This New England

Perhaps every little town should have this sort of place as a community center in these anomie-ridden times.

The St. Johnsbury, Vt., select board has approved a plan to bring exotic dancers to a downtown sports bar, Front Row Sports Tavern, before and after the main hunting season. Only one entertainment in town at a time, please!The select board ordered that the bar refrain from advertising the dancers with posters tacked up throughout the rather quaint town on the mighty Connecticut River. I think little advertising will be needed, though maybe a few tasteful signs in local ammo stores will keep some out-of-towners and their money in St. Johnsbury for a day or two before and after hunting season.

Bottled water or a Bud?

This is no way to induce a reduction in student beer drinking: Rhode Island officials recommend that those at the University of Rhode Island's Kingston campus boil water after two water samples taken from the URI Biological Sciences Center tested positive for coliform bacteria.

Ski hill hell
Northern New England's big ski resorts are now recruiting seasonal workers. But how good will business be this winter with the endlessly cited "financial meltdown" and the need to boost lift-ticket prices to pay for higher energy prices? Ski resorts are big users of energy -- to run the snow-making machines and the ski lifts -- and of water -- for the snow machines. Indeed, this is one heck of a environmentally wasteful business. It looks like it won't be able to waste as much this year

'Second death of Gordon Gecko'

From Tweedy, Browne Co.: "There will be lots of time for what we call the paternity suit phase {of the financial crisis} Our guess is that any logical analysis will turn up so many fingerprints and produce so much finger pointing that no one will get off free. Nor are we much interested in the media's gleeful post-mortem's on the second death of Gordon Gecko in less than 20 years.''

Of course, Hollywood is now hard at working developing scripts to tell the latest versions of "Wall Street greed'' -- as opposed to Hollywood greed. Producers will be praying that the credit crisis is gone when they have to raise the money to actually make the films, presumably during the Obama administration. Will they have to beg money from people they have insulted?

 Tags  Browne Gordon Gecko ski resorts St. Johnsbury Tweedy URI

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