Waste Not: Breaking the cycle of curbside contamination
Springtime in Burlington is a thing of beauty: grass greening up, drummers in the park… and greenbelts abloom with plastic bags and bloody meat trays. Garbage always accumulates over the winter. But this spring, certain neighborhoods started looking more like Queens than Queen City. Ironically, a chief culprit in this trashy trend is the number-one…
Y Homeless? How a controversial real estate deal is breaking up a household
The Roman orator and prolific letter-writer Cicero perfectly summed up the nesting instinct 2057 years ago this week, when he asked rhetorically, "What is more agreeable than home?" More than two millennia later, that question resonates for a handful of Vermont women who have suddenly found themselves scrambling for other digs in a threadbare local…
Dead Start: Viewing “Six Feet Under” unearths memories of a funeral-home childhood
All my life people have asked me what it’s like to be surrounded by death. I grew up in a funeral home, and spent the first nine years of my life living directly above people mourning their loved ones. My father is a funeral director, as was his father and his father’s father. Dad is…
Beaching and Moaning
Shirley Valentine has just received an impossible gift from her friend Jane: a free plane ticket to Greece, where Jane will be on holiday for two weeks. How to explain that leaving a house, husband and young son simply isn’t in the cards? There’s laundry to do, eggs to fry and cheap wine to drink…
Media Mergers Ate Our News! A Bernie-sponsored forum takes on big-box journalism
Here are some of the things that took place last Thursday: An Amtrak train derailed in Florida. Families of Flight 93 passengers listened to the September 11 cockpit voice recording. The Senate defeated a Bush administration proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And four Canadian soldiers were killed by American “friendly fire”…
Adam in the Graveyard
How cold it is, that white sun smoking overhead, powerful contours of snow braiding, dividing around the stones, sheeting and rumpling as if something were struggling to break through. In this place memory’s no salvation, there’s no cause to wake or trouble us, in this place love has dwindled to fatigue like winter gardens discarded…
Schedule Climax
The battle over the governor’s daily schedule finally reached a courtroom this week as lawyers for Seven Days, the Rutland Herald/Times Argus and Gov. Howard Dean made their cases before Washington County Superior Judge Alan Cheever. The judge said he’ll issue a written decision in “a few days.” This is a battle that goes back…
Church’ n’ State
Having recently been exposed in these pages as something other than "a harmless nut" Ñ thank you, Mr. Weinberg; our people will get back to you Ñ I thought long and hard before deciding to write again about the Catholic church and its poor, molested choirboys, driven to a life of sexual slavery by wicked,…
Land Locked?
Imagine this: The State of Vermont, in coordin-ation with several nonprofit organizations and a sustainable timber corporation, purchases 133,000 remote acres in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The contracts, easements and legislation authorizing the sale strive to satisfy all the interested parties: they require that the land be managed to allow traditional public access to the land,…
Flick Chick
For Vermont’s First Couple of Cinema, Jay Craven and Bess O’Brien, life is always about juggling multiple endeavors. The Peacham pair cannot really rest after their recent Fledgling Film Festival and the Burlington launch of a feature he directed, The Year That Trembled. On top of several other joint efforts, each is currently involved in…
