Rocket Joe of Wilbraham

Here's a character -- Rocket Joe Roberts of Wilbraham, AKA Farmer Joe, who took this photo of his Pekin ducks (that's what he calls them anyway). He's a Dark-Sky enthusiast; says light pollution will soon have obliterated the nighttime view of the sky with the exception of the moon and planets. Advocates for fewer of "shielded" lights (facing down not up) at night. Amherst character Dissident Vince O'Connor carrying the dark-sky banner in Amherst. Some links to Rocket Joe's world:

http://www.rocketroberts.com/joe.htm
Joe Roberts Astrophotography This page covers my activities in photography of the night sky.Amateur Astronomer's Notebook A site dedicated to amateur astronomy, especially suited to those just starting out!Hale-Bopp pictures I took Darn! No spaceship!Joe Roberts' Hawaii Five-O Page If you are a fan of the show Hawaii Five-O you'll want to visit this section (my most frequently visited page)!Minnechaug Class of 1978 Home Page Everything you loved and hated about school, and then some...Resume Not currently looking for work, but I'll consider outstanding opportunities...Technical Articles "readable" articles I wrote on technical stuff...Farmer Joe's Home Page Scenes and equipment from around the farm...Joe's Rocket Page Very little here right now, this is a new undertaking...Joe's Model Railroad Page Some highlights and photos of my 1970's vintage model railroad.Joe's Wilbraham Photo History Page Old and new historical photos from Wilbraham, MA.Joe's Farmall "M" Site A site with focus on my 1949 Farmall M tractor.Joe's Farm and Nature Page A page with photos of things around my hobby farm.A 1970's Teenager's Bedroom A page that illustrates my start in stereo systems and electronics.Korean War Photo Page Photos from in and around the front lines and rear area in Korea.My Backyard Observatory A chronicle of the construction of my Backyard Observatory.Joe's Radio Aircheck Page A page with classic radio airchecks from the 70s to the 90s!How and Why Wonder Books A page dedicated to the vintage childhood book series.Ramblings My comments on a variety of topics.Miscellaneous Notes and Facts A collection of common misconceptions and miscellaneous info...Important Notes about the contents of my pages Notes about copyright, originality of work, etc.

Nick Grabbe: A real individual in a good way

Photo is of an AlphaSmart, vintage laptop precursor on which my co-worker Nick Grabbe takes notes at meetings. Found this article he had written about his and wife Betsy's "radical frugality." LOVE it!
Good lifeTM just gets better
By Nick Grabbe
On a sunny spring weekend, you can find me splitting and stacking the wood that will keep my family warm next winter.
Or I might be loading the compost I made a year ago into a wheelbarrow and spreading it into the garden beds before the vegetables go in.
After pruning my two apple trees in March, I'll be spraying them in April and May, trying to outwit the insects and prevent disease.
None of these tasks is necessary to my family's survival. If I bothered to count up the money I save and compared it to the hours I toil, it wouldn't seem "worth it" financially. But over the years this lifestyle of urban homesteading and what we call radical frugality have become like a hobby for me and my wife, Betsy Krogh. It's worth it because we enjoy it.
For me, it all began 30 years ago, when I read a book called "Living the Good Life," by Scott Nearing. Nearing and his wife, Helen, spent decades in Vermont, building their own houses and growing their own food, before attracting widespread attention in the late 1960s. I wrote a story about Nearing when he came to Amherst to speak in 1976.
Like many young adults of that era, I thought I wanted to "go back to the land" like the Nearings, but there were several problems. I am not handy, and couldn't build a shed, much less construct a house or tinker with a tractor. Betsy and I have two children who have needed attention and community _ and money _ for the past 20 years. And I have no desire to retreat from society; I like being involved in my town and cherish the friendships I have developed.
So we've come to a compromise that suits us well. We live in a farmhouse-style home on a half-acre lot a mile from downtown Amherst. I work four days a week and enjoy writing the newspaper articles that provide us with a modest income and health insurance. Betsy has not worked for pay but has supervised the children and had time to contribute her talents to our home economy and the local community.
It isn't exactly living off the land, but it's a balanced life. Our beliefs are interwoven with our tasks, and as we go about our household chores, we have that good feeling you get when work and play become one.
Every April, I make a large compost pile and marvel at the magic I'm able to conjure up.
On Sundays throughout the year, I pick up peelings and spoiled fruits and vegetables at Not Bread Alone, the free-meal program at First Congregational Church. I layer them with ground-up leaves and our own kitchen scraps in a 4-foot-square enclosure made of cement blocks. Then in April, I relayer them with grass clippings or manure, plus dirt, lime and water. This concoction heats up, sometimes registering 160 degrees on my trusty compost thermometer, killing weed seeds and disease pathogens and producing a sweet-smelling natural fertilizer.
I spread it on the 11 raised beds in our backyard garden, providing all the fertilizer we need, and in April and May the seeds go in. We grow lettuce, beans, squash, peppers, tomatoes, raspberries, peas, kale, chard and rhubarb. We can the surplus of tomatoes, apples (made into sauce) and raspberries (made into jam) for winter use. We freeze beans and peppers. The kale usually lasts until January under a hoop greenhouse.
We do not use chemicals to deter pests, but do employ a variety of techniques, including hand-picking, wood ashes and compact discs hung from strings. We even use beer, which attracts slugs that enjoy it so much they drown in it. Once, when I went to a package store to buy a single bottle of cheap beer, I told the clerk sheepishly, "It's not for me, it's for my slugs!" I think I saw him raise his eyebrows.
Not all our efforts to go organic have been successful. Apples are the most difficult crop to grow organically. Several years ago, I stopped using chemical insecticides and fungicides, and also stopped getting apples on our two trees. One year we tried a new product that coats the trees with a clay-like substance that supposedly causes insects to look elsewhere. That didn't work either, and our trees eventually became firewood. I get more sheer enjoyment out of processing firewood than from any other outdoor task.
Several wooded lots in our neighborhood have been cleared for houses in the past two years, and I asked the contractors if we could have the trees. In one case, a contractor delivered them to me; in another, I cut them into logs and brought them to our yard in a wheelbarrow.
Using a chain saw to cut up trees is dangerous, and I'm careful to do it only when I'm feeling alert and to quit before I get tired. But using an ax and a maul to create stove-size logs is satisfying work.
The woodpiles seem so beautiful that sometimes I just stare at them and feel a deep sense of contentment. In the winter, warmed by the stove, I feel that all my work has been worthwhile. My heating fuel has not been transported thousands of miles from unstable countries, but has come from my own neighborhood.
Some aspects of our urban homesteading life are much easier because of our in-town location.
Living near town, schools and work, we usually own only one car. We use bicycles, the bus, carpooling and walking for much of our transportation with hardly any inconvenience. And living in a college town, we anticipate the annual late-May departure of the students, not only for the quiet it brings but because they leave behind all sorts of furniture, clothing and household goods that we are delighted to harvest from the roadsides. We also love finding books and other useful items at the "take-it-or-leave-it" exchange at the town's recycling center.
Other household practices are designed to save energy or avoid spending money. We hang our laundry on a clothesline outside to dry in the wind and sun, a practice that's actually restricted in some parts of Amherst. Last year, we invested in a solar hot-water system that adds a new dimension to taking a shower.
We belong to a natural-food-buying club in our neighborhood, and I regularly bake bread and cookies and make soup from scratch. In the summer, Betsy often cooks rice in our homemade solar oven. We get books at the Jones Library and share newspapers with nearby family members. We even pick up bottles and cans on the street; our redemption income is about $50 a year. At our little urban homestead, my family and I enjoy a high level of domestic security. We produce some of our food and energy and avail ourselves of what is freely given by nature or cast off by other people in our land of plenty. We relish the challenge of creative solutions to overcoming life's obstacles and acquiring life's necessities. We incorporate frugal and earth-friendly practices into our everyday routines. We seek satisfaction in relationships, work and the nonmaterial delights of expanding our minds and spirits.
In spring, as in the other seasons, we aim to enjoy it all.
Reprinted with permission of the Daily Hampshire Gazette. All rights reserved. Nick Grabbe is a freelance writer who lives in the Pioneer Valley. He can be reached at ngrabbe@gazettenet.com.

Rebel (or rogue) for the collection:Marilee Jones

Caveman blog includes gallery of rebels, rogues, indiVIduals and characters. Today's nominee: Marilee Jones, worked at MIT for 28 years, rising through ranks to dean of admissions. Trouble is she never graduated from college though she claimed to have. Exposed after publishing book “Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond."

NEW YORK TIMES

April 27, 2007
Dean at M.I.T. Resigns, Ending a 28-Year Lie
By TAMAR LEWIN
Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became well known for urging stressed-out students competing for elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. Yesterday she admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.
“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to M.I.T. 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” Ms. Jones said in a statement posted on the institute’s Web site. “I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the M.I.T. community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”
Ms. Jones said that she would not make any other public comment “at this personally difficult time” and that she hoped her privacy would be respected.
Ms. Jones, 55, originally from Albany, had on various occasions represented herself as having degrees from three upstate New York institutions: Albany Medical College, Union College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In fact, she had no degrees from any of those places, or anywhere else, M.I.T. officials said.
A spokesman for Rensselaer said Ms. Jones had not graduated there, though she did attend as a part-time nonmatriculated student during the 1974-75 school year. The other colleges said they had no record of her.
Phillip L. Clay, M.I.T.’s chancellor, said in an interview that a college degree was probably not required for Ms. Jones’s entry-level job in the admissions office when she arrived in 1979. And by the time she was appointed admissions dean in 1997, Professor Clay said, she had already been in the admissions office for many years, and apparently little effort was made to check what she had earlier presented as her credentials.
“In the future,” he said, “we will take a big lesson from this experience.”
Since last fall, Ms. Jones had been making speeches around the country to promote her book, “Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond,” written with a pediatrician, Dr. Kenneth R. Ginsburg. The book had added to her reputation as a kind of guru of the movement to tame the college admissions frenzy.
“Less Stress, More Success” addresses not only the pressure to be perfect but also a need to live with integrity.
“Holding integrity is sometimes very hard to do because the temptation may be to cheat or cut corners,” it says. “But just remember that ‘what goes around comes around,’ meaning that life has a funny way of giving back what you put out.”
Professor Clay said the dean for undergraduate education, Daniel Hastings, received information 10 days ago questioning Ms. Jones’s academic background. M.I.T. officials would not say who had provided the information.
“There are some mistakes people can make for which ‘I’m sorry’ can be accepted, but this is one of those matters where the lack of integrity is sufficient all by itself,” Professor Clay said. “This is a very sad situation for her and for the institution. We have obviously placed a lot of trust in her.”
On the campus, where Ms. Jones was widely admired, almost revered, for her humor, outspokenness and common sense, students and faculty members alike seemed both saddened and shocked.
“It’s like a Thomas Hardy tragedy, because she did so much good, but something she did long ago came back and trumped it,” said one friend, Leslie C. Perelman, director of the M.I.T. program in writing and humanistic studies.
Mike Hurley, a freshman chemistry student, said, “It was surprising,” adding, “Everyone who was admitted here probably knows her, at least her name.”
Mr. Hurley said that the admissions office had been unusually accessible, with Ms. Jones’s “bright” personality and blogs for incoming students.
“Whenever someone’s integrity is questioned,” he said, “it sets a bad example, but I feel like the students can get past that and look at what she’s done for us as a whole.”
Rachel Ellman, who studies aerospace engineering, said, “I feel like she’s irreplaceable.”
Ms. Jones had received the institute’s highest honor for administrators, the M.I.T. Excellence Award for Leading Change, and many college admissions officers and high school college counselors said yesterday that whatever her personal shortcomings, her efforts deserved respect.
“She’s been working and presenting a lot of important ideas about our business,” said Rod Skinner, director of college counseling at Milton Academy, the Massachusetts prep school. “What I’m hoping is that the quality of the research and the book will hold up.”
Ms. Jones was hired by the admissions office in 1979 to recruit young women, who at the time made up only 17 percent of the institute’s undergraduates, compared with nearly half today.
Since she entered the field, admissions to M.I.T. and other elite institutions have become increasingly competitive, and she made her mark with her efforts to turn down the flame of competition.
Among other things, she told students that they did not need perfect SAT scores to get into M.I.T. She also redesigned the institute’s application form, leaving less space for students to list their extracurricular activities, so as not to imply that every student needed 10 activities to fill the 10 lines that used to be there.
Competition remains fierce, though. For the coming fall, M.I.T. accepted 12 percent of 12,443 applicants.
Those who attended this month’s events for admitted students said Ms. Jones had been in good spirits, especially at a Saturday night finale. There, Ms. Jones, who in younger days was a torch singer at upstate New York clubs, took part in a “battle of the bands,” singing, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
Christy McKerney contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass., and Sara Rimer from Boston.

Ana weighs in on CAT BLOGGER screenplay idea

Not enough conflict/action, unclear whether aiming to be a Hollywood v. quirky script, "rich world of blogosphere" hard to translate into action -- was what Ana (my daughter, who works for L.A. talent agency I.C.M.) said about proposed script (see explanation at http://aboutamherst.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-about-this-for-screenplay.html) Must introduce conflict by Page 10, heroine bottoms out end of Act 2.

In response and after thinking some more, I come up with these modifications.

1) Drop the cat and wild turkey wondering around town in opening exterior shot. Make that JUST a turkey.



2) Locale: Pittsfield, MA., once a thriving General Electric town, now sad, post-industrial. Open with turkey wandering down train tracks, amid empty GE buildings, PCB-filled Silver Lake, Housatonic River undergoing dredging for more PCBs.

3) Opening interior shot: hospital room. Cat blogger talking to brother, small-time scribe and once small-time scribe, about downward spiral of newspapers.

4) Multiple cat owner either DIES or faces EVICTION by city.

More later.

Hello from the author

OK, MAYbe OnGeicoCaveman is not really turning into a cat blog. That was a bit of rebelliousness inspired by Media Bloggers Association saying that "cat bloggers" weren't welcome to join their organization. Maybe OnGeicoCaveman is the author's rebel, not-for-prime time side musings, inspired by the caveman, a smart, cultivated -- amusing, even -- guy who not everyone GETS. Whose problem IS that, is the question. The answer? Not clear. Photo is the author in NYC. Early influences: Ace teenage detective Nancy Drew, redheaded comic strip reporter Brenda Starr, "That Girl," Marlo Thomas.

Our cat Hester, like her or lump her

Mavericks: Dad, lone turkey of Amity Street

Dad explained why he declined to join an HMO in a front-page Berkshire Eagle story on Jan. 3, 1996. "It bugs me," he said, "when I get a call from Boston or somewhere and they say, 'How long are you going to keep so-and-so in the hospital?'"

Saw the lone turkey of Amity Street, pictured in a Gazette photo here in the Stop & Shop parking lot last year, walking south along the railroad tracks crossing Strong Street yesterday.

Listening to the peepers

Maybe this will just be AboutAmherst's shadow blog -- until the Geico caveman TV series starts.

Oh. I decided to turn this into a CAT BLOG

Unless anyone objects.