BrianKaneOnline » New Hampshire

The Only Big Dick From Wyoming Is Cheney

Brian — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:45:28 +0000

Sex accessory retailer Condomania has released a ranking of all fifty states by average penis size, and the state with the smallest dicks is Wyoming, home state of the previous Vice President.

The biggest dicks in America? New Hampshire. Ayuh.

They also rated cities by average penis size, and it turns out that New Yorkers aren’t as dickish as you probably thought, rating only #4. The Big Easy gets the top spot, with the nation’s capital rating #2 (Congress must have been on recess when they conducted the survey). Boston ranks 15th since, as we all know, people from Boston aren’t big dicks, they’re (m)assholes.

Like Sardines

Brian — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:05:58 +0000

Larger version

Nothing like a little infographicporn to brighten one’s day. This one asserts that if you took all 300 million-or-so inhabitants of the United States and packed them all into one place at the population density of Brooklyn, NY (which is to say 35,000 people per square mile), everybody would fit into an area about the size of the state of New Hampshire. (graphic found at Strange Maps, actual origin unknown)

Now, if you really wanted to pack ‘em in, you’d want to go with the population density of Mumbai, which has a population density of 76,793.5 people per square mile. That would squeeze everybody into a space the size of Connecticut, with each person’s own space coming to about a little over 4,600 square feet. Heck, a one-bedroom apartment in New York is lucky to be 750 square feet, so that’s PLENTY of room for each person!

Sorry, no pets, no smokers.

Hunger In America, More Hunger In New England

Brian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:51:14 +0000

While most of the mainstream media have been busily slobbering over Sarah Palin all week, a lot of the blogs and news websites I read have been talking about something that actually matters: a report from the Department of Agriculture that indicated fully 25% of all the children in the United States live in households that experience what the USDA euphemistically calls “food insecurity”. (Link to PDF of the report itself here). “Food insecurity” means that those families basically do not know where the next meal will come from and frequently have to choose between buying food and paying for other necessities, or even choosing which members of the family will get to eat on a given day.

The steep rise in unemployment is the most obvious factor, but the report points out that food insecurity is a problem even for families where parents hold down full-time jobs, indicating that wages are not able to keep up with the increasing cost of food. The Tom Toles cartoon at the top highlights a genuine irony of the situation — obesity from over-consumption of junk calories because the cost of better nutrition is beyond the reach of people struggling economically.

This article from the Daily Beast looks at the data in terms of what the author calls “Disproportionate Hunger” — where the costs of food, housing and energy are disproportionately high and thus exacerbate the situation. Three of the six New England states fall into the “Top 10″ list: Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut (which comes in at an astonishingly high #4). Massachusetts, by contrast, is #49, and New Hampshire #48. New England is traditionally an expensive place to live due to high energy costs for our long winters and the cost of transportation of goods into this region, and it also suffers from a perennially weak economy outside of the Boston economic zone. When times get bad in this country, New England always feels it harder than most.

This post at Fast Company tries to make the case that maybe we should be looking for technological solutions — incorporating engineered food products like the infamous “golden rice” to improve nutrition in junk food — but that’s really terribly misdirected, if you ask me. The availability of adequate nutrition is not the issue in this country. Indeed, even the global crisis in child hunger is less about the availability of adequate nutrition than it is about the iniquities of the economic situation, although it translates into genuine starvation elsewhere in the world. The issue boils down to the inequalities of the economic situation, whether we are talking about Vermont or Ethiopia.

But, hey, as long as all those Wall Street guys got their multimillion-dollar bonuses for bankrupting the rest of the planet, who cares if some kids in Skowhegan or Bridgeport or Rutland go without breakfast a few times a week, right? It’s their own damn fault for being poor in the first place!

Road Trip #3 – Not Another Shit Hole

Brian — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:20:00 +0000

I think the majority of New Englanders will recognize the bridge in the photo above immediately. It is the Piscataqua River Bridge that lets Interstate 95 cross from New Hampshire into Maine and has let millions of travelers completely dodge one of the deadliest traffic circles ever built and simultaneously bypass the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire for almost 40 years. I have early childhood memories of traveling to New Hampshire and sitting in monstrous traffic jams as my father slowly inched our car through the traffic circle and then across the old drawbridge, praying that the bridge would not have to go up and delay our trip yet another half-hour. The new bridge opened the same year we moved to Maine and transformed the trip forever.

Since I was obviously not ON the bridge in that photo, you can make the (correct) assumption that I was standing down by the riverfront in Portsmouth, which was the destination for this latest roadtrip. Oh yes, I have not forgotten about the roadtrips. I am simply having a profound lack of motivation to do almost anything these days, including these little adventures. I probably wouldn’t have even done this one had my friend Tony not e-mailed with the suggestion that we meet up and explore together, then cross-post to one another’s blogs. Here, for the record, is Tony’s post, telling about the roadtrip from his perspective.

Because of its location at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, Portsmouth’s fame and fortune throughout its history came from shipbuilding. The rivers made it easy to ship lumber and other materials downstream to build new vessels, and the relative shelter from the tides and rough weather made it possible to bring in ships that needed repairs. The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard went into operation in 1800 and built ships and submarines until 1969, when it was converted into a service yard for the existing U.S. Navy Atlantic submarine fleet. The military extended its presence in the area with the construction of Pease Air Force Base in the 1950s. As a military town for two centuries and as a crossroad for nearly every vehicle traveling almost anywhere in New England, Portsmouth had an economic advantage that many other New England cities and towns did not when the milling and manufacturing industries left the region. The military cutbacks of the last couple of decades have taken their toll, but Portsmouth has done well where other New England towns shrivelled up and died.

Which is to say that, on the balance, Portsmouth is not just another shit hole like most places in New England. And that’s good, because, quite honestly, after visiting Pawtucket I don’t know if I could have borne another one. But, having spent quite a bit of time visiting Portsmouth over the years, I knew what I was in for ahead of time.

The rainy June weather cut us a bit of a break and let the sun shine most of the day. The humidity was still quite high, but a gentle breeze from the waterfront kept things from being too oppressive. I couldn’t find a parking spot in the lot where Tony and I agreed to meet, so I parked in the downtown garage and wandered over to a tchotchke shop I knew to hang out until his arrival. (Tony’s post details his travel difficulties in detail, so I will let you read about all that there) Portsmouth’s downtown is several blocks’ worth of shops, pubs, restaurants and such. Apparently every waterfront town in America was forced to convert their downtowns into these giant tourist traps sometime in the late 1970s because I have been in dozens of identical ones from Camden, Maine to Alexandria, Virginia. In many places, these waterfront tourist zones have become the last bastion of small, independent retail, since the traditional downtowns have all long since been destroyed by malls and Wal-Mart. It is this unique and usually decidedly local character of places like Portsmouth that makes the commonality of the experience worth doing regardless of the town, because it’s about the only way left to buy things that are special to the place from which they came.

So, as I said, I twiddled away in one of those stores that sells all the goofy crap that people decorate their cubicles with — wind-up toys, naughty refrigerator magnets, rubber dog turds, ironic action figures, that sort of stuff — and eventually wandered outside to see if I could snag some free WiFi for my iTouch to check my e-mail. Tony soon arrived and we strolled to see what there was to see.

Portsmouth’s waterfront is still a working waterfront for the most part, so we wandered past tarp-covered piles of materials, assorted construction projects in various states of completion, a bit of road work, and not much else until we managed to find our way all the way down to the river’s edge. One particular attraction of downtown Portsmouth is Strawbery Banke, a museum focusing on the local history of Portsmouth, with an emphasis on the Colonial period. Having just returned from our vacation to Washington DC and Williamsburg, Virginia, I wasn’t really all that keen on investing the several hours needed to do yet another historical village. Instead, we headed back up toward Market Square and the shops.

As we wandered, we came across a sign for the “Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art” in front of a building that otherwise appeared to be office space. Neither of us knew that Portsmouth *had* a fine arts museum, so we investigated, only to discover that it really didn’t have one…yet.

Tucked into the corner of the front of the building, the museum was just a couple of days from its opening. It seemed an odd location, but from what was possible to see through the door, the space wasn’t really much bigger than an art gallery. I was actually a bit disappointed, because some of the promotional material in the lobby hinted that the first exhibition they plan to feature is going to be good. I snagged a quick snapshot of the “go away!” sign, but forgot to turn off my flash, which attracted the interest of a woman inside the space. She came out of the door and seemed like she wasn’t particularly happy to see us there, taking pictures of her sign. We muttered through some sort of an excuse and walked away.

By this point we were both warm, hungry and thirsty, so for lunch we agreed upon a barbecue place I’d walked by earlier. There was no shortage of places to choose from, to be sure, but I usually prefer to try places that seem like they might have a little originality to them, and Tony and I had recently been comparing notes about several barbecue places we like in our respective locales. The place was called Muddy River Smokehouse, and seemed to have all the requisite trappings of a decent barbecue joint — beer signs, posters for live blues music, etc. — so we walked in. It was mostly dark, with the bar up front and a few tables in the back. Things were clean and it didn’t look like any chairs had been busted over anyone’s head, and there was light jazz on the stereo, so it obviously wasn’t a real dive barbecue joint, but it is a tourist town after all.

The waitress had a great sense of humor and we kidded a bit about how much Diet Pepsi she should bring me. I knew she was a good one when she brought out TWO large glasses of DP just for me. I drained one almost instantly. The menu had all the usual offerings for the meat dishes. Tony went with a brisket and sausage combo plate, while I ordered just the brisket. For my money, the brisket is the real test of whether a place makes good barbecue or not. Too many places serve brisket that is too fatty and greasy and has a stringy texture. Good brisket has been adequately defatted and has been smoked all the way, not wet-cooked. Though not the absolute best brisket I’ve ever had, my sandwich was definitely way above average, with enough meat piled on that I didn’t even try to pick it up to eat.

The real highlight of the meal, though, was the fried pickles. Half-sour chips dipped in batter and deep fried and served with a spicy remoulade on the side. Pickles are a typical barbecue side, but most places just serve the 5-gallon-bucket variety. One place I like in my neck of the woods makes their own pickles, which are truly superior. This, however, was the first time I’d ever seen fried pickles on a menu, and the waitress vouched for them, so I ordered them. The batter *almost* overwhlems the pickle chips, but just enough of the pickle flavor comes through to make it work. The spicy dip did indeed kill any pickle flavor, so after trying a few that way, I stuck to eating them plain. You can’t eat many because of the deep fried batter — Tony and I together could not finish the app, though we did eat almost all of the app he ordered (chicken breast pieces wrapped in bacon and fried).

Satisfied with lunch, we wandered a little more, and we began to gripe that there really wasn’t much else besides shopping. As the words were leaving our mouths, though, we spotted a sign next to a large yellow house a couple of blocks down that said “Portsmouth Historical Society”.

As we came up to the house, we spotted this plaque identifying it as the “John Paul Jones House”. Well, that bore looking into, so we popped in. The woman tending the lobby offered some explanation: the house had not been owned by John Paul Jones, the famous naval captain of the Revolutionary War. Rather, he had roomed in the house for a period of months while his ship U.S.S. Ranger was repaired and then again while waiting for another ship to be built. The second ship was given to France upon completion as part of war debt repayments, so Jones never sailed in it, and shortly thereafter he left the United States and went to serve in the Russian Navy. However, the local historical society had used this somewhat tenuous connection to Jones to have the building designated a landmark and they use it as a small museum.

The first level of the house featured some furniture and artwork of the Revolutionary period such as these matching portraits of the owner of the house and his wife, but the featured exhibit was a collection of cross-stitch samplers sewed by Portsmouth girls. Some samplers dated back to the mid-1700s, while others were as late as the mid-1800s, but all were actual pieces made by girls aged 8-14 as part of their education as future housewives.

The second level had one very large room dedicated entirely to an exhibit about the “Treaty of Portsmouth” that negotiated peace between Russia and Japan after their brief war in 1904 over disputed territories in Northeast Asia. The treaty negotiations were held in Portsmouth at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt and were hailed at the time as a sign of the emergence of the United States as a major world power. Because the major European powers had been accused of meddling in the war, Roosevelt seized on the opportunity to promote the United States as a neutral party and to enhance his own personal presence on the world stage. So, during the summer of 1904, Russian and Japanese delegations ensconced themselves in Portsmouth, and formal negotiations were held at the naval facility.

Most of us learn about the Russo-Japanese War in passing during our school years, and mostly only because of Roosevelt and the treaty. This exhibit, thusly, increased my own personal knowledge about the specifics of the war and the endless details about the treaty conference on the order of several hundredfold. It was a huge feather in the cap of the mayor of the time, who had persuaded TR that Portsmouth was a perfect location, and was treated by the locals much like a Hollywood movie shoot is treated today, with reports of the comings and going of the delegates like sightings of Brangelina. A bit too much breathless reporting for my taste, but it was interesting to see how little media coverage has actually changed in that regard.

Tearing ourselves away from that exhibit, we walked into the next room to be greeted by a “lifelike” mannequin dressed as John Paul Jones himself, and a few objects associated with his stay — the desk he used, the bed he slept in, some decorative panels. In truth, they don’t have much and are just hoping they’ve dazzled you with the other stuff in the museum so that you won’t notice. I’ve been in a lot of museums like that, actually.

We concluded our afternoon with a refreshing beverage at a sidewalk table of a local cafe, watching the other tourists amble around. In recent years, Tony and I don’t see each other very often, and when we do it is usually in the context of some other event or in the company of our families, so it was nice to have the chance to sit and talk for a bit. Just as we were about ready to part company, the sky clouded up and began to sprinkle a little rain, which seemed all too likely a sign that it was time to go.

Road Trip #1, Part 3 – Power Lunch

Brian — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:26:06 +0000

Okay, let’s finish this up, shall we?

You never have to worry about finding a good place to eat wherever there are politicians and/or lawyers around. Lunch is part of the job description for both groups, with the lawyers usually picking up the tab. Show me a politician who pays for his own lunch, and I will show you someone out of office. The zone for the various Concord politicos only extends a block or two around the State House before the caliber of dining establishment reverts back to Subway, Chinese take-out, and a burrito place that looked promising enough that I probably would have gone there if nothing else turned up.

Directly across the street from the State House is a place called The Barley House Tavern, a gastro-pub with a menu based on the sort of food my brothers and I ate in the various pubs we visited in Ireland, but kicked up a notch from simple pub grub. They were pandering to the teabaggers that day with a “Tax-Free Burger” special, advertised with a large banner in front, but the prices on the menu were a little steeper than your average crankpot will pay for a burger and fries. When 90% of your clientele are charging lunch to the expense account, it doesn’t matter if the burgers cost $12. Unsurprisingly then, most of the people in the restaurant were wearing suits and similar business attire, yakking on cell phones or poking Blackberries, and the bits of overheard conversation were all insider baseball. While I was eating, one teabagger couple came in and sat in the booth in front of me. They were carrying their homemade signs, which they tried to stuff under the table, and they weren’t too happy that the fish and chips had curry in the batter. Even though I wasn’t carrying a sign, I’m sure they and everyone else in the place assumed I was a teabagger, too, and it made me die a little inside. I whipped out my iTouch and tried to make myself look terribly busy checking e-mail and Twittering in hopes that I could undo the damage.

The “tax-free burger”, which turned out to be a burger topped with thinly sliced prime rib really did not sound all that great to me. I mean, maybe Rush Limbaugh needs to top his red meat with more red meat, but that’s 50% too much beef for normal people. Instead, my eye was drawn to one of their house specialities: macaroni and cheese made with cavatappi pasta and a cheese sauce made with Guinness, topped with buttered breadcrumbs and served with a grilled marinated chicken breast garnished with some salad greens. It was sinfully rich, with just the slightest hint of bitterness from the stout ale. The chicken breast was also tasty, although it got a little charred. I hope I can come up with a reasonable replication of the cheese sauce, because it made for a superior dish of mac-and-cheese.

Well-fed, I waddled back into the main street to find that every last teabagger, public employee, gay-basher, and even the three liberal ladies were gone and downtown had turned into a vast emptiness. There was even ample on-street parking! The State House grounds were restored to their usual stately quietude, without the slightest hint that anyone had been there less than a hour before. Once I got over the astonishment, it occurred to me that this was the more typical scene on North Main Street, not the swirl of hot-blooded political adventurism I’d stumbled into. Were it not for the photographic evidence, I might have believed I’d imagined the whole thing.

Half a block down from the restaurant was a sign pointing down a wide alleyway that indicated I would find the New Hampshire Museum of History. A large stone building sat at the end of the alley in a sort of park that sits along the edge of the Merrimack River. The NH Historical Society converted the building, which was originally a warehouse, into museum space in the 1990s. It is quite modest compared to other local history museums I am familiar with (I am thinking specifically of the Maine State Museum), but the exhibits are about par for what one would expect. You begin with a timeline from the aboriginal Abenakis who occupied Central New England, through the early English colonial period and so on right up to a present-day diorama that features a prototype of the Segway. There is little remarkable about New Hampshire’s history, as it has always existed in the shadow of Boston and the rest of Eastern Massachusetts, but they convey some tidbits of info that don’t get much attention at the museums here in the Big City. I wouldn’t plan a day around going to this museum, but, like with the space museum, it was easy to see making another day trip to Concord with child in tow to visit this venue.

In all, the downtown portion of my adventure nearly coincided EXACTLY with the 2 hours I’d paid for on the parking meter. Four quarters bought me 120 minutes, and when I returned to my car there were 4 minutes left. And that even included taking a moment to duck into a coffee shop for an iced coffee for the road. I’d left home that morning not knowing quite what I’d do, but headed back for home utterly pleased with the little adventure that revealed itself to me.

Tomorrow, it’s Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and I am once again expecting to simply wing it; if it turns out half as well as this inaugural road trip, I will be very pleased indeed.

Road Trip #1, Part 1: To Slip The Surly Bonds Of Earth

Brian — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:51:27 +0000

Most places in New England can be categorized into one of two buckets: places tourists visit, and places tourists don’t visit. Concord lands squarely in that second bucket. It’s too large to be quaint and charming, but too small to host many of the attractions that a larger city can sustain. It’s not really a college town, which means there’s no perpetual population of 19-year-olds to keep things active. As the state capital, there are the functional trappings of bureaucracies: governmental agency offices, law firms, a higher-than-usual percentage of statues of obscure Great Men, but not enough marble and granite to outweigh the dull red bricks of old mill buildings and 19th century warehouses.

With that in mind, I set my GPS for one of the few actual tourist attractions, the McAuliffe Planetarium, located on the campus of the New Hampshire Technical Institute, on the northern side of town. As it happens, the Planetarium has recently undergone a metamorphosis. Originally a very modest little building dedicated to Christa McAuliffe not long after the Challenger tragedy, construction has barely been completed on an entirely new building expanding it into an actual science museum, and it has been re-christened as the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, honoring not only the memory of Christa McAuliffe, but the achievements of Astronaut Alan Shepard. Shepard, the first American in space, was a native of Derry, New Hampshire.

It’s a shrewd move on the part of whoever it was that decided to extend the center to honor Shepard. In the first few years after the explosion of the Challenger, there was quite a lot of public mourning, particularly for McAuliffe, and a memorial planetarium was fitting. But the second shuttle disaster transformed the public perception of the shuttle and of NASA into something less than stellar. Embracing the golden days of Project Mercury and the Real American Hero status of Shepard, along with turning the planetarium into a destination that will entertain and educate children for years rather that simply commemorate a fallen teacher, is nothing short of brilliant.

The model of the Redstone rocket, topped with a replica of Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mercury capsule stands right at the entrance to the building, announcing in no uncertain terms that this place is about the thrill of exploring outer space. The new center isn’t even completely finished yet, and so the parking lot was mostly filled with the pickup trucks and SUVs of construction workers. It was opened to the public about a month ago, and it’s evident that they were anxious to get it open for April school vacation whether everything was ready to go or not. Several large signs prominently proclaim the excitement that will be “COMING SOON!!”, just as soon as they can get the installations put together.

The galleries that were open were definitely designed with younger children in mind. On the main floor, the primary exhibit area is about outer space. This glowing orb was capable of becoming each of the planets of the solar system at the press of a button on its console. Here you can see it as the sun, Uranus, Jupiter, and the Milky Way.

A docent was just finishing up a talk for a group of pre-schoolers about Shepard and the Mercury program as I walked around. The kids sat patiently, but as soon as he was done, they jumped up and made their way up the stairs to the second level where an exhibit about natural science was about the only game in town. You have seen these a million times: the displays with cranks, levers, pulleys, handles and all other manner of hands-on demonstrations of basic physics. Kids love anything that they can touch or manipulate, even if they don’t actually pay any attention whatsoever to the scientific principles being demonstrated.

One wall featured some of the brazilion photographs NASA has collected over the last half century; many of them are iconic pictures seared into the brains of everyone in America over the age of 40, some more recent pictures focus instead on the wonders that have been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The exhibit suffers for not having the room for or attention paid to a proper photographic exhibition, but is a nice bridge that adults can use to explain the thrill of those years to their children just learning about outer space for the first time.

Back on the first floor, the new building connects to the old building via a corridor that features the space shuttle, but focuses on the successes of Discovery and the other shuttles rather than the unspeakable tragedies of Challenger and Columbia. A life-size mockup of the front of a shuttle includes a 3D computer simulation of landing the craft. One little boy I watched managed to crash his shuttle ass-end-first into the runway with a disquieting electronic “CRUNCH”. Moments like that will be causing plenty of discomfort and awkward explanations for staff and parents for years to come.

The planetarium wasn’t showing until later in the afternoon, so I had to take a pass on that, but the original exhibit areas that go along with the planetarium include several tributes to Christa McAuliffe and a letter from her sent to a fellow Concord-area schoolteacher about six months prior to the Challenger explosion. There are a few models of various space vehicles, and a tiny scrid of moon rock about the size of a wad of chewing gum that was given to the State of New Hampshire after Alan Shepard went to the moon on Apollo 14. I can remember how totally fascinated we were with anything that had the slightest to do with going to the moon back when I was Charlotte’s age, but a 40-year-old plaque with a tiny rock behind a magnifying glass just doesn’t seem to have the same thrill it did back then.

The Discovery Center is just the right speed for little kids, though probably would not hold the attention of anyone over the age of 10 for very long. It entertained me just enough for an hour, and I’m positive that Charlotte would enjoy it, even though she is a habitue of the glitzier Museum of Science in Cambridge.

The noon hour was just upon us as I headed out the door, and so my plan was to make the short drive into Downtown Concord, and explore with the intent of finding a place for lunch. Stay tuned for Part 2.

Does Everybody Have Their Permission Slip?

Brian — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:03:12 +0000

I’ll be hitting the highway for Concord, New Hampshire shortly.

So here is the premise, for those of you who tuned in late: starting this week, I plan to visit a different city, town, or other destination within a 50-mile radius of where I live. My visits will be brief, but my hope is that with each visit I will encounter one or more of the following:

a historical or otherwise significant local landmark or tourist destination
The main street/shopping district
A popular local restaurant for lunch
A unique site for some photographs

I’m also willing to entertain requests from you for specific places to visit if you know of any. And I’m open to whatever might happen along the way.

Twitter users who follow me will receive tweets from me as I am able to send them. If you are not already following me on Twitter, I am “bmkane”. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, good for you.

The actual posts about the road trips will appear on Fridays.

Punkin’

Brian — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:40:22 +0000

Yesterday we were looking for some destination to justify a leaf-peeping expedition for the afternoon. It’s nice enough to drive the back roads and enjoy the scenery, but we are always happier if there’s something at the end of the road worth visiting. Last year, our trek took us to a tiny little gift shop at the top of a twisting, muddy rutted road near Greenville, New Hampshire and from there to the peak of Pack Monadnock, the baby brother of Mt. Monadnock. But we didn’t want to repeat ourselves, and so Bridget scoured some websites looking for ideas.

What she found was this: Yankee Siege, a massive iron trebuchet that lives on a farm in Greenfield, New Hampshire, about an hour’s ride from our house. The Yankee Siege is the current World’s Champion of the international Punkin’ Chunkin’ Competition held annually in Delaware. Every fall, as they practice hurling ten-pound pumpkins to warm up for the competition, the Yankee Siege team opens their field to the public to come and watch.

Well, the drive, which was pretty much straight up Route 3 to Nashua and then across State Highway 101, wasn’t all that scenic, I’m afraid, since most of it consisted of the Nashua malls, but the destination made it all worthwhile. We got there around 2:30 just as they were about to fire off a shot. The crowd was actually pretty large; about as many people as you might find at a small apple-picking venue. At one end of the field is a mock-up of a castle, complete with stone walls, and at the other is the absolutely massive trebuchet.

The base of the trebuchet is over 50 feet tall, and with the complete throwing arm reaches 63.5 feet in height. It is capable of launching a payload of up to 300 pounds and uses almost 6 tons of counterweight ballast. That’s a lot of power to hurl a medium-sized pumpkin, and they hold the world record distance at 1702 feet. Unofficially, they have gone over 2000 feet, and they hope to achieve that in competition this year.

They do several throws over the course of an afternoon, about once every half hour, to accommodate the visitors. In between, there is time to explore the castle, get up close to the trebuchet, check out the other things they have on display, and, of course, spend money on snacks and souvenirs (I got a t-shirt!). They also operate a farm stand, where we bought a large pumpkin. Now, if I only had a trebuchet!

Unlike our unhappy apple picking experience last weekend, we all had a blast watching the trebuchet, riding in an ox-cart, and enjoying what scenery we could on the ride. I will definitely want to go see this awesome machine in operation again. Here’s a video I shot using my digital camera of the trebuchet in action:

A Cinderella Story

Brian — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:12:59 +0000

If you grew up in New England any time in the last 50 years or so, there’s a pretty high likelihood that you paid at least one visit to Story Land in Glen, NH during the summers of your childhood. The theme park has been a fixture of New England vacationeers since 1953, predating Disneyland itself by a couple of years. I first visited Story Land when I was about 10, if I recall correctly — a little old for a park that’s squarely aimed at the younger kids, and so I only went a couple of times.

We took Charlotte there for the first time in 2004, not too long after my heart surgery. Not much had changed in the 30 years since the last time I had visited, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were a few new rides and one whole section of the park that was a recent addition (plus obvious signs that there were more additions to come), but the basic attractions were all still there. The one of greatest import to Charlotte that summer was Cinderella’s castle. She was in the full throes of her Disney Princess phase that summer and the ONLY thing in the park that she wanted anything to do with was the castle and seeing Cinderella “in person”.

Though we did visit one other time, the group consensus at our house is that Story Land is pretty much a been-there-done-that for us, and not in the same league of cherished family traditions as York Beach. Nevertheless, I was completely intrigued and fascinated by this post at The Smart Set by contributor Meg Favreau. She worked at Story Land as a teenager and was one of the girls who got to be Cinderella. She doesn’t say what year her story took place, but she talks about one of the newer attractions and mentions the Internet, so it stands to reason that it was within the last 10-12 years. I have always wondered what it was like to have a summer job at an amusement park, so that alone would have been enough to recommend this article to you, but the tie-in to Story Land AND the fact that she was Cinderella make it a must.

SPOILER: Being Cinderella isn’t exactly a fairy tale.

Quote Of The Day

Brian — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:46:45 +0000

Slate has a new piece by our old friend Christopher Hitchens which addresses whether or not John McCain is nucking futz. Hitch plays it a bit cagily, but for the most part seems to say that he, too, goes along with the conventional wisdom that McCain is a loose cannon and who the hell knows what might set him off. After all, McCain is the guy who called his wife a cunt in front of campaign staffers, and has been known to get physically violent and verbally abusive with his peers.

But the quote I wanted to share isn’t even about John McCain. It’s about former Republican senator from New Hampshire Bob Smith, who is probably best remembered by people outside of New Hampshire as the guy who quit the Republican party after his own failed presidential bid in 2000 and tried to run as an independent, then went back to the Republicans with his tail between his legs in order to claim a juicy committe chairmanship. He lost his re-election bid in 2002, but made noise about running for President again as an independent.

Aaaaaaaanyway, this was Hitchens’ appraisal of Smith:

He combines the body of an ox with the brains of a gnat. Indeed, if his brains were made of gunpowder and were to accidentally explode, the resulting bang would not even be enough to disarrange his hair.

Well, given the amount of plaster he has to use for that combover, it’s no wonder.

Live Free Or Die!

Brian — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:28:03 +0000

Betty Hall is a state representative for Hillsborough, District 5, in the New Hampshire state legislature.

She’s 87 years old and has been a state rep for 14 years. She recently introduced a bill to the legislature calling for the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. The bill will have its first public hearing next Tuesday.

To that end, she has also announced that she is joining a hunger strike being organized by a women’s political action group called Code Pink. She says that she will fast until Congressman John Conyers begins impeachment proceedings in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and is ready to die for the cause. “I’ve had a good life. I can’t think of any better way to end it,” she told a blogger from the group AfterDowningStreet.org.

According to this blogger, the pressure on Conyers from the public is at an all-time high. His office’s phone lines are swamped, the fax machines are all but unreachable, and he’s receiving so much e-mail that his official Congressional e-mail address is bouncing all incoming mail.

Conyers has agreed to meet with a representative of the fasters, and has indicated that he’s willing to begin inquiriess into impeachment, which is a very small first step, but at least it’s more ground than he’s been willing to give to date. Resultingly, it appears that Dennis Kucinich reached a deal with Conyers not to reintroduce his impeachment bill to the floor of the House in exchange for the official inquiry.

Representative Hall has apparently decided that her state’s motto is more than just a tag line on a license plate.

The OTHER New Hampshire Primary

Brian — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:01:34 +0000

In this primary, the black candidate did win, there were no last-minute crying jags, and ALL the candidate supported torture (of mice).

Nin, the cat who lived in the weather observatory high atop Mount Washington in the New Hampshire White Mountains, recently retired at the advanced age of 17, so the fellows who work at the observatory (and apparently have plenty of spare time) decided to let the Internet choose which one of three potential pussycats would be the new resident feline.

The winner, with a whopping 53% of the vote, was Marty.

I think it’s only fitting that the winning cat’s name should be Marty. Those of us who grew up in Northern New England will unquestionably remember Marty Engstrom (YouTube link), who gave the weather report live from the observatory on WMTW Channel 8 for many, many years.

It might not be quite the same as the Bush-Clinton dynasty, but having a “Marty On The Mountain” is a bit of a New England tradition.

The BKO News Briefing: New Hampshire Primary Edition

Brian — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:05:50 +0000

A few bits and pieces I’ve seen today wrapping up yesterday’s New Hampshire primary:

1. Probably the best thing I read this morning was this op-ed at Salon by Glenn Greenwald about a bit of conversation between Chris “Tweety-Bird” Matthews and Tom Brokaw during NBC’s live coverage. It’s Greenwald’s assertion that despite the high-falutin’ Murrow-esque platitudes from Brokaw, it’s Matthews who makes the most revealing statement. The 24-hour news media have absolutely nothing of significance to say, and yet they blather on around the clock about the political horserace, spewing total speculation as “fact” and reducing an incredibly complex situation into nonsensical absurdities such as days’ worth of arguments about the price of haircuts, the color of neckties, and (when it’s Hillary) necklines and crow’s feet.

My own feeling is that the 24-hour news channels have been incredibly destructive to the public sphere of information. In the “good old days” when each network had exactly 22 minutes of news time per day, they under-covered important news out of necessity, and we all longed for more time to permit better coverage. But 24 hours a day times 3 full-time news networks PLUS the traditional half-hour nightly shows and assorted other news programs is complete overkill, and they simply can’t make adequate use of it.

2. One of the important stories coming out of New Hampshire and Iowa is the significantly-increased voter turnout, especially among younger and Democratic voters. Obama’s win in Iowa last week is credited to a 77% increase in voter turnout for the caucuses, which traditionally only attract party die-hards. And most of the people who turned out in Iowa were the demographically-critical 17-25 year-olds, who in turn were predominantly Obama supporters. Last night in New Hampshire. voter turnout was so far above expected numbers that the NH Secretary of State’s office nearly ran out of ballots to send to towns that were experiencing shortages.

High voter turnout is almost always good for Democratic candidates and bad for Republican candidates. Republicans pray for rainy or snowy election days, and the party does whatever it can to limit voter enrollment, to purge voter lists, and otherwise prevent people from voting. Democrats, on the other hand, would send a schoolbus to a graveyard if they thought they could get fifty people to the polls. But even the Republicans turned out yesterday in more numbers than expected; personally, I think they were making sure Mitt Romney got a great big FUCK YOU from our Neighbor to the North. The high turnout on the Democratic side shows that Clinton’s organization in New Hampshire had deep roots and could get the job done when it was needed the most.

What I hope the high turnout numbers mean is that the people of this country have been shocked back into realizing that VOTING COUNTS. That Karl Rove’s dirty tricks weren’t just the usual electioneering shenanigans, but that the nation has been brought to its knees politically by a system that was designed to be easy to rig.

3. Across the pond, British political writer Mick Hume tries to put an outsider’s perspective to what the “Change vs. Experience” meme really means. What he comes up with is tantamount to the old Texas saying “all hat, no cattle”. Our political system was designed purposefully to drive to the middle to prevent single-interest or extremist issues from dominating the electoral process. So “Change” isn’t particularly about any real change at all, merely a reaction to the dissatisfaction with the present keepers of power, which is why Hillary (and even Mike Huckabee) can make a legitimate claim to offering “change” just as much as Obama.

4. TV Newser found itself in the middle of a rumor mill yesterday, posting word that Bill Clinton’s two main campaign advisers, Paul Begala and James Carville, were signing on to the Hillary campaign. They had to post several updates throughout the day as Begala and then Carville both denied the story, and it appears that the blog was being given an insider story as conflict about the two men was going on inside Hillary’s camp. Finally, just about an hour ago from the time I am writing this, TV Newser has posted a firm denial from Begala. No more word from Serpent-Head yet.

5. So the race between Hillary and Obama will definitely continue into MegaTuesday on February 5 and might not be decided by then, even though we’ve all thought it would be for some time. If they stay this close, trading victories and keeping apace in the delegate count, it is possible that the DNC convention might actually be where the nomination is decided for the first time since, oh, 1960. If that’s the case, the Progressive Review says that the convention rules give Hillary Clinton the advantage in being able to put together the number of delegates needed to win. That means Hillary doesn’t need to knock Obama out completely, but Obama better hope he can pull in a few more Iowas than New Hampshires.

The First Ballot

Brian — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:12:50 +0000

So, apparently there’s this little business of an election in New Hampshire today that has a few people paying attention….

Before Jimmy Carter was the Democratic nominee in 1976, he began his trek to the White House as “Jimmy Who???” in New Hampshire, campaigning long before anyone else, doing more than due diligence by meeting the voters one-on-one. New Hampshire’s primary had been first in the nation since the 1950s, but Carter’s surprise win there and his subsequent capture of the nomination and then the White House turned the curious little election into the Most Important Event in American politics.

So, every four years like clockwork, the news media invade New Hampshire for a few weeks, and inevitably focus on Dixville Notch, the tiny town that opens its polls at midnight on primary day, a good six hours or so before all the others, and since there are only a handful of voters in town the results are known almost immediately. Prior to 1976, this was just a cute photo op for the pages of Life magazine, but these days the news media treat the couple of dozen voters like they were the deciding ballots for the whole election.

As it so happens, I have a personal connection to Dixville Notch. Dixville Notch is the town where The Balsams Resort is located, and my wife’s college friend Donna and her husband Rick are employees of the resort — she is the ski instructor, and he is the musical director. In fact, they actually live at the resort (nice, eh?), and for the past several election cycles have been part of the ballyhoo of the primary.

In the photograph above, you can see Donna casting the very first ballot in Dixville Notch. For a few years now, the polling place for the primary has been at the resort itself (let’s face it, there isn’t much THERE there, y’know?), and most of the people voting are the resort employees who live there. This isn’t the first time that Donna has been The First Voter, either. Somewhere I have a video clip of her from the 2004 election, too.

Rick is also part of the act. He’s one of the voting officials. In this MSNBC photo, he’s jotting down the final vote tallies so they can all go home and go to bed like normal people. They’ve got lots of snow up in the mountains this winter, so I’ll bet business at the resort is booming. Of course, all the media people clog the hotels closest to the Manchester airport so they can get the fuck out of Dodge tomorrow morning, but maybe Brian Williams or Katie Couric might stay over and enjoy the luxurious accommodations.

The only unfortunate bit of news I have to relate to you about this is that they voted Republican, more’s the pity.

BrianKaneOnline » New Hampshire

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