This New England

"Some of the Camp,'' a painting by NANCY S. WHITCOMB

Summer is coming. Man the boats!

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Back to the internal-combustion engine:

Does this hint at the beginnings of the erosion of the primacy of the automobile, and/or a more worldly attitude among us provincial Americans?

U.S. passport cards, about the same size as driver's licenses, can now be used as IDs to buy booze in Massachusetts These mini-passports (or quasi-passports?) can be used to travel between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and Caribbean nations -- strongly implying that we don't quite consider those places sovereign "foreign'' jurisdictions. The new cards aren't as big as "real passports'' to, er, real foreign places.

Rather an insult to our hemispheric neighbors. The new documents join driver's licenses, state liquor IDs, passports and Military Identification Cards as valid forms of identification for legally getting drunk.

I suppose the new cards are meant to boost the state's excise tax revenue from alcoholic-beverage purchases in the recession.

Why not make CVS coupons valid identification too? Or YMCA memberships?

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I love independent bookstores and those eccentric private libraries found in New England. They have such nice events, such as Tony Horwitz, next Friday, May 22 at 5-7 p.m. at the Providence Athenaeum talking about his book A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and other Adventures in Early America .

I'd mention with more enthusiasm that he won the Pulitzer Prize but 40 years of learning about the inside operations of the Pulitzer show in New York make me desist. As Bismarck said about legislation being like sausage-making -- you're better off not knowing how Pulitzers are handed out.

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The big product in northern New Hampshire has long been wood. For a long time it was wood for newsprint, toilet paper and other paper products. Now, apparently, it will be wood for wood-fired power plants.

Renewable energy! (But then, newsprint is recyclable.)

I hope that the new wood revival is less polluting than the old one, in which paper-mill chemicals polluted many streams in the mostly gorgeous region -- that is, gorgeous if you didn't look at it sociologically as a sort of sub-arctic West Virginia.

Lots of rural suffering up there. But luckily no coal has been found, just a little copper.

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New England is still New England when someone named Tristram J. Coffin is named to be Vermont's U.S. attorney. Sounds like something from a Bert & I record. Or Herman Melville. Or even John Cheever.

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The extraterrestrial University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth -- a remarkably attractive modernistic campus except for the poured concrete.The buildings' design is nice. The material they're made of, though, ages very, very badly.

Boston City Hall is the apotheosis of hideous brutalist concrete architecture. UMass Dartmouth, though, has managed to suppress the worst of its brutalist tendencies. The lushness of the campus, of course, helps.

Anyway, good session at UMass Dartmouth on May 15, in which such Internet experts as Walter Brooks, of Cape Cod Today, and Lou (as in Louise) Phelps, of Savannah Daily News, showed how to do new kinds of local daily ''newspapers'' online. New England, with its many strong towns and powerful sense of the hyper-local, seems tailor- made for these new creations.

Kudos to Prof. Fahri Karakaya of the UMass business school for putting the show together. It also had its vaudevillian aspects, thank God, thanks to the show-business talents of Mr. Brooks and Ms. Phelps.

 Tags  Cape Cod Today Fahri Karakaya Lou Phelps passport cards Providence Athenaeum Savannah Daily News Tristram J. Coffin Walter Brooks wood-fired

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