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Fall fun in North Canaan
Oct 23, 2024
Alec Linden
The North Canaan Pumpkin Fest occupied the expanse of Lawrence Field with spectacular weather on Saturday, Oct. 19.
While sporting a new name, North Canaan Events Committee Chair Jenn Crane assured that this year’s festival was a continuation of previous autumn celebrations organized by the Committee. It was the first year the event has been located at Lawrence Field, which Crane said was a welcomed change from the more restrictive sites of previous iterations.
“This is really about collaboration,” Crane said, highlighting the many partnerships that enabled the festival to go forward. The Committee joined with many local nonprofits and businesses to bring the action to Lawrence Field, including the Housatonic Valley FFA Chapter, the Scouts, Saint Martin of Tours church, The Music Lab, and the Cranford Club. Local farms also joined in, with Freund’s, Ford and Carlwood farms contributing to the festivities.
Vendor tents lined the field selling various crafts and trinkets, while activities for families included pumpkin painting, regular painting, face painting, kids karaoke and a petting zoo. The festival ran an emergency relief drive for communities in the Southeast impacted by Hurricane Helene, which was continued at town hall on Sunday.
Alpacas bask in the autumn sun at Pumpkin Fest.Alec Linden
The petting zoo was operated by the Housatonic Valley FFA and included two alpacas and several pint-sized goats in a small pen. Chris Crane, president of the chapter at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, said they’re “just trying to get outreach to the community” about opportunities with the FFA.
Other features included Heather Matthews’ “mobile classroom and book bus,” where she gives away donated children’s books. Based in Sharon, it was her first time bringing the book bus to North Canaan, and the day had been fruitful. “My goal is to give away as many books as possible,” and she had donated several hundred at the festival, Matthews said.
Another popular booth was run by national art honor society students from Mount Everett Regional School, providing face painting, painting lessons, and even caricatures for participants. Some 25-30 kids had stopped by, the students said, “and some adults too.”
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At 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 27, The Moviehouse in Millerton will host the SOAR Student Film Showcase, featuring a spine-chilling lineup of Halloween and horror short films crafted by SOAR students. This free event offers a unique opportunity to experience the creativity and talent of young filmmakers from Salisbury Central School. Following the screenings, viewers are invited to stay for a Q&A session with the filmmakers.
SOAR, a community-funded initiative, provides enrichment programs beyond the standard school curriculum, ensuring equal access for all students.
“This is the second year of collaborating with The Moviehouse,” said SOAR’s executive director, Lauren Brown. “From brainstorming the concept to editing the final cut, this workshop gives children an opportunity to work alongside Hollywood directors, screenwriters, producers, and actors to learn what it takes to make a movie.”
“This originally came about in the Spring of 2023 when SOAR reached out to us looking to collaborate in some capacity,” explained The Moviehouse’s General Manager, Jeremy Boviard. With a background in horror films writer, director, and Moviehouse board member Tod “Kip” Williams pitched the idea of doing a class centered on creating horror shorts. Williams led the program last Fall. “I came in to help about halfway through and had a lot of fun getting involved,” said Boviard. “This session I’ve essentially led the class, with involvement from Kip, his wife Gretchen Mol (also a board member), their son Ptolemy, other Moviehouse staff (Tom Cloutier and Kevin Pakrad), and local filmmaker Keith Boynton.” Many students returned for the second year of the class and have been able to build on their previous experience. “Working with each student to craft their stories and support their vision throughout the filmmaking process has been a lesson for all involved in adaptability and using the resources available to the best of your ability,” Boviard said.
No tickets are required—just come, enjoy, and be ready for a frightful afternoon. Please note the horror theme when considering younger children. Don’t miss this chance to support local youth in their creative pursuits.
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Former president Donald J. Trump’s October 2024 call to revoke the broadcast license of CBS for election interference put the spotlight (perhaps just for a hot second) on another place it belongs in American culture: our government policy toward media and the technology overrunning our lives.
“TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference.,” the ex-President posted, evidence-free, on his own platform, Truth Social.
“An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!!”
“[T]he Greatest Fraud in Broadcast History.”
At the end of the 19th century, the Lumière brothers premiered the first moving image film in Paris and Thomas Edison figured out electricity, the light bulb, and the phonograph. Advance the clock 130 years and toss in the advent of computational power and you get the technology steering our present moment: one where Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft have a combined market capitalization of $10 trillion but hardly any regulations over how they control our society.
Author Frank McCourt knows. A billionaire investor turned philanthropist and author, McCourt presents us with details about how our information system has failed us, but brings with them a game plan for urgent reform – what he calls, rightfully and with no exaggeration, “a once-in-a-civilization opportunity.”
We’ve become enthralled to our digital overlords, McCourt (and his co-author William J. Casey) tell us, each of us the digital equivalent of a feudal serf working land we don’t own.
When Amazon Web Services, for example, hosts a third of all websites; Google (with its 4+ billion users!) dominates search, email, video hosting, GPS services, document sharing, and smartphone software; Facebook collects 50,000 data points on each user; and Amazon and Facebook together take in “fully half” of all online advertising dollars, we’ve let our modern Rockefellers and Carnegies rule the roost.
"Our Biggest Fight" explains how these companies and the Internet as a whole have “evolved away” from earlier ideals into a system that is choking us. Inspired by Thomas Paine and his pamphlet Common Sense and the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt, McCourt presents plans for the “NewNet” and what he calls Project Liberty at www.projectliberty.io/
We need to “rearchitect” our media and technology ecosystem, McCourt says, with deeper and systematic consideration of data storage and portability and ownership, cybersecurity, and digital property rights. And it’s not just about the money. People and machines are now sliding “an array of racist, misogynist, judgmental, bullying, reductionist, untruthful content into our increasingly toxic online environments.”
He’s right.
And how about the math? In 2022 we each spent 151 minutes a day on social media. If you figure five billion people are online, and add up all the days in a year, that’s a lot of time that these companies have “sucked out of our lives” and “converted into advertising dollars.”
“We have a serious, global addition problem,” McCourt writes. “A public health threat that overshadows even the recent global pandemic.” “Society is shaped by information,” McCourt tells us. Letting everything get away from us may turn out to be “one of the greatest mistakes human civilization has ever made.”
Frank McCourt one of the few who can see the symptoms of crisis today, diagnose it, and propose and help administer treatment. Those interested in building a new “social contract” for the Internet age should dive into his plan of action today. And now’s the time, before others with other plans, or concepts of plans, start taking away our broadcast licenses and more – by force.
* Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT. His new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, comes out in February.
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