Mark Your Calendar

 

Pioneer Valley Roller Derby wheels in for a doubleheader game July 13 at Lossone Rink, 22 Greenwood Court, Easthampton, 6 p.m. Advance tickets can be purchased for $8 at Turn it Up! Records in Northampton or online at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/347616. Door price is $10/ adults, $5/12 and under, free/6 and under. Local teams Dirty Dozen (men) and Quabbin Missile Crisis (women) take on Harm City Homicide (Baltimore) and Worcester Warheads.

 

 

 

You Can Say That Again

 

 

 

I remember a time when administrators were called deans, provosts, treasurers and registrars—now it seems everybody is a vice president. With these titles have come higher salaries, bonuses, company cars, low-interest mortgages and severance payments for voluntary departures. Boards of trustees approve these lavish practices even as they fight unionization, eliminate full-time faculty positions, refuse even cost-of-living raises for the majority of workers, increase tuition and ask students and their parents to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans.”

Claire Potter, professor of history, New School for Public Engagement and blogger for Chronicle of Higher Education, speaking to CNN


 

Website to Watch


www.happyvalleylocavore.blogspot.com

 

Did you, perhaps, get a little carried away at the you-pick farm, leaving you with a surfeit of strawberries? Do you sometimes want to cry when you pick up your weekly CSA farm share and wonder what the hell you’re going to do with all that damn kale? Or perhaps you’re already looking ahead with dread to the days when zucchini is so aggressively fecund that it seems to be growing directly on your kitchen counter.

Happy Valley Locavore to the rescue. Blogger Meggin Thwing Eastman will help ensure that no green goes unused, no herb unappreciated in your kitchen by offering scads of intriguing recipes using whatever is popping up in your garden or at the farmers’ market right now. Strawberry balsamic pizza with arugula, feta and basil, anyone?

 

 

 

Report Card


C+

 

That’s the grade Massachusetts’ healthcare received in the annual “Healthy People/Healthy Economy” report put out by the Boston Foundation and the New England Healthcare Institute (find it at www.tbf.org). Overall, the commonwealth showed improvement in a number of areas and received good grades for school-based BMI reporting (A), primary care quality (B+) and farmers’ markets availability (B+), among other things. But its GPA was hurt by the F grade it received in the “sugar-sweetened beverages” category, earned by lawmakers’ refusal to undo the tax-exempt status of soda and candy.

 

Berkshire Bounty

 

Just down the street in Pittsfield from Barrington Stage Company’s On the Town (see StageStruck in this issue) another classic musical has just opened. Oklahoma! is the Berkshire Theatre Group’s season centerpiece in Pittsfield’s Colonial Theatre. Set in the 1906 western territory, where love blooms and jealousy lurks amidst elephant-high cornfields and surreys with a fringe on top, the show, debuting in 1943, marked the first Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration and the coming-of-age of the narrative musical that was more than mindless song-and-dance strung on a flimsy plot.

On BTG’s Stockbridge campus, James Goldman’s historical drama The Lion in Winter plays through next week. It’s a seriocomic family drama of schemes and quarrels in which the family happens to be the king of England, his estranged queen and their three sons vying for the inheritance, that is, the throne. Treat Williams and Jayne Atkinson star as Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, monarch and matriarch playing politics for keeps with wit and malice.

 

 

 

 

Worth Quoting:


You can’t give your child an ‘all of the above’ diet with toxic lead and arsenic, and think that adding some spinach and blueberries is going to make it OK. Likewise, reducing carbon pollution from coal does not make fracking, tar sands oil, deep water and Arctic drilling OK. … Obama’s promotion of cheap dirty fossil fuels makes coal regulations just window dressing on a disastrous policy. … If Obama won’t lead, the people will find a way to provide that leadership. It’s not the President’s legacy that’s at stake. It’s ours.”

 

Jill Stein, 2012 Green Party nominee and two-time Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate,
on President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy