As you may have noticed, I've changed the name of this thing again. Long timers know this blog was originally a print publication out of Springfield called The Baystate Objectivist. That name was kind of a joke, a play on the unimaginative tendency of everything around these parts to be called Baystate this and Baystate that. It is generally divided into two words - Bay State - so just to be contrary I mashed them together. Then I tried to spoof the journalistic convention of naming publications after ideological things, like the Cleveland Democrat or the Springfield Republican by using a term that was at that time obscure - Objectivist. Today of course everybody knows that as the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Anyway, for all my intended wit very few people got the joke and besides it wasn't a very catchy name and kinda hard to remember so I changed it to Samizdat, which is a Russian term meaning an underground publication. I thought Samizdat more accurately described what I write about - things that aren't published anywhere else - but to my surprise most people said they liked the Baystate Objectivist moniker for its oddness or whatever and asked me to change it back, so I did.
Eventually I took the project online and to distinguish it from the print version (they existed simultaneously for a time) I called this "Tom Devine's Online Journal." That was cool for a while, and then people started questioning the name's reference to a journal. That was when I first realized that a name had been invented for what I was doing, a condensation of "web-log" into the word "blog" and that furthermore people started singling me out as the Pioneer Valley's first blogger. But I had to draw the line when they started to call me things like "the father of the Valley blogosphere" so I demanded a paternity test. I ain't takin' the rap for that!
Anyway, it seemed like a good idea to change the name again so I had to figure out what to call this that would really explain what my blog is about. Then I realized that I actually write about just about anything and everything in the cosmos, so to cover all of creation I settled on "The Cosmos Report." I intended to call it "Tom Devine's Cosmos Report" but tomdevine.com was taken so I took tommydevine.com which no one had swiped yet and thus it became "Tommy Devine's Cosmos Report."
But the other day I was going through some of my old files and came across an edition of the Samizdat from 1993 and thought, "You know that was the best name I ever had." So it's back, only with "Valley" added for some geographical relevance, although I have never confined my subject matter strictly to this Valley and will continue to hit to all fields. So Valley Samizdat is the latest name until I come up with a reason in a year or two or ten to change it again, but it will always be the same sort of subversive weirdness no matter what you call it.
In the window of Feeding Tube Records in Northampton.
An advertisement tries in vain to be as cool as a real Northamptonite.
There was a book sale on the lawn of the Unitarian church this morning.
Northampton's version of Occupy Wall Street has dwindled down to one single overnight camper.
An attempt to hold an Occupy Springfield protest fizzled out when more cops showed up then protesters, as seen in this Mark M. Murray photo.
Despite our Valley's lefty reputation the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn't seem to be catching on around here, but maybe that's because the real firebrands are going to the big protests down in nearby New York City.
Speaking of New York, here is former Northamptoner Paolo Mastrangelo leaving Massachusetts in the rear view mirror as he heads to New York City where he moved a few years back.
When Paolo was living in Northampton he always had some kind of journalistic type activism underway and has continued to do so in the Big Apple, where he has been all over the New York media these last few weeks as one of the most prominent chroniclers of the Wall Street protests. To follow Paolo's further adventures click here.
Meanwhile the libertarians at UMass have been covering the campus with recruitment posters.
I managed to stop by briefly during my lunch break at the marijuana conference at UMass this week.
It was well attended. Here keynote speaker Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) addresses the crowd.
Trevor wrote a new song about Springfield's Dr. Seuss.
Some drummers playing in downtown Amherst this afternoon.
UMass horserides.
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