Holy Cow!

My new motor vehicle registration sticker arrived in the mail today. It's huge! The stickers they've used until now were little one-inch squares that go in the corner of the rear license plate. I was very confused when I opened the mail and found a 2x3-inch sticker. For a brief moment, I wondered how it could possibly fit on my license plate. Then I noticed the diagram for placing it on the windshield.

The little FAQ included with the sticker says that the new location is intended to cut down on registration theft. It also says that the old registration sticker can be left on the license plate. Hm. I once got pulled over because my registration had expired (it hadn't really--the new sticker never arrived in the mail). It was a cop downtown who pulled me over, just as I was driving past the Green. I have never seen Waterbury cops go after anyone for speeding (lots of drivers do 50 in residential 25 zones) or running red lights & stop signs, but they pulled me over because it looked like my registration had expired. Go figure.

Brewfest!!!

Downtown After Dark

Every so often, I meet someone who tells me that they won't go to any events that take place in downtown Waterbury after dark. This always amazes and disappoints me. Downtown Waterbury is incredibly safe, any time of day or night. The crime rate is almost nonexistent, and most of it seems to take place during the middle of the day (for example, a store on Bank Street was robbed one afternoon a few weeks ago; no one was hurt). I don't think it's any more dangerous than Southbury or Watertown.

I have worked and lived and socialized downtown for nine years. I have walked across the downtown area alone after dark many times. The sum total of the "encounters" I've had are this: a very pleasant man talked to me about life while we walked down the street, then asked me if I had any money I could give him; on a couple of occasions, a man in a car (not the same one each time) has pulled up alongside me while I walked and asked if I "needed a ride"; a dude sitting on a bench asked me if I was "all set"; a different dude lurking in the doorway of an abandonned building asked me if I smoked; one time my friend and my sister were walking further ahead of me, and they claim that a prostitute started yelling at them about how she didn't want their competition. Oh, and I did once hear a story about two girls getting mugged by a skinny white guy wielding a stick in a parking lot behind a bar. Nine years, and that's all that's happened.

One of my favorite downtown stories involves me, a toga, and floral garlands. I dressed up Roman style for an event at the Palace Theater, wearing a shirt, skirt and sandals that weren't too dissimilar from what Roman women wore. I wrapped a white bedsheet around myself as a palla (the feminine form of the toga), and then a friend helped me pin giant fake flowers in my hair. It was very impressive looking. I then had to walk the length of the Green and the short block to the Palace in this outfit, in broad daylight. I think I almost caused a traffic accident, as everyone turned to look at me and struggled to figure out what I was. One driver asked a police officer if I was supposed to be the Statue of Liberty. The walk back was done after dark, when the streets were pretty much deserted. One of the event organizers was very worried about my safety; she was convinced that I was going to be assaulted. The one dude I encountered in my walk across the Green in the dark just stared and muttered about how crazy I was. I think maybe he thought he was hallucinating. The moral of the story: if you really are worried about your safety, just look like you're crazier than anyone else, and they won't know what to do.

Juried Show at the Mattatuck Museum

Any artist with a studio or home in Connecticut is invited to enter THE CONNECTICUT VISION 2006, a biannual juried show. This year's jurors are artists Charles Cajori and Barbara Grossman.

Entries need to be brought to the museum on September 10-11. Full details are available at the Mattatuck Museum website.

Also, VOLUNTEERS ARE NEEDED to assist with receiving, especially during the afternoon of Monday the 11th. No experience necessary, and it's a great way to meet artists and see their work. If you can help out, call the museum at (203) 753-0381, x10.

Slime, Evil, Insanity and Stupidity, all in one package!

Giordano has managed to make himself a center of media attention once again. I think he must have been feeling left out when he saw all the political attention Waterbury has been receiving this month.

After stealing untold amounts of money from the people of Waterbury, after using his office to molest little girls, after abusing his power as mayor in more ways than anyone will ever know, Giordano still has the audacity to claim that the city owes him money for unused vacation time and sick leave. Waterbury owes him no money. If anything, he should be expected to pay back any salary he ever received. And he calculated the amount of time he claims to have acrued based on a 35-hour work week. Thirty-five hours of work a week from the mayor of a city of 107,000 people. That hardly even counts as full time. What a stupid man. But I guess that's why he's done so many evil things. He's too stupid to know right from wrong.

Lieberman

More catching up on blogs I should have written a week or two ago...

Jarjura officially endorsed Lieberman at my favorite pizza place (Dominick & Pia's -- best pizza!). Lieberman said that "Mayor Mike" was an inspiration to him, having won reelection through a write-in campaign after losing his own primary.

I've never been big on party politics. I'm not really a supporter of the existence of political parties. I think they go against the interests of the public, allowing self-serving politicians to keep their racket going.

There's been a lot of talk about Lieberman doing damage to his party by running for reelection even though he lost the primary. Part of the reason he lost the primary was his public stance about his intention to continue running no matter the result of the primary. A lot of Democrats disliked what they heard as arrogance in his determination. As if Lamont were any less arrogant...

I hope Lieberman wins (and not just because Lamont doesn't seem to like Waterbury). Maybe his actions will lead to positive changes to our two-party system.

Lamont, Swan, Slime & Evil

This is now old news, but I'm going to comment anyway. Would have commented sooner, only I was away when most of it happened. In reading through online articles about the incident, I noticed that a lot of newspapers in other states and countries referred to Waterbury as a gritty industrial city. It's been decades since that was an accurate description.

Shortly after Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Lamont, Lamont's campaign manager, Tom Swan, was quoted as describing Waterbury as the place where "the forces of slime meet the forces of evil." Waterbury has proven to be a Lieberman stronghold, which adds a greater sense of pettiness to Swan's comment. Swan claims that he was referring to ex-Mayor Giordano as the slime and ex-Governor Rowland as the evil. All other things aside, I think that's a terrible analogy. Giordano is both slime and evil. Compared to Giordano, Rowland is a bastion of goodness.

Swan's derogatory comment is a slam to all of Waterbury. He may claim that he was referring to specific individuals, but it seems pretty obvious that he was putting down the entire city and everyone who lives in it.

Swan initially apologized to Mayor Jarjura with a comment about how he usually doesn't associate Jarjura with corruption. Okay.... interesting use of "usually".... interesting that his apology only applied to Jarjura, not to the rest of us living in this city.

Lamont has since done some apologizing of his own, but hasn't gone further than to say that the comments were "unfortunate." It certainly gives the impression that Lamont doesn't care much about the people who live in Waterbury.

While You Were Out...

I left town for five days and all sorts of interesting stuff happened. Not to mention that the weather finally turned pleasant (while I was down south, where the temperature hit at least 95 every day -- but gas prices were at ~$2.85). Lamont, Lieberman, Jarjura, Dominick & Pia's, slime & evil... oh my!

I'll try to do some catching up over the next couple of days.

Cleaning up the mess

Yesterday the excessive heat and humidity finally came to an end with an intense storm at 6:30--torrential downpour, lightening, thunder, gale force winds. I briefly lost power a couple of times, which seemed odd since the storm had finished passing through long before-hand. Around 10pm, I noticed a flashing light out on the street. I peeked out the window and saw a utility guy warning a neighbor not to park too far down the street, but it was too dark for me to see anything else. When I went out this morning, there were small tree branches everywhere in the driveway. And, out on the street, half of a tree was resting on the power lines. There were two orange cones in the street on either end of the danger area.

Shortly after midnight tonight, a very noisy truck and crew pulled up outside. They're now working on cutting the tree out from the power lines. If they're working out there this late at night, more than twenty-four hours after the storm caused the damage, they must have had a lot to clean up elsewhere!


Blurry night shot of the cleanup crew. I really need to learn how to use my camera.

Farmer's Market

Here are some photos from the Farmer's Market on the Waterbury Green last week (with live music performance by The Carnegie Clapp Trio). The Farmer's Market is held every Thursday, 11am-3pm and was made possible through the tireless efforts of Marianne Vandenburgh and the Main Street Waterbury volunteer group. There is also a Farmer's Market in the Brass Mill Mall parking lot on Thursday afternoons. And I think there is one over near Lakewood Road as well.



Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers, Pies, Cookies, Organic Breads


Peaches!


Fresh Corn


Carnegie Clapp Trio

More Politics

I've now seen television commercials for both of the Democratic candidates for Governor. Based solely on their ads, it looks like DeStefano and Malloy are both scumbags. Aren't political campaigns great? ..... They leave me feeling ill. It's no wonder most people don't vote. It's too depressing.

Wonder Bread Thrift Shop

The Wonder Bread Thrift Shop on Meriden Road closed a couple of years ago. Today they started tearing it down. I don't know who "they" is. It was kind of a nice building. A little art deco in design.





Meanwhile, the gas station next to the thrift shop building closed a few weeks ago. I think it was a small-scale family business. I don't know why they closed. Maybe because there are larger gas stations on either end of the street.

I wonder if there's any connection to the Academy of Driving moving to Watertown. The driving school used to keep its fleet of cars just up the street and used this little gas station to fuel all its cars. That had to be a pretty significant portion of the gas station's revenue. The driving school moved the fleet to Watertown, because the owner didn't want to keep paying Waterbury's high property taxes on its cars.

Country Club Neighborhood Association

The Country Club Neighborhood Association should be ashamed of themselves. They're still bitching and moaning because four retarded people are going to move into their neighborhood. Come on! If they made this kind of fuss about blacks or an ethnic group, they'd be sued.

They seem to think that one house with four retarded people will destroy property values in their neighborhood. Please! That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. In fact, it's the sort of thing racist white people used to say when blacks moved into their neighborhood.

One woman complained that they don't know the names of the people moving into the house, so they can't check to see if they're on the sex offenders register. WHAT??? Since when does being retarded mean that you're a sex offender? (This raises another issue for me--being able to check a sex offenders registry gives people a false sense of security; John Regan was sexually assaulting women in his nice neighborhood for twenty years without being on the register.)

The Country Club Neighborhood Association is the most prejudiced group in Waterbury right now. Unfortunately, they've figured out that you can't make the sort of accusations that they made back in June, so they've changed their focus. Now the "only reason" they're upset is that they think the purchase of the house was done improperly, as an inside deal. They've got the state attorney looking into the case. This disgusts me even more than I already was. Where's the investigation into the Neighborhood Association's amoral prejudice? Why are they able to get away with being self-righteous bigots?

Lieberman & Lamont

I haven't decided who I would vote for, since I haven't read up on the candidates yet (and I'm not registered as a Democrat; I think I'm unaffiliated, so I can't vote anyway). Lieberman and Lamont both have campaign blogs, and Lamont has a campaign profile on myspace (there's a Lieberman profile too, but it's not "real").
Here are the links:

http://liebermania.blogspot.com
http://lamontblog.blogspot.com
http://www.myspace.com/nedlamont

Not for walking

It seems like most of Waterbury is designed for cars, not pedestrians. Or, perhaps more accurately, the people in charge of the design and layout of city streets and sidewalks travel by car only. Every so often, I get it into my head that I want to ride my bicycle in town. I know I'm supposed to ride in the street in the same direction as traffic, but I don't trust drivers, especially since most of them tend to go 40+ in 25 mph zones. At one point I thought it would be safest to ride on the sidewalk, but that proved impossible. In the downtown area, the sidewalks are spacious and well-maintained, but everywhere else they're a nightmare. The potholes in the sidewalks are worse than the ones in the streets; weeds, trees and shrubs are overgrown and blocking maybe 10% of all the sidewalks; and then there are the telephone poles planted smack in the middle of the sidewalk. This is why you sometimes see people in wheelchairs and motorized chairs riding down the street--the sidewalks are unusable.

If you do find a street where there's a well-maintained, usable sidewalk, you still have the problem of walking alongside a road where traffic is racing by at top speeds. And there's no shade. For some reason, our city planners seem to hate shade trees. On the rare occasions when they do plant trees (like the ones on West Main Street near the 7-11, or the new ones on Grand Street), they're tiny little things that never grow taller than seven feet and have leaves that are so small it seems like they don't cast any shadow at all. If I could choose one thing to change about Waterbury, I would probably have shade trees lining every street. It would make the city so much more pleasant and would change its image in a positive way.

Here are some excerpts about old-time Waterbury from the National Magazine published in 1857:
"...its beautiful Centre square and its quiet shaded streets lined with handsome residences, presents an appearance quite unique for a manufacturing town."

"Do not look at the sidewalks; they will not bear inspection."

Even 150 years ago, the sidewalks in Waterbury weren't any good. I think there was a time period, between then and now, when they were well-maintained and designed for pedestrians, but now that "everyone" drives to wherever they're going, they've been neglected. Those of us who either want to or have to walk are out of luck. Bicycling works so long as you don't mind getting yelled at by passing drivers who think you shouldn't be in the road, and so long as you don't mind that there's no where to lock your bike if you go into a store.

New Addition

Alexander Calder, Giant Critter, 1976

Here's the new Calder statue in the courtyard at the Mattatuck Museum. I LOVE this statue! It exudes joy and happiness. Everyone in Waterbury should go see it. (Go now!)

Fire

I really loved this house on the corner of Johnson and Chestnut Streets. The fire was earlier this week (fire photo swiped from a friend's livejournal), and was probably caused by faulty wiring. All the residents were safely evacuated, and the owner has insurance, so I guess the main loss is architectural. I wish I had a better photo of it before the fire (pre-fire photo swiped from assessor's website), but the house still had its original wood decorative siding. Now it's going to end up covered in vinyl siding, like the light gray house next to it (which is its twin).

I really really hate vinyl siding (and aluminum, etc.) on old houses. The original wood siding on Victorian houses is usually very decorative and beautiful, while the modern siding is hopelessly generic, mimicking clapboard siding more typical of an entirely different style of architecture. There are some great WWI-era houses over near Washington Park that originally had stucco siding, but are now sheathed in vinyl and don't look anywhere near as cute as they did with the stucco. I know I'm a hopeless architecture geek, but when houses have their original siding (maintained), they look so much better than they do with modern siding added.

Too Hot!

At least it's not to humid as well. But it's still pushing 100, and probably more if you're baking in direct sun. This is the time of year when my favorite invention is the air conditioner.

Earlier this year, when it was cold and dark out, I posted photos of Waterbury in the summertime. Now that it's insanely hot out, here are some photos of when it was cold and snowy!




Thanksgiving Day, 2005 - dark, cold, snowy!




Old factory buildings on North Elm Street, December 4, 2005





Snowstorm on February 12, 2006. The long-haired cat stayed out in the snow longer than the others. The fur on the bottoms of his feet finally proved useful.






The Feb. 12 snowstorm dumped three feet on my driveway. By the time it finished coming down, I couldn't see my car.

That was weird...

A huge thunderstorm just rolled by, making an incredible amount of noise. At one point the thunder was so loud I wondered if the building was going to get hit by lightning. But when I looked out the window, it was still sort of sunny, and there was no sign of rain.

Wifi Hotspots Redux

The Republican-American ran an article today about coffee shops with wifi access for customers. The article's writer, Tracy O'Shaughnessy, focused mainly on a place in Cheshire and a discussion of telecommuting in general. Tracy noted that Starbucks makes you pay for wifi, whereas the local coffee shops usually give you free access. She also listed a "sampling" of area wifi hotspots. The only one she listed in all of Waterbury was Brass City Buzz. She also listed one in Watertown, one in Southbury, one in Woodbury and one in North Haven. North Haven? I'm not even sure I know where that is. Somewhere north of New Haven, I suspect. She really should have listed more. John Bale on Grand Street in Waterbury. I've heard that the new (and very delicious) Pizza Cafe on West Main Street in Waterbury has public wifi. The Bronson library has wifi, but I don't know if they let the public use it. Most McDonald's have wifi, but like Starbucks, they make you pay to use it.

I'm not really sure what the purpose of the article was. Maybe it was just to let people who don't use wifi know that there are people who do. For people who want to know where they can go to get free wifi access, it was close to useless. A better article would have been one that has a comprehensive list of wifi hotspots, indicating which are free for customers, and reviewing the different coffee shops. That would have been a great article--or at least one I'd like to read!