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”…

I have pulled up out of my swan dive into obesity. After working so hard for so long, it has felt funny to take rest days. I took five of them, and in that time, I went from looking like a granite statue to looking like a combination of the Pillsbury Dough Boy, the Michelin…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week's Horoscopes are coming out under the light of an Aries Moon, in the wake of the Blood Moon Eclipse: if we're still here, all present and accounted for, then the apocalyptic gossip that preceded the event, was nothing but an exaggerated barrage of fear porn.…

By Dom Cioffi He was always going to be an athlete . . . Since the day my son was born, I’ve made sure that he was involved in sports. I didn’t do this because of my ego or because I have a secret fantasy that he will one day make millions as a professional athlete. I did it because…

Nausea. Twitchiness. Abject nervousness. Hot skin. Fear. Loathing. Frothing at the mouth. So the Thursday before the Spartan, I finally registered for the Ultra Beast. I waited, because as a nascent real estate agent I have very little money, and I had the sincerest hopes that the Spartan organization—with dozens of open spots in the…

Every year at this time I have a twinge of envy for students who go back to school. Fortunately for my parents, I loved school from day one. In fact, I loved it so much that I would have been a “professional student” after college if I could have earned a paycheck for learning! My…

By Barbara Mackay Eight or so years ago I collected milkweed seeds and painstakingly buried them one at a time under leaf debris at the back edge of my yard, hoping they would mature and attract more monarch butterflies to my home. The project has been wildly successful, but recently the monarch population has declined.…

Earlier this month, the California-based craft beer powerhouse Lagunitas Brewing Company announced that it was entering into a “joint venture” and/or “powerful new partnership” with Heineken International, a Dutch corporation that, in addition to putting skunky pale lagers into transparent green bottles under its own name, owns “over 170 beer brands” in “more than 70…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week's Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Capricorn Moon, with a slew of astrological activity backing up its conjunction with the Cardinal earth axis. There's so much going on, I'd be a fool to think that I could dissect all of it and…