68°F Rain [CapeCodToday Blog Chowder
Welcome to CapeCodToday's Blog Chowder! This page aggregates the most recent postings from all the CapeCodToday bloggers for your convenience. Bookmark this page or see below left for RSS options.Archives for: October 2005
Located on the grounds of the Cape Playhouse, the Cape Museum of Fine Arts, and the Cape Cinema. We feature a star-studded cast of service, food and drink. Enjoy chef Mark's fabulous creations in our dining room or a whimsical martini in our in our pub (Dennis)
Founded in 1954. Our mission is to encourage and advance understanding of our natural environment through discovery and learning. Exhibits, lectures and trails. (Brewster)
Halloween Tales
It is the afternoon of October 31st. The sun is past its zenith and headed toward the western horizon. Soon, twilight will arrive and Halloween will awaken with ghosts and goblins and grinning jack'o'lanterns.
I wrote the following article for the current issue of the Barnstable Patriot. If you want to read more about the legends I mention, check out Elizabeth Reynard's book "The Narrow Land." And a number of the ghost stories can be found in Mark Jasper's book "Haunted Cape Cod and the Islands." Until then ......
Things That Go Bump in Barnstable
by Jack Sheedy
In a blaze of red and orange the final day of October ends. A planet in the western sky blinks to life as purple twilight touches down upon the sacred landscape of wise, old houses and tapering church spires. Darkness slowly envelopes the aged gravestones and wandering stonewalls. Bats take flight as somewhere in the distance, a solitary coyote can be heard baying against the backdrop of a rising waning moon. A sudden wind across the great marsh wails like the final breath of a dying soul. Halloween has returned to Barnstable.
The town and her villages are awash in haunted tales and strange phenomena, cobwebbed stories that have survived to modern day. And if you believe such tales then you may wish to bolt your door this Halloween until dawn breaks upon the following morning.
These tales begin with legends from centuries ago – legends of witches, ghosts, black cats, and even the spirit of a mournful Scotsman. One of the earliest tales comes from the Native Indians and involves an old woman named Granny Squannit who lived in a beachside cave at Cummaquid. A medicine woman who was known for driving the Devil out of mischievous young boys, her distinguishing features included long hair that covered her face and a solitary eye in the center of her forehead. She claimed any gold buried in the forests or in the dunes, and marked the location of these treasures with glowing orbs. Over the years some locals claimed to have seen Granny Squannit’s orbs, but it is not reported if her gold was ever found.
At Grand Island, between Cotuit and Osterville, lived another woman with an interest in gold, yet her motives were quite sinister. Hannah Screecham, considered a witch by the locals, befriended pirates that visited the southern shore and helped them bury their treasures. Occasionally, Hannah would kill a pirate and bury him in the sand along with the treasure. Yet, when she attempted to dig up the gold for herself she was haunted by the pirates’ ghosts. Today, Hannah’s ghost walks the dunes along with the ghosts of the pirates she murdered so long ago. And her evil screeching can still be heard on stormy nights.
Meanwhile, in the vicinity of Sandy Neck, comes the story of a Scottish ghost known as Robert the Scot. A manservant to a wealthy physician, Robert was implicated when the doctor turned up dead and the dead man’s wealth in the form of gem’s and jewelry turned up missing. Soon, Robert also wound up dead and was buried in unhallowed ground at Scorton Hill in Sandwich. His restless spirit roams the countryside, searching for the missing gems in order to prove his innocence. It is said that imbedded within the breezes in the vicinity of Scorton you’ll hear the wailing sigh of Robert the Scot’s bagpipes.
Just south of Barnstable village is a forest that has been haunted for centuries, since the days of the local witch Liza Tower Hill. Born in the early 18th century, she grew up in the forest and lived there throughout her adulthood, in the vicinity of Mary Dunn Pond. In the forest she would dance upon the surface of the pond as devilish fish swam below and mutant animals gathered along the shore. On at least two occasions she was accused by local men of turning them into a horse and then riding them to Witches’ Sabbaths, sometimes as far away as Plymouth.
Even after her death, locals claimed to see her ghost in the forest, most notably witnessed by a Dr. Richard Bourne on Christmas night in 1810. On that evening, the good doctor made merry with the ghost, and drank and danced with her well past midnight. In the morning he awoke alone in the woods, most likely cold and a little hung over.
Over the centuries, strange lights were seen in the woods along Mary Dunn Road, so named for a former slave who lived along this route and who was “burned to death in 1850 in her little cottage half-way between Hyannis and Barnstable on the Indian Trail” according to historian Donald G. Trayser’s in his book Barnstable: Three Centuries of a Cape Cod Town.
The ghost of Liza Tower Hill is also associated with the Allyn House, a red saltbox along Route 6A considered among the oldest dwellings on Cape Cod, built around 1680. In this house the witch’s daughter Lydia worked as a servant for the Allyn family. It is said that whenever her daughter was mistreated or made to work especially hard, Liza Tower Hill made her presence known by banging on the walls, breaking up furniture, or causing the Allyn children to come down with a fever. The witch often took the form of a black cat, her familiar, and even up to modern day black cats have been seen roaming about the property.
There are a number of haunted buildings along the Old King’s Highway, but perhaps the most haunted of them all is the Barnstable House. Built in 1716 by James Paine, an ancestor of Declaration of Independence signer Robert Treat Paine, it seems that pain and sorrow was part of the building’s history since nearly the beginning. An underground river passes beneath the house and it was here where the owner’s young daughter was drowned. Another owner, Edmund Howes, hanged himself from a tree on the property. Still another, a Dr. Samuel Savage, was rumored to have practiced black magic in the house. Over the past three centuries the Barnstable House has amassed eleven ghosts according to psychics who have visited the building.
During the 20th century the place was run as an inn and restaurant. Typically, patrons would sit down at a table and be approached by someone dressed in old garb, whom they would assume was a waiter or waitress, only to find that no one by that description was on the wait staff. Others witnessed candles lighting by themselves or fires spontaneously igniting in the fireplace. A rocking chair in the parlor has rocked under its own power. And then, as told in Mark Jasper’s book, Haunted Cape Cod & the Islands, “There is another presence that is thought to reside in the dark, damp cellar. This spirit has been identified as the cantankerous Captain Grey. He is known as the ‘door slammer.’”
The most popular story associated with the building involves a late-night fire during the early 1970’s. Upon arrival, members of the fire department noticed a woman in a third story window of what should have been an empty building. Upon gaining access to the upstairs room, they found it empty … only to discover what appeared to be a woman with long blond hair and wearing a long white gown hovering above the front lawn. Soon, the image disappeared.
Tales of ghosts, strange noises and other unexplained phenomena have become attached to other Route 6A locations, such as the Lamb & Lion Inn, Beechcroft Inn, Crocker Tavern, and even the old carriage house behind the former Trayser Museum (now the US Coast Guard Heritage Museum). But if ghosts are not your cup of tea, how about local sightings of flying saucers, sea monsters, or even Sasquatch?
According to reports found on the Internet, this area was visited by UFO’s during the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. Two sites (www.cufon.org and www.ufo-connection.com) refer to an episode in 1953 that saw a jet take off out of Otis Air Base to investigate strange lights in the sky. The jet mysteriously crashed. Fifteen years later, a glowing UFO was seen landing late at night in Barnstable, somewhere in the vicinity of Race Lane. And ten years after that, a pair of motorists traveling through town along the Mid-Cape Highway witnessed a flying object, reporting that they could actually see creatures moving in the spacecraft’s windows.
Meanwhile down at sea level, stories of sea serpents in Cape waters predate the Pilgrims’ arrival as Henry Hudson claimed to have seen one here in 1609. A century later, Benjamin Franklin’s uncle saw a floppy-eared serpent with the head of a lion in Cape waters. And though it would seem there have been no Lake Wequaquet Monster sightings, in 1833 a serpent was such a nuisance pestering mariners in Massachusetts and Cape Cod bays that a whaling crew was sent out to harpoon the beast, but the serpent could not be found.
Yet, not all strange creatures around these parts hover in the air or swim in the salty brine. About a quarter century ago, along Route 151 in the neighboring town of Mashpee, a “Bigfoot” sighting occurred. According to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization as documented on their website www.bfro.net, two witnesses observed “a tall dark hair covered bipedal creature.” The sighting ended when the two witnesses “drove off at high speed.”
So this Halloween, when your doorbell chimes, don’t be so sure that it’s just the neighbor’s kids in costume. It could be something even more sinister!
Specializing in Long Term Care insurance, offering every carrier. Over our lifetime most of us will need some type of long term care. Call us now and allow us to do a needs analysis and pricing for you while you still may be insurable! (Brewster)
Conveniently located in Patriot Square near the movie theatre, Jason's Tavern offers American and international casual dining for the whole family, as well as cocktails, Keno, and early bird specials. (Dennis)
Electric bills on the Cape and islands will go down after the wind farm is built - according to the Alliance
... as in the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.
Hard to believe, right?
What's harder to believe is how some observers continue to insist, long after this was settled, that when it comes to Cape Wind and electric costs, "no one's bill is going down," in the words of my fellow blogger Massachusetts Democrant.
But since even the Alliance has given up on that shaky claim, it may be time for Democrant and others to move on to genuine issues (yes, like the impact to birds).
The Alliance didn't always say this about Cape Wind. Back in the fall of 2002, the group distributed a brochure with nine questionable claims about the project, including "Electric rate increases."
Yet by the following summer, the Alliance had changed its tune. In its quarterly newsletter (Vol. 3, Number 3), right out front, was an article titled, "Save Our Sound Calls on Cape Wind Developer to Clarify Electricity 'Savings' and Private Profits: Is 35 cents a month worth spoiling Nantucket Sound Wildlife and Beauty?"
The article cited Cape Wind's website as promising "New England electricity ratepayers annual savings of $25 million on their electricity bills. "
What this meant for New England residents, said Isaac Rosen, the Alliance's executive director at the time, were "on average, a savings of $4.16 a year, or just 35 cents a month."
"They are threatening to turn one of the most pristine sounds in the world into an electricity generating plant and the return for all of us who have to live with it isn't even enough to buy a cup of coffee," Rosen said. "And that doesn't even include all the public subsidies that will line the developer's pocket" (yeah, I miss Isaac, too).
Then a couple of weeks ago, when gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick announced his support for Cape Wind, Patrick was interviewed later that day on New England Cable News.
The first commercial to run after Patrick's segment was one paid for by the Alliance (what a coincidence). The ad ended with the dubious claim that the wind farm would cut electric bills, on average, by a dime per month.
No wonder so many people are confused about savings from Cape Wind - we've come to rely on the Alliance being consistently wrong about things like that.
As for the figure of $25 million annually cited by Cape Wind, where does that come from? It is based on a report from a consultant hired by Cape Wind in 2001, LaCapra Associates, "to examine how the insertion of a 400 MW wind project into the New England electricity market would affect clearing prices for energy in the regional electricity market."
Mainly due to that tough-to-beat fuel cost for wind - zero - the study concluded that "savings to New England electricity customers would be on the order of $18 to $22 million per year. While this estimate is very rough, it indicates that the savings impact of the project would be at least in the tens of millions of dollars over a several-year period."
But even if the report overstated the savings, what has happened to the cost of natural gas and oil since 2001? Natural gas has tripled in price while oil is twice as expensive - and who knows what happens if we get hit with a harsh winter.
Another caveat worth mentioning - the study examined the effect of a 400 megawatt wind farm; the capacity has since been expanded to 468 MW, which would mean further savings.
No love lost between editors Rolbein and Pronovost
The Voice ran an editorial on Oct. 20, titled "The Barnstable Patriot Act," that scoffed at Ottaway's stated reasons for the newspaper chain's recent acquisition of The Barnstable Patriot, one of the oldest and few remaining independent weeklies on the Cape.
"And so what does our daily newspaper, also in the Ottaway fold, tell us about this fulcrum moment (that intimately involves them too)?" the editorial asks.
"One word pretty much covers it: Pap."
The rest of the editorial, which can be found by following this link to the Voice website, continues in the same vein.
You'll find Pronovost's response, also at the Voice site, by following the link there marked "letters."
"Given Seth Rolbein's stormy relationship with Community Newspaper Company during his Fidelity Investments era, I can see why The Cape Cod Voice would view" the Patriot purchase with skepticism, Pronovost writes.
More on this to follow after the readers here after a chance to digest the exchange.
Nice Night to Travel
The cottage that we stayed in was pretty good in size, with 2 bedrooms, a full kitchenette and a living and eating area. It had a quirky little bathroom with an enclosed out side shower. Sometime through the day my wife had to go to the bathroom. Being 7 months pregnant in a small space is interesting enough, but when she finished she tried to open the door. It had one of those latches for a handle, the kind that has the piece of metal that looks like a spoon on on end and a hook on the other and just stick through a hole in the door. You push down on your side and it pushes the latch up on the outside to let you out. For the life off here she could not get it to work, the latch would not go up. Eventually we had to give her a hand in getting out. We still laugh, remembering the day she got stuck in the bathroom.Abbicci: The ABC?s of Italian
Sometimes a restaurant takes on a personality of its own, regardless of who’s doing the cooking.
Abbicci is an intimate restaurant, on the town line in Yarmouthport, near Cummaquid. It’s a familiar and reassuring site to the locals. It recently underwent a face lift which makes it much more inviting. And the valet service makes parking a cinch. Parking can be a challenge otherwise.
Atmosphere
This is the type of restaurant you take your spouse to. In fact, all the diners this night were couples. It’s a nice place to set the mood for the rest of the evening. Understated, with no particular decor, no special lighting and no tacky music. Just a simple ensemble of elegantly set dining rooms and tables.
Service
And that’s the thing with a date night restaurant, it’s not about the food. Service is the thing. And Abbicci delivers it in buckets. The wait staff was extremely efficient. Swift, silent and unobtrusive to the point of being invisible. Exactly what you want if you’re focusing on your date. Memorable by its absence.
Food
An ode to Marcella Hazan, the menu gives a lesson in classic Italian cuisine. And therein lies its secret. Abbicci hooks you with their menu. It reads like a romance novel. It seduces you. Unfortunately, just like reading a book, it tends to leave you unsatisfied.
We ordered the (very) small portions of several dishes. Arancini – the 2 small risotto croquettes filled with cheese, were a bit too skimpy. Risotto – not the rich creamy porridge variety, but the rice side dish kind, was overwhelmed by black pepper. Cannelloni – a spinach pasta stuffed with veal, in tomato sauce and béchamel, was interesting enough. But the Pesce – a delicately pan prepared sole in a Milanese style, egg battered with lemon and olives, was the best selection of the evening.
The dessert menu featured, what else - chocolate. We tried the Trio of Chocolate, a sampler of favorites, otherwise, made with chocolate.
Wine
The extensive wine menu is skewed in favor of very expensive wines at some very generous prices. We chose a bottle of syrah from a small California vineyard. Delicious.
The season’s over, the kitchen’s tired, and it shows. Overall we give Abbicci 2 ** for setting the scene for date night right. But you have to shell out some serious plastic to get the mood right. So it’s also 3$$$ for Abbicci. Subconsciously, that's part of the seduction.
Write us a letter
cctoday wants to hear from you
While we now have forty local, blogs on this site, we still haven't heard from YOU.
If you are reading these words you are online and have access to email, and now you can write as easily as our bloggers do without maintaining your own blog.
Just send a Letter to the Editors
If any local matter concerns you, or you have thoughts you wish to share with our surfers, send an email today with the word "letters" in the subject line to jbrooks@eCape.com
Of course you can also add coimments to any of your blogs, but we'd like to feature your letter more prominently as well.
(Just don't write to me for the next 3 weeks as I'm typing this in the S.F. airport waiting to leave for Cambodia. Walter)
On a side note, our "What's Hot!" continues to sizzle. Here's the latest rankings of our forty "Cape Blogs" and I didn't even make the Top Ten:
10 most popular blogs
1. RappCity - (13,947 references)
2. Citizens for Open Government - (8,148 references)
3. Media Watch - (7,547 references)
4. Cape Cod Living - (7,328 references)
5. Dead Bloggers Society - (6,869 references)
6. Wind Farmer's Almanac - (5,551 references)
7. Peter Porcupine - (4,599 references)
8. Massachusetts Democrant - (3,339 references)
9. Boston Cod - (3,197 references)
10. Cape Cod Crusader - (2,928 references)
Surrendering control of content - and why it should be allowed
Several years ago I read an article about "60 Minutes" and "Nightline" that was critical of how the shows handled interviews.
On "60 Minutes," questions asked by correspondents were often filmed a second time, without the person interviewed present, ostensibly for the sake of brevity.
The way to tell when this happened, according to the article, was if you could see only the correspondent and not the subject when all the questions were asked.
On "Nightline," a different technique was used - Ted Koppel would interview someone hundreds of miles away, with Koppel looking at the person on a screen and he or she apparently looking at Koppel on another. In other words, both people could see each other while they spoke.
But according to the article, the subject being interviewed would not be looking at Koppel on a screen and see him as he asked questions - he or she would be looking at a camera lens.
As a result, many of the people on the show came across as shifty because they did not seem to look Koppel in the eye. Problem was, they couldn't see him.
I haven't watched either show enough in recent years to know if the practices have been abandoned, but I hope so. They are inherently unfair and the potential for manipulation is enormous.
Why do I mention this? Because readers who post responses to postings in Blog Chowder may be unaware of the potential for similar abuses of trust.
As constructed, each of the bloggers at this site is, in effect, his or her own publisher, with control of the content. In turn, the publisher of capecodtoday.com, Walter Brooks, has control of the entire site, as he should - he owns it.
When a person decides to blog, a fundamental question has to be answered - to what extent will responses be allowed: completely unfettered, none at all or something in the middle?
Unless you are drawing thousands of readers every day, having time to respond to comments should not be a problem. This is why I have always allowed them on my blogs.
And since I often don't mince words in my criticisms, I have an obligation to allow those I've criticized to respond - in their own words, exactly as they write them.
I doubt that many people who post comments at Blog Chowder are aware that their comments can be edited. I say this from first-hand experience - Peter Porcupine misspelled a word in a response and I corrected it. Barbara Durkin, an intelligent and rational critic of the wind farm, double-posted a comment and asked me to remove one. Sure, Barbara, not a problem. Obscene spam appears on my old wind blog, for some reason on older posts, and I delete it. The same goes for anything libelous or defamatory - the laws for them still apply here.
As for me editing anyone's comments, that's it. Beyond that, I don't do it - ever.
Keep in mind that the bloggers here have control of only their own content; in other words, their postings and responses to them. None of us have access to the content of other blogs, as well it should be. We're a long way from the level of trust needed for open access to all on a site like this, if it happens at all.
This issue of access is one of the fundamental ways that online media differs from the mainstream. Every letter to the editor of a newspaper goes through an editing filter. Few publishers are comfortable running anything even slightly critical of them or what they have published, regardless of how much readers or viewers love seeing it. When was the last time you saw a correction on the nightly news?
These are among the reasons why mainstream media is so threatened by the blogosphere: many of us here are willing to surrender control of content - even to those we have criticized in the strongest terms.
The beauty of this approach is that it allows readers and our opponents to have their say, in their own words, in response to what they see in the media, rather than the traditional model of the high priests in the media interpreting their words for them.
Those still working in that model are worried about the future, as well they should. And this approach, to this observer anyway, looks to have a long, healthy future.
Thoughts from this week's State House News
A couple of items were interesting in the weekly summary from the State House News Service. Let's look at one piece mentioned, speaking about the Reilly's criticism of the Legislature over Melanie's Bill.
"The AG's criticism, incidentally, is fraught with its own peril for Reilly: in Massachusetts, when you criticize the Legislature, you're criticizing the Democratic establishment, and Reilly needs that very establishment to do well in his gubernatorial bid. Past AG's have suffered significant damage to their ambitions by building a sense they enjoy attacking their would-be patrons and supporters. But the immediate point is how bad the public relations are going for the House of Representatives - so bad that DiMasi is starting to deliver tirades against the press, a classic symptomof the PR death spiral."
Did I miss something? Has being part of the insider club worked out well for any of the preceeding candidates for Governor my Dems have tossed up there? I'm not a Reilly fan, and I wouldn't say criticizing the Legislature over this is profile in courage material. However, it is in Reilly's interest to show some independence to the electorate. Perhaps the party is blissfully unaware that the GOP has been effective at using the "insider" argument repeatedly.
Next we have Treasurer Cahill's secret You Don't Work Here Anymore club. I'm not sure to what extent these type of agreements exist in any level of state government. The piece I'm interested in is the resignation of his Deputy Treasurer, who is the one that crafted these. Back to SNS:
The appointment of political operative Doug Rubin had struck State House veterans as odd, and his position became far less tenable after stories surfaced of five-figure "non-disclosure", "non-disparagement" agreements were arranged with several employees as they departed the Treasury, some abruptly. Rubin will go back to political consulting; the press release announcing his departure said he planned to do so even before the brouhaha over the severance packages.
Certainly a misstep from Treasurer Tim, I don't know if we have a cause and effect thing here. Regardless, I was not happy to read elsewhere that Rubin has been advising Deval Patrick. I think I'd stay away from that for the time being. Rubin may have been instrumental in helping Cahill get elected, but it isn't telling tales out of school to suggest that the slogan "Tim for Treasurer" is what stuck in the voters' minds. I believe it was his daughter that came up with that.
I'd check, but she too has signed an agreement not to discuss matters pertaining to the Treasurer ;). I lose points for taking the easy joke. Cahill overall has done a good job, especially in his role in revising the entire School Building Assistance reimbursement process.
A sand spit held together by package stores
Welcome to a meeting place for Cape families affected by alcohol
Someone once described Cape Cod as a sand spit held together by package stores. Whether this is correct or not, there are hundreds of AA meetings here and many Cape members say they took a "geographic cure" which landed them here before becoming members.
This blog is NOT an AA site, however. It is a place where members and non-members, alcoholics and non-alcoholics can tell their stories anonymously, or make comments and ask questions.
As the preamble to the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous states, "Alcoholics Anonymous® is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety."
Feel free to add your opinion, anonymously or otherwise.
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