By Barbara Mackay The transition from February to March is not subtle. With hardly time to recover from a truncated month, we attend Town Meeting, cede an hour to our clocks, and navigate spontaneously erupting frost heaves. The forest is going through a seasonal transition, too, but at a more leisurely pace, and often invisibly.…

If you’re like me, you never watch regular-season college basketball, and then when the NCAA tournament rolls around and nobody can talk about anything else, you have to root arbitrarily for certain teams and against others, since you have no idea who the players are on either team or what they’re like. Yet it strikes…

I first discovered James Joel six years ago when he was playing with Ryan Fuller in the duo group Fuller n’ the Hole at Center Street Saloon in Rutland, during my Monday night bar shift, which we referred to as “Mayhem Mondays.” Joel has really progressed over the years and has built a nice solo…

By Dom Cioffi It was as urban ghetto as our little Vermont town was ever going to get. It was the early 1980s and we had just been declared legal to drive (which consequently gave us the freedom to roam). Sure, we’d hit the gorge or the movie theater on occasion, but most of the…

By David Barrell Perhaps only at Suicide Six do skiers and riders pass by a hen house while skiing on the Back Door trail. By Karen D. Lorentz Where can you ski by a chicken coop with hens fluttering around and a few minutes later descend a steep slope made famous by ski racers, yet…

By Carolyn Lorié If you peek into a wood duck nesting box during the breeding cycle, you might find 10 to 11 eggs, which is the bird’s normal clutch size. But you might also stumble upon a box overflowing with as many as 30 eggs. How, you might ask, can one duck lay and care…

Back in the '50s it was easy to tell when it was Sunday. I’m not sure it’s so simple any more! Shopping was not an option, as downtown stores were closed except for small food stores, pharmacies and places that sold newspapers and sundry items. There was no mall or shopping center. Life pretty much…

In the immediate aftermath of the courtroom verdict that awarded $7.4 million of the profits from the 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” to the family of Marvin Gaye (whose 1977 single “Got to Give It Up” was allegedly plagiarized), two distinct groups of commentators formed. On the one hand, countless “experts”—lawyers, journalists, musicians, musicologists—emerged with articles…

It’s virtually impossible to scroll through Facebook and Instagram and not come upon hashtagged gym selfies and food photos repping every approach to health—from #paleo to #rawvegan and everything in between. Personally, I have dabbled in essentially every diet, macronutrient ratio, and “lifestyle” out there, and what I’ve found is exactly what has been claimed…

By Joe Rankin A guy down the road has been working in his woods for the last couple of years. He’s cleaning them up-—and I mean cleaning. He cuts the underbrush, takes out the dead trees, the downed logs, the dead branches. Okay, I confess. The neatnik in me is envious. Part of me would…

“Saturday Night Live” recently did a sketch that mocked Kanye West’s latest awards show-related apology, which came two and a half weeks after Kanye rose in protest at the Grammys when alt-rock legend Beck beat out R&B star Beyoncé for Album of the Year. The begrudgingly contrite tweet was funny in part because it came…

If you like Pink Floyd, then head to the Pickle Barrel on Thursday night to see the next best thing to Floyd: The Machine. I have seen The Machine numerous times and they put on a great show. If you close your eyes, you would swear you were listening to Floyd, and when you open…

By Tom Joyce “Give everyman his DEW!”  Tullamore D.E.W. that is. How’s that for a whiskey slogan? It’s not as effective as being mentioned in a country or rap song but for 1873 it’s pretty impressive. Daniel E. Williams used his initials to market this Irish Whiskey after rising though the ranks at the distillery,…

By Dom Cioffi I first started hearing about the product with the code name of “Ginger” in the early months of 2001. Secretive press releases called it a “paradigm shift in the way humans will live” and “the next big thing.” I craved any and all information about this mysterious device, but little was available.…

By Dom Cioffi I learned at a very young age that a sport coat is a highly necessary life item. After all, you never know when someone is going to die or get married or ask you to interview for a new job. In each of these cases, a sport coat provides a level of…