Lammas, Aug. 1

In the Wheel of the Year, Aug. 1 is called Lammas and marks the first of three harvest holidays. This U.K. postage stamp acknowledges the pagan origins of the holiday, also known as Lughnasadh.


Bread is a part of the Lammas holiday. Probably here in New Jersey, the main harvest item is zucchini right now, so why not make some zucchini bread?

The Wheel of the Year is marked with eight holidays, including the solstices and equinoxes. Anyone who spends a lot of time outside becomes aware of the changing seasons and can appreciate how holidays arose around planting and harvests in the old days. Those who are in air-conditioned offices all day are somewhat divorced from nature and may not have the same sense of the seasons turning to harvest time. But one can enjoy the bounty of nature on Lammas, even if it comes from Trader Joe's!

--Bernice 

Remembering Lazaar's and Boise's

Cleaning out a desk yesterday yielded not one, but three Pink Pearl erasers - and some memories of going downtown to buy stationery supplies.

Plainfielders used to be able to shop at Lazaar's on Park Avenue or Boise's on Front Street (or both, if a true lover of paper, pens, pencils and such). You could get just one of whatever you fancied, in contrast to Staples, where things come only in multiples. Staples was widely blamed for the demise of the friendly neighborhood stationery store and indeed, after about 50 years serving Plainfielders, Lazaar's closed soon after the big store opened on Route 22.

I remember meeting a young artist while I was part of the Johnson family's "Plainfield Today" team. When I found out he had no proper supplies for his drawing, I told him to wait in our North Avenue office while I dashed to Boise's to get some good paper and a gum eraser.

Unlike the Pink Pearl, which has a bad rap in this article, the gum eraser can cleanly get rid of pencil lines after a cartoon or drawing has been inked. I still use one when I get a library book where some inconsiderate person has underlined words or phrases in pencil that I feel compelled to erase before reading. (Note to Charlie: I always called them soap erasers too.)

It took me a long while to get used to Staples after Boise's and Lazaar's were gone. I still wish I could get a single needed item instead of a pack. But I came to appreciate their ability to special-order my favorite extra-fine point pens and narrow-ruled pads. Thinking I was going to write a book in retirement, I ordered two dozen of the latter, but still have more than a dozen left after nine years. On the other hand, I have gone through dozens of Staples spiral-bound notebooks while taking notes at city meetings for the blog.

One of my favorite destinations in Seattle is a stationery store inside the great Uwajimaya store in the International District. Audrey and I both overindulge in pens and notebooks at Kinokuniya Book Store when I am visiting.

Somewhere along the line, I discovered JetPens online and used donations to my my blog's PayPal account to get my favorite Pilot Hi-Tec C pens to go with the Staples notebooks for meeting notes. But you can bet, if Lazaar's and Boise's were still open, I would just go downtown and get my supplies.

--Bernice

A Pretty Sight

The new peninsula at Park and Ninth now has the finishing touch of lovely floral plantings.

Conceived by residents who worked with city and county officials, the peninsula had a difficult birth. For many months, it was only a promise. Work began  last year. 

Believe it or not, this process won Planning Board approval way back in 2007. But resident Maria Pellum, a champion of the project, had to keep up the pressure to make sure the original design was kept. A large sign crediting the mayor for the project was the only indication of its viability for years.

Kudos to those who held officials to their word! It is now the innovative, visually pleasing project that residents dreamed up so many years ago.

--Bernice

Problem Solved on Park Avenue

A gleaming white stretch of sidewalk on Park Avenue is the happy ending to a long story that began with a hurricane.

The highly destructive storm known as Hurricane Irene wreaked a lot of havoc, but one of the more noticeable effects was a huge tree falling across one of the city's busiest paths for drivers and walkers. The trunk of the tree was cleared from the street, but the stump and roots that lifted the sidewalk remained for a long time, causing schoolschildren and everyday pedestrians to walk out in the street to pass.

Over at City Hall, the post of director of Public Works & Urban Development had been vacant for several months. The last permanent director, David Brown III, had resignd in November 2010. From January through March 2011, Jacques Howard of the Office of Community Development served as acting director, but after his 90-day stint elapsed, no one held the title.

In late August, Hurricane Irene struck and went down in meteorological history as the fifth most costly hurricane on record in the United States, destroying homes and causing 47 deaths. A broken sidewalk on one street in Plainfield was maybe the least of the damage, but as weeks and months wore on, it became a symbol of the trouble it took to get things fixed in the city.

On Sept. 26, Eric Jackson became the third permanent PW&UD director in the tenure of Mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs. Jennifer Wenson-Maier had served the entire four years of the mayor's first term but was not reappointed for the second term. Brown came and went in 2010. Still, the department seemed almost stable compared to the turnover in the revolving-door offices of the city administrator and the finance director. Public Works tasks mostly got done even without a director.

Jackson immediately took steps to clean up City Hall, which had become cluttered and uninviting. He introduced needed training for division heads and just generally came across as a take-charge guy.

But the sidewalk situation eluded a quick resolution.

Questions of responsibility caused the repair process to be delayed even while Jackson made improvements in many other aspects of the department. In March 2012, Plaintalker brought it up again. Readers and Councilwoman Rebecca Williams offered comments.

At long last, the sidewalk is fixed. It looks great and one would never know it was such a thorny problem. Schoolchildren, seniors and residents in general can safely pass along this stretch of Park Avenue once again.
Thanks to Director Jackson and all those who kept on the case to get this very visible and embarassing problem resolved.


--Bernice

Reader Wants Your Help

Carolyn Logan wants people to join her fight against the water company:

Hello
I've been ill and really not paid attention to the fact that the size of my monthly bill exceeds my old quarterly bills! Now that I live alone there is no way I have used 17,000 gallons in one month.  The water company claims they send someone to read the meter and that it was read and meter is operating fine.  They will send me a kit to determine if I have any leaks.

However, I have found they are a market driven company with stockholders and not responsive to their privilege of operating a public utility.  If they are operating legitimately, they we should have the right to go to the market and choose a company that best meets are needs.

I'm sending this to the PlainTalker to ask my neighbors in joining me in flooding the state and local authorities about our right to choose a company to be our public utility.

Ant/Aphid Mutualism

Once again my back yard near Park & Seventh reveals a nature story and maybe a lesson.

I noticed some deformed leaves on a plant, then saw some large black ants crawling around. Having studied the lives of insects since my childhood, I guessed there were aphids inside the leaves.

Ants and aphids can rely on each other in unique ways. The ants nurture the aphids in return for access to the honeydew they secrete. You can read about this "mutualism" here.
The curled-over leaves form chambers where the aphids stay. The carpenter ants live nearby in holes created by chewing the wood of the back stairs. We found big piles of sawdust earlier this summer whre the busy ants had been working.

Here you can see the tiny aphids on the underside of a leaf.

This plant is a weed in a patch of Cosmos. Obviously, we could disrupt this whole symbiotic system by pulling up the weed, but the ants and aphids would most likely regroup on some other plant.

Here some ants are tending aphids on the stem of a Cosmos plant. The aphids suck juice from the plant and excrete the honeydew. As described in the article linked above, the ants stroke the aphids and "farm" them for the honeydew. Click on any photo to enlarge or to start a slideshow.

To humans, both the ants and aphids are pests, but their little society is fascinating to observe. There are probably a lot of analogies in the human world for this mutual dependence and control. I leave it to you, the readers, to make your own analogies.

--Bernice

From Editor to Auditor: A CN Story

One thing I like about Facebook is being able to keep up with old colleagues from the Courier News. They post about weddings, new babies, job searches and somewhat surprisingly, a wide variety of athletic accomplishments. Recently a former editor announced his departure from journalism in favor of becoming an auditor, a transition that to many made a lot of sense in light of the much-reported decline of the newspaper industry.

This individual came to the Courier News as an intern in 1993 and stayed on for six years, rising through the ranks to assistant managing editor. He was the deputy managing editor at a Westchester newspaper when he left the news biz, having earned an MBA in Business Administration and headed for prestigious financial firm.

When he was at the Courier News, circulation was around 50,000. In March 2012, it was 15,533 Monday through Saturday and 20,165 on Sundays.

News, or what passes for it nowadays, is more likely to reach the consumer through a mobile phone or tablet than through television or the print media. The newspaper industry is still struggling to adapt to readers' new habits by developing "platforms" of information, but a lot of it is more lifestyle "content" than old-fashioned news. Things that used to make Page One - a new school superintendent or a big budget gap, for example - may not even get covered. Reader-generated content is fair game even for A-1 over the fold sometimes, and food and drink stories take up many column inches.

Former colleagues called the editor's decision a loss to journalism and wondered how such a talented and dedicated newsman could just leave it all behind. Older colleagues who knew the heady days of breaking big stories were especially saddened. But hard-hitting news is awash nowadays in a sea of what used to be called "community news," a spaghetti dinner at the firehouse or a marathon for charity. Maybe over the past 19 years the industry's direction made a change in profession a very logical move for someone needing to earn a living for another quarter-century or so.

The worrisome thing for some of us is who will keep the public informed of what decisions are being made that will fundamentally affect our hometowns? The experiments in hyperlocal coverage that were launched in the past few years are now suffering the same pressures as the so-called legacy media, trying to get more work out of smaller staffs and hoping to make up the difference with contribution from readers.

As always, Plaintalker welcomes your comments.

--Bernice