This New England

"Santa With Elves,'' by Norman Rockwell, at the National Museum of American Illustration, Bellevue Avenue, Newport. To me, the museum is the most entertaining attraction in attraction-rich Newport.

"It's nothing new," Col. Dave Gill, a U.S. Army recruiter, in Portsmouth, N.H., noted to the Associated Press about the latest big storm in northern New England, which brought some places in the region 3 1/2 feet of snow -- and all in one day.

I guess you have to be tough to move there, too, as pretty as it can be. (Pretty sometimes isn't quite enough when it's 10 below.) The immigrants aren't exactly pouring in, although New Hampshire, anyway, has had a remarkably resilient economy.

Then there's Vermont , where 522 more people reside this year than last, if we are to believe the U.S. Census Bureau. (Are all 522 really year-rounders?)

(The population is falling in comparatively tropical Rhode Island, with a bad economy overwhelming ocean views. Perhaps the quitters have found the state's motto, "Hope,'' increasingly irritating.)

Still, even with many anxious residents of Manhattan's West Side, such as laid-off Lehman Brothers employees, again eyeing the "simple life'' (nothing simple about keeping your driveway plowed or dealing with frequent power failures), the Green Mountain State remains the state with the second smallest population, after Wyoming.

Odd considering that it's in a very populated region. Long winters and lack of flat terrain still scare away people. They'd rather stick with the coffee-table books featuring Vermont scenery -- the pleasure without the frostbite.

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Wood for fuel is often considered ecologically attractive in New England because it isn't, well, oil and because it's our own "renewable'' fuel (albeit quite slowly renewable).

Still, that doesn't mean it isn't polluting when you burn it, with the wood smoke sitting in the valleys and making things difficult for asthmatics.

So it's good to hear that starting Jan. 1, New Hampshire will start implementing rules that will force users of outdoor wood boilers to get cleaner ones. The idea is to ultimately reduce particulate pollution from burning wood in the state by 90 percent with much more efficient boilers. There are about 2,000 outdoor wood boilers currently operating in the state.

The smell of wood fires in wet cold places still evokes memories, especially of old-fashioned ski area with lodges that always had roaring fires, though the rope tows sometimes ran on smelly old Ford truck engines.

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Concord, Mass.-based Polaroid Corp., the pioneer of instant photography, has sought bankruptcy protection for the second time in seven years. Polaroid was once the very symbol of Boston-area high-tech prowess.

But this time it's not because of the assault on the film business by digital photography (Schumpeter's "creative destruction'') but rather because of an alleged $2 billion fraud at its parent company Petters Group Worldwide LLC ("destructive destruction'').

A sigh of the times.

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I recommend David Carr's recent piece in The New York Times about how a little New Jersey newspaper thrives by shunning the Web and Edward Wasserman's recent piece in The Miami Herald about young people still going into journalism, of all things.

 Tags  Petters Group Polaroid Vermont Census wood boilers

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