By David Fortier
Come Sunday morning, Mother’s Day will have arrived, and Mary will have hung flower baskets—her Mother’s Day gift—hanging on the porches. At some point during the day, we will stop at my mom’s and bring her own hanging flower basket for the plant holder by the front door of her condominium. It’s our tradition.
This year, though, Mother’s Day falls on the birthday of the oldest child. Keeping in mind Mother’s Day, his birthday celebration is on Saturday, and it is an event for the young people.
Also, on Saturday, the second annual “Dinner on the Diamond,” a fundraiser benefiting the Friends of Parks and Recreation Fund through the Main Street Foundation, will have drawn twice the numbers from last and introduced the first annual “All-Heart Park Advocate of the Year” winner, former mayor Ellen Zoppo-Sassu.
The event featured a band, Southern Voices, that got the crowd clapping along; some terrific food, from Greenhouse Tavern and Cafe; and the airing of the Bristol Parks System promotional video, submitted for the 2023 National Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Park and Recreation Management, the nation’s highest honor for park and recreation agencies. Last year Bristol was one of four gold medalists nationwide, the first in Connecticut for the last 50 years.
There is a lot going on in the city lately, the efforts from the past that are finally seeing the light, since they took time and effort to develop, find support and financing for, and draw up contracts. These things do not happen overnight. They take time and a vision.
A prime example is the Rockwell Theater at the Bristol Arts and Innovations Magnet School, which put on two shows last week—a gala event featuring Bristol native Kevin Raponey, who has performed on Broadway, and The Bristol Chorale. The theater and the shows were definitely in the air at the park event, sprinkled throughout more than one of my conversations.
Something new at TBE—if you haven’t seen it already, check out our featured photo on Facebook. The aerial was taken by Laura Bailey with a drone. Look for more.
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Reading and listening this week was mostly news and opinion essays and one long podcast. A friend recommended a New Yorker short story, “Snowy Day,” after a discussion from earlier in the month. At school, the library media specialist is culling books to make room for new ones, so I grabbed a bunch. One is a collection of Hemingway’s journalism and another, a collection of essays and fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
And there was a bunch of poetry, from Yeats to Dylan and Pastan. What I did not add to my own shelves, I passed along to the students. There was some competitive bargaining for copies of Dante’s Inferno, Paradiso and Purgatorio.
The podcast, which I mentioned last week, goes on for a couple of hours, and just gets more and more intriguing, at least for me. It’s called “#376—Stephan Wolfram: ChatGPt and the Nature of Truth, Reality & Computation.” It is definitely not for everyone, just because it takes a real commitment to get through. I mention it only because the discussion about artificial intelligence—I don’t like that terminology—which is not only in the atmosphere at the moment but has been for years, only coming to the fore after the emergence of ChatGPT.
Note: I don’t like the term, “artificial intelligence,” simply because, from my perspective—the term is misleading. It is technology, having been programmed to simulate “thinking,” misrepresenting just what it does-cull and sort and producing without meaning. More about that at some point.
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In the week ahead, look for the adoption of the 2023-24 city budget at the Joint Board Budget Adoption meeting on Tuesday.
Enjoy the week!
“Come Sunday morning” is intended to be a weekly review, a recounting of the past week and an anticipation of week to come. Among its features will be reviews of old and new books, sharing of favorite podcasts, some family news, Bristol events and happenings and issues surrounding education, work and community journalism. He can be reached at dfortier@bristoledition.org.
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