The Gardner News: modern offer, modern rejection

The Gardner News is enthusiastic about these new mobile webby things. They include a QR code in the paper from time to time.

Each time that I use my trusty Google Googles to scan the code, however, I get this.

[caption id="attachment_3939" align="alignnone" width="168"] Click to enbiggen[/caption]

It's been temporarily for the many months that I've tried it.

The continued Awful Awful saga

We learn from today's Boston Globe that Harsha Agadi, CEO of Friendly's, is, um, stepping down.  Just a few weeks ago, Agadi was featured in the Globe's Sunday business section, where he outlined the ice cream and restaurant chain's path to something like success. The company is, or was, developing a new concept for its stores, as well as improving its french fries.

Read the rest of the blog at my TelegramTowns.com blog, The continued Awful Awful saga.

Times and map makers were unkind to single women

By placement of an abbreviation, the maker of this 1870 map of Gardner, Mass. seems to have editorialized either on the financial status or morals of one Miss Wilder.
The map (thumbnail links to a full-size (3.2MB file):

On the north side of town, we see this:

An American tune

Downstairs in the Goodnow-Pearson building in Gardner, you take a 45 rpm record a listening booth and, for the two minutes and and change, be transported into the world of rock-and-roll.
The listening booth at Goodnow's wasn't the first place I'd heard Hound Dog. Maybe it was the radio in the Studebaker pickup. I didn't have a radio in my room yet. My parents kept the clock radio tuned to WBZ/WBZA, which had a regular lineup of disc jockeys and played a lot of rock and roll.
Most likely, though, I heard Hound Dog at the homes of one of the older kids in the neighborhood, the ones who had their own record players and stacks of 45s from Elvis, Little Richard, Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, and more.
Hound Dog was the first Elvis song that I knew. The longer and more complex story of how important he was or wasn't is best left for another day.
Just think about a little and very white kid in an enclave of first and second generation immigrants listening to a white kid from the south cover a song of anger and betrayal written by a couple of Jews and first heard when sung by black woman and you'll be thinking about America.