Wake Up and Smell the PCBs

I don't know, maybe these falling trees have a story to tell about what is under the ground at the old Northampton Honda and Mass Electric land. When people talk about our need to spur development along King Street, they often mention the vacant Northampton Honda site (171-187 King). So why is nothing happening there? Signs have been put up, and they have been up there so long that they fell down. The building is drowning in weeds that have turned into trees. What happened to the 2005 mixed-use development that Berkshire Development LLC wanted to put in there.

Some people think that it was the demands of our new King Street development zoning that killed the project. It was Wayne Feiden and the city council who drove a deep-pockets developer away. The city wanted two story buildings with residences and offices upstairs; the developer thought that this space would be difficult to rent, and the lawsuit from Florence Bank who didn't like a bank across the street didn't help. It turns out the major problem was the site itself. read the full story here

Unappreciated, but still working

The Upper Roberts Dam yesterday

The Pond behind it

About 5:30 pm, it was clear that the hurricane had jilted us and left us in the lurch. Then we heard the astounding news that the Mill River was at, or close to flood stage. About five-thirty or a little later, the field staff for Kirbyontheloose went out the door, camera in hand. At Baker dam it was a real mini-Niagara, thunderous and impresssive, and the show had drawn a crowd of us rubber-neckers. Upstream at the bridge below Musante beach, the water had carved out more of the bank, at the swimming area there was no swimming, and further up in the meadows the brook lapped the road, but didn't close it. The object of my trip was the Upper Roberts dam, to see how this much-maligned dam was doing. Yes, the DPW has done its best over the years to demolish it. Today I saw Ed Shanahan on the street, and he remembers that in the seventies or eighties they had brought out a wrecking ball and tried to knock it down. That didn't work. Then last year, they went after federal money to demolish it with heavier equipment. But here it was,holding fast, doing its job. The pond behind it was a foot or two higher than I remembered it being last fall. That foot or two of water times the expanded area of the pond was all water that wasn't pounding at the footings of the bridge downstream, creeping up on Water Street, going over the Baker Dam, and pouring into the boat house down at Paradise Pond. For more background, see this older post from December of last year

No swimming at Musante Beach

Space Age Medicine

He sat there at the keyboard of his laptop, peering at the screen. He was not a happy camper. Our ten minutes together was over, and it had been a lot of fun while it lasted. A small joke, the ticker was okay, blood pressure normal, normal sounding arteries, medicine that seemed to be working okay. I was putting my shoes on, and he was at the keyboard of the computer the health service had given him, summarizing and documenting, tapping away at the keys, sending to Alabama or somewhere on Mars a form to get me a 90 day supply of medicine.

“Nice the way they make it so you don’t need an assistant any more.” I said. “Doing all the work yourself.”

“You noticed that huh?” he said. “Here I am, just like everyone else in the world, staring at the goddamn screen, filling in blanks. Data, data, data.” Read the full diary entry here

Watch out for the Facebook Shark

This voracious little animal comes in a blue box. I have scrambled the brand name on this picture since I don't want to give the people that are marketing it any publicity at all.

We all know that Facebook is huge right now, number two only to Google. Approaching 700 million users. Anything that is really popular attracts the wrong element, and now it seems that all of us using Facebook and other social media sites are vulnerable to all kinds of marketing gimmicks the second you "friend" anyone that you don't know really well. I confess to friending people in the past without thinking about it very much. A young and beautiful face wants to be this old guy's friend. Sure. But who is she?

I have four emails from the blue box guy in my in-box today. Let's call him Denny. I've listened to what purports to be his warm and convincing voice as he guides me through a demo tape on how his software works. He wants to help me increase the number of hits on my blog, he wants to help me to get rich off of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and all the other social networks. The picture on his website shows a young handsome guy standing in front of a swimming pool. He has addresses in Miami and Nevis; he might be wanted for something and he might not. He has 79 domain names going. Read the article by clicking here.

Congratulations to Owen Freeman-Daniels

on his election, and on a running a good solid campaign. The Election is over, the voters have spoken, and all the political signs up and down the streets of Ward Three are coming down. In that spirit, I have taken down my postings that focussed on campaign issues. I am going to take a little breather and be back next Friday, August 12 with some kind of August surprise.