Sad Prude

Food for Thought Books in Amherst has had a constant problem recently with someone who keeps coming by when they are closed and covering up with tape the posters in their window showing two guys kissing.



Finally they put up the following message under the poster:

To the sad prude that keeps putting duct tape over the images of love and affection on this sign:

Every time you do this you just make us decide to keep them up longer. If you keep it up, we'll be sure to get 100 of them and display them in every inch of window space we have. That's a promise.

Hugs and kisses,

Food for Thought Collective

The details of the 2010 census were released yesterday for Massachusetts and the Boston Globe put up charts and graphs explaining it all. The problem is their maps were of a state I don't quite recognize. Notice that the display is called, "Every person counted." Oh really?


WHERE THE FUCK IS WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS???

At last a beautiful dash of purple life breaking through the brown death.



Graffiti on the UMass Fine Arts building.



This creature was part of a student movie being filmed at the UMass library.



Yesterday a jazz band was playing in the lobby of the UMass Student Union.


Full moon over Ludlow by Tony Mateus.

Authenticity

For some reason straight people like to think that gay people have special codes or clothes they wear to alert other people that they are gay. I think it makes the straights feel safe, that they don't have to worry about who's queer because they can tell just by looking. It makes them nervous to think that an athletic he-stud or a glamorous sex-kitten might be queer as a three dollar bill. In the dark days of the past when it when it was genuinely dangerous to be open about sexuality maybe you needed certain subtle symbols that only other gays would know, but that hasn't been true in a long time. The truth is that gay people are just like any other people, and generally act and dress the same as straight people, unless of course they're just playing up to stereotypes for fun in order to mess with the heads of the straights.

That's not to say that there won't always be fashion trends among subcultures. When I was growing up the hot clothing item for gay guys was the baseball cap. Almost no one wore baseball hats on the streets in those days, unless they were on their way to play on a baseball team, and it was sort of an insider gay thing to wear one. But as they say, if you live long enough you'll see everything come back in style, and I have lived to see the day when almost everyone wears a baseball cap, as it has become our unofficial national hat. Although it's lost its status as an item of gay chic, I still wear a baseball cap most days, in that stubborn way most of us have of clinging to the fashions of our youth, even as the hair beneath my hat turns grey.

Oh well, better grey than gone.

Sometimes people buy me baseball caps as gifts. Recently someone gave me a rather unique Pink Floyd baseball cap. Of course there is nothing particularly special about an item of Pink Floyd clothing, as they've been selling them since at least the early '70's. What was unique about this cap was that it looked like it was manufactured many years ago. The Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon logo was scuffed and the cloth of the bill was worn ragged in several spots. The black color was faded as if it had been exposed to many years of washings and rainstorms.



Yet the truth was that the hat had been purchased by my friend at the Hampshire Mall the day before! In fact, when I flipped the hat over, I could see on the inside the clean virgin cloth of a hat that had never been worn! I realized that the hat had actually been manufactured to look old and beat up on purpose. Since then I've learned that clothing that is meant to look worn out on the first day you wear it is actually a new fashion trend. Or new to me anyway; look at these allegedly ultra-trendy jeans promoted in a January trend alert.



The trend alert explains:

The vintage/worn look has never been so in. Everywhere you look, you can find a pair of distressed jeans, cut offs, tees, and even tights! While many people opt to ‘distress’ their clothing themselves, many retailers and designers have caught on, and started to make their new clothing look not so new....

According to the trend alert there are also strict rules for wearing new clothes that look old:

The distressed look isn’t for everyone, and can be done completely wrong. There is a fine line between keeping up with a trend and looking like you just rolled out of a garbage bin. Its important to remember that sometimes less is more, and never wear something with a massive hole in it or more than one distressed piece of clothing at a time.

Only one high-priced rag at a time? So if I'm walking down the street wearing my raggedy hat, then I am a true fashionista, but if I wear it with a pair of old jeans then I am suddenly just a bum. Sheesh, with the subtle, hard to follow fashion rules of today no wonder the popularity of nudism is rising.

And don't assume that this fad has anything to do with trying to save money in these times of economic stress by making old clothing seem fashionable. It actually costs EXTRA to buy your clothes already worn out. My scuffed and faded Pink Floyd hat retails for almost $25 dollars, which is about an extra ten bucks to buy it looking like it was rescued from a dumpster!

I realize that some of this is just the silly randomness of fashion. In fact, there is something humorously reflective of the general affluence of our society that we can afford to pay extra just to look like we can't afford new clothes. Tattered hats, ripped t-shirts and holey jeans - hey, it costs a lot of money to look that broke!

Yet I can't help but see in this fad something more disturbing. It's part of a modern phenomenon I first became aware of with the arrival of the national chain Applebee's Neighborhood Bar and Grill.



The food at Applebee's isn't bad, at least not as national chains go, but I remember thinking when I went to my first Applebee's, "Can you really mass produce a neighborhood bar?" I have to say that I share many sentiments with this person's review of a Applebee's in California:

I'm probably opposed to Applebee's as much on principle as I am on the generic food they serve. It really upsets me how these huge national chains are homogenizing our country, erasing all of the regional character that used to differentiate one city from the next. What really gets my goat about Applebee's, however, is how they try to cultivate the false image of a long running family owned neighborhood hang-out joint. You can see this in their obnoxious TV ads and in the sometimes fake local memorabilia that they use to decorate the interior of their restaurants. To the uninitiated, all of the local crap on the walls would seem to lend an air of authenticity to the place, as if it had been a local icon for years and years, when in fact most of the items are likely to pre-date the chain restaurant's existence.

In the Springfield neighborhood of ol' Pine Point where I grew up, we had a genuine neighborhood bar appropriately called The Pine Point Cafe. Here's a picture Jay Libardi took of me outside the joint in 1993.



As you can see, architecturally it was nothing special, really just a cinderblock box. Inside it was just as plain, decorated with nothing but electric booze advertisements and some faded pictures tacked up of drunken evenings from long ago. It was indeed a hard drinking place, where the only barriers to your consumption was your wallet, as no one was ever asked to leave as long as their money held out. If that meant you got so drunk that your friends had to help you home, then that was okay, because it was easy to sympathize with that, Pine Point being the kind of neighborhood where everyone seemed headed toward a tragedy, or getting over one. Everybody knew everyone else, and they sorta cared about everybody else, and that made it a place that was special from anyplace else you could go. I have fond memories of the Pine Point Cafe that even my alcoholism couldn't erase.

The Pine Point Cafe did not have corporate backing. It would not have made an appealing setting for a national TV advertisement. It was not fashionable to say that you went there. Actually it doesn't even exist anymore, unpaid taxes and neighborhood do-gooders having finally forced its doors closed several years ago.

But that dive was real in a sense that I don't think an Applebee's could ever be. Or a pre-tattered Pink Floyd baseball cap. Because no matter how much you pretend that the Applebee's is your oldtime neighborhood bar, or that your tattered cap is the treasured relic of your years of devotion to a classic rock band - deep in your heart you know that the Applebee's just opened last year and that you bought your hat at the mall last week.

What the Applebee's and the hat are meant to be are substitutes for something that's supposed to be authentic in our lives - places and things that reflect memories to be treasured - and the fact that so many people need commercial substitutes for those places and things, in numbers sufficient enough to support a restaurant chain and a line of clothing, says something about the way we live today that is sorta sad.

A pumpkin sale in front of a UMass frathouse yesterday afternoon.



Recently I walked a bit of the Knox Trail in Holyoke. It is a beautiful stroll through the New England forest.



This waterless brook bed illustrates what a dry summer it's been.



Pulaski Park in Northampton continues to be the canvas for a chalk artist. Whoever it is I hope they keep it up. That's a lot of work for something that will only exist until the next cloudburst.




out the bus window on route nine.

Hail Columbus

Better Late Than Never




Monday was Columbus Day, and I didn't mention it, but an essay has come to my attention that I think is worthy of belated reprinting. My main personal memory of Columbus Day's past is a speech I once gave at the Duggan Junior High Columbus Day assembly, which I have written about before:


But does He hate same sex hand holding?

When I was a student at John J. Duggan Junior High School in Springfield I occupied the lowest position in the student class system - the junior high school queer. Everybody is really sexually insecure and confused at that age so one way to prove to yourself and your friends that you're normal is by showing how much you hate the faggot. Fortunately I fell in with some hippies who adopted me as their pet queer and taught me about surviving outside mainstream society and how that was really a superior way to live anyway. Besides, I didn't care what anyone thought because I knew all those straights were virgins and I already had an active sex scene going and was secretly the best fucked boy in my class.

On Columbus Day one year I was picked to read a poem in front of the whole school at the Columbus Day assembly. I read it really dramatically and everyone cheered at the end and the principal Miss Mason congratulated me over the school intercom for the best reading of that poem she had ever heard in her many decades of teaching (so many that my mother also had her as a teacher). Everyone was nicer to me after that, and I realized that people will let you get away with being different and an outsider as long as you entertain them.

Another memory I have is from grammar school, when I was outside star-gazing after supper on Columbus Day, and with my little telescope and the help of a book I took out from the Pine Point Library I found the planet Saturn. I was the kind of weird little kid for whom such things were a big deal.



But I doubt that modern kids have many Columbus Day memories, they hardly know what it is anymore, and what they do know is almost all negative. Happily Thomas A. Bowden from the Ayn Rand Institute wrote a compelling piece this week explaining why Columbus is still relevant and deserving of praise:



Throughout history, prior to the birth of Western civilization in ancient Greece, the world seemed impervious to human understanding. People believed that animistic spirits or capricious deities had supernatural powers to cure diseases, grow crops, and guide the hunter’s arrow toward his prey. To get the attention of these inscrutable spirits, people resorted to prayer, ritual, taboo, and human sacrifice, relying always on the mystic insights of shamans and priests.

This pervasive mysticism had practical consequences: festering disease, perpetual poverty, and a desperate quest for survival that made offensive warfare against human beings seem as natural as hunting animals. Such was the plight of America’s Indians before 1492--and such was Europe’s own plight, once the civilizations of Greece and Rome had given way to the mysticism of Christianity and the barbarian tribes.

It was Western philosophers, scientists, statesmen, and businessmen who liberated mankind from mysticism’s grip. Once scientists revealed a world of natural laws open to human understanding, medical research soon penetrated the mysteries of disease and epidemic, allowing us to look back with pity upon American Indians and other historical victims of diseases now preventable and curable.

On a much wider scale, the Industrial Revolution employed science, technology, and engineering to create material goods in profusion, so that even people of average ability could become affluent by historical standards. By demonstrating how wealth can be created in abundance rather than stolen by armed force, America and the West supplied a moral alternative to the bloody tribal warfare of past eras.

Western civilization’s stress on the value of reason led inexorably to its distinctive individualism. Western thinkers were first to declare that every individual, no matter what his skin color or ancestry, is fully human, possessed of reason and free will--a being of self-made character who deserves to be judged accordingly, not as a member of a racial or tribal collective. And thanks to John Locke and the Founding Fathers, individuals were recognized as possessing individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness--rights that made slavery indefensible and led to its eradication, at the cost of a civil war.

These are the facts we are no longer taught--and the measure of that educational failure is the disdain with which Columbus’s holiday is regarded in the country that owes its existence to his courage. It is time to take back Columbus Day, as an occasion to publicly rejoice, not in the bloodshed that occurred before Columbus’s arrival and after, but in our commitment to the life-serving values of Western civilization: reason and individualism. We do so by honoring the great explorer who opened the way for that civilization to flourish in the New World.

Roundabout

Mountainview Farm in Easthampton by Greg Saulmon.



Pine Point Community Council Meeting by John Lysak.



The 1979 class of the sadly defunct Technical High School in Springfield is turning their class reunion into a gathering of all Tech graduates.



Sad art by Beckie Kravetz in the UMass Student Union Gallery.



A painting in the Northampton Brewery.



A painting in the Haymarket Cafe.



Describing the view.



Rise....



And fly.



Blue Cheer got their name from a street brand of LSD. The band's chief creative force Dickie Peterson died Monday at age 61.

Stepping Out

Rosenberg's Statement

Yesterday in Amherst as I was about to cross the street to go shop at the Big Y, Amherst bloglord Larry Kelley pulled up.



"Hey sailor," he called out, "ya lookin' for a date?"

Just kidding! Actually Kelley was on the way to pick up his daughter, but we chatted a little about recent blogworthy events, such as how State Representative Stan Rosenberg has publicly confirmed that he is gay. He did it in an offhand, almost by the way manner, as part of a Fourth of July essay he wrote for The Hampshire Gazette.

As a foster child who grew up as a ward of the state, as a gay man, as a Jew, I understand what it's like to be cast as "the other." I rarely discuss these facets of my character because I don't practice identity politics. I practice policy politics. And I firmly believe that we will never fulfill our potential as a just society until we embrace the principle of equality for all and adhere to it as fundamental, immutable policy.

Kelley and I agreed that the statement was no surprise. Not just in the gay community, but among straights as well it was pretty obvious to anyone who cared to contemplate it that the never-married, never seen on the straight dating scene Rosenberg was probably gay. But does it matter that he came out and said so?

Sorta. It doesn't hurt to have straight people see that gays are not creepy deviants, but people they actually know and who are successful in public life. It is especially important for young gay people to see that. On the other hand I have no qualms about any gay person who doesn't care to talk it about it. Who wants to go through all the crap you have to put up with from ignorant people who have all kinds of misconceived notions and ugly labels they want to put on you once you say that you are gay?

Personally I never pretended to be straight, as I knew early on that the damage I would do to myself by faking straightness would be worse for my psyche than anything any gay basher might do. But I've seen plenty of people come out and what they have to put up with. Beforehand, everyone is always whispering behind your back, "Is he gay? Is he gay?" Then when you finally come out and say, "Yeah, I'm gay," the straights go, "Aha, I always knew it!" Well if you always knew it, why all the whispering? Then they criticze you for being dishonest for not coming out sooner. However, if you then go on to talk about your sexuality more than a couple of times after that, they tell you to "stop shoving your sex life down our throats."

Straight people - I'll never understand them.

As a politician Rosenberg is not ideologically aligned with me. For example, from what I've seen he never saw a tax increase he didn't like. But I was impressed with Rosenberg when I met him in person last year at the Amherst Survival Center. Here's a picture of him I took that day.



What impressed me was that Rosenberg was genuinely interested in learning about the Survival Center and how it operated. I could see that this was not some politician blowing through on some photo opportunity for a political campaign. He asked intelligent questions and made insightful comments. He actually sat down and ate lunch with all our regular customers, and again showed an interest in what people had to say. In other words he acted like a real person gathering information about an issue he cared about, instead of just acting like a politician.

Kelley pointed out to me other admirable aspects of Rosenberg's character. Several years ago Amherst got embroiled in one of those political correctness scandals that only Amherst seems capable of, this time regarding the play Westside Story being performed at the local high school. Most people regard that play as a beloved American classic, but a handfield of dizzy leftists were demanding the play be cancelled on the grounds that it had racist overtones that no one had ever noticed before.

In other words, it was precisely the sort of issue that politicians abhor, since politically there is no winning position on it. Whatever side you take, you're going to alienate people. Yet Kelley expressed admiration for the fact that Rosenberg came out publicly on the side of those who wanted to show the play, citing First Amendment issues. That did not please some members of Rosenberg's core constituency, but he defied them anyway. Few would have criticized Rosenberg for staying silent, but he spoke out because he felt there was a larger issue at stake.

Kelley also reminded me that Rosenberg, despite representing the district that includes UMass, recently caused the UMass hotel to lose its special tax exemption. For Rosenberg it was a simply matter of fairness, why should the region's privately owned hotels be placed at a competitive disadvantage? Such commonsense thinking is in too short supply in politics these days.

In other words, Stan Rosenberg is a person that, whatever your political persuasion, must be considered a man of courage who isn't afraid to do what is not politically popular. Sadly there are not many others of such strong principles in politics today. These are characteristics that dwarf into insignificance anything to do with Rosenberg's sexual orientation.

Yet I'm sure there are those who, having supported him in the past, will now not do so because Rosenberg has become "officially gay." But that's okay. Who wants the support of such mental midgets anyway?

Says it All

I love this graphic in today's Boston Herald:



The "GOP hopeful" referred to is Charlie Baker, a former bureaucrat under William Weld who is running for Governor. But the fact is every candidate for Massachusetts Governor this year from both parties (and third parties) is going to lambaste Deval Patrick for the recent round of tax increases by linking him to the still reviled Michael Dukakis. The tax-raising Dukakis handed control of the governorship to the Republicans for sixteen years. Will that be the Patrick legacy as well?

High Times



Captain Skypilot Ken Babbs the Intrepid Traveler (above) invited the Merry Pranksters over for a Fourth of July bash. Check out the home movie.



Gathering Clouds



Bill Dusty took a series of cool photos of a massive thunderstorm descending on Springfield's Eastfield Mall. Check it out here.

Orientation

The UMass campus was filled this morning with new students undergoing orientation for the start of school in September.



The UMass Alumni Association had a little display set up offering the members of the Class of 2013 free UMass flip-flops (useful when dealing with ideologically rigid professors) and Cape Cod potato chips.



The Class of 2013?



Damn that makes me feel old!

Today's Video

In the late 1970's UMass Collegian cartooning legend Steve Lafler was so popular you would go to parties or Martian Highway shows and see people actually dressed up like characters from his comix. Here is Steve and his friend Johnny Ricco in a recent attempt at playing the Grateful Dead.

Um, stick to the penwork Steve.

Emily's Scents

An Erotic Sensibility?



I hide myself within my flower,
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too --
And angels know the rest.

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness.

-Emily Dickinson

There's a fun book out called What the Nose Knows which explores all things smelly in an entertaining and informative way. Written by respected science writer Dr. Avery Gilbert, a section of the book is devoted to smell and creativity. Several paragraphs are about Amherst's Emily Dickinson and her nearly obessional devotion to flowery fragrances.



This near-recluse lived her entire life at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was knowledgeable about botany and obsessed with flowers, of which she grew many kinds on the property and in an indoor conservatory. Cultivating flowers was a hobby for many women of her time, but unlike them Dickinson could not have cared less about showy scentless orchids.

Her exclusive passion was scented flowers. Her favorites make an impressive list: French marigold, mignonette, peony, primrose, Sweet Sultan, Sweet William, roses of various kinds, lilac, mock orange, honeysuckle, jasmine, heliotrope, and sweet alyssum. Dickinson was not into subtlety; she preferred the strong perfume of tropical jasmine and ripe "Bourbon" roses. Her conservatory was saturated in scent. Given the Victorian sensibilities of the time, these lush blossoms were considered too suggestive for the drawing room. Instead she placed pots of them in her bedroom and next to her writing desk. Not surprisingly, flowers are a major theme in her work; one in five of her poems refers to flowers in some way.

Too suggestive for the drawing room? You mean the flowers made you horny? He says she kept them by her bed and writing desk so perhaps that helps explain the erotic tension many scholars have noted in her work. Gilbert, however, quoting several passionate passages from Dickinson's poems, goes even further:



This casts a sinister new light on the poet's album of of pressed flowers, lovingly preserved in the Emily Dickinson room of the Houghton Rare Book Library at Harvard. Scholars celebrate it as a beautiful record of her passion for flowers. I think the album is a creepy thing - it houses the trophies of a serial killer.

I think Dr. Gilbert is getting a bit carried away there and reading too much into too little, but it's still an interesting notion. The whole book is full of such unexpected insights about the role of aromas in our lives. I recommend it.

Did you know that in 1987 a flower was named after Emily Dickinson? This website describes it as "One of the few variegated Hostas with fragrant lavender flowers. An irregular creamy margin on a medium green leaf." Here's a photo:



Kesey and Rand

I stumbled upon an interesting essay in the Los Angeles Times that makes comparisons between the work of Ken Kesey and Ayn Rand.



The journals that Kesey kept while composing his books detail how serious he was about the craft of writing, and how good. He poured every chaotic impulse and vision he had into "Cuckoo's Nest" and "Notion" but found ways to keep the basic storylines clear and simple. In "Cuckoo's Nest," the "wild goose" renegade Randle P. McMurphy rolls into the mental ward like Shane coming to town and is at once set in opposition to Big Nurse Ratched who, if not exactly the villain of the fable, is certainly the representative of society's cruel and oppressive forces. In "Notion," our first clue about the logger Hank Stamper is given by an arm that Stamper has affixed to a pole in his yard, a dead man's arm with defiant middle finger sticking upward. Both books are set in Kesey's native Oregon, and both have the same blunt plot motor that served Ayn Rand in "The Fountainhead": the guy who just refuses to give in.



Rand uses the device to tell her favored story about the triumph of the individual will, while Kesey takes it in a diametrically opposed direction. The resistance of McMurphy and Hank Stamper is glorious but destroys them and brings death to others. Thus a dilemma is raised: Does America want brute individualism or the comfort and suffocation of social order? Kesey's life tells us which side he came down on, but in his fiction he didn't answer the question; instead, he explored its ambiguities in dramatic and shattering ways. Kesey's subject was "the great wild American hollow, which is scarier than hell."

Rough Justice

Even by Springfield standards it was a terrible and senseless crime - a 20 year old pizza delivery person named Corey Lind was brutally murdered while out on a delivery. Arrested was Alex Morales, who told police three different versions of what happened, each more incriminating than the last. Here's what he looked like when arrested.



Here's a photo by David Molnar of what he looked like when he appeared in court.



However Morales showed up with more than just a haircut and a new suit. He also had a whole new alibi he thought would get him off the hook. According to the Springfield Republican:

Taking the stand in his own defense, Morales testified he had first met Lind, of Chicopee, about 2 1/2 weeks before the day of the slaying. Morales stated he was walking home from work and Lind stopped and asked him if he knew where a certain address was located. Lind, delivering pizza, gave him a ride home that night and four or five other nights, he told the jurors.

Morales testified that he wanted a ride from Truman Circle home to Massasoit Street in the early morning hours of Dec. 8 and that he called Domino's to order a pizza in the hopes that Lind would be the delivery person and would give him a ride.

One of the first questions defense lawyer Alan J. Black posed to Morales was if he had been the victim of sexual abuse as a child. Morales said he had been sexually abused by an older brother for nearly two years when he was 7 years old.

In his testimony, Morales said Lind asked if he wanted to hang out together and Lind drove to Monson in search of a field where Morales said he had gone to with his girlfriend.

Morales said that as they were sitting in Lind's car in the field, Lind moved close to him and put his hand on his leg. He told the jury he then "freaked out" in part because of his childhood sexual abuse.

Morales testified he got out of the car and thought Lind was coming after him and yelling at him, perhaps with a knife, so took his own knife and kept swinging it, cutting Lind.

Asked repeatedly by Black why he didn't tell police that he was acting in self-defense after an unwanted advance, Morales kept saying he was scared and he didn't want to talk about his own childhood sexual abuse or what he alleges were Lind's advances.



So it would be okay for Morales to have killed Lind if it could be proven that the person murdered was gay? I don't know which is more contemptible, that the defense lawyer even allowed his client to take the stand with such a story, or that it was thought that it might work. But of course, it's perfectly acceptable to defend your manhood by killing a queer if he makes a pass at you. Especially if a faggot bothered you when you were young.

To the jury's credit they quickly returned with a guilty verdict, showing they gave the "I only killed a queer" defense little credence. But just the fact that such a defense was even attempted shows that we still live in a society where there are those who feel that even murder is justified as long as the victim is gay.

I don't want to sound mean about it, but I hope that in prison Morales is introduced to gay sex - and not in a gentle way.

Today's Video

Okay boys and girls, the word for today is SUBVERSIVE.

Memorial Day

In Downtown Hamp


State Street

Yesterday was a holiday, and the milkweed plants celebrated by sending forth beaucoup billions of their fluffy white selves, until they covered the ground like snow, as you can see on the woodland way into downtown Northampton.



Equally annoying were the swarms of those evil little gnats that drive you insane by trying to land on your eyeballs. Wait, how dare I complain about such petty things on the day that we remember those who endured - and still endure - genuine hardship and even death for our freedoms.

In Pulaski Park the reggae band The Black Rebels were performing for free.



A lot of reggae sounds the same to me, although I realize that is considered blasphemy to say in some circles. In any case the drummer and bassist were really good.



There were lots of people dancing.



Hula-hooping is big in Northampton.



The usual Northampton characters were onhand, like the guy who calls himself "Uncle Sam the Homeless Man."



Ira McKinley was capturing it all for posterity.



I decided to climb the fire-escape on the Academy of Music to see what I could see.



Looking down on the hacky-sack players.



The partying crowd.



Hope you had a good one.

Grad Stats

On Memorial Day Weekend they held the ceremonies for 419 Amherst College graduates. Here are some statistics released by the college.



• Nations and states represented by this year’s seniors: 21 countries (including Bulgaria, France, Guatemala, India, Jamaica, Kenya, New Zealand, Poland and Singapore), 33 states and Washington, D.C.

• Top five most declared majors: Economics, English, psychology, political science and biology.

• Theses completed by members of the Class of 2009: 220.

• Seniors whose mother or father (or both) attended Amherst: 51.

• Employers of the new graduates: Massachusetts Audubon Society, Poverty Action Lab, Metropolitan Museum of Art, government of the Republic of Singapore, Infosys Consulting, U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, Project Horseshoe Farm, Massachusetts General Hospital, Goldman Sachs, Teach for America, the U.S. Forest Service and Cravath, Swaine & Moore, among many organizations. Even in this challenging economic climate, members of the Class of 2009 are finding jobs, enrolling in graduate school programs, volunteering for nonprofits and taking the world by storm.

• Amount raised for the Class of 2009’s parting gift to the college, a donation to the Annual Fund: $13,633. $10,000 of that total is from an anonymous individual who would only give the money once 80 percent of the class had contributed; 82.2 percent of seniors have donated so far.

• Meals served on campus during commencement weekend: An estimated 5,500. The spread for all of the activities calls for 1,700 smoked turkey wraps, 500 vegetable wraps, 500 pounds of Southwestern corn and chicken salad, eight gallons of hummus, 2,400 pieces of Tuscan chicken, 800 pounds of vegan tortellini with roasted vegetables and 1,200 pounds of fresh fruit salad, among other goodies.

• Seats for graduation spectators: 5,000. That’s in addition to the 2,600 chairs and 300 tables that Amherst’s building and grounds crew arranges in front of Valentine Dining Hall for meals.

• Diplomas personally signed by Amherst President Anthony W. Marx: 419.

• Hours spent by the staff of the college’s registrar’s office rolling and affixing ribbon to every diploma by hand: About 25.

• Estimated amount of hand sanitizer available across campus: 3 gallons. The college is providing the antibacterial, waterless gels in two-, four- and eight-ounce containers and in dispensers in an effort to stem the spread of influenza germs. There will even be a dispenser on the stage at commencement for graduates who wish to disinfect their hands before receiving their diplomas.

• Graduates, friends and family members spending the weekend in the town of Amherst: Approximately 5,000.

Today's Video

No comment.

GAY = SIN from Matthew Brown on Vimeo.