwriter got Poland’s historical role in Europe right, but he did not get its controversial authoritarian role today right at all.

It was the wrong place for that speech; a wrong reading of the crisis in Europe today. It is not only a crisis about its survivability, but also a crisis about its relationship with the United States; what has happened to the United States, where is it going and can it be trusted?

We have lost much of the trust of our friends and allies and we have done so by our own hand. This has been greeted by those who wish us harm with a kind of diplomatic smirk.

American steadfastness in the world, once as solid as the Rockies, has crumbled; it has been traded away for a kind of desire to shock. We have abandoned friends tested by time not because we should but because we could.

The trashing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was the first act of infidelity in the steady betrayal of allies. To the 11 other potential signatories, it was a simple statement: America does not care anymore. Its abandonment also diminished U.S. leadership in Asia. The result: a distrust of our consistency that will not easily be restored, and a vacuum waiting for China to fill.

After the communist triumph, Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time Inc., bellowed, “Who lost China?” Today’s question: “Who is empowering China?”

In Europe, the Trump administration has strung together a series of small offenses and insults, calculated to exacerbate not to heal. Trump has chosen to be the enfant terrible of the West. Why, oh why?

Every U.S. administration since Eisenhower has supported the integration of Europe. Bit by bit, as Europe struggled to become something bigger than the sum of its parts, the United States has been its cheerleader — even when it was feared (wrongly) that a kind of Fortress Europe might result from integration.

Along comes Trump like a loud reveler in a funny hat, outdoing European fears about The Ugly American.

Trump has ruffled European feathers in all the ways imaginable, from his initial refusal to assert that the United States would honor NATO’s Article 5 and come to the aid of members if attacked.

Trump’s renunciation of the Paris climate accord stung Europe. But so too did his endorsement of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and his cozying up to Nigel Farage, the British nationalist, and Marine Le Pen, the French anti-EU politician. These things rankle, so why do them?

This week in Europe, I found a resignation about Trump. People who, when I last visited or spoke to them, were expressing deep concern are now shrugging and considering the president as a dancing bear, amusing and dangerous. Europe, they tell me, is looking at a new uncertain future, but one that depends less on U.S. leadership than it has at any time since 1945.

An inadvertent gift may be that Trump has forced Europe to look again to itself and to what is right about its union: Its dream of being a bulwark against future internecine wars, with or without U.S. backing. And, of course, the “shared values” that Trump trotted out de rigueur in Warsaw.

Europe is shrinking in size with Britain’s exit and the United States is shrinking in world influence with Trump’s ascent.

Dark shadows are passing over the Western alliance and the liberal values it has promoted like free trade, human rights and accessible justice — long the best hope of the world.

Trump’s Polish speech has not reassured.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail,com),  a frequent contributor to New England Diary, is a veteran publisher, editor and columnist and executive editor and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. This piece first ran on Inside Sources.

Shaving crisis

"Untitled''(mixed media), by Neal Beckerman,in his show through July 29 at Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine.

Poets ignore Maine's blood-sucking reality

Black fly. The blood-loving insect drives fishermen and other visitors crazy in inland northern Maine from late May to July. New England Diary's editor experienced the horror during a fishing trip to Moosehead Lake.

"It seems odd that in all the years during which poets have sung of the lure of the Great North Woods {of Maine} not one of them has made even passing mention of midges and black flies...{It} gives rise to the suspicion that the poets of the great outdoors...have never been north of Portsmouth, N.H.''

-- Kenneth Roberts, in Authors Only (1935)

By size, anyway, Fox News is part of the 'Mainstream Media'

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' on GoLocal24:

Three prominent journalists at CNN were fired the other week for inadequately sourcing a story linking Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager and Trump confidant, to a Russian investment fund supposedly being investigated by the Senate. That is as it should be, although I doubt that we’ve heard the last about Mr. Scaramucci’s past activities.

One difference between the so-called mainstream media and Republican-Trumpian outlets as Fox News is that the former’s journalism is almost always much  more rigorous than Fox and  other Trumpian-style outlets. CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post, et al., make mistakes but they correct them. Fox, such allied newspapers as The New York Post and right-wing radio talk show people assiduously avoid making corrections or apologies, however erroneous their reporting and conspiracy theories.

Even many Trumpians, whatever their wishful thinking, tend to believe reporting from the “mainstream media’’ more than from the likes of Fox News, let alone such sleazy operations as Breitbart News and the pro-Trump National Enquirer.

As for “the mainstream media,’’ note that the most watched cable news outlet is Fox and  two of thetop five newspapers in America are owned by the Republican propaganda organ called News Corp. – The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. And the consolidation of the radio business has resulted in right wingers having far more broadcast radio outlets around America than the left or the middle. Listen to your car radio as you drive around America.

Meanwhile, I’m saddened by the decline of the quality of news reporting in one of my alma maters – The Wall Street Journal. While the news reporters used to report without fear or favor on activities of both Republican and Democratic administrations, now they usually shy away from looking into the dubious activities and those in the administration of Donald Trump, who is a close ally of News Corp. czar Rupert Murdoch.

'Drip drip the trees'

"My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read, 
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed, 
And will not mind to hit their proper targe. 

Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too, 
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again, 
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true, 
Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men. 

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough, 
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town, 
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock's crown? 

Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn, 
If red or black the gods will favor most, 
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn, 
Struggling to heave some rock against the host. 

Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour, 
For now I've business with this drop of dew, 
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower-- 
I'll meet him shortly when the sky is blue. 

This bed of herd's grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use. 
A clover tuft is pillow for my head, 
And violets quite overtop my shoes. 

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in, 
And gently swells the wind to say all's well; 
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin, 
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell. 

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats; 
But see that globe come rolling down its stem, 
Now like a lonely planet there it floats, 
And now it sinks into my garment's hem. 

Drip drip the trees for all the country round, 
And richness rare distills from every bough; 
The wind alone it is makes every sound, 
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below. 

For shame the sun will never show himself, 
Who could not with his beams e'er melt me so; 
My dripping locks--they would become an elf, 
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go. ''

-- "The Summer Rain,'' by Henry David Thoreau

Impressions of a Cape town in summer

 "Queen Anne's Lace'' (oil on masonite with collage materials added, fabric, mixed media behind plexiglass), by Joan Baldwin, in her show "E. Orleans,'' at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through July 30. E. Orleans means East Orleans.

She says: "I constructed a diorama like format for impressions of E. Orleans, the popular vacation town at Cape Cod. The pieces hang on the wall but are three dimensional, with the background of each terrarium painted in oil on Masonite with sculptural collage elements added to complete the habitats. In the show there is also a hanging installation of a mother and newborn moths emerging from a cocoon, that is representative of the emerging life at the Cape during the spring and summer."

James P. Freeman: RINO Baker drifts left along with the anti-Trump Bay State

For many Massachusetts Republicans, Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration is the advancement of a dishonest marketing campaign:  Baker and Switch. (Run as a Republican, cozy up to Democrats, disown the Republican Party.) Rejected Republicans, perhaps feeling duped from day one, should take note. Baker’s dispiriting drift to the left may just prove to be a stroke of genius for re-election in 2018. It’s a plan without Republicans — the abandoned, fatherless children of Massachusetts politics.

The plan was actually hatched well before President Trump skunked The Party of Ronald Reagan. As  a Baker senior adviser, Tim Buckley, told The Atlantic, the governor’s campaign in 2014 focused from the beginning on “showing he could say ‘screw you’ to the Republican Party.” Those words have proven to be prophetic and strategic.

The cold calculus of political reality, as Baker’s team knows, does not favor any Republican in the Commonwealth, let alone an incumbent Republican governor. As of February 2017, there were 4,486,849 registered voters in Massachusetts, with just 479,237 registered Republicans (11 percent of the total). Unenrolled voters numbered 2,424,979 (54 percent) while registered Democrats numbered 1,526,870 (34 percent).

Since the 2014 election, unenrolled voters have increased by 133,824, while Republican voters have increased by only 9,973. Increased unenrolled voter registration is trending upwards, and may accelerate, as Trumpism (a governing style resembling the Coney Island Cyclone) roars through the land.

Even though Baker beat Martha Coakley by just 40,165 votes in 2014, the election was a blue lagoon of civility.

Next year’s election, by comparison, will be a dark pool of uncertainty but will certainly feature a rabid anti-Trump sentiment and, by extension and association, Republican defensive posturing. And in the Commonwealth — what fun! — the proselytizing progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren will also be on the ballot. Republicans will be the expendables. Something the governor, understandably, wishes to defy for himself.

Baker is an elusive electoral enigma.

He is a social liberal and a fiscal conservative who has melted the cryogenically frozen corpse of {Nelson} Rockefeller Republicanism into new life. He enjoys a 75 percent approval rating in a state where Democrats control 79 percent of the House and 83 percent of the Senate, and Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won last November (61 percent to Trump’s 33 percent). He maintains a working relationship with House Speaker Robert DeLeo (where massive power resides), whose understated temperament is like his own. And,  he operates without a political base, given the minuscule minority status of his party.

Seemingly harboring zero national ambitions, Baker would be the first Republican Massachusetts governor to be re-elected since William Weld, in 1994 (who resigned in 1997 after being nominated as U.S. ambassador to Mexico – a nomination killed by right-wing North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms).

Baker’s survival instincts are validated by this paradoxical fact:  Even as prospective Democratic gubernatorial candidates (Setti Warren, Jay Gonzalez and Bob Massie) rightly cite his lack of grand vision for Massachusetts, many Democrats on Beacon Hill quietly concede that state government is functioning better under the bipartisan executive leadership of Baker than it did under his predecessor, Democrat Deval Patrick (who, with contempt for hands-on management, always spoke with a grand vision).

As The Boston Globe noted the other week, “State Democrats turn attention to Trump, not Baker, at convention.”

Still, for conservatives (a fringe of the fringe in the Commonwealth) hoping there might be some application of conservative ideas in this playground of progressivism, there is deep dissatisfaction with the governor. His risky political plan (popularity is perishable; a large unenrolled bloc can shift allegiance quickly) is, some believe, at the expense of foundational principles.

Howie Carr recently wrote in the Boston Herald:  “As his first term in the Corner Office  {of the State House} continues, it seems that the Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) governor finds himself more and more ‘disappointed,’ not just with his party affiliation, but also with the drift of public affairs in general.”

That might explain Baker’s puzzling appointment last week of Rosalin Acosta, a Lowell bank executive, as his labor secretary. Acosta (a progressive activist and anti-Trump enthusiast) and her husband this year founded Indivisible Northern Essex, a liberal advocacy group that began supporting progressive candidates around the country. Should a progressive run against Baker, whom would Acosta vote for?

James P. Freeman, an occasional contributor to New England Diary, is a New England-based essayist, former Cape Cod Times columnist and former financial-services executive. This piece first ran in The New Boston Post.

'Residue of my dream remains'

"Like the stench and smudge of the old dump-heap

Of Norwalk, Connecticut, the residue

Of my dream remains, but I make no

Sense of even the fragments. They are nothing

More significant than busted iceboxes and stinking mattresses

Of Norwalk, and other such human trash from which

Smudge rose by day, or coals winked red by night,

Like a sign to the desert walkers"

-- From "Dream, Dump-Heap and Civilization,'' by Robert Penn Warren

Moscow mysteries

Urbane bunnies

Eastern Cottontail rabbit.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

I noted a while back the proliferation of rabbits in Providence. Well, the same thing’s happening in Boston, including downtown.

One Boston Globe reader suggested that a partial explanation might be the use of less toxic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides in lawn and shrub areas these days. And maybe fewer feral cats (I hope!). Will the  bunny population explosion lead to an increase in killing rabbits for food, albeit not at French levels? 

But they're so cute!

Tim Faulkner: Coming soon -- live war exercises for the East Coast

--Navy map

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The Navy intends to fire missiles, rockets, lasers, grenades and torpedoes, detonate mines and explosive buoys, and use all types of sonar in a series of live war exercises in inland and offshore waters along the East Coast.

In New England, the areas where the weapons and sonar may be deployed encompass the entire coastline, as well as Navy pier-side locations, port transit channels, civilian ports, bays, harbors, airports and inland waterways.

“The Navy must train the way we fight,” according to a promotional video for what is called "Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing Phase III."

An environmental impact study of the war games was released June 30. Public comment is open until Aug. 29. A public hearing is scheduled for July 19 from 4-8 p.m. at Hotel Providence. Comments can be submitted onlineand in writing, or through a voice recorder at the hearing.

The dates and exact locations of the live weapon and sonar exercises haven't yet been released. In all, 2.6 million square miles of land and sea along the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico will be part of the aerial and underwater weapons firing.

The Navy has designated southern New England as the Boston Operating Area, Narragansett Operating Area and Newport Testing Range.

The Navy describes the weapons exercise as a “major action.” The live ammunition training includes the use of long-range gunnery, mine training, air warfare, amphibious warfare, and anti-submarine warfare. The Navy says weapons use near civilian locations is consistent with training that has been done for decades.

The Navy, in conjunction with the National Marine Fisheries Service, will announce one of three options for the battle exercises by fall 2018. One of the options is a “no-action alternative.”

The Office of the Secretary of the Navy has full authority to approve or deny the live war games. President Trump, however, has had difficulties finding a new Navy secretary. Venture capitalist Richard V. Spencer is expected to face a Senate confirmation hearing this month. Previous nominee Philip Bilden withdrew from consideration in February over financial-disclosure requirements.

The Navy says an environmental review for the excises was conducted between 2009 and 2011.

The live war games would deploy passive and active sonar systems. The Navy said it will use mid-frequency active acoustic sonar systems to track mines and torpedoes. Air guns, pile driving, transducers, explosive boxes and towed explosive devises may be used offshore and inland.

Risks to sea life include entanglements, vessel strikes, ingesting of harmful materials, hearing loss, physiological stress, and changes in behavior.

The Navy says it is using acoustic modeling done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to minimize impacts to marine mammals such as whales and porpoises. NOAA, however, isn't involved with efforts to mitigate environmental impacts during the war games. Spotters on naval vessels will search for mammals during the exercises. The Navy said it will partner with the scientific community to lessen impacts on birds, whales, turtles, fish and reefs.

While some sea life is expected to be harmed by the explosives and sonar, the Navy says it doesn't expect to threaten an entire population of a species.

Tim Faulkner writes frequently for ecoRI News.

Check out the special on kids' bones

"In the Future We'll Build Our Shopping Carts from Sticks and Twigs So We Can Stock Up on the Bones of Our Children" (scavenged sticks and twigs, India ink, paint, wire and cardboard), by John Christian Anderson, in his show "My Inheritance,'' through July 23 at Boston Sculptors Gallery.

Mr. Anderson uses both scavenged material and handcrafted parts to create sculptures  looking like  facsimiles and evoking both ominousness and humor.

The title, "My Inheritance,'' refers to a future in which   art will be created with ever-dwindling resources. 

Steven Clifford: How rigged system produces grotesque CEO pay and hurts America

"Avarice'' (2012), by Jesus Solana

Via OtherWords.org

CEO pay at America’s 500 largest companies averaged $13.1 million in 2016. That’s 347 times what the average employee makes.

So CEOs make a lot of money. But, some say, so do athletes and movie stars. Why pick on corporate bosses, then?

First, because the market sets compensation for athletes and movie stars, but not for CEOs. Teams and movie studios bid for athletes and movie stars. CEO pay is set by a rigged system that has nothing to do with supply and demand.

NBA teams bid for LeBron James because his skills are portable: He’d be a superstar on any team. CEOs’ skills are much more closely tied to their knowledge of a single company — its finances, products, personnel, culture, competitors, etc. Such knowledge and skills are best gained working within the company, and not worth much outside.

In fact, a CEO jumping between large companies happens less than once a year. And when they jump, they usually fail.

Lacking a market, CEO pay is set by a series of complex administrative pay practices. Usually a board, often dominated by other sitting or retired CEOs, sets their CEOs pay based on the compensation of other highly paid CEOs. The CEO can then double or triple this target by surpassing negotiated bonus goals.

This amount then increases target pay for his or her peer CEOs, giving another bump. Since 1978 these annual rounds of CEO pay leapfrog have produced a 1,000 percent inflation-adjusted increase in CEO pay.

At the same time, the bottom 90 percent of American workers have seen their real incomes decrease by 3 percent.

American workers were once rewarded for productivity. Inflation-adjusted wages and productivity rose in tandem at about 3 percent annually from 1945 through the mid-'70s. But since then the bosses have taken it all. Although productivity growth increased inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP by 84 percent over the last 36 years, real wages have remained essentially flat.

Where did the money go? It went to the 1 percent, and especially to the 0.1 percent.

The latter group, a mere 124,000 households, pocketed 40 percent of all economic gains. Business executives, CEOs, or others whose compensation is guided by CEO pay constitute two-thirds of this sliver.

In other words, it’s business executives — not movie stars, professional athletes, or heiresses — who grabbed the dollars that once flowed to the American worker.

Outsize CEO compensation harms American companies, and not just in the tens of millions they waste on executive pay. The effects on employee morale are much more costly. When the boss makes 347 times what you do, it’s difficult to swallow his canard that “there’s no I in team.”

Worse, CEO pay encourages a short-term focus. Instead of making productive investments, companies buy back their own stock to keep its price high, which boosts their own paycheck. From 2005 to 2014, stock buybacks by America’s 500 largest public companies totaled $3.7 trillion. This consumed over half of their net income.

That $3.7 trillion could have been invested in plants and equipment, new technology, employee training, and research and development. Instead, corporate America cut R&D by 50 percent, essentially eating the seed corn.

If athletes and movie stars were paid less, team owners and studios would simply make more. The hundreds of millions paid to CEOs, on the other hand, hurts their companies, employees and our economy. It’s a principal driver of our country’s startling income inequality.

One of the few checks on CEO pay is a rule under the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law requiring companies to disclose the ratio of CEO to average worker pay. Congress is now considering repealing this rule.

If you think that CEOs making 347 times what you do shouldn’t be held secret, maybe it’s time to let your representatives know.

Steven Clifford is the former CEO of King Broadcasting and the author of The CEO Pay Machine: How It Trashes America and How to Stop It.

Welcome to Blueberry Muffin Lane

Mt. Kearsage, near poet Donald Hall's house in New Hampshire.

"Let the poor move into the spareroom of their town
cousins; pave garden and cornfield; build weekend houses
for skiers and swimmers; build Slope 'n' Shore; name the new

"road Blueberry Muffin Lane; build Hideaway Homes
for executives retired from pricefixing for General Electric
and migrated north out of Greenwich to play bridge
with neighbors migrated north out of Darien. Build huge
centrally heated Colonial ranches—brick, stone, and wood
confounded together—on pasture slopes that were white
with clover, to block public view of Blue Mountain.
Invest in the firm foreclosing Kansas that exchanges
topsoil for soybeans. Vote for a developer as United States
senator. Vote for statutes that outlaw visible poverty.''

-- From "The One Day,'' by Donald Hall (who lives in rural New Hampshire)

Mining the real rural New England

The Mount, the (mostly)summer mansion built for Edith Wharton in 2002 in Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires.

"I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county {Berkshire County, Mass.} as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me. Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little -- except a vague botanical and dialectical -- resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it. Even the abundant enumeration of sweet-fern, asters and mountain-laurel, and the conscientious reproduction of the vernacular, left me with the feeling that the outcropping granite had in both cases been overlooked. I give the impression merely as a personal one; it accounts for Ethan Frome, and may, to some readers, in a measure justify it.''

-- Introduction to the novel Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

The art of hunting and fishing

"Huntsman and Dogs" (oil on canvas, 1891), by Winslow Homer, in the show "Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art,'' at the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt., through Aug. 27.

The museum says that this is the first major exhibit  in America to explore the visual culture of American hunting and fishing in  painting and sculpture from the early 19th Century to World War II. The show includes works by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, as well as by  such specialist sporting artists as Charles Deas, Alfred Jacob Miller, Carl Rungius and Arthur Fitzwilliam  Tait and modernist interpretations of these subjects by George Bellows and Marsden Hartley, among others. 

New England's tidal power

The world's first commercial-scale and grid-connected tidal-stream generator – SeaGen – in Strangford Lough., Nothern Ireland. The strong wake shows the power in the tidal current.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

The old saw was that New England has virtually no sources of energy. Of course what that meant was no fossil fuel (except for tiny amounts of coal in parts of southern New England). But it does have lots of wind power,  good solar-power resources and not insignificant river-water power. The last help make possible New England’s leading role in starting the American Industrial Revolution.

And, especially from Massachusetts Bay north, where the tides get progressively stronger and there are hundreds of estuaries,  New England has substantial tidal-power potential, too. And so it was heartening to hear Avery Brookins’s interview on Rhode Island Public Radio with marine conservationist Jonathan White. Mr. White is the author of Tides: The Science and Spirit Of the Ocean, about the promise and challenges associated with installing tide mills. To hear his interview, hit this link: