two MORE biting the dust in west hartford center

one of them has been in the center since the 40s. i thought black and blue square was supposed to be bringing throngs of shoppers down to the ENTIRE center? every article i read about b&b square says it's hoppin' and doing well. i can't say one way or another. i hope it is but i'm still sorry it's there. i hate the IDEA of it even.

one more time too - to the town of west hartford, BLACK AND BLUE SQUARE (which you used TOWN FUNDS to finance) was supposed to bring our taxes down and allow us townfolk MORE MORE MORE. well, WTF HAPPENED? not only haven't our taxes gone DOWN DOWN DOWN but we're losing services left and right

hey, YOU voted for it, i didn't

Allen Collins Clothing Store Closes In West Hartford
By BILL LEUKHARDT |The Hartford Courant
WEST HARTFORD — - The last sale at Allen Collins clothing store ended Friday and included deals on fixtures and furniture along with closing-sale prices on men's and women's business and casual clothes.

The iconic store at 8 Ellsworth Road, a source of quality clothes and service since the 1940s, closed its doors, done in by the recession and the prevalence of discount outlets that emphasize price, not assistance.

"Allen Collins has been a standard business in West Hartford where business men and women would go to buy suits. It's sad to see the store close," said interim Town Manager Ron Van Winkle, a town native. He walked across South Main Street on Thursday from town hall to wish owners Brian and Tina Rosso well.................

and japanalia is moving from farmington avenue west hartford center to:

JAPANALIA EIKO is moving from
West Hartford Center (May 30 is our last day) to 11 Whitney St. Hartford*, reopening June 2.

25% off SALE May 21-June 6

Phone till May 30, 860-523-7722
from June 2, 860-232-4677

* corner of Farmington Ave, formerly
LaMotta Fine Art, next to Japanalia on one!

talk about offshore

i saw the cover but i didn't actually read it yet. i absolutely WILL today - at brunch. i thought it was quite brilliant but i had NO idea the extent to which the the advocate went


hell, there was even an article about cake (written by someone offshore)! dang


Connecticut Alt-Papers Outsource Editorial Content to India
By Mark Fitzgerald
CHICAGO The Hartford (Conn.) Advocate and two of its New Mass. Media alternative weekly siblings outsourced all their editorial content to India for their issue that hits the streets Thursday. "It's been fascinating to me to see this go from a chuckle in an edit meeting to an entire issue," Group Managing Editor John Adamian said in a telephone interview. All the local news, arts and entertainment reviews, restaurant critiques in the Advocate papers in New Haven and Hartford plus the Fairfield County Weekly were written by Indian freelancers hired for the occasion using ads on Craigslist sites in Mumbai and Bangalore -- the two favorite spots for U.S. outsourcing to India. So Nilanjana Bhowmick writes about the Shad Bake the Essex (Conn.) Rotary Club holds, as well the Shad Derby Festival. Nidhi Sharma Kirti writes about a new exhibition of Pequot Native American art opening in Ledyard. Even the sex-advice column was outsourced to the land of the Kama Sutra. In one example, Vijayalaxmi Hegde writes about an upcoming concert by the California group Cake: "Perhaps, it is this versatility -- this ability to belong to many genres and not be constrained by one -- that is the key to Cake's longevity. It's been a decade and a half since the Motorcade of Generosity rolled by and close to two decades since 'Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle' happened. If this is not durability for an indie band, what is?"..........

OUTSOURCE THIS

We hired Indian freelance journalists to write the paper this week. Here’s why we did it.

Last year, a news Web site in Pasadena, Calif., made headlines when they started outsourcing city hall coverage to reporters in India. Using simple webcams and e-mail, the site, Pasadena Now, would put journalists half a world away inside city council chambers to observe and file stories on local government. The site fired its staff, and replaced them with Indians who’d crank out 1,000-word stories for the rock-bottom rate of $7.50.

The media world was abuzz: American news outfit outsources local reporting to the subcontinent. Could we all be next?

We wondered too about the limits of outsourcing local news, particularly alternative journalism. Covering city council meetings via webcam is one thing. Producing entire issues of a local news and arts weekly is quite another. What started as a joke — "I’ve got an idea. Let’s outsource an entire issue to India just to see if it can be done" — has culminated in what you see here.
.....................

oh hell let's have MORE cake

congratulations to plan b tavern

for winning golden local best burger award
we stopped in yesterday afternoon prior to seeing cake. had NO idea they were going to be celebrating with free burgers and the like. i was there early so i sat at the bar awhile with jon (one hell of a bartender. you can find him at plan b monday, tuesday, thursday and friday afternoons and the half door for saturday brunches, then sat outside (they put a tent up) when my friends joined me. had a little bit too much to drink (ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh - but i wasn't driving) but all turned out well.

shawn and al, congrats!

cake was amazing

(my favorite cake song is mexico. they played it and i was thrilled).

phenomenal

their recorded music doesn't even do them justice. one MUST see them live and i'm so glad i did. great rapport with their audience. hell, THEY GAVE AWAY A TREE. yes. a REAL LIVE TREE (of course it wasn't full grown).

i don't do well in crowds but i held my own. i separated from my friends so i could stand up in back against a wall. even then i was claustrophobic BUT i didn't totally flip. i kept running into people i knew - that was cool too.

a lot of the webster theater audience were assholes BUT they sure did know ALL THE WORDS TO EVERY SONG and hell, THEY SANG ALONG AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS (me too a few times). as i said, they related to the audience and the audience sure related back to them. you could feel it in your soul and it made you feel warm and smiley inside.

come on now, cake endorses SOLID POTATO SALAD on their website:



stop by and check them out. great website, great songs, and seems like they sure are earth conscious as well. you go boyz!!! (and thanks for one wicked cool show) cake music

(shout out to julia, spiro, nate, allie, amy, eileen, brian, mike)

guess who's going to see cake tonight?

Cake Performs Webster Theater In Hartford
By DOUG WALLEN | Special to the Courant

You might not expect a band as iconoclastic as Cake to do a string of shows in the "Evening With" format, where there's no opening band and the headliner plays two long sets with an intermission. But then, consider how many songs the Sacramento band can choose from: five albums, a B-sides collection and the endless possibilities available to musicians who have no trouble covering Frank Sinatra, Black Sabbath, the Muppets and, most famously, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive."

"We'd had a lot of people complaining that our sets were too short," says Cake leader John McCrea, "and that we didn't play this song or that song. I ignored those complaints over the years, thinking maybe less is more. But I agreed to play two sets [in one night], just as an experiment. It's worked pretty well and people are still paying attention until the very end, it seems."................

pic:

Cake performs at the Webster Theater in Hartford on May 28. (TIM JACKSON / July 18, 2004)

ravings of a semi-sane madwoman: sonia sotomayer

ravings of a semi-sane madwoman: sonia sotomayer