Often cast as the quintessential New England rural poet, Frost was a San Francisco native, who then spent the majority of his youth in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He attended Dartmouth and Harvard Colleges, but graduated from neither, ultimately settling in Derry, New Hampshire, where he wrote many of the poems for which he is most famous including “Mending Wall.” He taught English at Pinkerton Academy, (my alma mater) and at Middlebury College for many years. Frost’s gift was to be able to take the doings of everyday people and express them in the vernacular while teasing out the deeper meanings that we are often too busy to see. Although he was recognized and honored in his lifetime, winning four Pulitzer prizes, receiving more than forty honorary degrees, and reading “The Gift Outright” at John Kennedy’s inaugural, he was no stranger to grief and depression, losing both his parents at an early age and outliving all but two of his six children.
After posting yesterday that I gave our dog Rosie chicken soup for her cold, Lise Breen thoughtfully wrote in the comment section that onions and garlic are known to be toxic to dogs and in large quantities can damage a dog’s red blood cells. I don’t make chicken soup with tons of garlic and onions, but am very glad to know for future reference.
Avocado
Bread Dough
Chocolate
Ethanol (Grain Alcohol)
Grapes and Raisins
Hops
Macadamia Nuts
Moldy Foods
Garlic and Onions
Xylitol
Winter’s Coming ~ Time to Bundle Up!
Nat Johnson writes that he keeps his elderly Basset warm with a quilted cotton coat from Orvis. Here’s a link to the Orvis Quilted Waxed-Cotton Dog Coat. Nat suggests that it is better to spend money on the more substantial coat. This coat from the Company Store looks toasty warm and think it would be so charming on our little black Scotty. If you have a moment Nat, we’d love to see a photo of your Basset hound wearing his coat.
Thanks so much Nat and Lise for sharing your tips and suggestions!
Hmmmmm, Rosie was none too pleased when I asked her to model this bow for a GMG holiday post several Christmas’s ago. I wonder how she is going respond to wearing a cute little red and black plaid winter coat…
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Click the photo for a larger Panorama. (The roof is not tilted, that is my iPhone 6+ panorama stitching the photo.)
Cape Ann Tool Company November 10, 2014.
So the renovation seems a little weird but now I think I got it. Ream out the inside and put in nice new windows and redo the stucco on the stone end of the Cape Ann Tool Company. I would have thought those would be done last but I think they are aiming to get businesses in there quickly.
I could see a coffee shop, a little market selling fish, bread, and coffee, maybe even some light tackle so a kid could go catch a flounder over on the right. If I was dreaming I couple picture Plum Cove Grind moving into the front and a restaurant moving into the back overlooking Pigeon Cove.
No law against dreaming. An Indian Seafood Restaurant! Anmol II. Be still my heart. If you did that Anmol I promise to bring my family dining at least once a week.
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BOSTON —The Massachusetts Air National Guard is advising residents that there will be a flyover of five F-15 fighter jets from Barnes Air National Guard Base over eastern and southeastern Massachusetts on Wednesday.
The flyover is part of a planned media event, the National Guard said.
The jets will pass over Bedford, Salem, Boston, Norwood, Foxboro, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard at the following times and altitudes:
•8:10 a.m. Hanscom AFB, Bedford (1,000 feet)
•8:13 a.m. Salem (1,000 feet)
•8:16 a.m. Boston, Massachusetts State House (1,000 feet)
•8:18 a.m Fenway Park (1,000 feet)
•8:21 a.m. Norwood Airport (5,000 feet)
•8:23 a.m. Gillette Stadium (1,000 feet)
•8:32 a.m. Cape Cod (5,000 feet)
Good Morning Joey, As you are tied into the lobstering community, I am hoping you can help. The attached photos show a number of traps and buoys that washed up on the beach at Diamond Cove (Davis Neck end) during the first big storm (10/23/14). They can only be accessed at low tide as they are so heavy that they don’t float or show during high tide. One of the names on the traps is Bob Beloff, I believe of Rockport. If anyone knows these lobstermen, we would very much appreciate it if they retrieve the traps before they are buried further in the sand. Many thanks for your help!
I’d like to take this Veterans Day to honor some of the Veterans we have found through our Clark Cemetery restoration project. This is from personally researched information I have done on my own.
First is
Richard Powers was born on May 7, 1827 in Gloucester. He served in the Union Army Company D, 32nd Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He was killed in action on August 21, 1864 at Weldon Railroad in Petersburg, VA.
James Hicks was born in 1816. He lived In Gloucester as a Fisherman until he enlisted into the army on Feb 20, 1863 as a Private at the age of 43. He enlisted in Company l, Massachusetts 1st Heavy Artillery Regiment and Mustered out on Jan 9, 1865. He died in Gloucester Feb 12 1890. He was widowed by Georgianna Hicks.
Edward H Staten was born in 1838. He lived in Salem with wife Caroline and son Edward B. He enlisted in Company A, Massachusetts 5th Infantry Regiment on May 1, 1861. He was promoted to Full Captain on July 6, 1861. He commissioned as an officer in Company B, Massachusetts Co B 7th Infantry Company on July 6, 1861. He mustered out on July 31, 1861 at Boston, MA. He then commissioned as an officer in Company I, Massachusetts 6th Infantry Regiment on July 15, 1864 and mustering out on October 27, 1864 at Readville, MA.
James Wilson was born 1817 and lived in Gloucester as a farmer. He enlisted as a Private on December 20, 1861 at the age of 44 in Company A, 30th Infantry Regiment Massachusetts. He was disability discharged from Company A, 30th Infantry Regiment Massachusetts on April 4, 1862 at Ship Island, MS.
Joseph Green was born August 5, 1843. At the age of 21 on April 15, 1864 he enlisted in the US Navy where he served aboard the USS Jamestown as a Landsman. He joined the ship after it had departed for the pacific to protect American commerce from Confederate Privateers and the ship remain on that duty until after the end of the war. She decommissioned at Mare Island and September 17 1865 and Joseph Green mustered out of the Navy on October 25, 1865.
This Wednesday Only:
Roast Sirloin “French Dip” $10.95!
Wednesday, November 12th
Special Guest: SASQUATCH!
For the love of Gloucester. Paul Cohan (a.k.a. Sasquatch) takes center stage this week at the Rhumb with poignant – and
often hilarious – tales of every day life, not just here on Cape
Ann, but around the world as well. ~ Fly Dinner with great music! *Each week features a special, invited musical guest Dave Trooper’s Kitchen… Prepared fresh weekly by “Troop”… always good! Roast Sirloin “French Dip” $10.95! Plus – Check out Fred’s rockin’ wine menu!
You can watch it on NBC Saturday November 15th at 1:30PM
The Story From Daughter Sarah Borge- My father has never been an average man. Whether it was building a snow fort for myself and my younger brother or building a masterpiece staircase, Joe Borge puts his heart and soul into every task put in front of him. Of course, training for a championship competition is no different. Since I was young, my parents have competed in countless road races together; watching them train, and training with them was like being let into some sort of secret meeting. This was THEIR time. This was an opportunity for husband and wife to bond and shut out the constant intrusions from the deluge of every day life. The banter and jests they shared always kept the training light and enjoyable but their competitive natures always fed the intensity of the activity. Those who know my mother, know she is a formidable opponent on a race course and her talents are only strengthened by my father’s own athletic prowess. However, when you’ve spent over twenty years running marathons, you search for new ways of feeding your competitive spirit. For my father, it was triathlons; although, these competitions were not entirely new to him. You see, since he was a teenager, my father had a dream to compete in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. We as a family would sit down every November and watch the competition when it aired on television. I remember the look in my father’s eyes, the same look he had at the start of every race or the start of a new project: determination. There’s really nothing quite like it, seeing true determination in a person. What’s even more impressive is being able to witness the outcome. For years he has talked about racing at Kona and when he finished his first full Ironman in Florida, it looked like his dream was as close as it had ever been. It was in April of this year when my phone rang with my mother on the other line telling, well screeching really, that my father had been picked to race in Kona, Hawaii. We as a family could not have been more excited and scared for him. The amount of training he needed to complete for this race was like no other training he had ever done and since our last name isn’t Vanderbilt, his 50+ hour/week work schedule wouldn’t be able to take a back seat in any way. But, because of the man he’s always been, he managed to balance his work and training quite well and when he was done with his 100 mile bike rides and 20 mile runs, he was always easily convinced to hit Mile Marker for a lobster roll and wine. Those of you who know my father know he is an amazing individual and it was wonderful seeing the support he received while training; it is a true testament to his person. Dad, you’re the hardest working man I know and you bring everything you’ve got to the table (which you probably made yourself). I can’t ever tell you enough how proud you make me and how much I’ve loved being your daughter and your friend. You’ve been an Ironman long before this race; the rest of the city just knows it now.
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Sunday evening, on the way home to Rockport from Danvers, I saw a deer that had been struck dead on the side of 128. It made me super sad. It also made me worry about the driver who had hit it….as that is never good either.
It also reminded me of a time a couple of years ago that Freddy, the boys, and I were driving home from New Hampshire and ended up behind a guy with his dead deer trophy strapped casually to the back of his Jeep like it was a Thule or a bike rack. Previously, I had only seen deer under tarps or in the back of pick-up trucks. Never ever plain as day on the back of a car, in the middle lane of a large highway. I’m not sure why it struck me as so out of the norm, but it did.
Please allow me stop here for a moment and say that I understand hunting and realize that there are merits to it for population control and certainly out of a necessity to feed a family. As a sport, simply for fun, I still don’t have to like it. This post is not intended to start a hot debate about whether it is OK or not….it is simply to retell a story. So, I’m not going to go all “anti-hunting” on you….that being said, don’t feel the need to go all “pro-hunting” on me. I should add that I just finished reading one of my favorite books ever, My Side of the Mountain, to my students….in which young Sam Gribley hunts and kills many deer and an abundance of other animals to survive in the woods. I should mention too that I am the proud owner of two German Shorthaired Pointers, and, while our “bird dogs” don’t hunt, I enjoy hearing stories about their “friends” who do. It seems hypocritical for me to say “it’s ok to shoot a turkey, a pheasant, or a quail, but not a deer” so I don’t.
I’ve also been on sport-fishing boats and have caught tuna, mahi-mahi, and marlin, and have felt super sad as the color drained from their previously gorgeous bodies. It seems hypocritical for me to say “it’s ok to catch large fish, but not a deer” so I don’t. A dear friend of mine (no pun intended) who passed away a couple of years ago, was an avid hunter and we agreed to disagree on the subject. He teased me relentlessly about his “Gut Deer” (as in Got Milk) sticker on the back of his truck.
I also remember being at an airport in Africa with my camera gear all ready to “shoot” the Big 5 in Namibia and Botswana and standing behind people fully loaded with giant guns all ready to shoot some of those very same magnificent creatures. Again….I’m sure there are valid arguments for that….but, I don’t have to like it. And, in the case of large African mammals, I really don’t like it.
But, I digress….big time.
Back to the deer on the Jeep.
My concern upon seeing the deer was mostly that I didn’t want my boys to see it. They were maybe two and four at the time. My husband slowed down a bit and changed lanes so that it wasn’t as easy to spy. At the same moment, a little teeny car came flying by us, with an even teenier driver blaring her horn, screaming, and waving her middle finger wildly at the driver of the Jeep. She was so incredibly upset and passionate. I remember being proud of her….but yet, oddly, feeling bad for the hunter too. Her anger was so deep and….dare I say, mean. That sounds crazy, right? Me calling her mean for her rage against the hunter. It seemed like such a personal attack. She was so emotional and enraged. I remember feeling kind of confused by the whole encounter. It bothered me for days, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.
To go back to Africa…. I was confused in the same way that I felt on Day #3 of safari, when I found myself rooting for the cheetah to catch and kill the impala because I knew there were babies to feed. Days #1 and #2 I was cheering for the prey…not the predator… but, that changed upon seeing the hungry little ones. Surely the impala had hungry little ones too? Knowing who to root for was hard…so I opted to not align myself with either side of the hunt, but to simply watch it unfold…sometimes through the tiny cracks between my fingers that were covering my eyes.
So, all this had been spinning in my head as I thought, “Blog worthy or not?” and then I sat on the couch and saw a video of a deer attacking a hunter that a friend had put on Facebook…. and I laughed…. and then I felt really bad for the hunter. Full circle.
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Alice Curtis made this selfie in her bedroom mirror about 75 years ago. It probably wasn’t Gloucester’s first selfie, but I’ve never seen an older one. Today’s selfie is defined as taken with the photographer’s arm, and no mirror, tripod, or self timer used. Some say a cell phone camera must be used. I say hogwash, and enjoy the photographer who made 7,000 of my historic negatives. Alice was a pioneer in many ways.
Thirty five and some years later, about 1975, I photographed my maternal grandmother, Jennie Lee (Mitchell) Scales reflected in her bedroom dresser mirror. I think the comparison of the two photos is amazing.
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So the GloucesterClam – www.gloucesterclam.com went to a self hosted format and they made the unthinkable mistake of asking for what amounts to a pittance of a donation to help with costs associated with maintaining their site.
In the short time since I posted it I’ve gotten three remarks about the Clam having an ad on the site and asking for a donation as if they had just lit their children on fire and tossed them into a dumpster.
You will notice that the website has totally changed over the weekend. If you didn’t notice, you should probably feel shame in many places around your body.
We decided to do this for a bunch of reasons – better content options, better layout, plugins that can help us track you to the nearest streetcorner, the ability to add a store to sell you stickers and shirts – stuff like that. Our free options were totally limiting us, maaan. We needed freedom, baby, and we had to go get it.
So because that migration and subsequent dozen small frustrating issues took up the majority of my weekend (also I had to make several trips to Dogtown to dump leaves and brush just like everyone else in town), I have no real content to post today. But look, our site is pretty! And it’ll continue to look even better in the next few weeks as we make a few more little changes. Make sure you let us know if you have problems commenting or viewing anything. Unless your comment is terrible, in which case don’t. And be sure to let us know if you like it, or if there’s something else you want to see.
We just added a new feature- you can subscribe to our email list on our sidebar, so you know when we’re doing Clam nights or other events, and you can keep up with the latest in ClamLand. We aren’t going to sell your email to the Russians. Probably.
And now I’m going to make today’s content-less post EVEN WORSE for you. Here we go: the Clam is a labor of love for us, but it does cost us some money for upkeep. We bring you original, sometimes funny content on a daily basis – sometimes we stay up way past our bedtimes to figure out what will make you laugh tomorrow.
It’s been almost 6 months of hard, but fun, work on this blog, and we hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. If you love us, and want to keep us going as long as possible, donate to us using the Paypal button on the left. Even $5 is a huge help to offset stuff like hosting, Clam nights, the gas we use driving around to take pictures that barely relate to our posts, beer to get through Wicked Tuna recaps, and the hush money we paid Marty after he accidentally droned over KT’s top-secret sexy ladyrobot lab.
So for me to get three comments in such a short amount of time about a tiny ad and the audacity the Clammers had in asking for a donation on their blog, it tells me that it’s definitely a thing. Not that I didn’t know that there are many many people out there that would begrudge them for asking. I get it completely. When my dad or other people couldn’t comprehend why I would do GMG without selling ad space or posting all the community announcements and not asking anything in return I felt and still feel that I got back way more in friendships and appreciation than I could ever make up for with the utter disgust that people who feel entitled to free content obviously feel every single day when you ask them for money for your hard work.
I don’t know why people are the way they are but it’s so very obvious that there is a huge contingency of people that think that content on the web should always be free and if you have the audacity to ask people to help cover the costs of maintaining the site that provides that content then you are just a greedy “out-to-make-money” son of a bitch.
I don’t begrudge the Clammers asking for money and I wouldn’t begrudge the Clammers if their site became so popular that the Huffington Post decided to buy them out and made millionaires out of them. If you like the content and have the means, I suggest you donate to them. if you have the means but don’t feel like donating, then don’t. Just don’t bitch about a mere suggestion that you could donate if you’d like.
If it bothers you so much to have to scroll past an ad on their site or to have to read a post where they ask for a donation then I suggest you re-examine the work you do for a living and how you would feel if someone told you that you really ought to do it for free.
They’re not doing it “for-the-money” trust me. No successful blog is written “for-the-money”. You have to have major league passion about a subject because there’s only about a bazillion other blogs or sites people could visit for free written by people that are passionate about that subject matter. No one writing for money and given assignments could ever deliver the quality of material that someone who is passionate about a subject could over time.
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I guess more folks spend money on mobile phones and tablets because that’s 90% of what they cover. I cannot tell you the last time I saw a review on a desktop computer but there has to be a little more than zero people still buying desktops, no?
I prefer creating content for the blog on my desktop wayyyyyy more than I do on my cell phone, laptop or tablet.
The limitations of small screens, less computing power and weaker applications make desktops so much more convenient to work on.
But I’m not sure why they get ZERO love on the tech websites. Does anyone else feel the same way?
Do you even consider buying a desktop any more? If so, where do you get your desktop computer info and what tech websites do you read on the regular?
Update:
See, I’m not sure if they are dying or just not being reported about.
My theory from a while back when tablet’s started to take off was that most teens will probably end up with tablets and be happy to simply consume content on them. Because they are just fine using tablets and cell phones for info they don’t feel the need or can’t justify the purchase of a more powerful desktop computer and hence don’t get into the creative side of computing as much.
I guess what I’m wondering is if the complete lack of desktop computing coverage is warranted. Is virtually no-one buying desktop computers any more?
I understand that tablets and cell phones are way more prevalent among teens and I get the obvious portability advantages of a laptop, but don’t working people and creatives still buy more bang for your buck and more powerful desktops?
Again I’ll go back to the main point- are there so few people buying desktop computers that they warrant virtually zero tech coverage?
I feel like that because there’s basically no one out there doing it that someone could carve out a niche with a desktop review site. That’s how far away from desktop computing we’ve got in my mind. That it would actually be considered a niche category in tech media coverage.
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Marine Forecast :
Tue SE winds 5 to 10 kt. Seas around 2 ft.
Tue Night SE winds 5 to 10 kt…becoming E after midnight. Seas around 2 ft. Patchy fog. A chance of showers.
The surface of the sun from October 14th to 30th, 2014, showing sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles (22 years). During this time sunspot AR 2191 produced six X-class and four M-class solar flares. The animation shows the sun in the ultraviolet 304 ångström wavelength, and plays at a rate of 52.5 minutes per second. It is composed of more than 17,000 images, 72 GB of data produced by the solar dynamics observatory (http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/) + (http://www.helioviewer.org/). This animation has be rendered in 4K, and resized to the Youtube maximum resolution of 3840×2160. The animation has been rotated 180 degrees so that south is ‘up’. The audio is the “heartbeat” of the sun, processed from SOHO HMI data by Alexander G. Kosovichev. Image processing and animation by James Tyrwhitt-Drake.
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Good Morning Gloucester 