By Laurie Morrissey We call them shooting stars, and they never fail to make us catch our breath in surprise and wonder. But they’re not stars at all. Those bright, brief streaks across the night sky are meteors. Clear skies permitting, the next few months bring three excellent chances to see batches of them. Meteors…

Back in the 1960s when I was old enough to get my license, the high school I attended (Mount St. Joseph Academy, or MSJ) did not have driver education. In my youth there didn’t seem to be the urgency that today’s teens have to get a license. Once you got your license most kids drove…

The next few weeks of my life are going to be boring.  I am ready for boring.  I am doing a bunch of training for a new job (outside sales for residential solar juggernaut SolarCity), and just marking time running and walking 1-5 miles a day.  No eight hour slogs, no running up and down…

The Oscar winner Robert Zemeckis put forth “What Lies Beneath” in the midst of Hollywood’s end-of-millennium resurgence of interest in ghost stories. This period began in 1999 with “The Sixth Sense,” “Stir of Echoes,” “The Haunting,” and “Sleepy Hollow,” and continued into the 2000s with “The Others” (2001) and “The Ring” (2002). Zemeckis, who also…

By Dom Cioffi Several months ago, after finding my son and his two friends indoors playing video games, I demanded that they exit the house. It was a beautiful summer day and they were wasting it staring into a television monitor. I barked something about never being allowed to stay inside when I was a…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week's Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Libra Moon, with aspects that tell me the next few days are bound to be a little intense. This could get completely out of hand. We could talk about how that makes it imperative for us…

By Dom Cioffi I sidled up to the bar and ordered the cheapest draft beer available. After all, I was a college student on a very strict budget. The $15 I had in my pocket had to last me all night, and that had to include food later in the evening. It was still early,…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Void-of-Course Moon, that kept us on hold until the wee hours of the morning, Tuesday. Sitting in the last Decan of the sign Cancer, running on the heels of hard hitting aspects to both Uranus and…

By Brady Crain A frosty view from Killington Peak at sunrise on Oct. 3, as witnessed by the columnist on xhis new training regimen. Nothing exciting happened this week, and it was everything that I hoped that it would be.  Boredom, preparation for a new job, some running, lots of walking, and lest we forget,…

By Declan McCabe Invasive species have earned their bad reputations. English sparrows compete with native birds from Newfoundland to South America. Australian brown tree snakes are well on their way to exterminating every last bird from the forests of Guam. And I don’t think anyone can fully predict how Colombia’s rivers will change in response…

Movies are often based on true stories. When a true story is based on a fictional movie, it’s a somewhat more special circumstance. “Man with a Plan,” a 1996 independent mockumentary, is a special movie. Directed by John O’Brien, a Harvard-educated sheep farmer from Tunbridge, Vt., it’s one of the few genuinely notable examples of…

By Dom Cioffi On Feb. 11, 2013, in speech before the most important cardinals in the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI stunned the world by becoming the first pontiff to resign the papal leadership position in nearly 600 years. There was no scandal; there was conspiracy. Pope Benedict was simply tired and of sound enough…

  By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul It was the dotted, orangey-yellow and black stripes that stood out, drawing my son’s gaze to the edge of the sandbox. A small caterpillar clung to the goutweed, munching away on the green leaves. At first we thought it was a monarch caterpillar, but the stripes weren’t quite right. Out…

Recently a friend forwarded to me a Facebook picture of my friend Betty Clark and me in a huge pile of leaves. The picture had been taken in front of my house and it appeared in the Rutland Herald in 1956. Our arms are raised up in the air and our grins go from ear…

“The Trouble with Harry,” the 1955 comic mystery film, was technically Alfred Hitchcock’s second movie set in the Green Mountain State: previously, the soundstage “mental hospital” in “Spellbound” (1943) was somewhat arbitrarily designated a Vermont address, a detail that bore little or no significance to the story. On the other hand, “The Trouble With Harry”…