What, Bob Dylan in town again?!?!?

And the answer is yes. Bob Dylan and His Band, as they bill 'em nowadays, will be returning to the Mullins Center on Friday, November 19 at 8 p.m. Presales end Thursday night, with a general public ticket sale starting Friday at 10 a.m.

The Belle of Amherst...and her great love?

Here's a tale that deep Emily Dickinson aficionados may have already been aware of, but that the rest of us would be startled by: A Boston Globe Magazine article on Sunday postulated the existence of a love interest for the famously reclusive poet.

The man in question seems to have been Otis Phillips Lord, an old friend of Emily Dickinson's father to whom Emily may have turned her attention once her father had passed away. Read and judge for yourself.

Follow the aces

Kevin Ziomek and Emma Mendoker are a couple of special pitchers operating on local high school mounds right now, and we've devised a way for you to follow what they're up to on a game-by-game basis -- and when their next starts will be. Head to the High School Sports page, and you'll find blocks devoted to each player at the right-hand side.

It's been a while since a pair of local hurlers lit up their leagues like this Amherst Regional High School pair. Ziomek, a senior, has commanded the attention of major league baseball scouts for a couple of seasons now, but Mendoker, a junior who has the advantage of pitching nearly every outing for the Hurricanes softball team, is actually putting up more impressive and dominating stats. It's all relative, though; they're both performing some notable feats out there this season, and we felt they were worth following a little more closely than usual.

I'll be working in conjunction with our high school sports reporters, Jim Pignatiello and Mike Moran, to track their basic stats, give links to their most recent game story on GazetteNET and an archive of the season's coverage, and let you know (as soon as we do) when their next starts are scheduled. And our aim is to use the capability to follow other local athletes who warrant that level of attention down the road. Let us know what you think.

Editor's Pick: My most memorable video of the year

One thing we've been able to do this year on GazetteNET -- and a thing that's been a long-held goal of this news organization -- is to really ramp up our ability to tell a wide variety of stories on video, a medium that certainly befits a Website and complements a print newspaper well. Over the past couple of years, and particularly in 2009, we've tackled breaking news and a wide range of features with an eye toward extending the value of stories for our audience. Our numbers say you approve, so we'll stick with it.

A big reason for that is the contributions of a wide variety of staffers and college interns. All of our photographers (Carol Lollis, Jerrey Roberts, Gordon Daniels and Kevin Gutting) now shoot video, and with predictable excellence given their excellent eyes for images and how they can tell a story; a couple of them have mastered production as well, and 2010 should yield a full raft of fully produced video stories from that department. Similarly, our staff reporter Catherine Baum has taken to the world of video with a fresh eye and meticulous attention to storytelling and detail. And it looks like we have a couple more staffers in the pipeline.

We also rely quite a bit on interns from the college community -- mainly the Five Colleges, of course, but also from other institutions. Modern journalism students are being taught (and correctly so) that simply scribbling it down for print isn't a full approach to their professional futures anymore, and they're responding with a solid interest in multimedia forms of storytelling. I was fortunate in 2009 to have the chance to work with a couple of interns exclusively assigned to GazetteNET multimedia; throughout the summer, UMass senior Kylie Jelley took every oddball assignment I threw at her and came back with some sterling video work and a lot of improvements to our overall presentation. I also got some good contributions from interns assigned to other departments in the newsroom who sought a chance to do some multimedia work. This wonderful piece from summer features desk intern Chelsey Pollock is actually my favorite from the entire year; she really caught a great look at the women who are skating in the revival of Roller Derby and why they're motivated to go after such a rough, demanding sport.

But I think the most memorable video of our year here came from my fall GazetteNET intern, UMass senior Sara Cody. Early in her excellent stint here, I assigned Sara to go to the Amherst 250th anniversary parade on a rainy late-September Sunday and see what she could bring back. The result was a great look at a once-in-a-generation event that will serve as a solid record of a rare milestone in that storied town's history -- not just any old parade, but one that both marked the depth of Amherst's history and captured the people and places of its current moment. It really was one for the books, both for Amherst and for GazetteNET. Great job, Sara.

All of our videos remain available at our GazetteNET Videos page and at GazetteNET's YouTube channel, and we hope you'll keep watching and sending us your feedback. See you in 2010...

This can only mean one thing

Here in the Cube, we're hardly isolated; the phones ring, the emails come in (oh, how they do fly sometimes), and there's even iChat in operation at key times, mainly to pass files around quickly. And occasionally we get some funny stuff over the transom.

This picture is one: It seems that spring has sprung, and apparently that was the signal for some Northampton High School students -- seniors, most likely -- to make sure that outgoing principal Beth Singer's car wasn't harmed by a sudden rainstorm. How thoughtful, don't you think? At least they didn't try to stick it in a microwave once it was covered.

I wonder if Singer had outlined any guidelines for pranks for NHS students, as Amherst Regional High School principal Mark Jackson did recently to make sure things didn't get too out of hand. Anyway, many thanks to Bryn and the folks at Northampton Cable TV for passing this one along.

A change in roles

It's an interesting question, perhaps: Would Stephanie O'Keeffe be an Amherst Select Board member today if she hadn't started blogging about Town Meeting two years ago? Of course, we can never really know 100% (although she may have a solid guess, for her own part). There are so many variables: Would she have become as deeply involved in town affairs without the blog, would she have built up the same level of visibility and base, etc., etc. But she says herself that blogging about TM was a catalyst for her deepening involvement in the town's political process.

Fact is, though, O'Keeffe is on the town-official side of the fence now, and in a very open, personal-point-of-view post on her original TM blog that's well worth reading, she explains why she's ceasing posting there. Public officials can sometimes come across as kind of....well, official, in a monolithic name-in-the-paper sort of way, when you're just reading about them in the news or even watching them go through the meeting rounds on local cable access. None of that here, though; this has the personal voice of any real blogger describing an experience different from anything they'd ever experienced before. Check it out; you won't have to be an Amherst resident, a political junkie, or even a supporter or opponent to appreciate the writing in this particular post.

Readers of O'Keeffe's TM blog need not feel deprived of her viewpoints, incidentally. She's also published the inAmherst.com site for a while now (it sounds like that'll be changing focus somewhat too), and she's also got a domain with her own name where she's blogging from a town official's perspective. Nor is O'Keeffe the only blogger on the Amherst Select Board; although she's not quite as prolific, Alisa Brewer also maintains a blog with her views on town affairs. This trend will only grow, and that's a good thing; the more we hear from officials about what they're thinking, whether about a town budget or life itself, the better we'll all understand how they're managing our affairs.