Last weekend was the time for “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac,” a yearly celebration and remembrance of Jack Kerouac, who grew up in Lowell, Mass. This year, the city celebrated the 50th anniversary of the release of Kerouac’s On the Road. Steve Edington, a minister at Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua and a member of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, also gave his yearly tour of Kerouac sites in Nashua, where Kerouac’s parents were both raised and buried. The first Kerouac book he read was The Dharma Bums, while he was studying to become a minister in the late ’60s. He was interested in Kerouac’s religious journey and soon became so fascinated with the author that he read all of his published books. He’s written two of his own book on Kerouac: Kerouac’s Nashua Connection and The Beat Face of God.

StageCoach Productions is closing its first season with a musical based on an ugly time in American history from a young, acclaimed composer. Jason Robert Brown’s Parade, written with Alfred Uhry, tells the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man from Brooklyn who was accused of murdering his 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta in 1913. Brown won a Tony for the score in 1999.

Every so often, apple grower Erick Leadbeater has to police apple pickers who consider apples the perfect size for a baseball

I’ve got a question for you here today: who’s more popular in these parts, the Patriots or the Red Sox?

It’s a question I’ve been wondering about for the last few weeks. With the Patriots having won three Super Bowl titles this century and currently inspiring “Can they go undefeated?” chatter, and the Red Sox at the same time holding the best record in baseball a few years after ending the 86-year-old Curse of the Bambino, we are in the midst of an unprecedented run of sports luck these days. And it has skyrocketed the popularity to the absolute peak the Patriots and Red Sox have ever enjoyed.

If you could create any object just by designing it and printing it out, what would you make?

Now, what if you could only make things up to, oh, say, a foot square? And you could only make them out of a plasticky material that really isn’t strong enough to bear any weight?

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