This week the Concord Public Library launched it's new website. Some of the new features on the website include access to the Special Collections including original survey diagrams by Thoreau, as well as a Brief History of Concord.
Since April or May of this year the library has been closed while under renovations and additions. It's expected to reopen in January, and I supposed the new and improved website is part of the PR to build anticipation for the reopening. I for one have been anticipating the reopening for quite a while. I live just a couple blocks from it, and I can't wait to start spending my weekends there in new reading rooms. For me, the library has been particularly difficult to concentrate in because of the creaky floor boards.
I've been on the town of Concord mailing list for a couple months now. The pillars of the online community take it quite seriously. In addition to the indepth discussions of town affairs, school boards, town history, etc... there seems to be quite a bit of sparring and bickering, leading to public admonishments regarding proper netiquette for the list. Yikes! Take it easy already. I'm on quite a few mailing lists, and I've never seen the ePolice so active as on the Concord list.
One of the more interesting threads recently has been an off topic one regarding the history of computing. Of special interest to me, one of the cofounders of Zork is said to live right here in Concord. Zork continues to thrive today, and it was the first computer game to ever truly capture my interest back in 1980 or 81 on my Commodor 64. Zork was a text based, adventure computer game that accepted user input in the form of phrases or sentences.
10 years ago, shortly after I first moved to Concord, I began discovering just how fascinating it can be to live here. Just a few months after reading the New York Times best seller Einstein's Dreams, I attended a book reading at the Concord Library for Good Benito by Alan Lightman. It was then that I discovered that Alan was not only the author of Einstein's Dream, but that he lived about 10 houses away. During the book reading, I was particularly amused at the level of coincidence when the setting for the book ranged from Fell's Point in Baltimore, where I'm originally from, to Lake Constance on the border of Germany and Switzerland, where my friend Bettina was living at that time. The cover of Good Benito was the inspiration for the original homepage of Talkingtree.com when I first started web development. The Concord Journal has published an interview with Alan Lightman this week, regarding the current state of his experience with writing.
Later that year, I had the chance to hear Edward (E.O.) Wilson speak at the Concord Academy on the topic of Biodiversity. Dr. Wilson [biography] continues to be a well known and established professor at Harvard, and may be best known as the author of Sociobiology, a book that was very controversial upon publication in 1975 because it introduced the idea human social behavior is founded in Biology and can be approached for study in the same manner as animal behavior. Occassionally I've continued to bump into Dr. Wilson, but I haven't been aware of any other local talks.
You can find out what's currently going on in Concord by checking out the local Arts & Lifestyle page in the Concord Journal.
My favorite part is the Police Log. Nearly every week there's some wacky report of turkeys chasing children in the back yard. In addition to the usual turkey story, this week there was even a report of the train whistle blowing too many times, as well as a report of a "stink bomb" being left in a mailbox.
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