Wareham BLM, 6/6/20

Wareham had a Black Lives Matter protest Saturday.

The rally involved protesters marching on the Wareham police station.

There was also a kneeling section of protest with a moment of silence.

The WPD substation took no chances. To be fair, it reverts back to the Water Department on July 1st, and what odds would you set on two plate glass windows with WAREHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT painted on them surviving a police brutality March?

This dude was just regular paranoid. The march was peaceful. To be fair to this guy, and as someone who boarded up my beach house a few times for what turned out to be a minor nor'easter, I can say with some confidence that it is better to board up unnecessarily than it is to be sweeping up glass on a Sunday morning.

Heavy

Police

Presence

Bourne may have had 5 cops at their rally, which had almost 5 times as many people. Sturgis kids organized it, and Sturgis kids are efficient AF.

Bourne trended younger, whiter, fewer people arriving from taverns... more of a Pep Rally. Wareham, 33% black, was a much angrier BLM crowd. Watching this crowd come up the street was like watching a thunderstorm forming.

However, aside from some shouting, it was less menacing than I thought it would be.

The organizers did a good job, and the people were there for a good cause. No heads needed to get busted.

There were about 200 of us, but there was great potential energy.

The crowd was white enough that I didn't feel like Mr. Kurtz.

Good kids at both rallies I attended.

I had a protest crush on the girl in the dress, and she did say hi at one point. My game has actually been improved with the rioting. I have a cool job that puts me in wild scenes, and I have a thrice-bitchin' USA plague mask, which covers up my worst feature... my face. I'm a towering man, genuinely ugly, and I look somewhat like the Frankenstein monster. I will miss these days of pandemics, masks and rioting.

It took a while to get people kneeling, but once they Kaepernicked, all went well.

The kneeling was the evening's centerpiece.

Extra points for the functioning inland Gateway lighthouse.

Two straight protests where I forgot to wear black. I did have black running pants for this one, but my FAIRHAVEN BLUE DEVILS t-shirt was grey/blue. I didn't think of the Farrakhanian implications of "blue devils" at a BLM police brutality rally, I just collect local town shirts.

This rally was cooler than Bourne's because the old dudes in the crowd would yell at the younger ones if they started doing something stupid. This guy didn't tell at anyone, he was just photogenic 

"It was Saturday night in America, and I felt like a native son."

The angrier folks were upfront, with nothing between them and some ice-grill cops was Oxygen.

These kids social distanced well, but most of the crowd was jammed together like a Chinese subway.

Officers Baptiste and Declas, I believe. This got a pop from the crowd, although some girl behind me, with impressive lung power, kept telling "Token" over and over. The chief, who has a whole squad of other cops to deal with, declined any offers to Kaepernick or even Tebow.

The organizers did a good job, and it wasn't easy. There was a great deal of animus.

You don't gotta go home, but you can't stay here.

Bourne BLM Protest

Buzzards Bay was the host for Thursday's Black Lives Matter protest rally.

The event was organized by 2 activists from Sturgis.

The audience trended young. It was like a slightly ominous pep rally.

Exemplary motivation, however....

The rally was based in Buzzards Bay Park.

There were hundreds of kids. I want to say a thousand, but amateurs always overestimate, and I'm an amateur.

The crowd wasn't all kids.

When a rioter at a BLM rally has to smash MLK's words to get into your store, the paint is mightier than the plywood.

Please note that these cops aren't beating anyone down or anything. I walked the grounds constantly, and saw not one moment of a Bourne cop being anything but nice to the kids.

It seemed like a good bunch of kids, especially this one handing out free water.

Attempts to estimate crowd size should note there were dozens of cars full of kids repeatedly circumnavigating the protest.

To the children's credit, the cars I observed had the passenger cheerleading while the driver was concentrating. I look for stuff like that, reporters are ghouls. One moment's distracted kid driving through a protest can become the next moment's accidental Chancellorsville, and I like to have the camera aiming the right way when sh*t like that goes down.

There is some irony in rolling through the BLM Protest about oppression while you and the other white Cape Cod rich kids cram into a 2020 BMW Thanksdad,...but they do seem to have their hearts in the right place, and I did not take up this vocation to make fun of good kids.

Bourne PD was the only law I saw, and the Statie barracks were 300 yards away. I thought this was a sniper, but it got less sinister when I zoomed in later below.

They did a 8:23 moment of kneeling silence, although I'd have whittled away the kneeling part, considering that whole Minneapolis thing.

See? Much less sinister... unless some sniper is celebrating Take Your Daughter To Work Day, at which point it becomes considerably more sinister.

Cute kids

The moment of silence was part George Floyd, part Colin Kaepernick and part Smith/Carlos. It was as silent as I have ever seen that many kids be, and I was a high school teacher for a while. You could hear thoughts.

Poster board companies, crippled by Coronavirus school closings, saw a brief comeback yesterday.

I may be wrong, but this may be one of the event organizers.

Our photographer lands a selfie.

Chief Woodside was out among the protesters, shaking hands and helping de-escalate things.

Main Street was blocked off.

The kids did march to the police station, but no rioting happened.

Mouse Found In Locally Sold Red Bull

One of our writers in on her way to Internet Infamy after this wonderful purchase.

The writer purchased the can at the 7-11 in the Cranberry Highway. It seemed "heavy" as she opened it.

I will drink nothing but clear bottle water from this day forth.

Surf Check: Marconi Beach To Marshfield

A storm forming just offshore churned up some surf towards the tail end of nor'easter season.

We started off in Wellfleet, at Marconi Beach. There were no social distancing problems, no one else was there.

Our work on the Outer Cape today went down about 3 hours before high tide.

This wasn't a terrible storm by any means, but now you know for sure.

Next stop, Nauset Light Beach in Eastham

The wind had been E/NE for some time. We got lucky everywhere we stopped, no rain, only mist. 

The surf was still building when we were on the Outer Cape. We like to be on the South Shore for high tide, as people on the South Shore build closer to the coastline, and we get better house-vs-wave shots.

We'll do the Outer Cape for high tide during a bad storm sometime.

Off to the mainland

Marsh Vegas! 

Duxbury Beach

"I be creepin" through the hood..."

Good surf for a weak storm

We had to leave Duxbury about 45 minutes before high tide.

See you next time!

Last Snow Of The Season, And Late Season Snow Information

Hanson

Late-season snow facts:

- According to WBZ, Boston has had snowfall of 12 inches or more after March 20th once, in 1997. More on that in a sec.  Boston has 6 instances where 6 or more inches of snow fell after March 20th. Worcester has had 12 such events.

- The average date of Boston's last snowfall is March 25th.

- The latest measurable snowfall for Boston was a half inch on May 10th, 1977. The latest we've had non-accumulating snow in Boston was June 10th, 1955.

- This source tells me that New York and Atlanta both have the same day, in different years, for latest snowfall... April 25th.

Brockton

- Most of New England had frost on August 23rd in 1816, and lake ice was seen around the Bay State into August.. This was due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which gave everyone red, smoky skies and drove worldwide temperatures down. New England had her corn crop fail, and all sorts of food prices skyrocketed. June snow fell in some parts of New England. It is known as The Year Without A Summer. They had one period where it went from 95 degrees to 35 degrees in a half day.

- Three late-season snowstorms stand out in our history. One was that May 10th, 1977 one from The Farmer's Almanac. The record is a bit later in the year for the Berkshires. The other late-season trace snow events of note in our history are the ones I was yapping about up above.

- Our second storm of note was the 1997 April Fool's Day Blizzard. Over 25 inches of snow fell on Boston, and coastal flooding tore apart the shoreline.

Duxbury

- Our third late-season storm of note was a 17-21 inch blockbuster that hit Worcester and areas north on April 28th, 1987.

I was a freshman at Worcester State College for that storm, and had just picked up a girl from West Boylston High School for a date... because that's how I rolled in 1987, playboy! We went to a movie, came out, and there were 6 inches of snow on the ground. We had an Italian dinner somewhere, and there was a foot on the ground when we came out of the restaurant.

I had only been driving for a year, and had zero savvy. We nearly hit a plow when we skidded all the way down a hill on Route 62. We were close enough that all I could see out of my window was TOWN OF BOYLSTON on the plow's driver side door.

We also drove into a drift in some guy's yard in Berlin, Massachusetts. It ended well... the homeowner called his sons out to shove my car from the drift, and they came out single file... and each one was bigger than the last. The last son had the size and build of an industrial freezer. "Don't worry about it, just steer" is how the father replied when I offered to make Katie drive so that I could get out and help shove the car. They literally lifted my car and threw it from the drift.

I got zero (0) kisses from that date, too. The only time I even got a hug as when we nearly crashed into the plow, and that may have been a case where she was trying to wrestle me into a position where the plow blade hit me first. I really can't blame her.

Anyhow, 17 inches of snow is about as much as we get that late in the year. If you get snow on your lawn after May 10th, you just saw a regional record.

Abington