It could be fun, but $12 for 24 minutes seems a bit steep. That said, some of these New England parodies are pretty fun. Wonder if they would get more recognition if not money on YouTube.
Also, it seems pretty similar to what Edgar Wright was doing with Hot Fuzz.
The New England Cottontail, found in New Hampshire and Maine, is facing a range of problems including habitat loss and competition from the rival invasive species, the Eastern Cottontail.
A really interesting profile of Maine novelist Carolyn Chute by Charles McGrath illustrated with an equally great photo by Erik Jacobs (above) that paint a picture of a different kind of writer than usual.
The copier in her living room is used to churn out tracts and fables, mostly written by Ms. Chute and illustrated by her husband, that set out the group’s political philosophy, which is essentially one of cheerful, nonpartisan economic populism.
The 2nd Maine Militia, or Your Wicked Good Militia, as it’s sometimes known, is progun, against corporate lobbying and campaign contributions, and opposed to tax subsidies for big business. The group has been known to meet in a hired hall, but more often it assembles in the woods behind the Chutes’ home, where the members shoot at cans and other targets, talk about what’s wrong with the world and dine on potluck.
In 1996, in an incident recreated in “The School on Heart’s Content Road,” the militia invaded the State Capitol in Augusta, carrying placards that read, “Smash Corporate Tyranny.” Many of the militia children were in costume, and Mr. Chute wore a Revolutionary War uniform. There were some kazoo-playing and a little shouting, and someone duct-taped a piece of cardboard over a portrait of Joshua Chamberlain, the Maine governor and Civil War hero.
In the 1990s, state Superior Court Judge Robert Crowley was quoted as saying coffee brandy “is very prevalent in the criminals who come before me. I don’t know whether brandy is more bang for your buck but it runs the gamut.”
“I see it in bar fights, domestic assaults, [drunken driving] and worse crimes,” the judge said.
The Maine Sunday Telegram and Maine libraries have put together a Literary Map of Maine (unfortunately not embeddable) that link the location of notable Maine books with the towns associated with them. Good idea for drawing attention to another aspect of a state's heritage. They limited it initially to 50 authors with plans to add later although they should have been as inclusive as possible and include as many writers and books as they could find.
Daniel Gross explains more about the great lobster price decline that we've written about.
“At root, the global forces that are driving up the price of food don't significantly affect the vacation lobster business in Maine. Commercial and consumer demand doesn't vary much for off-the-boat lobster. Sure, many lobsters are sold to processing plants. But unlike other seafood products—think of canned tuna, or clam sauce, or frozen fish fillets—lobster is not produced or marketed on a mass global scale, which also means there are no speculators trying to make a killing on lobster futures. The fact that people are eating more and better in China and India isn't much boosting the demand for lobsters from Maine. Even in the United States, lobster remains to a large degree a regional product.
An interesting discussion by University of Maine student Cameron McCormick.
(Video by BatGuys of a coyote in Sudbury).
A multiple vehicle accident on Rt. 395 south ripped open the refrigerated truck and spilled 11,000 pounds of live lobsters and fish and about 150 gallons of diesel fuel.
Some of the fuel spilled on the seafood in the crash leaving it exposed without refrigeration for hours, prompting Webster's director of public health to order the load destroyed Sunday."
Seymour Papert, a distinguished retired MIT professor who suffered a severe brain injury in an accident on a Vietnamese street, is struggling to recover his former abilities.
"Papert, who was a professor of mathematics, education, and media technology at MIT, has devoted much of his career to learning: self-learning (he taught himself Russian) and learning about learning. He was one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence, and he invented the computer language Logo to teach children about computers.
Now he must learn something even more challenging - how to be Seymour Papert again.
Nineteen months ago he was struck by a motorbike in Hanoi and suffered a brain injury so severe he was comatose for a month and couldn't walk, talk, or read. The man widely considered to be the most important living thinker about the way children learn is struggling with an unreliable memory and an uncertain grip on words. And his wife and his caregivers are using insights from his theories about learning to help bring him back to a normal life."
A very well-done article that covers a lot of issues surrounding this sad story.
If you're not thinking of economizing this summer and you can't get enough lobster you can "buy" a Maine lobster trap for the season and feast on all the lobster the trap catches.
"For USD 2,995, consumers can own a Maine lobster trap and all the lobsters it catches for an entire year through the Premium Trap program from Catch a Piece of Maine. As "partners," as the company calls them, customers of the program are assigned a dedicated lobsterman who will fish their trap throughout the 32-week season. Everything he catches is tracked with a colour-coded band placed on the lobsters' claws, and all data is recorded online so that the partner can view their trap's activity, manage their catch and schedule shipments from anywhere. As lobsters are caught by the trap, the partner's account grows; as lobsters are requested for shipment, it decreases again. Lobsters can be shipped in batches of four as soon as they are caught, or they can be saved for later (in which case the company will substitute one just caught for the original); either way, details are included on when, where and by whom they were obtained. Catch a Piece of Maine guarantees at least 48 1.5 lb lobsters for each partner—totalling over 70bs.—and also 12 lbs. steamer clams, 12 lbs. mussels, and 48 servings of Maine-made desserts over the course of the year."
How a family spent seven years at sea before settling in Maine:
"After seven years at sea and a third child, the Martins decided to try life on land. As they traveled south, Maine was the first state on the right. They dropped anchor, built their own house, and the kids went to school in America for the first time."
After Roxanne Quimby grew Burt's Bees into a giant business (and sold it to Clorox) she searched for a mission in life and found it in buying vast swathes of land in Maine for a future national park:
"Most of Roxanne's red rectangles are east of the park. She is stitching her own crazy quilt. These are plots of land she has bought. There are others she hopes to buy. Some are scattered and separate. By bargaining and swapping, she is trying to put together a whole. In concert with RESTORE, what she has in mind is a national park. "I feel like my reason for being put on this earth will have been fulfilled because this will live on after me. A park is a demonstration that there is something in America that I can love," she says, her counterculture philosophy re-emerging. "It's very democratic: A Mexican immigrant or a millionaire, for 10 bucks, they both get the same experience.""
In the process Quimby has stepped into the contentious feuding over whether the future of Maine is the declining forest industry or a growing tourist economy which depends on outsiders.
"By the summer of 2007, Roxanne Quimby had spent $39 million to purchase
80,000 acres of wilderness. Nearly 65,000 acres of it lies between
Baxter State Park and the East Branch of the Penobscot River. To her
mind, a park is the only reasonable destiny for this land: "If we leave
this to chance, we will not have the opportunity to make decisions
about what happens next."
In the process of making these purchases, Roxanne gobbled up hunting grounds, snowmobile trails, and some beloved primitive camps that families and hunters had passed down through generations. "I own it now," she proclaimed. "Buying the land also means I am buying the right to call the shots."
The Boiled Dinner may not be that exciting but it is a classic New England meal and perhaps a reason for New England's less than stunning culinary reputation (although it has changed a lot). You may know one variation of the Boiled Dinner as the Irish-American classic corned beef and cabbage.
If you don't want to make it Jane and Michael Stern recommend Moody's Diner in Waldoboro, Maine as one of the rare restaurants still serving it.
Maine-based Hannaford Brothers supermarkets, with 25 Massachusetts stores, is the latest retailer to report that outsiders gained access to its payment information compromising the security of possibly millions of customer credit and debit cards.
"Hannaford didn't mention the number of payment cards that were compromised. But citing company officials, the Associated Press reported that as many as 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers may have been taken, and that about 1,800 cases of fraud have been reported as a result of the breach thus far."
Computerworld has some interesting theories on how the theft was accomplished:
"Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said that based on the alerts sent to banks by Visa and MasterCard, the intrusion at Hannaford appears to have involved the theft of magnetic stripe data from the back of credit and debit cards. Such data "can be used to make counterfeit cards," Litan noted. "Otherwise, Visa and MasterCard wouldn't have bothered notifying all these banks."
Under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard mandated by the major credit card companies, retailers are prohibited from storing magnetic stripe data in their systems. In this case, Litan said, the card information appears to have been stolen while it was in transit from Hannaford's systems to those of the financial institution that processes transactions for the chain.
"Thieves are going after data in transit," she said, noting that as companies get better at protecting stored data, more attackers are targeting information while it's being transmitted. According to Litan, many merchants still don't encrypt such data, even though doing so is a requirement under the industry security standard, which is known by the acronym PCI."
Nail-based sculptures by John Bisbee at the Portland Museum of Art.
"It all started when Bisbee was a student in college. He was raiding abandoned houses for found objects to use in his art when he came upon an old bucket of nails.
"I kicked the bucket and it flipped over," Bisbee recalls, "and the nails had cohered, oxidized — they'd rusted into the bucket shape. And it was just such an obvious thing of beauty — it was so clearly above anything I had ever envisioned making myself. And I sat down on the bed, and I knew that I needed to get some nails.'"
You can hear Bisbee discuss his work at the museum on March 22 at 2pm.
The exhibit ends March 23, 2008.
(Image: Cocoon from Portland Museum of Art)
What happens if you just drive through the EZPass without one of those little boxes. Well, in Maine, not much until you get near the 1300th (!) drivethrough.
"Derek M. Theriault, 28, was charged Friday with racking up roughly 1,300 toll-evasion violations totaling $1,797.50, the Portland Press-Herald reported."
Rogues Gallery of Portland, Maine: communally produced men's wear:
"The Rogues aesthetic is an amalgamation of New England coastal life:
the sludgy seascape, the local Slayer fans, Stephen King's American
gothic (he was born in Portland) and the woodsy communal feasts [designer Alex]
Carleton holds in the backyard of his weathered fisherman's cottage."
The law student clinical program at the University of Maine School of Law is taking on the RIAA on behalf of fellow students accused of file-sharing violations.
"In what’s probably a world’s first, not lawyers, but student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic have themselves taken up the fight on behalf of students.
Hannah Ames and Lisa Chmelecki from the Cumberland clinic are now officially representing two Maine students.
Ames and Chmelecki are being guided by clinic director and U of M assistant professor Deirdre Smith.
They’ve filed a reply to the US Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic v Twombly, and the subsequent California decision, Interscope v Rodriguez, which dismissed the RIAA’s “making available” complaint as mere “conclusory”, “boilerplate” “speculation”."
It seems like part of a wider trend among universities and faculty recognizing that they and their students might have an interest in not acquiescing to all the demands of the RIAA. Another example, the Oregon Attorney General is assisting the University of Oregon's response to another RIAA file-sharing case involving 17 University of Oregon students. (via Peter Black's Freedom to Differ)
Inside a smelt fishing shack on an icy Maine tidal river:
"What observations would Herman Melville, the great bard of the whaling industry, make about smelts, a variety of fish so modest in size that the limits Maine imposes upon anglers are a matter of quarts, not inches?
Smelt fishing is a deep and dependable tradition on the state's coast. As soon as the ice is thick enough, smelters drag their customized shanties onto the tidal rivers and sit inside them, stoking wood stoves and tending to baited lines that hang through holes in the ice.
Every December, whole villages of such smelt shanties spring up almost overnight here — an official, if unnecessary, signal of winter's arrival." (Image: Redpath Museum)
Maine high school students try to prove there are mountain lions in Maine. This is the kind of high school project we wish we could have been a part of; better than yearbook. A
group of Dexter Regional High School students and their teacher-adviser
Regan McPhetres plan to investigate and prove the existence of mountain
lions in Maine. -- "There’s
evidence they exist around us," McPhetres said Sunday, despite the
reluctance of some state officials to embrace the findings. He said
confirmed sightings have been reported in Vermont, New Hampshire and
New Brunswick. -- The next step, the science teacher said, is to prove a breeding population exists in the state. (via Cryptomundo)
Maine wants its Declaration of Independence back. An early copy of the Declaration of Independence was sent to the clerk of Wiscasset, Maine in 1776 and next turned up in the attic of a Wiscasset resident, whose father had also been a town clerk, when she died in 1994.
After that, the "document was sold at an estate auction. It changed hands several times,
ending up with a private collector in Virginia who paid $475,000 for it
in 2001.
Now Maine is seeking to reclaim it, citing a state statute
that says a public document remains public until explicitly
relinquished by the government."
--
"Plumstead's father was Wiscasset's town clerk from 1885 to 1929, and state officials believe that like many local officials of the era, he kept public records in his home.
Maine officials say the state is not obligated to pay anything to get the document back. It is unclear whether the state's statute regarding public documents will hold up in a Virginia court."
How do you make Malibu look Maine for Heroes?
"To make the set more authentically "Maine-like," a Heroes producer recently called local businesswoman Beth Shissler, co-owner and operator of Sea Bags, to ask for a Sea Bags tote bag to use in the scenes. You can see the bag in the episode that will air on Monday, December 3."
A tour of Stephen King's Maine. "The Barrens [in Bangor] is also a favorite with King buffs. The
city has built a walking path through this wooded area along Kenduskeag
Stream. In "It," the sewer pipes here are the gateway to a monster's
lair."
And more on Stephen King and Bangor.
Partnership in a Maine lobster trap. Catch a Piece of Maine is a clever way to guarantee income for lobstermen and appeal to local food interest with an online business aspect (check your lobster account; free shipping):
"With your purchase of a partnership ($2,995), you will be assigned a lobster trap number fished by one of the eight professional lobstermen pictured on the meet the lobstermen page. During each fishing trip, your lobsterman will record the catch from your trap. This data is retrieved when your lobsterman sells his daily catch back at the dock and will be recorded onto an online database. You will receive an online personal lobster account where you can view your trap’s performance updated every Friday afternoon. You will be able to see when your trap was checked, how much it caught, and how many lobster credits you have available for shipping. You are guaranteed at least 40 lobsters from your trap, but most traps average 50 or often more." (via Luxist)
Deer hunting season begins in Vermont and Maine: An old-school New England tradition that seems increasingly distant to urbanites, suburbanites and even rural dwellers. Even as trendy urbanites embrace the taxidermy/hunter aesthetic.
New England states pretty healthy according to new research. The New England states rankings: Vermont (1); New Hampshire (4); Connecticut (5); Maine (7); Massachusetts (9).
The Onion on Portland, Maine's decision to give contraception to middle schoolers:
"This is outrageous. I think my daughter should have to get pregnant at 13 just like I did."
As scientists use decoys (see AP picture left), often used in hunting, to lure lonely puffins to stick around.
Stephen King's recurring dark village of Castle Rock (from The Dead Zone, Creepshow and others) was suggested but even in the category of King's creations Salem's Lot seems the creepiest. In fictional New England towns in horror fiction Arkham, Massachusetts and creepy Innsmouth from King's inspiration H.P. Lovecraft seem like stronger choices. And outside of horror fiction, Peyton Place, New Hampshire is probably on of the best known even if people might not have read the book or seen the movie or TV show.
Rebecca Charles, the owner of NY's Pearl Oyster Bar, claims to be "the first chef in New York who took lobster rolls, fried clams and
other sturdy utility players of New England seafood cookery and lifted
them to all-star status on her menu." Now she's suing a former employee, now the proprietor of Ed's Lobster Bar, for stealing her ideas. You know the ones she seems to have gotten from various New England eateries and "another narrow, unassuming place, Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco."
Megnut notes the similarity of menu items but if you so many of these items can be found at every seafood place from Connecticut to Ipswich to Downeast Maine. Its sort of like the similarity of menus at pizza places. Boston's Union Oyster House has a pretty similar menu.
This legal analysis doesn't think much of the suit and thinks the real issues are psychological. This accords with another post of Megnut where she notes that all these places are booming. Would any of these places be as successful if they were up near Boston where there is a plethora of similar spots?
Around our neck of the woods:
Woodman's in Essex claims to be the home of the fried clam.
Boston's Union Oyster House claims to have been serving seafood since 1826.
And Jasper White's Summer Shack has played around with all these ideas.
Is a mysterious beast at loose in Wiscasset, Maine responsible for the slaughter of 26 sheep? Stick-in-the-muds favor the theory that feral dogs are responsible but crypto-zoologists hold out hope for a more mysterious creature to be found responsible. Previous attempts to determine the identity of the Maine Mystery Beast have ended in confusion. (Banner (left) for the Mount Desert Island Marathon by Paul Szauter celebrates the Beast)
Shopping local (fairly local) can now apply to the pet casket market. Woodworker Matthew Dow of Albion, Maine has been developing a new line of business at his custom woodworking and saw mill operation by hand-making pet caskets for animals large and small. Prices for basic models range from $95 to $395 based on size.
Shakers, now known primarily for their simple elegant furniture and baskets, have their last active community just north of Portland, Maine. The community, Sabbathday Shaker Village in New Gloucester, was once one of 18 such communities around the country. However, the Shakers' strict celibacy policy meant that the group could grow only by converts and an adoption program since discontinued. Shakers were part of a big field of utopian and religious groups in the nineteenth century almost all of which have become defunct. At a time of religious resurgence it's interesting to consider some of these past religious communities.
There's a museum open in the summer season but uniquely there are also active worship services on Sunday that are open to the public that provide a real sense of the community.
There are also inactive Shaker villages and museums in Harvard, MA, in the Berkshires and Enfield, CT that are part of a whole Shaker Trail.
This photo of a Maine moose hauling logs currently making the email rounds is actually a Photoshop hoax. The text purports to describe the benefits and problems of working with a moose:
Mr. Leroux ... cautioned however that there were a few problems with using a bull moose. Come June, when the new antlers start, the new bone is "in velvet" and must itch like crazy as the moose stops every once in awhile and rubs his rack against just about anything to appease the itch. Once, before the brothers learned to tie him of by himself while they had lunch, moose was rubbing his antlers against the hame on the Clydesdale called Jack and got it wedged there for a bit. Jacques said he wished he had a camera as it looked like moose was trying to push Jack over.
The other problem is the rutting season. The brothers learned quickly to leave moose in the barn as he was constantly on red alert in the woods during this time. The brothers are also considering trying this with two females to make a matched pair which would become an instant hit at the Maine Fairs. The trouble with the bulls is their racks. They would be constantly rubbing and hitting each other and yes they would have to be gelded as I just couldn't imagine getting the two bulls anywhere near each other, let alone in harness.
There's a detailed examination of the errors in the photo but interestingly using moose under harness is actually not implausible and there are apparently real photos of it being done in Canada and Alaska.
An interesting article considering the evidence for cougars (or mountain lions) in Maine. Some good discussion of sightings although most sources seem skeptical given the infrequency of sightings, mistakes, and lack of prey carcasses.
Fascinating article about the reverberating culture clashes as a Somali community springs up in Lewiston, Maine.
