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HVRHS basketball falls to Terryville
Jan 20, 2024
PHOTO BY RILEY KLEIN
TERRYVILLE — Housatonic Valley Regional High School (HVRHS) boys basketball lost 71-48 to Terryville High School on Friday, Jan. 19.
The Mountaineers played the Kangaroos even early, before a second-quarter run by Terryville put HVRHS behind by double digits. Terryville’s swarming defense forced turnover after turnover and allowed the Kangaroos to hop their way to a win.
HVRHS opened the game with the stretch offense centered around the big men, Wes Allyn and Flynn Ryan, down low. The tall lineup gave the Mountaineers a strong presence in the paint on both offense and defense. After the first quarter, Terryville led 12-9.
In the second quarter, HVRHS switched to small ball with twin guards Jacob and Sam Marcus at the one and two. Terryville adjusted to full-court press and opened the quarter with four consecutive forced turnovers, resulting in a 13-1 scoring run for the Kangaroos.
Captain Jesse Bonhotel recognized the momentum shift and urged his team to feed the forwards.
“Get the ball to Wes in the post,” Bonhotel shouted to his teammates.
Turnovers continued to plague the Mountaineers and by halftime, Terryville led 32-18.
The press continued into the third quarter, but HVRHS began to adapt and overcome. Passing accuracy improved and the Mountaineers were getting the shots they wanted. Terryville kept its foot on the gas offensively and pushed the lead to 55-29 by the end of the quarter.
In the fourth, guard Anthony Labbadia hit a hot streak by nailing four 3-pointers. HVRHS outscored the Kangaroos in the final quarter 19-14, but time simply ran out.
Terryville won 71-48.
HVRHS was led in scoring by Labbadia with 19 points and six threes. Allyn finished with 11 points for the Mountaineers.
Terryville’s top scorers were Christian Disapio with 16 points and Deon Dao 13 points.
HVRHS varsity basketball moved to 1-9 this season and Terryville advanced to 6-3.
The Mountaineers will host Nonnewaug High School on Tuesday, Jan. 23, at HVRHS. Junior varsity is scheduled to tip off at 4:30 p.m. with varsity to follow at 6 p.m.
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Why are so few films set in CT?
Jan 17, 2024
In her new book from Lyons Press, actress Illeana Douglas deftly chronicles a fictionally neglected state in “Connecticut in the Movies: From Dream Houses to Dark Suburbia.” Full of deep cuts and an entire section dedicated to Yale University making brief appearances in film — Indiana Jones lectures at a fictional version of the college, but we all know globetrotting Indy is a New Jersey man — it becomes clear that a book with the same attention to minor detail about New York or Boston movies would have to be three times as long.
Why does Connecticut, a state in such close proximity to New York City — in the heart of New England, a region where Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Louisa May Alcott and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped solidify American fiction — have so little to show for its cultural canon? Even Hartford’s crowning historical site, The Mark Twain House and Museum, celebrates an author whose best-known masterpieces are set in Missouri, waxing on “half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions.”
In terms of material to adapt, Yale does not have its alum-penned collegiate novel to hold up next to “This Side of Paradise” (Princeton), “Love Story” (Harvard), or “The Group” (Vassar). Neither has Connecticut had its populist hometown laureate mining its culture for the masses like Stephen King did for Maine or John Irving for New Hampshire. Certainly, the most famous piece of fiction set in Connecticut is Amy Sherman-Pallidino’s television series “Gilmore Girls,” inspired by the Californian writer’s brief visit to Washington, Conn. Set in an imaginary Litchfield County-type town filmed on a studio set in Los Angeles, the robust ensemble of verbose and anxiety-inducing residents — class-conscious, parochial meddlers — are satirically rendered as they belligerently assault each other’s character in the echo chamber of weekly town ordinance meetings. Small-town Connecticut, Sherman-Pallidino’s writing suggests with a gleeful smirk, is no place for privacy. Is it a place for happiness?
The magnum opus of literary Connecticut fiction is Richard Yates’ largely forgotten “Revolutionary Road,” the author’s debut that was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award. Vivisecting the underbelly of suburban conformity, Yates’ bitter marital plummet into empty adultery and emotional paralysis served as the chief inspiration for Matthew Weiner’s Emmy-winning series, “Mad Men.” However, in the 1960s-set show, the frigid central family is placed in Ossining, N.Y, and Connecticut plays a minor role much later when a supporting character’s nightly commute to Cos Cob serves as the setting for an extramarital affair with a troubled housewife that ends with her undergoing electric shock therapy.
In examining the 2008 film adaptation of “Revolutionary Road,” along with Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm” and Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven,” Douglas writes of the Connecticut period pieces: “Sometimes the dark storylines about adultery, insanity, abortion, alcoholism, racism, homosexuality, and wife-swapping are filmed so elegantly, or set against such sumptuous production values… that the savagery is muted by the beauty of the sets and photography. Women who live in modern glass houses or well-appointed mansions are imprisoned by circumstances they cannot escape, but their hair is amazing!” Key, she points out, is though each of these stories is dripping in destructive sexual activity, “There is no joy in it.”
More contemporary depictions of Connecticut can be seen in Jonathan Demme’s 2008 drama “Rachel Getting Married” and the 2005 Diane Keaton-led Christmas film “The Family Stone,” both caustic descents into dysfunction as an offputting outsider (Anne Hathaway, the black-sheep sister; Sarah Jessica Parker, a potential daughter-in-law) intrudes on a horrible family of smug liberals, resulting in a horrific time. Douglas quotes “Rachel” screenwriter Jenny Lumet (daughter of director Sidney Lumet) as barely apologizing for her indictment, “Sorry if you’re from Connecticut, but, ‘ech.’”
Perhaps the state’s proximity to Manhattan and its commuter railway — all the appealing traits a realtor would point out — has damned its fictional portrayal. Connecticut has become media shorthand for a stultifying caucasian bubble, a resting place for city men to dump their wives and children, a claustrophobic limbo for couples with enough money to own a home but not enough internal excitement to hack it in the big city. No one grows up in Fairfield County in the movies; it is a place you go when you want to feel rich.
This stereotype of Connecticut is used to opposite effects in the 1945 romantic comedy “Christmas in Connecticut” and in the 1975 and 2004 comedy/horror adaptations of “The Stepford Wives.” In the Christmastime crowd-pleaser, Barbara Stanwyck is a single Manhattan writer who uses the imagery of a fabricated Connecticut farm in her weekly column to sand off her rough edges and lull her readers with a placating false persona of a wedded homemaker. In “The Stepford Wives,” based on the novel by “Rosemary’s Baby” author Ira Levin, New York wives are moved to Fairfield County and brainwashed into conformity — becoming docile, serving homemakers.
Douglas devotes a good deal to the lush summer palette of 1986’s “The Swimmer,” starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Eleanor and Frank Perry (the late uncle to pop singer Katy Perry). The setting of the film was moved to Westport, Conn., by the suggestion of the directing team, but the short story published in a 1964 issue of The New Yorker by John Cheever focused its criticism on New York’s Westchester County. Like Don Draper in "Mad Men," Cheever spent his later life in Ossining. The preeminent anthropologist of WASP culture never wrote about Connecticut, targeting instead the upper-middle class peculiarities of New York’s Upper East Side and Greenwich Village and the suburbs of Westchester. That Cheever’s stories are synonymous with Anglo-Protestant Connecticut likely speaks more to the city’s influence on the state than its unique cultural identity. There are still plenty of Connecticut stories to be told, true of any American state, and the small canon of films and novels should not be a deterrent to writers but an open invitation to explore undocumented territory.
Douglas will discuss her book at Kent Memorial Library on Saturday, Jan. 20, at 2 p.m.
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Photo by Mick Thompson/Audubon
It has not been easy to work outdoors this winter thanks to the rain and melting snow. I am spending more time on social media, which I am not proud to admit, and have found several Facebook Groups – rather Facebook found them for me - that share information on native and invasive plants. The algorithm did good this time. I am rather hooked.
These groups include ‘Native plants of the Northeast’, ‘Native and Invasive Plants of the Eastern US’, ‘Propagating Native Plants’, ‘Invasive Plants ID and Removal in the US and Canada’,
‘Connecticut Native Plants’ and ‘New England Native Plant Seed Share/Trade’. Many within the communities are fierce advocates of native plants. They identify species almost competitively, the way someone might with the New York Times Spelling Bee, and offer suggestions on ridding invasive plants, propagating and planting native substitutes.
Recently, a community member shared a chart that put some data around a serious issue.
Berries of invasive plants do not offer the nutrition required by migrating songbirds. For birds that migrate south for the winter, a lot of fat is needed in their food to sustain them through their journeys. The research study behind this chart comes from a 2013 paper published in the scientific journal Northeastern Naturalist. Even though the study is now 10 years old the findings remain relevant and the issue it informs is more acute than when the study was published.
In addition to migrating birds, those that over-winter in our area require food with a high fat content to nourish them through the winter and into spring when they can rely on caterpillars (and, for the caterpillars to survive we need to plant the native plant they eat.) Sadly, birds in the wild are being malnourished due to the proliferation of non-native and invasive plants and their berries. Birdfeeders can only do so much.
According to the study, Japanese honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica thunbergii berries have less than 1% fat content. Compare this to northern bayberry, Myrica pensylvanica, a native shrub, at 50% fat. Remember tasting the sweet nectar from honeysuckle flowers as a kid? Perhaps the berry is similarly tasty to birds, but don’t eat a berry to find out; although the flowers are fine for human consumption, the berries are toxic to us. Japanese honeysuckle is basically junk food for birds.
The avian candy store includes berries from multiflora rose and buckthorn, with less than 1% fat, and autumn olive and oriental bittersweet at less than 3% fat. Compare with the native plants that co-evolved with local birdlife over millenia: gray dogwood has 35% fat, virginia creeper 34%, arrowwood viburnum and spicebush at 48%. These plants have been largely replaced in our backyards, fields and woodlands with non-natives and invasives, adding to the decline of our bird life.
When a bird ingests a berry it also ingests the hard seed or seeds inside the berry. The bird’s digestive system removes the outer part of the seed and excretes it coated in poop fertilizer, greatly increasing the seed’s chances for germination. This helps to explain the rapid spread of invasive species.
Some of the berries of invasive plants have healthful benefits, providing a few useful nutrients for the birds, and even for humans. Invasive Barberry, Berberis Thunbergii, is a relative of the Barberry, Berberis vulgaris, that is used in Persian cooking. Both types of plants have sour-tasting berries that contain berberine, an antioxidant phytonutrient that has been shown to lower cholesterol and help control blood sugar in humans.
Autumn olive, Elaegnus umbellate, which comes to us from Asia, is a shrub or small tree that can produce as much as 30 pounds of fruit from a single mature specimen. The fruit contains many more times the lycopene levels than our main food source of this carotenoid — tomatoes.
Lycopene has been shown to inhibit certain cancers and protects against diabetes among other benefits of its anti-oxidant rich pulp. Harvesting the prolific number of berries from the autumn olive will help to reduce seed dispersal by birds so, if you decide not to remove the plant it is a good idea to collect as many berries as possible when they are ripe. There are many recipes for autumn olive condiments and dishes to be found online.
The berries of the Amelachier genus are being touted as a superfood in Canada, where the tree is called saskatoon (here we know it as shadblow or serviceberry). According to Web MD and a few other sources I have checked, the berries have plenty of vitamins and minerals as well as the kind of flavonoids that can help prevent blockages in our blood vessels and can protect our heart and liver. They are ripe when purple; not red, or they will be too sour.
There’s only so far a bird feeder will go to solving this life and death issue for the birds in our area; still, it can’t hurt. Planting more native shrubs that produce fat-containing berries is the only long-term solution to the winter nutrition issue. A health food pantry to replace the existing sweet shops in our backyards.
Dee Salomon “ungardens” in Litchfield County.
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A break from the bleak
Jan 17, 2024
Photo by Patrick L. Sullivan
We were only a few days into 2024 and I was casting around for a word to describe the immediate angling prospects.
After rejecting “lousy” as ordinary and “@&#%!” as unsuitable for publication in a family newspaper, I settled on “bleak.”
It was cold. It was rainy, except when it was snowy. All the rivers and streams were high.
And then it happened. Friday, Jan. 12, wasn’t bleak.
The day before, I had to go to the dentist in Kent. I decided to improve the shining moment by doing a little recon work in the vicinity.
Macedonia Brook was just barely fishable. It would have been a question of walking along and dropping a line into intermittent spots, primarily deeper slower pools and runs with some soft water on top.
Kent Falls brook was in similar shape.
Problem is, Lakeville to Kent is 45 minutes no matter how you slice it, unless you drive over the speed limit and don’t take your foot off the gas for anything, such as other cars, stop signs, animals or people — then it’s 43 minutes.
So I looked around here first. The Blackberry was too high, full stop. But the Mystery Brook (That Shall Not Be Named) was in decent shape.
I suited up and deployed a fixed-line rod, a Dragontail Mizuchi, with No. 3 level fluoro line and the same 2 feet of 4X nylon tippet I used the last time. Hell, I used the same fly, a bedraggled size 12 March Brown dry with most of one wing chewed off.
No takers on the surface, which wasn’t surprising. The fish were feeling the bleakness.
The only way forward was to get something down into the slow-moving depths, where a lethargic char might shake off the winter blahs long enough to eat something. Similar to me falling asleep during a Knicks game and only stirring from the couch long enough to get something from the fridge.
Sounds bleak, doesn’t it?
Around 1 p.m. two things happened. The sunlight hit the water, and almost immediately little tiny speck-type insects appeared. Nobody was eating them, at least not on the surface, but it did indicate the stirring of life.
The second thing that happened was I caught a spunky little brookie while tight-lining a size 14 Bread and Butter nymph through a slow, deep section.
This dizzying success made me think of trying a bigger fly.
The size 16 Wooly Bugger in a greyish purple-y color and with a tungsten head had the fish swimming in circles. I nicked a couple but could not seal the deal.
So I went with the nuclear option: a Green Weenie.
Not just any Green Weenie, either. This is Joe’s Green Weenie, tied with a darker green material than the average store-bought Weenie, with a jig hook and a heavy bead head.
I have suggested to Joe that he sell these remarkably effective flies and even offered a marketing slogan: “Nothing Beats Joe’s Weenie.”
For some reason Joe thinks the slogan might be a bit much.
Anyhoo, Joe’s Green Weenie sinks like a stone, and provoked bona fide tugs.
But the bleakness had rendered me rusty, and I was unable to bring any of the participants to hand.
I did, however, land a stick. For a hot second, I thought it was the proverbial monster brook trout.
Bottom line, I spent an enjoyable two hours and change on a trout stream with some action in the middle of January. I did not freeze, fall in or suffer any injury other than getting slapped in the face by a branch.
My message is simple. Never mind bleak. Just watch the weather, monitor the streams and keep your gear handy. The opportunities will come.
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