Once upon a time, in Spring Hill, Tennessee…

Way back in the summer of 2003, a man was working on adding a window to a door frame.ย  He had instructions on how to put the window in the door frame, and how to make sure that the window would open and close without any trouble.ย  All he had to do was tighten a…

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How to get your film back from Rocky Mountain Film Lab! (maybe)

February 2010.ย  I find an undeveloped roll of 127 vest pocket film in a Kodak Brownie Super 27 camera, in an antique store in Manchester, New Hampshire.ย  I buy the camera, and am curious as to what’s on the roll of film. After searching the Internet for a company that claims they can develop the…

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Life at 165 Eaton Place: Remembering “Upstairs, Downstairs”

Some of the greatest prime time dramas revolved around families of influence and affluence.ย  If I were to mention the family surnames, you could hear the theme music pulsing in your head.ย  The Ewings.ย  Yep, you can hear that “Dallas” theme now, can’t you?ย  How about the Carringtons.ย  Ah, there’s the fluglehorn intro from “Dynasty.”ย …

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The movie theater no one will ever restore

We lost a lot of theaters in the Capital District over the past few decades.ย  Several theaters were knocked down to make the Empire State Plaza.ย  Several drive-ins were repurposed for the expansion of urban sprawl.ย  The few regional theaters in the Capital District have been chopped up into multiplexes. There’s a building on Central…

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The Louis Saunders Memorial Basketball Tournament in Roxbury

Last year, Ian McCarthy, the general manager of the PBL team in Manchester, asked if I would come and photograph his team as they participated in a summer money tournament in Boston.ย  I had a free weekend, and Ian’s a good guy, so I said sure.ย  This meant traveling to Boston for the weekend, and…

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Recovering the Trophy – and Restoring it

Tuesday morning, July 27.ย  I received a phone call from Anthony Clement, the principal of Harriet Gibbons High School.ย  As those who follow this blog know all too well, Harriet Gibbons HS was the former Street Academy of Albany, my old high school.ย  It’s also the former alternative high school that was shut down earlier…

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Four trivia victories down… four trivia victories left to go

The Street Academy trivia team has notched four consecutive victories at Side Door Cafe; four more breaks the record. Are there any trivia teams strong enough to stop this juggernaut?

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Ten Canadian pop music songs that should have been big American hits

I’ve been listening to some streaming audio stations from Canada – oldies stations like CKOC in Hamilton Ontario, and pop music stations like NRJ 94.3 in Montreal. And it’s almost like listening to a parallel universe of music – you hear the popular American and British hits, but then the announcers will rattle off a…

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Anagrams in the Timesunion.com Blogosphere

Anagrams are fun. Anagrams are when you take some text and rearrange the letters to get an entirely different text. Anagrams are also fun if you can mix the letters up from one person’s name, and discover that the rearranged letters can form a phrase or sentence that might mean something wry or contradictory to…

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