Mmmmmm, burgers

The plaudits keep coming in for Northampton restaurant Local Burger. The Main Street eatery made USA Today's list today of 51 great burger joints as the entry for all of Massachusetts (one for each state, plus the District of Columbia).

Florida coverage of Frank Tudryn's passing

Northampton isn't the only area grieving the passing of longtime Northampton High School head football coach Frank Tudryn; the Naples, Fla., area, where Tudryn coached and taught at Gulf Coast High School from 2000, is also feeling the loss of the charismatic coach. Visit GazetteNET's story on Tudryn today for a video from the Naples Daily News, as well as links to that news organization's local coverage.

Interview with the Pedal People

On Sunday, the Daily Kos blog had an interview with Alex Jarrett and Ruthy Woodring, the founders of the Pedal People bicycle trash pickup service in Northampton. Interesting to see their innovative approach to municipal services getting some national attention.

Now there's a band name

A friend from the West Coast emailed me today, more or less out of nowhere, to ask if I'd heard anything about a new version of Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band that's appearing out in Oakland, which I had -- Yoko has dusted off the old name that she and John Lennon had used back in the '70s for a new outfit with her son Sean and some of his younger cohorts from the New York area. So I was slightly jolted about a half-hour later, walking into downtown Northampton, to see the flier at right.

Turns out this is one of the bands that'll be appearing at an arson victims benefit at the Elevens on Saturday night. The poster was adjacent to the full benefit poster, which is repro'd below. Great, eye-catching way to draw attention to this most worthy cause. (And sometimes, plain black letters on a white background is still the best design. Frankie says "Relax!")

On location in downtown Northampton

And why is it called "downtown" when it's in a city, anyway?

But I digress. For the past few days, of course, downtown Northampton has been doubling as a location set for Mel Gibson as he starts in an upcoming thriller, "Edge of Darkness" -- amazingly, his first starring role in a film in more than six years. The production has caught plenty of local attention; GazetteNET's James Lowe has been filing daily reports with plenty of details and color. Gibson & Friends have also had perfect weather and -- judging from today's scenes -- plenty of curious but respectful crowds.

Extras portraying war protesters line the corner of Main and King streets in Northampton on Wednesday for a scene in the new Mel Gibson thriller "Edge of Darkness."

It helps that the movie crew seems to be pretty veteran and used to handling location shooting. You'll occasionally see coordinators on these setups acting like officious jerks, but that isn't at all the case here. For shots at the intersection of Main and King/Pleasant streets, the walkie-talkie guys were there handling foot traffic at the corners; they pleasantly asked the crowds to get behind certain landmarks (the big silver box that controls the streetlights, for example), the crowds pleasantly complied, and it all worked out.

The scene itself today was basic but interesting: Gibson, who has been fairly visible throughout the shooting, drives a car past a bunch of war protesters. The car was a stick shift, which I know because he ground the gears for a second when he pulled it out of the parking space. Bet we're not going to hear that on the final soundtrack, right?

It's all pretty heady for those who like movies, and why not? The fun continues tomorrow up on Mount Sugarloaf in Deerfield, where they've apparently built some kind of fort for a scene that's set overlooking the Valley. We'll see if they pull that off; the weather probably isn't going to be quite up to snuff tomorrow, but if they hold it off a day, they'll have another spectacular day for shooting that. With luck, we'll have the Valley, circa 2008, preserved on DVD, Blu-Ray, and whatever the next formats are for generations to come.

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.

Drive-By Truckers at the NBO

Patterson Hood (left) and Mike Cooley, the core of the excellent rootsy American band Drive-By Truckers, did an acoustic set for 93.9 The River on Friday afternoon at the Northampton Box Office. They're playing at Pearl Street tonight, and it should be well worth it. Alas, I couldn't make it to this one, so for me the three-song NBO set was sort of a consolation prize. The guys looked a little bit worse for wear after driving down from Canada and enduring a Customs check at 6 in the morning, but they sounded fine.

Really, this is one of those little types of things that makes living around here so worthwhile. I mostly lived in or near big cities before this, and you can get to take this kind of stuff in the likes of Boston or San Francisco for granted. But the quality differences are noticeable in a place like the Valley. For one thing, just try finding commercial radio as consistently decent in either of those cities as it is around here. The stations here fit the local feel prety well; go to a city, and you're into cardboard-cutout sound. (People look at the record business as an area where business models make life tougher than it once was, but radio is generally a far, far more awful product, and that business did it all to itself.) For another, an in-store like this would be mobbed in a city. Here, it's mellow, just a nice add to the workday for some fans, and yet this area will turn out a good crowd for a band like this tonight.

Must say, it's good to get outside the Cube now and then....