Category: All Posts

Evan gets even

Forty years ago I was in the first semester of my freshman year at Westfield State College. I was accepted at UMass in Amherst and at Boston University, but I had to put myself through school, and the only way I could afford to do that was by attending one of the 4-year state colleges in Massachusetts.

I worked hard to earn my B.A. in Economics, and I am very unhappy with the trouble that is going on at Westfield State now, because of Evan Dobelle.

What Boston Globe reporter Scott Allen doesn’t say in the video is that these events are history repeating itself, because Dobelle went through this before, ten years ago at the University of Hawaii. The difference is that the board of trustees in Hawaii didn’t want to hassle with a lawsuit, and they decided to give Dobelle a generous settlement to make him go away.

Close Encounters of the Third Season Kind

If it’s true that the third and final season of Star Trek is the weakest, it’s certainly also true of Lost in Space, which became quite silly toward the end of its run. But I have a fondness for season 3 of LiS, because the month before it started my father bought the family’s first color TV. Another reason for my continued interest in the series had to do with being a boy who had just turned twelve.

I’ve just finished watching a third season episode called Hunter’s Moon, which features my mother’s old friend, Vincent Beck, who I talked about at this link. Vince was never one to turn down a job, no matter how he looked playing the part.

Early in the episode, “Special Guest Star” Jonathan Harris as the always insufferable Dr. Zachary Smith exclaims, “We’re doomed! We’re Doomed!” Ten years later, Anthony Daniels would pick up on that expression as C-3PO.

DogRat of Arabia

It’s been over 20 years since I was in Saudi Arabia. It’s changed a lot since then, as seen in Frank Gardner’s recent BBC documentary. Over lunch one day in Riyadh with an American who had lived in the Kingdom for several years, he told me that the single most important problem for post-Cold War America would be the radical Islam movement. He wasn’t wrong, as most recently proved here in Boston on Marathon Monday.