Spare Time: Twentysomething bowlers pin their hopes on a league trophy
“I brought the lucky bowling stone!” announces Mia Sladyk as she hurries into Yankee Lanes on a December evening. The stone is a half-dollar-sized light blue rock from Ben Franklin. It is, in fact, emblazoned with the words “lucky bowling stone.” Sladyk’s team needs a little luck tonight. The quirky bunch of twentysomething bowlers is…
Road Runner: Animals inspire ultramarathoner Bernd Heinrich to go the distance
It’s hard to believe Bernd Heinrich doesn’t know precisely how far it is from the Richmond-Hinesburg Road to his house in the woods. You’d expect something more exacting than “three or four miles” from an award-winning physiological ecologist who won a Guggenheim to get the buzz on bumblebees. More to the point, the 61-year-old Heinrich…
Motherly Glove: A mom makes a case for combat sports
In general, there are three types of combat sports: aerobic-style, boxing or kickboxing and martial arts. The first tends to attract predominantly women, while classes with a lot of sparring have at least as many men as women. Nearly any town that has a health club probably offers at least one type of class. How…
Visual Healing: A mysterious eye ailment sidelines “Mr. Charlie”
“It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world,” wrote art critic John Berger, whose Ways of Seeing was a veritable ode to the visual environment. Though it was not meant to do so, his simple sentence speaks volumes about the kind of loss suffered by the vision-impaired. But which is the crueler…
Taliban Wins!
The purification of the Vermont Republican Party continued full steam ahead Monday evening as conservative party activists turned out in force to thwart the nomination of a “moderate” to fill a state senate vacancy. In the process the local political Taliban spit in the face of tradition, decency and Republican Party royalty, i.e., the prestigious…
Zero Tolerance
Ouch! Eek! This is your columnist’s reaction to being in New York City. I’m at a hotel called the Martinique, on 32nd Street near Fifth Avenue. This and a dime would once have got me a cup of coffee, but Manhattan has very little to offer these days that isn’t glitzy, overpriced, packaged and canned.…
Same Old, Same Old
Nora Jacobson never seems to rest. While most of us were frittering away the holidays on festive pursuits, the Norwich filmmaker was laboring at her craft. She began shooting Out of Her Mind on November 13 in New Hampshire and Vermont, with some scenes at the Statehouse slated to give genuine legislators a chance to…
Spa Deal: You don’t have to spend a fortune to get soaked in Quebec
I’ve always regarded the flat stretch of road north of Vermont’s border as a bleak throughway punctuated by the occasional poulet et frites stand — the dreary cornfields, complicated silver silos and Ski-doo rentals an obstacle course between me and Montréal. But for once, this desolate strip was my destination. My brother Erik and I…
Fuggetaboutit? Experts brainstorm on the mechanics of memory
Pay attention! Those are marching orders in the battle to enhance and preserve memory, according to local experts in the field. The better your concentration, the greater the chances you’ll retain information over the long haul. In the incredible tale of brain cells struggling to survive in the cerebral cortex, the moral is: Gray matter…
